TikTok ban upheld by Supreme Court days before law takes effect
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(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law set to ban social media platform TikTok in less than 48 hours.
“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” the ruling states. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”
It continues, “For the foregoing Per Curiam reasons, we conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights. The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is affirmed.”
The court’s ruling was unanimous, with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor and conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch writing concurring opinions.
In an apparent effort to limit the implications of its ruling, the court said its judgment should not be interpreted as a rebuke of common practices taken up by social media companies, such as data collection.
“We emphasize the inherent narrowness of our holding,” the unsigned ruling says. “Data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age. But TikTok’s scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment to address the Government’s national security concerns.”
Unless TikTok severs ties with China-based parent company ByteDance, the ban will take effect on Sunday, the day before President-elect Donald Trump assumes office.
The ruling follows indication from the Biden administration that it would not enforce the potential ban in the immediate aftermath of the deadline, leaving implementation of the law to Trump. Trump, who opposed the ban, has said he will seek to reverse it.
Trump said he had spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday morning with TikTok being one of the topics they discussed, according to a Truth Social post.
TikTok — which boasts more than 170 million U.S. users — challenged the sale-or-ban law on First Amendment grounds, arguing that a potential ban would limit the free-expression rights of its users.
Lower courts, however, found merit in security concerns about potential data collection or content manipulation undertaken by the Chinese government.
Even after the ban takes effect, TikTok could remain available for U.S. users.
Rather than force TikTok to take the app dark, the law targets third-party companies like cloud-service providers and app stores. TikTok could circumvent such restrictions, at least temporarily, though experts say the quality of the app would degrade over time.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — In a late-night Friday move, President Donald Trump fired at least 17 independent watchdogs — known as inspectors general — at multiple federal agencies, sources familiar with the move told ABC News.
The conversations about ousting these government watchdogs began during Trump’s transition back to the White House.
While inspectors general can be fired by the president — it can only happen after communicating with Congress 30 days in advance and in 2022 Congress strengthened the law requiring administrations to give a detailed reasoning for the firing of an IG.
There isn’t yet have a complete list of all the IG’s impacted, but at least one high-profile watchdog — Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz — did not receive notice that he was fired as of yesterday evening.
Horowitz is an Obama appointee and has issued reports that have been critical of both the Trump and Biden administrations.
The current law also mandates that any acting IG’s must come from within the IG community, though it’s unclear whether the Trump White House believes they need to follow that aspect of the law.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told ABC News earlier this week that the president must tell Congress before removal.
“First of all to remind that our Inspector General can’t be removed from office until the president, and that’s any president, not just Trump. So this is a message to all these presidents you’ve got to tell Congress a month ahead of time the reasons for removing them,” Grassley said.
He added, “And the other thing is that inspector generals are expected to be independent of political pressure, independent of the head of the agency, and to make sure that the law is enforced and money spent appropriately, and there shouldn’t be any political pressure against any of his work.”
Grassley said Saturday that Congress was not given the required 30-day notice.
“There may be good reason the IGs were fired. We need to know that if so. I’d like further explanation from President Trump,” Grassley said in a statement given to ABC News. “Regardless, the 30 day detailed notice of removal that the law demands was not provided to Congress.”
In floor remarks Saturday morning, Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer ripped into the Trump administration for the move, saying that the dismissals are a possible violation of federal law.
“These firings are Donald Trump’s way of telling us he is terrified of accountability and is hostile to facts and to transparency,” Schumer said.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst launched a bipartisan IG caucus just ten days ago.
(WASHINGTON) — For the first time in U.S. history, military aircraft were used this past week to deport scores of undocumented migrants from the United States. Middle schools, Trump administration officials say, are now seen as places to target for immigration enforcement operations. And, according to President Trump’s “border czar,” every undocumented immigrant should worry they could be arrested at any time, even if they have no criminal record.
The “border czar,” Tom Homan, says it’s all part of the Trump administration’s effort to send a “clear” message: “There’s consequences [for] entering the country illegally,” he told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz on Sunday.
“If we don’t show there’s consequences, you’re never going to fix the border problem,” he said.
More than 11 million undocumented immigrants are currently estimated to be living in the U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to take unprecedented action to remove as many of them as possible and stem the flow of more migrants coming to the southern border.
In his first several days in office, Trump declared a national emergency at the border, announced an end to the so-called practice of “catch and release” — when migrants claiming asylum are given court dates and then released pending those proceedings — and sought to overturn the long-held Constitutional right of birthright citizenship, a move that immediately faced legal challenges and was at least temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
As for the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country, Homan said the administration will deport “as many as we can,” starting with threats to public safety threats and national security, Homan said.According to estimates released by House Republicans last year, based on government data, hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants in the country are convicted criminals or have charges pending against them. Government statistics indicate that in the past four years, hundreds of migrants were caught along the southern border with names matching known or suspected terrorists on a government watchlist. And Homan has said more than 2 million people were detected along the border but never captured, so authorities don’t know who they are or what threat some of them could pose.
According to statistics released by the Department of Homeland Security last year, a tiny fraction of those who reached U.S. borders in the prior three years had any kind of criminal record, and the vast majority of them involved nonviolent crimes, such as driving under the influence or previously entering the country illegally.
Homan told ABC News that the Trump administration is only “in the beginning stages” of carrying out its mass deportation plan, making public safety threats and national security threats a “priority,” but “as that aperture opens, there’ll be more arrests nationwide.”
And he warned that there will be “collateral arrests,” especially in the so-called “sanctuary cities” that he says are resistant to helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials locate and arrest undocumented immigrants already in local custody for other crimes.
“Sanctuary cities lock us out of the jails,” said Homan, who led ICE as acting director in Trump’s first administration.
According to Homan, that creates significant safety concerns: When an undocumented immigrant arrested for a serious crime is released by local authorities, instead of being deported, it “endangers the community.”
Nevertheless, Homan said that’s a time when ICE officers would likely make “collateral arrests.”
“When we find him, he’s going to be with others … [and] if they’re in the country illegally, they’re coming too,” he said.
He emphasized that anyone in the country unlawfully is “on the table.”
“It’s not OK to violate the laws of this country,” he said. “We have millions of people standing in line, taking the test, doing their background investigation, paying the fees that want to come in the right way.”
“So if you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem,” he said.
On Monday, during Trump’s first day in office, acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman issued a directive telling immigration authorities they could conduct operations in so-called “sensitive” areas that he said were off-limits during the Biden administration.
“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” he said in a statement.
Others, however, said the administration was simply creating fear within the immigrant community, with the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration saying that “turning places of care, healing and solace into places of fear and uncertainty … will note make our communities safer.
He said that as they prioritize national security threats and public safety threats, ICE officers might have to even go into schools because “many” members of gangs tied to South and Central America, such as MS-13, are between 14 and 17 years old.
In his interview with ABC News, Homan said that no other law enforcement agency is restricted from entering certain locations to promote public safety in the same way ICE has been.
“Name another agency, another law enforcement agency, that has those type of requirements, that they can’t walk into a school or doctor’s office or a medical campus,” he said. “No other agency is held to those standards.”
“These are well-trained [ICE] officers with a lot of discretion, and when it comes to a sensitive location, there’s still going to be supervisory review,” he said. “But ICE officers should have discretion to decide if a national security threat or a public safety threat [is] in one of these facilities.”
Homan said anyone already in the country unlawfully “should leave,” and those looking to claim asylum should “do it the legal way.”
“Go to the embassy, go to the point of entry,” he said. “You shouldn’t come to this country and ask to get asylum and the first thing you do is break our laws by entering illegally.”
In the meantime, Homan said the Trump administration is using not just the military but the “whole” government, including the Justice Department, to support its mass deportation plan, which allows ICE officers to concentrate on conducting enforcement operations.
But Homan acknowledged that the federal government won’t be able to remove every undocumented immigrant in the U.S., and that his “success is going to be based on what Congress gives us.”
ICE doesn’t currently have enough funding from Congress to detain all of the undocumented immigrants that the Trump administration says it hopes to arrest.
“I’m being realistic,” he said. “We can do what we can with the money we have. We’re going to try to be efficient. But with more money we have, the more we can accomplish.”
“What price [do] you put on national security?” he added. “When you … don’t secure that border, that’s when national security threats enter the country. That’s when sex trafficking goes up. That’s when, you know, that’s when the fentanyl comes in.”
As for what success practically looks like at the end of the Trump administration, Homan said: “Our success every day is taking a public safety threat off the streets or getting a national security threat out of here.”
In an interview on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy warned of an “assault on the Constitution” under President Donald Trump.
“I think this is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly since Watergate,” Murphy said. “The president is attempting to seize control of power, and for corrupt purposes.”
Pointing to the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the federal government, including by freezing foreign aid programs under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Murphy said the country is in the midst of a “red-alert moment” and argued that Trump is ushering in “the billionaire takeover of government.”
Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, have called for a shuttering of USAID, with Trump posting on social media, “CLOSE IT DOWN!”
“The president wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent so that he can reward his political friends, he can punish his political enemies,” Murphy said. “That is the evisceration of democracy.”
“You stand that next to the wholesale endorsement of political violence with the pardons given to every single Jan. 6 rioter — including the most violent, who beat police officers over the head with baseball bats — and you can see what he’s trying to do here,” Murphy continued. “He is trying to crush his opposition by making them afraid of losing federal funding, by making them afraid of physical violence.”
Murphy accused Musk of being motivated to shutter USAID in order to promote his own business interests.
“It makes America much less safe around the world, but it helps China. USAID is a thorn in the side of the Chinese government,” Murphy said. “Elon Musk has many major business interests at stake inside Beijing, and so making Beijing happy is going to accrue to the financial benefit of Elon Musk and many billionaires who outsource work to China.”
Murphy said it amounted to an “assault on the Constitution in order to serve the billionaire class” that will require “full scale opposition.”
“You can’t just rely on the courts,” he said. “Ultimately, you’ve got to bring the American public into this conversation, because we need our Republican colleagues in the House and in the Senate, ultimately, to put a stop to this. You cannot just rely on the court system when the challenge to the Constitution and the billionaire takeover is so acute and so urgent.”
Murphy also pushed back against Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who said on the Puck podcast “Somebody’s Gotta Win” last week that Democrats need to tone down their rhetoric, saying Americans are “not going to pay attention” if Democrats “keep yelling” and using “the most severe kinds of language.”
“I don’t agree. I’m not going to calm down,” Murphy said. “This is a fundamental corruption, and democracies don’t last forever, and what those who are trying to destroy democracies want is for everyone to stay quiet, for everyone to believe that the moment isn’t urgent.”
