A federal appeals court on Friday blocked the Trump administration’s plans to end protections for 600,000 people from Venezuela who have had permission to live and work in the United States.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court ruling that maintained temporary protected status for Venezuelans while the case proceeded through court.
An email to the Department of Homeland Security for comment was not immediately returned.
The 9th Circuit judges found that plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had no authority to vacate or set aside a prior extension of temporary protected status because the governing statute written by Congress does not permit it. Then-President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration had extended temporary protected status for people from Venezuela.
“In enacting the TPS statute, Congress designed a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics,” Judge Kim Wardlaw, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, wrote for panel. The other two judges on the panel were also nominated by Democratic presidents.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of San Francisco found in March that plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their claim that President Donald Trump’s Republican administration overstepped its authority in terminating the protections and were motivated by racial animus in doing so. Chen ordered a freeze on the terminations, but the Supreme Court reversed him without explanation, which is common in emergency appeals.
It is unclear what effect Friday’s ruling will have on the estimated 350,000 Venezuelans in the group of 600,000 whose protections expired in April. Their lawyers say some have already been fired from jobs, detained in immigration jails, separated from their U.S. citizen children and even deported. Protections for the remaining 250,000 Venezuelans are set to expire Sept. 10.
Congress authorized temporary protected status, or TPS, as part of the Immigration Act of 1990. It allows the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to grant legal immigration status to people fleeing countries experiencing civil strife, environmental disaster or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that prevent a safe return to that home country.
In ending the protections, Noem said that conditions in Venezuela had improved and that it was not in the U.S. national interest to allow migrants from there to stay on for what is a temporary program.
Millions of Venezuelans have fled political unrest, mass unemployment and hunger. Their country is mired in a prolonged crisis brought on by years of hyperinflation, political corruption, economic mismanagement and an ineffectual government.
Attorneys for the U.S. government argued the Homeland Security secretary’s clear and broad authority to make determinations related to the TPS program were not subject to judicial review. They also denied that Noem’s actions were motivated by racial animus.
The Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing mounting upheaval after Doug Beck, head of the Defense Innovation Unit and the last high-profile Biden holdover, abruptly resigned without explanation. Beck’s departure severs a key link to Silicon Valley and follows a wave of senior exits, including multiple top generals ousted or retiring early. Hegseth, a former Fox News host whose tenure has been marred by scandals and culture-war battles, now faces intensifying scrutiny as critics warn his leadership is destabilizing the nation’s defense establishment.
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In just a few months since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has claimed remarkable powers to reshape global trade and has erected some huge barriers to imports into the United States.
Trump has done all of that while repeatedly revealing how little he knows about what he imagines he can design. By now, it is obvious that Trump does not understand what trade deficits are, does not know that Americans bear the cost of his tariffs, and does not comprehend how American manufacturing is dependent on global supply chains.
But what if the problem actually runs deeper than that? What if the man who has been entrusted by the Republican Party to reshape huge swaths of the national economy and the flow of global trade is suffering from the same sort of cognitive decline that marked Joe Biden’s time in office?
It’s an unsettling question, but one that ought to be pondered in the wake of what happened on Monday in the Oval Office. While hosting South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and taking questions from reporters, Trump went off on a long, nonsensical tangent about magnets and what he apparently believes is a two-decade-long conspiracy orchestrated by the Chinese government.
“They have to give us magnets,” Trump began. “If they don’t give us magnets, then we have to charge them 200 percent tariff for something, you know?”
Alas, there’s the old fallacy at the root of so much of Trump’s trade policies. In effect, the president is promising to place higher taxes on Americans if the Chinese government doesn’t do what he wants. How that’s supposed to work remains unclear as ever.
Aside from that nonsense, however, there is a discernible point here: The trade of rare earth metals, including some that are used to make high-end magnets, is a crucial part of the U.S.-China trade war. In April, China added those items to its export restriction list in response to Trump’s threat of higher tariffs on Chinese goods. The inability to import those magnets is a serious problem for American automakers and other industries. It’s almost like trade wars have unintended consequences.
After that, things got truly unhinged.
“You know, China intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets, and nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘Let’s all do magnets,'” Trump continued.
To be clear, the concept of magnetism is not something that the Chinese invented in the early 2000s. It’s also not true that “nobody needed magnets” before then, even though global demand for rare earth metals has increased in the digital age, since they are essential for manufacturing the advanced electronics that power everything from televisions to fighter jets
This ought to illustrate to Trump why launching a trade war with China (and much of the rest of the world) is such a terrible idea. From cocoa beans to bananas to rare earth metals like samarium and yttrium, there are tons of commodities that do not exist in sufficient quantity in the United States to meet consumers’ and business’ needs. The free market has found ways to solve that imbalance, but Trump’s trade policies are making those solutions more expensive and difficult.
But not to worry, Trump explained, because America is now “heavy into the world of magnets now—only from a national security standpoint.”
“But we have a much more powerful thing, and that’s tariffs,” he added. “We’re going to have a lot of magnets in a pretty short period of time.”
Well, that’s a relief, I guess? It sounds like he’s got it all under control, though anyone listening to those remarks would understandably wonder what “it” is.
Incredibly, this isn’t even the craziest thing Trump has ever said on the subject of magnets.
At a campaign rally last year, Trump claimed that “all I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.”
Magnets, to be clear, work just fine when they are wet. They also work underwater. (In fairness, Trump is not the first prominent figure in American culture to wonder about these things.)
Of course, Trump has never been someone who speaks with particular clarity. His unscripted remarks are often meandering, unfocused, and riddled with inaccuracies and strange non sequiturs. He believes himself to be an expert in everything from global macroeconomics to the hydraulic systems on naval ships.
Even by those standards, however, Monday’s business with the magnets stands out.
Indeed, if you walked past someone in the street who was repeating Trump’s words verbatim, you’d likely keep a healthy distance and possibly wonder what substance they’d most recently been using. If an elderly loved one—a parent or a grandparent, maybe—said the same things privately that Trump said in front of television cameras on Monday, you’d probably wonder if something was wrong. Maybe you’d encourage them to see a doctor.
But this isn’t a bum in the park or your grandfather that we’re talking about. This is the person who currently wields more power than any other human being on the planet, and who is using that power in novel and expansive ways to reshape the economy. Whatever the appropriate response might be in those other situations, shouldn’t it be significantly elevated here?
I am not saying that Trump is a moron, or senile, or in a state of mental decline. But we ought to ponder with some seriousness the same question that Reason‘s Jacob Sullum asked a few months ago during a similarly bizarre incident: If Trump were any of those things, how would we know?
https://reason.com/2025/08/27/does-it-matter-that-donald-trump-is-confused-by-magnets
President Donald Trump on Monday said he would target former President Joe Biden’s circle, calling them “evil people.”
“There were some brilliant people,” Trump said, referring to Biden’s allies in his White House. “But they’re evil people, and they’re going to be brought down. They have to be brought down ’cause they really hurt our country.”
Trump’s threat to have his political opponent’s allies “brought down” marks his latest move to potentially target political adversaries in a pattern that has alarmed critics who paint the president as pursuing retribution and say he is weaponizing the Justice Department — a claim the president has made about the Biden administration.
Biden’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump made the comments during lengthy remarks in the Oval Office, where the president and his allies made a series of claims about the impact of his anti-crime efforts in D.C. and top officials took turns heaping praise on him. While signing executive orders that aim to do away with cash bail, Trump repeatedly focused on the murder rate in the city, saying it had not seen a single person killed in 11 days — a change that he has been brandishing in recent days as he touts his administration’s efforts to address D.C. crime. That push has included federalizing the D.C. police force, deploying the National Guard and stepping up the federal law enforcement presence in the city.
Trump claimed that it has been “many years” since D.C. went a week without a murder. Publicly available crime data from the Metropolitan Police Department, however, indicate that D.C. went 16 days without a murder earlier this year, from Feb. 25 to March 12.
Trump argued that the city’s restaurants are experiencing a “boomtown,” a comment that is uncertain, as restaurant employees in a D.C. neighborhood with a large immigrant community told NBC News last week that business was declining due to Trump’s policies. His deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who attended the signing with Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claimed that people in D.C. had resumed wearing jewelry and carrying purses because of Trump’s anti-crime push.
“They’re wearing jewelry again. They’re carrying purses again,” Miller said. “People had changed their whole lives in this city for fear of being murdered, mugged and carjacked. It is a literal statement that President Trump has freed 700,000 people in this city who were living under the rule of criminals and thugs.”
At the start of the operation, though, crime in D.C. was down 26% compared to last year. Many city residents, too, have slammed the deployments and said it is scaring Washingtonians.
The president has frequently claimed that Democrats weaponized the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies against him, pointing to his criminal indictments related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents, as well as his conviction related to falsifying business records, which were dropped when he was elected to a second term. Trump repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the cases against him.
Democrats have gone after Trump’s comments, arguing that the Trump administration’s several investigations into his political foes constitute the exact weaponization that he claimed they pursued against him.
The Justice Department is investigating Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and New York Attorney General Letitia James on allegations of mortgage fraud.
James led a civil fraud case against Trump, and Schiff served as the lead House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial. They denied any wrongdoing.
NBC News has also previously reported that the Justice Department is in the initial stages of an investigation into James’ handling of her civil fraud case against Trump, which her attorney likened to a “political retribution campaign.”
Trump also threatened Friday to fire a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, if she did not resign after facing separate accusations of mortgage fraud. Cook said she won’t step down.
On Monday night, Trump said he was removing Cook from her post. Trump has been highly critical of the Federal Reserve for not adjusting interest rates as he would like.
And late last week, the FBI searched the home of former national security adviser John Bolton. A source familiar with the matter told NBC News at the time that the search was part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.” Bolton did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment Friday.
Also on Monday, Trump left the door open to investigating former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a staunch critic of Trump who was among the Republicans who ran against him for president. Trump was referring to a 12-year-old scandal called “Bridgegate.“
“If they want to look at it, they can,” Trump said, responding to a question about whether the White House planned to investigate Christie. “You can ask Pam. I think we have other things to do, but I always thought he got away with murder.”
On Sunday, after Christie criticized him on ABC News’ “This Week,” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social, “For the sake of JUSTICE, perhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again?”
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies in Congress have pushed to hear testimony from Biden’s circle about his mental acuity while in office, which Trump and Republicans claim was in decline but was covered up by the former president’s team. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has sought testimony from Biden’s former White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor and former White House aides, including his domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden and his deputy chief of staff, Annie Tomasini.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/-going-brought-trump-vows-go-bidens-advisers-rcna227019
