Judge orders Trump administration to facilitate return of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador
In an aerial view Salvadorian armed forces stand guard outside CECOT (Counter Terrorism Confinement Center) where thousands of accused gang members are imprisoned on December 15, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. John Moore/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of the Venezuelan migrants who were were deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison last year in violation of a court order.
Boasberg on Thursday criticized the administration’s refusal to offer remedies for the deportees for what he called “flagrant” due-process violations.
“Our starting point is the Court’s prior finding that the deportees were denied due process,” Boasberg wrote. “Against this backdrop, and mindful of the flagrancy of the Government’s violations of the deportees’ due-process rights that landed Plaintiffs in this situation, the Court refuses to let them languish in the solution-less mire Defendants propose.”
The judge’s order requires the government to provide “boarding letters” and cover the financial cost of air travel for the Venezuelans currently in third countries who “so desire” to return to the U.S.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
The Environmental Protection Agency flag flies outside the EPA headquarters in Washington on Thursday, August 7, 2025. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — More than two dozen Senate Democrats are launching an independent investigation into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a rule change on how the agency calculates the health benefits from curbing air pollution.
The EPA wrote in its regulatory impact analysis last month that it would no longer apply a dollar value to the health benefits that result from its regulations for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone because the agency says there’s too much uncertainty in the estimates. In the past, the EPA calculated a dollar value based on the health benefits of reducing air pollution, which included the number of premature deaths and illnesses avoided, such as asthma attacks.
The senators described the new policy as “irrational” and said it will lead to the EPA rejecting actions that would impose “relatively minor costs” on polluting industries that could result in “massive benefits” to public health, according to a letter sent to the EPA on Thursday and obtained by ABC News.
“The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President Trump’s largest donors,” the senators wrote.
Led by Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Ranking Member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the senators are requesting documents and information about how EPA made this determination by Feb. 26.
The decision to not quantify the health benefits of environmental regulations is “completely unsupported” and “a very stark departure” from the way the EPA has worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations over the last several decades, said Richard L. Revesz, dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law who specializes in environmental and regulatory law and policy.
The regulatory impact analysis does not cite any science or economics and did not allow for public comments, Revesz told ABC News. The approach was also not submitted to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, “which is standard,” nor was it submitted for peer review, he added.
“Each of those things are necessary elements for changing scientific policies like this, and EPA violated every single one of them,” Revesz said.
Senate democrats are seeking the basis on which the EPA made the decision; what the EPA willl take into account when undertaking Clean Air Act rulemaking; whether the EPA has discussed ceasing to quantify health effects of other pollutants; and whether the EPA consulted with any third parties, including the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Surgeon General, public health experts and interested civil society groups.
It was industry executives who pushed for benefit-cost analysis during Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, said Janet McCabe, visiting professor at Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law and former deputy administrator of the EPA between 2021 and 2024. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, which instructs each agency to perform rigorous cost benefit analysis for any rule or regulation to be implemented.
“There’s a whole field of environmental economics where models and analytical methods and data collection have evolved on both the cost and the benefit side to help decision-makers and the public understand,” McCabe told ABC News.
While the EPA points to uncertainties in the estimates, assigning a number to monetize health benefits is “very defensible” because of the vast number of studies that allow economists to estimate ranges of health impacts in terms of monetary value, McCabe said.
In the past, when the EPA felt like it could not rigorously assign a number to either cost or health benefit, “it would say so,” McCabe said.
The EPA has received the letter and will respond through the proper channels, an EPA spokesperson told ABC News.
PM2.5 and ozone — soot and smog — are two of the most dangerous and widespread pollutants in the U.S., according to health and environmental policy experts. They are produced by a number of sources, including emissions from vehicles, power plants, the agriculture industry and oil refineries.
The agency is still considering the impacts that fine particulate matter and ozone emissions have on human health, like it “always has,” but that it will not be monetizing the impacts “at this time,” an EPA spokesperson told ABC News last month.
“EPA is fully committed to its core mission of protecting human health and the environment by relying on gold standard science, not the approval of so-called environmental groups that are funded by far-left activists,” the EPA spokesperson said.
The new EPA rule could prove dangerous to human health in the future because it will make it easier for the Trump administration to weaken air pollution controls, the experts who spoke with ABC News said. The EPA will only have the cost to industry to consider when making policy decisions without factoring in the benefits to health, the experts said.
“There will be nothing on the health side to balance them,” McCabe said. “That will make rules much easier to justify from a cost benefit perspective, because all you will see is the costs.”
In its regulatory impact analysis published in January 2024, the EPA calculated the benefit avoided morbidities and premature death in the year 2032 as worth between $22 billion and $46 billion. In February 2024, when the EPA tightened the amount of PM2.5 that could be emitted by industrial facilities, it estimated that the rule would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths by 2032.
This data will no longer be considered under the new rule.
“It’s not even estimating how many deaths that is, even though the models for doing both things have been very well established for a long, long time,” Revesz said.
People protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they march toward the South Texas Family Residential Center on January 28, 2026 in Dilley, Texas. (Joel Angel Juarez/Getty Images)
(MINNEAPOLIS) — Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, asylum seekers who were arrested last week in Minnesota, were ordered to be released by a federal judge in Texas on Saturday.
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered Conejo Ramos and his father released from the immigration detention center at Dilley “as soon as practicable” but no later than Feb. 3.
“Any possible or anticipated removal or transfer of Petitioners under this present detention is prohibited,” the judge wrote in his order.
d4vd looks on during his arraignment for the murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez at Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center on April 20, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Ted Soqui – Pool/Getty Images)
(LOS ANGELES) — The 14-year-old girl whose dismembered remains authorities say were found decomposing in the singer D4vd’s towed Tesla last year died by “multiple penetrating injuries,” according to the newly unsealed medical examiner’s report.
D4vd — a 21-year-old Los Angeles resident whose legal name is David Burke — has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of the teen, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, officials said. The “Romantic Homicide” singer was arrested last week following a monthslong investigation.
The Los Angeles County medical examiner found she had two penetrating wounds of her torso, including injury to her liver, and reported evidence of traumatic injury. There were presumptive positives for benzodiazepines and meth/MDMA in her system, the report stated.
There was severe postmortem change to her body based on how long she had been dead.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
