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President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on April 23, 2025.
White House claims win on border security but stays mum on tariffs
In response to Trump’s tariff threats, Canada presented a security plan that included drones and helicopters for border patrols. The government began to roll the plan out soon after. In February, it expanded the plan, adopting a “Fentanyl Czar” and listing drug cartels as terrorists under the country’s Criminal Code.
Now, the White House is claiming that there have been “successes” at the border. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says “Thanks to President Trump, operational control of the border is becoming a reality, and the administration’s historic measures are yielding huge results,” with apprehensions down 95% from March 2024 levels.
Despite the successes cited by Trump, tariffs on Canada remain in place, including 25% on non-USMCA-compliant goods along with steel and aluminum, and 10% on energy and potash. There’s been no indication from the White House the tariffs are going anywhere, regardless of what happens with the border. That may be a vindication for those who’ve argued that the border was an excuse for tariffs, not a reason. But as the US and Canada face recession risks amid the trade war, it will be of limited comfort at best.
Salvadoran police officers escort an alleged member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua recently deported by the U.S. government to be imprisoned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison, as part of an agreement with the Salvadoran government, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, in this handout image obtained March 16, 2025.
Where does Trump’s immigration crackdown stand, nearly 100 days in?
President Donald Trump’s actions against migrants have generated among the most controversy of any of his policies during the first few months of his presidency. His administration’s deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a Salvadoran maximum security facility has drawn comparisons to the worst abuses of totalitarian regimes, and Trump’s approval rating on immigration issues has slipped a bit in several polls.
Here’s a brief rundown of three of the most salient actions Trump has taken on migration.
1. Mass deportations of alleged criminal migrants
In March, the Trump administration defied court orders to remove over 200 Venezuelan migrants whom it alleged – without providing proof or due process – were criminals without legal status in the United States. The White House claimed it had the authority to do so thanks to the 1789 Alien Enemies Act, which it invoked to target the Tren de Aragua, a gang it alleges to be conducting “irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
The Supreme Court ruled on April 8 that while the administration could use this act to deport alleged gang members, it must provide them the opportunity to challenge their removals in court first. Eleven days later, it ruled that the administration must halt deportations under the Alien Enemies Act pending a further ruling from the court. The White House derided challenges as “meritless litigation” – even though it admitted in one case, that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, it mistakenly deported him to a potential life sentence in El Salvador. Despite another Supreme Court ruling that the administration must facilitate his return to the United States, the administration says it cannot retrieve him from El Salvador.
2. Executive Order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”
Trump issued this broad executive order, aka PAPAI, within hours of his inauguration. It revokes several Biden-era executive orders related to immigration and attempts to further the crackdown Trump promised on the campaign trail.
For example, it removed restrictions on immigration authorities attempting to make arrests at sensitive locations like churches, schools, or certain workplaces. It urges state and local law enforcement to aid in immigration arrests, which are usually outside their jurisdictions, and threatens so-called sanctuary cities with the loss of federal funds if they do not assist. The order also mandates the creation of “Homeland Security Task Forces” in each state, reporting to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. These task forces are meant to marshall more manpower and resources to make arrests, but the White House has expressed frustration with the pace of detentions.
3. Militarized border protection
In another executive order signed on his first day in office, Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border, enabling military forces to take a greater role in securing the region. He also assigned the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot wide strip of land running along much of the border from New Mexico to California, to the Defense Department. DoD has announced it will administer part of the reservation as a section of Fort Huachuca, a military base in Arizona. Doing so will allow military personnel to put up barriers and make arrests as part of their security duties, but those actions are likely to be challenged in court.
Despite – or perhaps because of – the crackdown along the border, apprehensions are way down compared to the Biden administration. Authorities detained just 11,017 attempted migrants along the southern border in March 2025 compared to 189,359 in March 2024.
Burkina Faso’s junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traore attends the first ordinary summit of heads of state and governments of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in Niamey, Niger, on July 6, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Burkina Faso foils coup effort, Trump dents democracy rating, Spain to hit defense-spending target, Musk to reduce his DOGE hours, Migrants arrested while fleeing US, Japan rids foreign debt, Tourists killed in Kashmir
40%: Burkina Faso’s ruling military recently foiled an attempted coup aimed at removing junta leader Cap. Ibrahim Traoré, the country’s security minister said on Monday. The Sahel nation has had to deal with widespread insurgency in recent years, with rebel jihadist groups reportedly controlling around 40% of the country’s land mass.
55: US President Donald Trump made a dent in American democracy almost as soon as he won the 2024 election, according to a survey of 520 political experts. The Bright Line Watch benchmark gave US democracy a rating of 55 in February, down 12 points from where it was on the day of Trump’s election victory and 14 points from where it was in October 2024. It’s the country’s fastest drop since the survey began in 2017.
2%: Our globally minded readers will immediately recognize this figure as the proportion of gross domestic product that NATO member nations are encouraged to spend on defense. Under pressure from the Trump administration and its European allies to expand its military, Spain said Tuesday that it will finally hit that figure again this year, after falling short for over 30 years.
130: Elon Musk is DOGE-ing himself. The Tesla CEO says he will cut back his role in the government after his electric vehicle company reported a massive profit drop. Musk says he will spend just one to two days each week on DOGE following accusations that he has let his focus on Tesla slip. Regardless, temporary government employees like Musk are normally limited to working 130 days a year, which would expire at the end of May.
8: So much for the Great Escape: From January through April, US authorities arrested eight undocumented Dominican migrants in Puerto Rico who were trying to return to their home country. The arrests raise questions over the Trump administration’s stated goal of encouraging undocumented migrants to leave of their own accord.
$20 billion: Trump’s tariffs have Tokyo in a selling mood. Japanese investors said sayonara to more than $20 billion of foreign debt early this month. The selloff shows how Wall Street jitters can ripple across the Pacific. It’s not clear which foreign debt Japanese investors unloaded, though they are the largest holders of US Treasuries of any country worldwide, so their investment choices are observed hawkishly.
26: Outrage is rising after gunmen killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Pahalgam on Tuesday. Several other victims remain critically injured. The Resistance Front – believed to be an offshoot of Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba – has claimed responsibility.
US Supreme Court
US Supreme Court stays deportation of Venezuelan migrants – for now
The US Supreme Court issued a decision early Saturday temporarily halting the Trump administration’s imminent deportation of Venezuelan migrants. The men, accused of belonging to criminal gangs, were to be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law usually used in wartime.
Instead, the justices instructed the government “not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.” Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
What was the basis for the decision? Time. While the Supreme Court had upheld the use of the statute in other cases, it required that deportees have adequate time to contest their removal. The American Civil Liberties Union claimed that in this case the men had not had adequate time to do so: Detainees were told they would be removed that evening or the next day, and some had reportedly already been loaded onto buses.
What’s next? In response, on Saturday afternoon the Trump administration asked the justices to reject the migrants’ stay after its additional review. There was no indication that the administration would defy the Supreme Court in the meantime – a move that would have sparked a constitutional crisis.
The first U.S. military aircraft to carry detained migrants to a detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, who Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called "highly dangerous criminal aliens," is boarded from an unspecified location on Feb. 4, 2025.
Trump’s plan to send migrants to Guantánamo meets first legal hurdle
On Sunday, Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales of the Federal District Court for New Mexico granted a temporary restraining order on jurisdictional grounds barring three Venezuelan men from being moved to the US military base at Guantánamo Bay.
It’s the first legal challenge to the Trump administration’s plan to use the base – best known as a prison holding detainees from the “War on Terror” – to house non-citizens to be deported. So far, around 50 people, all believed to be men, have been moved to the base from the US. But the agencies overseeing the flights and detentions haven’t released critical information about the people being held, including their identities or the status of their immigration cases.
The three men, Abrahan Barrios Morales, Luis Perez Parra, and Leonel Rivas Gonzales, all scheduled for deportation since 2023, have been held at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico since November 2023. They are part of a case challenging their indefinite detention at the center, a case that is also being overseen by Judge Gonzales.
“There’s only one purpose to bring [migrants] to Guantánamo,” Seton Hall law professor Jonathan Hafetz says. “To try to extinguish or limit rights that [migrants] have; to have greater secrecy, and fewer protections for migrants.”
This is not the first time that migrants hoping to settle in the US have been held at the base. But the earlier cases differ from those under Trump’s policy because they never made it to the US in the first place; migrants held at Guantánamo were typically coming from Haiti or Cuba and interdicted before they could get to the mainland. Trump is sending people already in the US to Guantánamo, which migrants and advocates see as a legal black hole.
The “War on Terror” made Guantánamo synonymous with human rights abuses and indefinite detention. And while there have been significant legal battles over the “War on Terror” detainees’ constitutional rights, Hafetz says the current situation is more clear-cut.
“Anyone who’s in the United States – and even if they're moved out – you cannot take away someone’s constitutional rights by moving them into an offshore prison,” he says. Furthermore, ICE has no congressional authority to hold migrants at the base; there’s no legal foundation for the plan, according to Hafetz.
Thus far, there are no legal challenges to the new administration’s policy – the lack of information about who’s been moved makes that difficult. But the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal aid and human rights groups have requested immediate access to and information about the people being held there, indicating that bigger legal challenges are coming.
Members of Mexico's National Guard queue to board a vehicle upon disembarking from a plane, after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed with U.S. President Donald Trump to bolster border enforcement efforts in response to Trump's demand to crack down on immigration and drug smuggling, in Tijuana, Mexico, on Feb. 4, 2025.
HARD NUMBERS: Mexican troops head to the border, Carney promises defense binge, Critics call on Canada to suspend US agreement, Tariff talk tops tickers
7,000: Earlier this week, at least 7,000 Mexican troops were on their way to the US-Mexico border as part of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s deal with the Trump administration to postpone, for one month, the imposition of a 25% US tariff on all Mexican goods. Experts say that the deployment, meant to meet Trump’s demands that Mexico crack down on fentanyl traffickers and illegal migrants, represents a reshuffling among the tens of thousands of troops that Mexico already deploys throughout the country to tackle these issues.
2 in 5: Mark Carney, who is campaigning for the Liberal Party leadership, has pledged to meet a target of spending 2% of GDP on defense. That would be two years earlier than stipulated under current commitments made by outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The matter has taken on fresh urgency in light of US President Donald Trump’s demands that NATO allies raise the benchmark to 5% of GDP – and his threats to annex Canada.
21: Immigration advocates and lawyers are calling on Ottawa to suspend a 21-year-old agreement with the United States under which Canada sends asylum-seekers apprehended at the border back into the US for processing. Critics say that the Trump administration’s recent moves to drastically restrict refugees’ access to asylum petitions fall afoul of international law, and they warn that Canada should not be complicit in these violations by sending people back to the US.
200: What’s the word among Wall Street analysts these days? Tariffs. Tariffs. Tariffs. So far this year, the term has come up at least once in more than 200 earnings calls with top companies listed on the S&P, a major stock index of American firms. The big question, of course, is how are companies planning to cope either with higher US tariffs themselves, or with the broader political and economic uncertainty about if, when, and how heavily Trump will use them.People gather during a service at Starting Point Community Church, which assists members of the newly arrived migrant community, amid concerns of intensified immigration enforcement.
Hard Numbers: Trump targets Chicago immigrants, Senate to vote on ICC sanctions, DeepSeek drowns tech stocks, Lukashenko “wins” again, China’s DAM big project
50,000: Over the weekend, plans leaked that the Trump administration planned to target undocumented immigrants living in Chicago who have committed crimes – spurring the mayor to reaffirm the city’s commitment to being a sanctuary city. Chicago has struggled to respond to the 50,000 mostly Venezuelan migrants who have arrived in the city over the last two years but says that it will resist the president’s deportation plans.
7: Senate Democrats and Republicans are negotiating changes to a House-passed bill that would impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its alleged unfair targeting of Israeli officials ahead of a vote on Tuesday. Tech companies have raised concerns about potentially being affected by the sanctions, as they provide cybersecurity support to the ICC. All 53 Republicans are expected to support the bill, and at least seven Democrats are likely to vote for it as well. European officials, meanwhile, have expressed concern that the legislation could undermine the institution.
15: Global tech stocks plunged on Monday after Chinese startup DeepSeek launched a lower-cost AI model than US competitors, in what Marc Andreessen called AI’s “Sputnik moment.” DeepSeek’s assistant surpassed ChatGPT in Apple App Store downloads, triggering widespread sell-offs. Nvidia fell nearly 17%, leading the Nasdaq’s 3% decline. The startup claims its model uses less data and costs only $6 million to train, compared to competitors with much higher costs.
86.8: Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, secured another term on Sunday with 86.8% of the votes in an election widely condemned by Western leaders as fraudulent. With opposition leaders either imprisoned or exiled, and independent media banned, European officials dismissed the results as neither free nor fair.
300 billion: China is building the world’s largest hydropower dam in Tibet, with the potential to generate 300 billion kilowatt-hours of energy per year, triple that of the Three Gorges Dam. While crucial for China’s clean energy goals and economic stimulus, the project has sparked environmental and security concerns from neighboring India and Bangladesh who worry the project could threaten their water security.
How Trump's assertive foreign policy impacts international relations
And the response by President Trump was immediately 25%, maybe 50% tariffs, and shut off visas and shut down diplomatic engagement. And there was immediate response by President Petro that was over the top, and as Trump's own responses are over the top, and going to completely hit the Americans back really hard. Now, America is Colombia's most important trade partner, and the size of these countries is a little bit different. And within a couple of hours, Petro very quietly accepted Trump's terms. The deported Colombians will be accepted back in Colombia, and the trade war with Colombia is in our rearview mirror. Not really a surprise.
So Trump is going out there, and he's saying all these extraordinary, extravagant things. Huge exaggerations about what he demands and what he wants. And if you're Colombia, the response was absolutely on par. I mean, the post that we saw from President Petro, who is also kind of a populist firebrand on the left, isn't enormously popular, frankly, and has had a lot of difficulty in passing economic policies. But he gave it a shot and it was entertaining to watch and read and a lot of Colombians responded well to it. It felt like good old nationalism. And of course, he had to back down. Why? Because you're not allowed to do the same thing that Trump is. It's not just about who's right, it's also about who's powerful. And Trump's more than happy to hit him with a stick. And so that turned out to be a loss pretty quickly for the Colombian government.
There are a lot of other countries that are working the same way. I see this happening with Mexico where the Mexican president has been incredibly careful. US is the most important relationship. Suddenly they are seizing enormous amounts of fentanyl. More in one seizure than they've done in four years under Biden and showing Trump, "Look at what we can accomplish because we know this is important to you." And working to get Chinese trade and investment that is problematic and coming through to the United States out of Mexico and willing to put more money and resources, people on Mexico's southern border to reduce the numbers of people that are coming through Mexico into the United States. They desperately don't want to fight with the Americans. They're going to make a lot of offers. Call it defense. Call it capitulation. But that's definitely what you're seeing.
I see this from Denmark, which is publicly trying to say nothing. There've been some leaks. But in general it's been very careful both from Denmark and all of the Nordic leaders I've spoken to, they've been very, very careful. Nothing public about the challenges that they're having. Of course, privately completely unacceptable that the United States would make demands of Greenland and wouldn't work through a very stalwart, though small, ally. The Danes who do everything the Americans ask in terms of coordinating on military exercises and providing multilateral support when the Americans want more participation in different wars or humanitarian support. You name it, the Danes are there. But that didn't matter to Trump. He said, "I want Greenland."
And they are privately trying really hard to get this out of the headlines to say nothing that would be provocative, not respond the way the Colombian President did, not get Trump to do anything even more angry. And instead, find a way to keep Greenland a part of Denmark, don't vote for independence and keep the alliance stable. Most places around the world, that's what they're doing. They're acting like Mark Zuckerberg and Meta and all of those tech titans that have given the money and have gone down to Mar-a-Lago and are saying, "No, we've always loved you Trump and we want to work with you and please don't hurt us."
But there are a few exceptions and I think it's worth mentioning who I think they are. Exception number one, this may surprise you: Canada. Canada is an exception not because they're unfriendly with the US, not because they don't depend on the US, but because they have an election coming up. Their government fell apart. And now everybody in Canada is angry at the United States with all of this threat of tariffs and we want more money for the Americans for security, and you guys should be a 51st state. Not only are the liberals angry, the conservatives are angry and they have to outdo each other to be tough on Trump in the United States or they think they're going to lose the election upcoming. So the fact is that Trump, I think, made a strategic mistake in going after Canada early because the Canadians are not in the position to respond well given the election.
The other two exceptions, the Europeans who want to be constructive with the US but have a stronger position if they can be collective through the EU and on some areas they can. On Russia-Ukraine, they can be collective, which has helped them bring Trump closer to the European position on Russia-Ukraine in the last three months than he was when he was initially elected. On trade, on tariffs, on China, Europe is more collective and has more regulatory force as long as they can act together. That is going to continue to happen, gives them more leverage, vis-a-vis the Americans.
And then finally the Chinese who don't act collectively, but they are stronger as an individual country. And they're going to be much tougher to engage with as we saw with the first phase one, phase two trade deal. It took a very long time to sort of come together and then they didn't actually uphold a lot of what they promised. A lot of decent conversations, but the Chinese were much more willing to lecture Marco Rubio in their first call with the US Secretary of State than anyone else he has spoken with around the world. Why is that? Because the Chinese want to show they're not going to be pushovers and that they are tougher and bigger and stronger and can hit back the way that many other countries cannot. What does that mean for US-China relationship? Probably going to get worse before it gets better. That would be my bet at this point. But we'll see how much of a deal Trump really wants.
That's it for me. I'll talk to you all real soon.