Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, testifies during a Senate hearing to discuss election security and the 2020 election process. Krebs is one of the people President Trump has targeted since he returned to office.

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Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, testifies during a Senate hearing to discuss election security and the 2020 election process. Krebs is one of the people President Trump has targeted since he returned to office.

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An NPR investigation has been following President Trump’s efforts to retaliate against his perceived enemies since he returned to the Oval Office in January.

NPR’s Tom Dreisbach found that Trump’s targets are already facing the consequences – including criminal investigations, attempted deportations, and firings.

Trump has used government power to target more than 100 people or institutions across American society – and they’re all feeling the consequences.

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Email us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by Monika Estatieva and Erika Ryan, with audio engineering by Damian Herring.

Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

Medical research from the Department of Veterans Affairs has produced advances like the pacemaker, the CT scan, and the nicotine patch. Now VA scientists fear life-saving research will be scrapped as the Trump administration promises massive cuts of jobs and contracts.

Democratic Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts says the Trump administration’s “attack on science” through federal funding cuts will not only affect Harvard and other major research universities, but they will also negatively impact the U.S. economy.

Healey argues that President Trump’s funding cuts don’t put “America first,” and that cuts are forcing scientists and researchers out of the country, making the U.S. “weaker and less competitive.”

“China is on our campuses right now recruiting away faculty and staff and students, saying, ‘Come to China and you can study and research there.’ So it’s not good for our economy,” she told Morning Edition.

Harvard sued the Trump administration after it froze more than $2.2 billion in federal funding for the university, arguing that the government is violating the First Amendment and not following legal procedures.

During a hearing Monday in Massachusetts, U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs scheduled oral arguments for July 21. Harvard asked for a final decision on an expedited schedule rather than an immediate order to restore the money. This means that, unless the White House reverses the freeze, Harvard will be without what it says is critical funding for at least the next 12 weeks.

Massachusetts and 18 other states are suing the administration, arguing that its threats to withhold federal funding from states and districts with diversity, equity and inclusion programs are illegal.

In the face of these challenges, Healey, a Harvard graduate, said her job and that of other Democratic governors, is to push back against the administration’s demands, or the country will risk losing its “intellectual capital” to global rivals.

Healey and NPR’s A Martínez further discussed the ramifications of the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts to universities and public schools across the country.

The following excerpt has been edited for clarity and length. 

Interview highlights

A Martínez: Your state is seen as a capital of sorts for higher education. How do you approach the pressure the Trump administration is putting on Harvard and other schools?

Maura Healey: Well, I think it’s about being clear about what’s happening. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has engaged in an attack on science and an attack on research. It’s showing up in the cuts that he’s making, both to NIH funding, for example, and also to colleges and universities. And this has serious and detrimental consequences, not just for the colleges and universities, but for our economy. The scientists and the researchers who are discovering life saving cures and treatments, discovering the next technologies for our own military, for our own security, these folks, we’re going to be losing to other countries. And that’s not America first. That’s not making us more competitive. It’s making us weaker and less competitive.

Martínez: Governor, we just heard from Marc Short, a long time adviser to President Trump’s first Vice President, Mike Pence. He mentioned that he doesn’t really think a school like Harvard gets much sympathy around the country. Is that something that you can understand?

Healey: Well, I would disagree with that, because, first of all, this is an issue that is far beyond Harvard. It’s much bigger than Harvard. We’ve seen cuts to colleges and universities and research institutions in just about every state in this country. And I’ll tell you that as a result of that, life saving clinical trials and treatments have been stopped.

Other countries are recruiting away faculty and scientists, taking away our intellectual capital. The manufacturers, who make the parts and the equipment for our labs and for our research, are not getting orders. It has a detrimental impact on our economy. Massachusetts, for example, every dollar invested yields $2 to $3 in additional GDP growth for our state. And so, with that going away, we have serious and negative effects on our economy. And that’s on top of what Donald Trump is already doing to tank the economy with tariffs and with other inflationary tactics that are just making life more expensive. This isn’t good. And it needs to be reversed.

Martínez: Democrats have said that the president is exceeding his power on issue after issue. But what’s the strategy then for pushing back on that?

Healey: I can tell you what governors are doing, in particular, Democratic governors, we’re on the front lines. We’re seeing firsthand the impact of President Trump’s action. We’re seeing what it means to have veterans services gutted and people laid off in our states. We understand what it means to have education funding slashed and the effect on our students, especially poor students and students with special needs and disabilities. And I think the job is to push back to make sure that people are in courts. The attorneys general have been successful, and in court, at stopping some of these illegal and unconstitutional actions.

The digital story was edited by Obed Manuel and Kristian Monroe.

President Trump opened up a new front in his assault on public media on Monday, asserting that he was removing three of the five board members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The corporation sued Trump on Tuesday morning in response, pointing to federal law and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to argue that he does not have the power to take these actions.

U.S. District Court Judge Randolph D. Moss set a court hearing for Tuesday afternoon to take up the CPB’s motion for a temporary restraining order preventing Trump’s decree from taking effect.

“As numerous courts have repeatedly affirmed, the Constitution gives President Trump the power to remove personnel who exercise his executive authority,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a comment emailed to NPR. “The Trump Administration looks forward to ultimate victory on the issue.”

The CPB distributes more than $500 million annually to public broadcasters, primarily to local television and radio stations. PBS and its stations each receive, on average, 15% of their revenues from the corporation; NPR stations receive 10% of their funds from the CPB while NPR itself receives about 1% directly from CPB. (NPR receives a bit more indirectly because local member stations pay NPR for the right to air its programs.)

Under the law that created CPB more than five decades ago, the president has the authority to appoint members of its board, in consultation with Senate leaders of both parties.

The law does not, however, establish any authority for a president to remove them. As the CPB lawsuit notes, that law does not include the clause common to U.S. government agencies that its board members “serve at the pleasure of the President”.

Indeed, the law specifically states that the CPB “will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government” and sets up a series of measures intended to “afford the maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.“

The board members targeted by Trump are Tom Rothman and Diane Kaplan – both appointees of former President Joe Biden – and Laura Gore Ross, who was appointed to the board by Trump in his first term and then reappointed by Biden.

“Not a federal agency”

In recent weeks, the Trump administration similarly took control of the boards of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Trump appointed himself chairman of the former and shut down the latter. The two organizations are hybrids – duck-billed platypuses of Washington fauna: The Kennedy Center is a public-private partnership; the peace institute an independent nonprofit corporation with the secretaries of defense and state as board members by virtue of their offices.

In a statement, CPB says, “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is not a government entity, and its board members are not government officers. Because CPB is not a federal agency subject to the President’s authority, but rather a private corporation, we have filed a lawsuit to block these firings.”

In its lawsuit, CPB’s legal team cites the statute authorizing CPB, which specifically states that no officers or employees of the U.S. government can serve on the board – and no board member can be considered a federal employee.

Trump’s sweeping actions to remake the federal government and workforce have inspired a raft of litigation. Along with many wins, the White House has been handed numerous defeats in court, among them cases filed by law firms objecting to executive orders and staffers of the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia seeking to reinstate funding for their networks.

A chilling effect

Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck says the CPB’s lawsuit “has legs.”

But he adds a warning to those who oppose Trump’s actions:

“The Trump administration is not trying to win all these lawsuits,” Vladeck says. “A lot of its behavior is patently unlawful. And a lot of its behavior will not survive litigation. But it’s nevertheless designed to intimidate, to chill, to shift the conversation, to consume the oxygen.”

Trump’s assault on public broadcasting is part of his broader war on the media, which encompasses his own private lawsuits, regulatory pressures, restrictions on journalists’ access, mass cancellation of news subscriptions used by federal agencies, scaling back protections against prosecutors’ investigations of reporters and more.

In an interview with the Atlantic published this week, Trump praised Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who killed a drafted presidential endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris last fall and reshaped his opinion pages away from its criticisms of Trump.

“He’s 100 percent. He’s been great,” Trump said of Bezos.

More broadly, Trump has targeted independent institutions that often serve as a platform for critical voices, which include non-profits, foundations, and universities.

Public media, because of the taxpayer subsidy, hits a rhetorical sweet spot for the president.

In a recent U.S. House subcommittee hearing, the president’s conservative allies sought to portray public media as a plaything for liberals and Democrats. Yet the CPB chief executive now suing Trump, Patricia de Stacy Harrison, is a former co-chairperson of the Republican National Committee and State Department official under President George W. Bush.

A two-line email

News of the president’s intent arrived Monday evening in an email to the three board members from Trent Morse, the deputy White House director of presidential personnel for the executive office of the president.

It read, in full: “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

As the CPB noted in its legal filing, the message did not state the authority Trump was invoking to fire them.

A vow to take back funding

The White House’s email to the CPB board members dovetails with Trump’s efforts to shut down the corporation altogether. He has said that he will ask Congress to claw back the $1.1 billion it has already granted to support the nation’s public broadcasters through September 2027.

Once they receive a formal request, the U.S. House and Senate would each have to affirm the withdrawal of those funds — called a “rescission” — by a simple majority within 45 days for it to take effect. While Republicans who control each chamber have publicly signaled support, it is not clear whether they have enough support within their own ranks to do so. Congressional leaders say they have not yet received the request.

Congress’s decision to authorize money for CPB for two years at a time was a further effort to insulate the corporation, and public media more generally, from political pressures; a 1975 House Committee report said the advance funding would “go a long way toward eliminating both the risk of and the appearance of undue interference with and control of public broadcasting.”

Other government pressures on public media

Trump has used other levers of government to exert pressure on public media. On social media, he has repeatedly pounded NPR and PBS to contend they should receive no taxpayer funds.

His chief broadcasting regulator, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, has opened up a formal investigation into NPR and PBS stations and the networks’ practices for running underwriting spots for corporate sponsors. He says they are indistinguishable from commercials; NPR and PBS and public media stations say they closely adhere to the guidance they have received from commission staffers over the course of decades as they have been encouraged to broaden their revenue streams beyond public coffers.

The investigation carries implications, however, as Carr’s agency oversees who is granted licenses to broadcast on the airwaves — and who can beam their signals using the desired noncommercial range of terrestrial broadcasting frequencies.

The chapter on media in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term – disavowed by the president on the campaign trail and closely followed by his aides once back in office – calls for NPR, PBS and public media stations to be “shorn” of their noncommercial status.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

The only female unit to serve overseas in World War II is receiving a Congressional Gold Medal on Tuesday, exactly 80 years after pulling off an incredible organizational feat.

The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — nicknamed the Six Triple Eight — was a predominantly Black, all-female unit that was deployed to Europe towards the end of the war to tackle a burgeoning crisis: a backlog of some 17 million pieces of undelivered mail.

When the women arrived in Birmingham, England, in February 1945, they were greeted by multiple warehouses full of mail addressed to the roughly 7 million American soldiers and government personnel stationed across Europe, many of whom were frustrated because they hadn’t received any letters for months or even years.

There was so much mail that one general estimated it would take the unit six months to sort and deliver it all, according to the National Museum of the United States Army. But the Six Triple Eight — whose motto was “no mail, low morale” — managed to do it in half the time, even in harsh conditions.

After their success in Birmingham — and the end of the war in Europe — the unit accomplished similar missions in Rouen and Paris, France. And while the unit’s members received several medals upon its return to the U.S. in 1946, there was no welcoming ceremony or public recognition of their service.

The story of the Six Triple Eight has gotten more attention over the decades, including a 2019 Meritorious Unit Commendation from the U.S. Armed Forces, a 2024 film and a yearslong campaign to recognize its members with a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award given by Congress.

The Senate voted on legislation to bestow the award in 2021, and the House unanimously followed suit a year later. Then-President Joe Biden signed the act into law in 2022.

“It never occurred to me that it would happen,” retired Major Fannie McClendon, one of the two surviving veterans of 855-person unit, said at the time.

However, because of the time required to design and produce the actual medal, the ceremony in the U.S. Capitol wasn’t on the books until recently. Earlier this year, over a dozen senators wrote House Speaker Mike Johnson a letter urging him to “swiftly” schedule the medal ceremony and warning of a “critical juncture.”

“Today, only two members of the Six Triple Eight are known to be alive,” they wrote. “Those still surviving ought to not wait any longer to receive this long-awaited recognition they rightfully deserve.”

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s ceremony, supporters had even more reason to grow antsy about the lack of recognition.

A webpage about the Six Triple Eight appeared to be among those purged in the Department of Defense’s push to undo diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. NPR reported in mid-March that the unit’s story was no longer prominent on the Arlington National Cemetery website, but still findable using the search function.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says that 14 of the unit’s members are interred at Arlington National Cemetery, while 32 are interred in VA national or state veteran’s cemeteries across the country.

The Department of Defense has since restored some of the entries it removed. Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in early April demanding all webpages be restored, including that of the Six Triple Eight.

“Erasing this extraordinary legacy is an egregious betrayal of their service,” Ross wrote, calling it disrespectful to all veterans. “This timing is especially egregious when the country is just starting to appreciate the story of the 6888th.”

The Department of Defense has not responded to NPR’s request for comment. The Department of the Army, which runs Arlington National Cemetery, told NPR over email on Tuesday that no profiles of individuals laid to rest there have been permanently deleted from its website, only recategorized. The page for the Six Triple Eight is now listed under “Prominent Military Figures.”

A barrier-breaking battalion 

American Women’s Army Corps (WAC) Captain Mary Kearney and American WAC Commanding Officer Major Charity Adams inspect the first arrivals to the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion at a temporary post in Birmingham, West Midlands, England, in February 1945.

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Black women were virtually excluded from military service until the start of World War II, which prompted the creation of what came to be known as the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).

While the WAC opened up opportunities for women in non-combat roles, segregation policies of the time meant that Black WACs could only make up a maximum of 10% of the overall force, the National Museum of the United States Army explains. The U.S. Army was not fully integrated until 1948.

Only about 6,500 of the 140,000 women who served in the WAC during World War II were Black, according to the Department of Defense.

Black organizations and civil rights figures, like Mary McLeod Bethune, pushed for Black women in the WAC to get the same opportunity to serve overseas. Under mounting pressure — and a growing backlog of mail — the War Department created the 6888th in 1944.

“They kept hollering about wanting us to go overseas so I guess they found something for us to do overseas: Take care of the mail,” McClendon told the Associated Press. “And there was an awful lot of mail.”

The battalion included five companies, commanded by Maj. Charity Adams, who became the highest-ranking Black Army officer during the war. While the Six Triple Eight has often been called an all-Black unit, it had at least two members of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent.

After several weeks of training, the women sailed to Scotland — where they were forced to run for cover upon arrival when a German rocket exploded near their dock — and then took a train to Birmingham to begin sorting mail and boosting morale.

Navigating mail, sexism and racism

The battalion was greeted by dimly lit warehouses stacked floor-to-ceiling with undelivered mail, including six airplane hangars full of returned Christmas presents, according to the DoD.

They found rats eating packages of sweets meant for soldiers, mail that had bounced back as troops changed locations and a maze of recipients with similar or identical names: The DoD cites reports that there were 7,500 men named Robert Smith.

The unit broke into three eight-hour shifts and worked seven days a week. They came up with a system that involved creating and updating millions of locator cards with the serial numbers and locations of American personnel in Europe, searching for clues to suss out intended recipients.

Adams estimated in her 1989 autobiography, One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC, that the unit averaged 65,000 pieces of mail per shift.

On top of the task at hand, the women of the Six Triple Eight also confronted sexism and racism during their time overseas. They were not allowed into a local club for enlisted soldiers, and Adams led a boycott of the alternative segregated facilities they were offered, according to the National Park Service.

“They decided to run their own food hall, hair salon, and refreshment bar,” it says. “The women were subjected to slander spread about by male soldiers who resented that Black women were allowed in the Army.”

Some Black male service members wrongly assumed the women of the unit had been sent to Europe to provide companionship, the DoD says, a notion they “quickly set straight.”

Some of the Six Triple Eight’s recreational basketball players were invited to play on an Army all-star team, but uninvited when the Army learned of their race. And when three members of the unit died in a Jeep crash, the War Department didn’t provide funds for their funerals — the rest of the women collected the money themselves.

After the war

Upon the unit’s arrival in France, it drew attention from Black and white service members, who — as Adams later recalled — “suddenly found that they had business in Rouen.” They had to increase security around their compound.

With the help of French civilians and German prisoners of war, the unit was able to clear a similar-sized backlog of mail in just five months. In October, the downsized unit — about 300 members had been discharged by then — was sent to Paris to continue the work.

The remaining soldiers were sent back to the U.S. in February 1946, where they received the European African Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, the Women’s Army Corps Service Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.

“The unit was disbanded at Fort Dix, New Jersey without any further ceremony,” reads the website of the National Museum of the United States Army.

The museum notes that while the Six Triple Eight may not have been celebrated with parades or public recognition, their achievements prompted the General Board of the U.S. Forces European Theater to recommend the “continued use” of female soldiers of color, “along with white, female military personnel … in such strength as proportionally appropriate.”

Part of the first Black WAC members pose at Camp Shanks, N.Y., before heading overseas in February 1945.

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Gaining recognition

Over the decades, members of the Six Triple Eight — and increasingly, their surviving family members — gained more recognition for their groundbreaking service.

Some of the women returned to England in 1981 to be honored by Birmingham’s mayor. Adams released her memoir eight years later and was honored by the Smithsonian Institution National Postal Museum the following decade. A monument in the unit’s honor was established at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in 2018.

Their legacy has also been honored in books and movies, including a 2019 documentary and a 2024 movie, directed by Tyler Perry and starring Kerry Washington as Adams.

“These women were fighting for a country that wasn’t always fighting for them, but they believed in the seed of what this democracy could be,” Washington told NPR’s Morning Edition in 2024. “And they believed in their own capacity to create important change.”

Washington and Perry said they worked with a veteran of the unit, Lena King, to better understand the women’s experiences during the war — and why some were ashamed to discuss their experiences afterward. One Florida woman who will be attending Tuesday’s ceremony only learned last year that her late mother was in the battalion, as Spectrum News 13 reported.

King died in January 2024 at age 100. Years earlier, she was already one of the few surviving unit members who could weigh in on its upcoming congressional honor.

“I wish more of the 6888th members were here, and I hope that I’m still here when President Biden signs the bill,” she said in a 2022 release from the office of Sen. Jerry Moran, R-K.S. “That will be a great day.”

President Trump is chipping away at the right to due process within the immigration court system, immigration lawyers and former judges say, in an effort to fast-track deportations.

Over the course of his first few months in office, the administration has removed some protections from deportation, cancelled grants that provided legal representation to children, fired dozens of the judges responsible for hearing cases, and moved individuals to far-flung locations — including to prisons out of U.S. jurisdiction.

The onslaught of explicit policy changes and messaging show a rapid effort to make it easier to remove certain migrants from the country.

“I hope we get cooperation from the courts, because we have thousands of people that are ready to go out and you can’t have a trial for all of these people,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week.

Experts argue the administration’s actions are weakening the limited due process immigrants in the U.S. are entitled to, and could lead to similar erosion for lawful permanent residents and U.S. citizens.

“This is a slippery slope towards sending residents of the country … to a place where the U.S. courts have no reach,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “That’s the heart of the matter.”

At its core, these due process rights center on a key factor: having access to an impartial judge. Those placed in immigration proceedings in immigration courts within the Department of Justice don’t have the right to a lawyer — and most people don’t have one to argue their case, which lowers their chances of success.

But they may have a right to their day in court.

Those courts are already an imperfect system. The success of asylum claims varies widely among each individual immigration judge, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, and people face various barriers to access legal services.

But any sliver of due process is significant because it’s an opportunity to prevent erroneous removals, give people a chance to argue why they should stay, or sign off on the government’s removal orders.

Most recently, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia raised the specter of due process being ignored, after the Trump administration admitted to sending him to a mega prison in El Salvador by mistake.

White House questions due process for immigrants

Trump and his advisers have taken to social media to cast doubt on the ability to provide due process for the thousands of people they are aiming to arrest and remove.

“I’m doing what I was elected to do, remove criminals from our Country, but the Courts don’t seem to want me to do that,” Trump wrote on social media. “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”

Proceedings in administrative court have been known to take months and even years, with courts facing a backlog of millions of cases.

Vice President JD Vance went as far as to call it a “fake legal process” that is the “ratification of Biden’s illegal migrant invasion.”

“The judicial process is for Americans. Immediate deportation is for illegal aliens,” echoed deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

And the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, on social media, sought to paint due process as a partisan issue: “When the Left says ‘due process,’ they mean, ‘no deportations.'”

To justify due process, legal experts broadly point to the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states that no person “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and the Fourteenth Amendment, which applies to states.

Democrats and immigration advocates say that if due process is scrapped at any level, it hurts everyone in the system — including U.S. citizens.

“What the administration is relying on is that unauthorized immigrants are not popular in the country, and therefore people say, ‘They’re not entitled to the same due process as U.S. citizens,” Chishti said.

“That may be politically a good slogan. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not make any distinction between citizens and noncitizens for the application of the protections of due process and judicial review,” he said.

Still, due process is considered a “spectrum of rights,” with different people being allotted different levels of protection, according to multiple lawyers contacted for this article.

The fewest rights are offered to more recent arrivals to the U.S. without legal status. Lawful permanent residents and naturalized citizens traditionally have the most protections.

“It’s the position of the Trump administration that they can’t do much process at all,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge now at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower levels of U.S. immigration.

“At the end of the day, the question is going to be for the courts whether and what process is due, and how that process should be afforded,” he said.

Pictured in this 2014 photo is one of ten court rooms at the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review in Arlington, Va.

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Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Opportunity for impartial arbiter

The immigration court system is unique. The judges and courtrooms are within the Department of Justice, under the executive branch as opposed to the judiciary.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, was created in 1983 explicitly to pull immigration judges out of what was formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“There was a lot of criticism that when the government was bringing charges to try to remove people, that the people who were making those decisions were just too closely intertwined with the enforcement agency,” said Ashley Tabaddor, a former immigration judge and former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

People who are subject to removal proceedings have a right to go through the immigration court process. The immigration court system offers a neutral setting for people to make their case, including for protection from prosecution, said Tabaddor, now an immigration law consultant.

“What is at stake is oftentimes a life and death situation,” she said.

Court backlogs and less legal aid

Previously, nonprofits relied on grants and other federal funds to offer support to those least likely to be able to make their own case in immigration courts, including children.

That money is drying up, and pro bono work from big law firms is also at risk after Trump targeted some law firms for work on causes unpopular with him.

The South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project has over 700 cases representing children; cuts in their funding means they cannot take on more.

“We’re in this situation of trying to go through how we can meet our ethical duties as attorneys and represent people, but also not having the ability to pay for those services,” said Aimee Korolev, the deputy director.

In addition to cutting off grants that facilitate legal aid, the administration has directed the Justice and Homeland Security departments to take disciplinary action against immigration attorneys and law firms accused of committing fraud and “mass illegal immigration.”

“What we’ve seen is just this unprecedented attack on immigrants and access to counsel, including attacks on immigration lawyers, the pro bono attorneys, and on immigrants themselves,” said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center. Her group is one of those that’s lost federal funding to provide legal aid to unaccompanied minors.

She said the group’s recent wins point to the importance of due process.

Its clients include U.S. citizens or others with legal status who were questioned or wrongly arrested or detained, as well as lawful permanent residents who have prior convictions, such as Robert Panton, 59, who is facing removal proceedings for a single nonviolent drug offense.

The Department of Homeland Security says it abides by the Constitution but that it has the right to revoke visas.

“We have said time and time again that if you are in this country on a visa or green card and have committed a crime then you may be subject to visa revocation,” Tricia McLaughlin, the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an email to NPR. “We are absolutely following due process under the US Constitution.”

However, the department disputed that U.S. citizens were getting arrested.

“DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted and are not resulting in the arrest of U.S. citizens. We do our due diligence,” a senior DHS official said. “If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.”

Issues with U.S. citizens getting accidentally swept up in immigration arrests stretch back several administrations. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found that in the five years prior, potential citizens did have encounters with immigration officers that could lead to their arrest and even deportation.

Bypassing the process

Immigration lawyers say the administration is also trying to skip the often lengthy immigration court process as much as possible.

The Trump administration has sought to boost deportations of those eligible for “expedited removal,” which allows the government to immediately remove someone without a court hearing. Trump also invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which also allows the administration to speed up deportations of certain gang members with more limited due process.

Several lawsuits are challenging the president’s proclamation, and the Supreme Court temporarily blocked deportations under the act.

A member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus holds a picture of Kilmar Abrego Garcia during a news conference on April 9, 2025.

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Using a combination of laws allowing for quick removal, the administration sent more than 200 men to a mega prison in El Salvador. In court filings, attorneys for some of the men allege they scrambled to find clients who had been removed while in the midst of their immigration court processes.

Trump has also moved to lay off and encourage the resignations of hundreds of court staff, including the judges who are supposed to approve deportations.

This included judges who sit on the Board of Immigration Appeals, which hears appeals from immigration judges.

“We are already hearing that cases are piling up in the queue because there aren’t enough board members to review those appeal cases,” said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Those cases include recent arrests and detentions of people on student visas or without criminal records.

“The dramatic changes that the administration has made in just less than three months now are overwhelming the overall legal system structure, be it private attorneys or nonprofits,” Chen said. “There’s just an overwhelming amount, like a fire hydrant of demand for assistance.”

Encouragement to self-deport

And there’s some evidence the Department of Homeland Security is more actively trying to encourage people to skip going to court.

Across different court waiting rooms in Texas and Chicago, the Homeland Security Department has put up signs that read: “Message to illegal aliens: a warning to self-deport.”

Photos of signs were shared with NPR on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the government against attorneys or their clients. In Spanish and English, the signs warn of consequences if people do not “self-deport,” including the risk of hefty fines.

DHS, in a statement to NPR, didn’t deny putting these signs up in immigration court waiting rooms.

“President Trump and Secretary Noem have a clear message to illegal aliens: leave now,” McLaughlin said in response to questions about the signs. She said people should use the CBP Home App to self-deport and show they’re following the law.

Tabaddor, the former immigration judge, said leaving people without legal counsel, or chipping away at the process, means more mistakes are possible.

“At our fundamental level, we have to recognize that errors are made. We’re all human,” Tabaddor said, reflecting on her 30 years in federal immigration work.

“You have to have a system in place for those people to be given notice and an opportunity to respond. Otherwise, it’s absolute lawlessness.”

Recently, when President Trump threatened to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, financial markets flipped out. Then Trump insisted he wasn’t going to fire Powell, but he still took time to criticize the Fed’s interest-rate policy under Powell’s leadership. Markets chilled out, a bit.

This confrontation between the president and America’s central bank inspired Planet Money to collaborate with its sister podcast The Indicator to make an episode that serves as a primer on the Federal Reserve. It explains why economists and investors tend to believe that an independent central bank — free of presidential meddling — is crucial to a stable, low-inflation economy. And it goes over a bit of the history of Trump’s antagonistic relationship with the Fed under Powell, a man Trump appointed to head the U.S. central bank in the first place.

As the episode explains, the Fed is supposed to be insulated from partisan politics. But a new study shows how partisan politics has long influenced how much faith Americans have in the Fed. And it’s not as simple as members of one political party trusting the Fed, and members of the other party distrusting it. American faith in the Fed has been more like a pendulum that swings with presidential elections: people have tended to trust the Fed more when their party’s leader sits in the White House. However, this study finds, after this most recent presidential election, the pendulum didn’t swing.

The old pendulum swing

In the study, economists Carola Binder (at University of Texas at Austin), Cody Couture (at Hamilton College), and Abhiprerna Smit (at William & Mary) look at partisan views of the Federal Reserve. They first analyze survey data from Gallup Poll and the Michigan Survey of Consumers between 2001 and 2023.

The economists find a clear pattern in this historical data: a huge predictor of whether respondents said they trusted the Fed was whether their political party controlled the White House.

For instance, if a respondent was a Democrat, they were more likely to express trust in the Federal Reserve when President Obama was in office. If a respondent was a Republican, they were more likely to express trust in the Fed when President Bush was in office (independents, meanwhile, tended to always be the most distrustful of the Fed, whether a Democrat or Republican was in office). This is a factor, the economists find, that is “much larger than any demographic differences.”

It’s kinda weird because the White House doesn’t call the shots at the Fed. The central bank has long been independent of the political branches in its day-to-day decision-making.

Importantly, this phenomenon of Americans expressing trust in the Fed when their political party controlled the White House was true during President Trump’s first term as well (even though, starting around 2019, President Trump began bashing Jerome Powell and the Fed’s interest-rate policies). Republicans tended to have higher trust in the Fed than Democrats, during his first term.

The economists wanted to see if anything has changed in President Trump’s second term. Would this pattern repeat itself? Republicans definitely distrusted the Fed more than Democrats during President’s Biden’s tenure. Would they, like they had in the past, begin trusting the Fed more than Democrats now that a Republican controlled the White House?

This time the pendulum didn’t swing

To answer this question and more, the economists conducted an online survey in early 2025 of more than 3,000 Americans. They did this survey in two waves, shortly before and then shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

The economists’ survey suggests that, actually, this time is different. Republicans expressed lower trust in the Fed than Democrats did (and independents are in the middle, between Democrats and Republicans, in how much they trust the Fed).

The economists offer a couple of potential explanations. One is that the explosion of inflation that began in 2021 “caused a persistent erosion of Fed credibility among Republicans.” Another explanation: Republicans have become “more skeptical of technocracy” – or, Deep-State experts, if you will – “regardless of who controls the Presidency.” Maybe a simpler explanation is that, with Trump publicly bashing Powell and the Fed in the media, his supporters now consider the Fed, under Powell, as being antagonistic to their political tribe.

Binder, Couture, and Smit have another kinda weird finding: Despite Republicans expressing less faith in the Federal Reserve, they were also significantly more likely to believe that inflation will be lower in the future. It’s weird because the Federal Reserve’s biggest job is managing inflation. So many Republican respondents were like, nah, we don’t trust the Fed. But also, inflation is going to go significantly down.

The economists’ survey did offer respondents space to write why they believed what they believed. And — despite the potential inflationary impact of Trump’s tariffs and immigration crackdown — Republican respondents often gave answers that suggested they believed Trump would single-handedly bring down inflation through, for example, business deregulation or greater energy production.

Democrats, meanwhile, expressed the highest faith in the Fed. Yet they were more likely to express fears about inflation. Many of them tended to cite tariffs as a reason why they believed inflation would get worse. Many others just said basically, because, you know, Trump.

Some of these economists’ findings may be a bit puzzling to those who closely watch the Fed. But maybe it becomes less puzzling when you realize: many Americans don’t really understand what the Fed is or what it does! They probably just take their cues from the leader of their political tribe. And, for the first time in decades, the president has been sending a strong signal that the Fed is not doing what he wants.

A coalition of labor unions, nonprofits and local governments including Chicago, Baltimore and Harris County, Texas, has mounted the broadest legal challenge yet to President Trump’s massive overhaul of the federal government.

In a lawsuit filed late Monday, the plaintiffs charge that actions taken by the president, Elon Musk and the heads of nearly two dozen federal agencies to dramatically downsize the federal workforce violate the Constitution because Congress has not authorized them.

“Three months into this Administration, there can be no real doubt that impacted federal agencies are acting according to the direction being given by President Trump through DOGE, OMB, and OPM,” the lawsuit states, referring to the government efficiency team that Musk oversees, as well as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

“Over and over, newly appointed agency heads have explained that they are reorganizing, eliminating programs, and cutting thousands upon thousands of jobs, because the President directed them to and because DOGE told them how much and what to cut.”

The plaintiffs include some of the same unions and nonprofits that sued the Trump administration over its mass firing of probationary employees in the same federal court in San Francisco. In that case, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that OPM illegally directed six federal agencies to terminate recent hires and those newly promoted into new positions. Alsup ordered more than 16,000 fired workers reinstated. The Supreme Court later vacated the reinstatement order but has not yet considered whether the firings were illegal.

The new complaint goes further, arguing that Trump’s Feb. 11 executive order “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative” and actions taken since by his administration to implement it “usurp” Congress’ authority under the Constitution.

The argument dives into history, noting that “since the founding of the nation, federal courts have recognized that the federal agencies are not created by the President,” but by Congress, which has the sole authority to undertake the kind of wholesale transformation Trump has ordered, the plaintiffs argue.

Yet Congress, which is led by Republican allies of Trump, has largely chosen to remain silent as the administration fires federal workers, shuts down government programs and closes federal buildings.

Trump has touted these moves as restoring accountability. He has repeatedly argued that the American people, through the 2024 election, gave him a mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and inefficiency in the federal government.

Citing irreparable harm, the plaintiffs have asked the court to vacate Trump’s executive order, along with accompanying memos to agencies issued by OMB and OPM on how to implement the order. They have also asked the court to void agencies’ “reduction in force” or RIF plans, arguing that the compressed timeline — only a matter of weeks — set forth by the Trump administration for submitting those plans for approval could not have allowed for proper compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements.

The lawsuit takes direct aim at Musk’s DOGE, which is installing representatives in agencies across the government to direct workforce reductions. Noting that unlike with OMB and OPM, Congress has not granted DOGE any kind of statutory power, the plaintiffs write: “DOGE has no authority at all to dictate to the agencies created and governed by Congress any level of staffing cut or spending reduction.”

The White House did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment on the lawsuit.