Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

When the Washington Post reported via anonymous sources that a government intelligence assessment concluded the Venezuelan government was not directing the migration of members of the Trenreport de Aragua gang to the United States, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, dismissed such reports and said those “behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence” had “twisted and manipulated [the information] to convey the exact opposite finding.”

But a redacted copy of the intelligence memo shows that the Washington Post’s reporting was accurate. 

The April 7 intelligence assessment broadly concluded that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The six-page memo from the National Intelligence Council, “Venezuela: Examining Regime Ties to Tren de Aragua,” was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on May 5 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The foundation provided us a copy of that memo.

The conclusions in the National Intelligence Council memo — the shared assessment of 18 U.S. intelligence organizations — undercut the basis for President Donald Trump’s March 15 invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelan immigrants suspected of affiliation with Tren de Aragua. In that proclamation, the Trump administration argued that TdA is “conducting irregular warfare” in the U.S. and operating “in conjunction” with the Maduro regime, and in support of “the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”

As we have written, the Alien Enemies Act is an 18th century law that says that in times of war or during an “invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government,” the president can apprehend, restrain, secure and remove any immigrants who came from the enemy country.

Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act hinges on two assertions: that TdA is “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States” and that it is acting “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

As we said, the National Intelligence Council memorandum broadly contradicted that second statement.

What the Memo Says

According to the NIC memo, “While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The NIC memo listed several reasons for its conclusion.

First, it said, “Venezuelan intelligence, military, and police services view TDA as a security threat and operate against it in ways that make it highly unlikely the two sides would cooperate in a strategic or consistent way.” The memo noted that in late January, “at least two Venezuelan National Guard units arrested TDA members in Venezuela in separate operations.”

The memo further noted — citing press reports and redacted sources — that “[s]ince at least 2016, Venezuelan security forces have periodically engaged in armed confrontations with TDA, resulting in the killing of some TDA members.”

The memo stated that the intelligence community “has not observed the regime directing TDA, including to push migrants to the United States, which probably would require extensive coordination, and funding between regime entities and TDA leaders that we would collect.” The memo stated that “the decentralized makeup of TDA … would make such a relationship logistically challenging.” The memo also noted that the IC “recognizes the regime appreciates migration as a safety valve, allowing discontented Venezuelans to leave.”

In her April 21 social media post criticizing press reports about the then unreleased memo, Gabbard contradicted those assessments, saying, “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence fully supports the assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime, and thus subject to arrest, detention and removal as alien enemies of the United States.”

“Illegal immigrant criminals have raped, tortured, and murdered Americans, and still, the propaganda media continues to operate as apologists for them,” Gabbard said in a released statement. “It is outrageous that as President Trump and his administration work hard every day to make America safe by deporting these violent criminals, some in the media remain intent on twisting and manipulating intelligence assessments to undermine the President’s agenda to keep the American people safe.”

But the released NIC memo shows the media reports were not twisting the intelligence assessments. As the Washington Post reported on April 17, “The intelligence product found that although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader. The product builds on U.S. intelligence findings in February, first reported by the New York Times, that the gang is not controlled by Venezuela.”

The FBI’s Position

The FBI was the lone agency among the 18 U.S. intelligence organizations on the National Intelligence Council that offered partial dissent. (Other NIC organizations include the CIA, the five Department of Defense armed services, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence, and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.)

According to the memo, “While FBI analysts agree with the above assessment, they assess some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA members’ migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries, based on DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and FBI reporting as of February 2024.” (The italics are the memo’s emphasis.)

On April 23, Fox News Digital said it talked to an unnamed “senior administration official” who shared unclassified portions of an FBI report in which “[t]he FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan government officials likely will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to threaten, abduct and kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of Maduro and his regime.”

In a speech in Michigan on April 29, Trump referenced that report, saying, “The FBI recently assessed that these vicious gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela to foment violence and instability in the United States of America.”

The NIC memo, however, said that “most of the IC” has concluded that “intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible.”

“Some regime officials are probably willing to capitalize on migration for personal financial or other benefits, even though the Maduro regime probably is not systematically directing Venezuelan outflows, such as to sow chaos in receiving countries,” the NIC memo stated. “The intelligence record indicates Venezuelans have migrated voluntarily, often at great personal risk, to flee political instability and near-collapse of Venezuela’s economy. The IC attributes increased migration flows, including the spike in US arrivals from 2021 to 2024 of Venezuelan nationals –which could include some TDA members — to a variety of push and pull factors including socioeconomic conditions, family ties to the United States, and migrants’ perceptions of US and regional enforcement.”

But the NIC said that while Maduro may not have been directing the migration of Venezuelans, neither has he sought to stem it, saying that migration “helped him retain power by having dissidents leave the country.”

“The Maduro regime may have also welcomed the logistical, financial, and political headaches that unregulated migration has caused for the US Government, its perceived principal adversary, even if not a principal intent,” the memo stated.

Even in cases of “limited IC reporting suggesting a link between TDA and some Venezuelan officials aimed at facilitating TDA migration to the United States,” the memo noted that “in some cases, reporting warns that these sources could also be motivated to fabricate information.”

An official in Gabbard’s ODNI, however, said there’s reason to put more credence in the FBI intelligence than the assessment from the umbrella National Intelligence Council. The FBI assessment is based on its domestic law enforcement operations against TdA in the U.S., an ODNI official told us. “This information and intelligence are the most robust and accurate given their focus on domestic security and crimes, versus limited intelligence assessments from other intelligence elements who by law focus solely on foreign intelligence collection, and who until President Trump took office, had very limited resources focused on TdA,” the official said.

The ODNI official argued that the Venezuelan government is “aiding and abetting” TdA by creating conditions in the country that enable it to thrive — much the same way that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was providing sanctuary to al Qaeda, and thereby enabling al Qaeda to carry out its Sept. 11, 2001, attack in the U.S. The official also pointed to comments that José Gustavo Arocha, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, made to Fox News Digital in December. Arocha said that TdA is “a state-sponsored Maduro regime organization. The real boss of the Tren de Aragua is in Caracas, Venezuela. It is the Maduro regime, because they created TdA, and they use the TdA as a blackmail [tool] for any situation.”

The NIC memo acknowledged, “The lack of transparency and accountability in Venezuela has created an environment for widespread corruption and for regime officials to benefit from a variety of illicit activities, an environment fueled by Maduro’s illegitimate and autocratic grip on power. This persistent outflow of migrants probably offers opportunities for some regime officials in capacities to facilitate migration movement to look for and receive personal kickbacks for their services, and to conceal the benefits they receive.”

The memo noted that U.S. law enforcement reports claim members of the regime “have cooperated with TDA by providing financial or material support, but we cannot verify the sources’ access. Even so, these reports do not claim that these figures direct the group.”

And, the NIC memo warned, “Some reports come from people detained for involvement in criminal activity in the United States or for entering the country illegally, which could motivate them to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise ‘valuable’ information to US prosecutors.”

Courts on Use of Alien Enemies Act

The question of whether the Maduro regime in Venezuela is coordinating with TdA is central to the Trump administration’s argument for invoking the Alien Enemies Act in order to — as Trump put it — “expel every foreign terrorist from our soil as quickly as possible.” As we said, the act pertains to times of war or an “invasion” by a “foreign nation or government.”

The act has been used three times in U.S. history, during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.

In his March 15 proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump declared that “TdA is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States. TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.” And as a result, the proclamation said, “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA, are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”

Trump invoked the act in March to summarily deport 238 Venezuelan migrants alleged to be members of TdA, who were then sent to a mega prison in El Salvador. But the New York Times found no evidence that a vast majority of the men had any connection to Tren de Aragua.

Some federal judges have ruled that the administration can’t use the Alien Enemies Act in this way.

On May 1, a federal district judge in Texas — who was appointed by Trump — concluded that Trump had improperly applied the Alien Enemies Act.

“[T]he historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms,” U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. wrote. “As a result, the Court concludes that as a matter of law, the Executive Branch cannot rely on the AEA, based on the Proclamation, to detain the Named Petitioners and the certified class, or to remove them from the country.”

In similar cases in other states, two more federal judges have since concurred.

“Since Respondents have not demonstrated the existence of a ‘war,’ ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion,’ the AEA was not validly invoked by the Presidential Proclamation,” Judge Alvin Hellerstein, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, wrote in a May 6 ruling.

“Petitioners have not been given notice of what they allegedly did to join TdA, when they joined, and what they did in the United States, or anywhere else, to share or further the illicit objectives of the TdA,” Hellerstein wrote. “Without such proof, Petitioners are subject to removal by the Executive’s dictate alone, in contravention of the AEA and the Constitutional requirements of due process.”

The same day, a federal district judge in Colorado, an appointee of President Joe Biden, said she found “unpersuasive” the Trump administration’s definition of “invasion” to broadly include “hostile entrance,” or “hostile encroachment.” U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney said she agreed the word “invasion” meant military action against the U.S.

These decisions can all be appealed by the Trump administration, and the question of whether the president can use the Alien Enemies Act may ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

To commemorate his first 100 days in office this term, President Donald Trump gave a speech in Michigan and granted interviews to several news outlets. In our review of his remarks, we found false and misleading claims, including quite a few Trump has made before:

• The president insisted that an immigrant who was deported to El Salvador has tattoos on his knuckles that say “M-S-one-three,” but the actual letters and numbers in a photo Trump shared are an “obvious digital manipulation,” an expert told us.

• Trump said the FBI had confirmed that “gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela” to the U.S. Anonymous sources told one news outlet that the FBI backed up Trump’s claim, but other unnamed sources have said 17 intelligence agencies disagreed with that assessment.

• Trump took credit for recent increases in military recruiting, but those gains began under his predecessor and before he won reelection in November.

• He misleadingly said that a House Republican budget resolution that aims to cut about $800 billion in Medicaid spending over a decade would “look at waste, fraud, and abuse,” adding that “nobody minds that.” One expert told us the cuts are “orders of magnitude too large to not be destructive.”

• The president claimed that since January, “job gains for native-born Americans now exceed job gains for foreign workers … for the first time in nobody even knows when.” But there were several two-month periods in 2024 when native-born employment exceeded gains in foreign-born employment, which includes U.S. citizens born abroad.

• Trump claimed that there were “$7 to $8 trillion” in business investments in the U.S. since he took office, but the White House said more than $5 trillion in future investments have been announced. He also falsely claimed that under former President Joe Biden “nobody was really investing in this country,” including Apple.

• He misrepresented Democrats’ concern about deportations, wrongly saying that they were “claiming we’re not allowed to deport illegals.” Democrats have been critical of the lack of legal due process afforded to those who were deported.

• Trump said that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “announced that we’re banning eight major artificial dyes from our food supply.” The administration wants food companies to eliminate the dyes, but there’s no agreement and no broad ban.

• The president cited a Trump-friendly polling firm to boast that “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction.” Other polls show most people think the country is on the wrong track.

• He wrongly said “we’re doing great” with international tourism, which he said would become apparent in the next six months. But there were 11.6% fewer overseas visitors to the U.S. in March than there were the previous March.

Trump also repeated claims we’ve checked before about inflation, gasoline and egg prices, trade deficits, education, illegal immigration and more.

We reviewed his speech in Warren, Michigan, on April 29, and his recent interviews with ABC News and Time.

Knuckle Tattoos

The president claimed in his interview with ABC News that Kilmar Abrego Garcia — an immigrant who was deported without a hearing to El Salvador in March — had tattoos on his knuckles that labeled him as a member of the gang MS-13.

“He said he wasn’t a member of a gang and then they looked and on his knuckles he had MS-13,” Trump said.

The president was referring to a photo that he first shared on his social media platform, Truth Social, on April 18 and then shared again on April 21.

The photo appears to show tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s left hand, with each one labeled — “Marijuana,” “Smile,” “Cross,” “Skull.” Above each tattoo is text that shows a letter or number — “M,” “S,” “1,” “3.”

In the exchange between Trump and Terry Moran, ABC News’ senior national correspondent who conducted the interview, it appeared that the president understood the “MS13” to be part of the tattoo rather than text added to show an interpretation of the meaning of the tattoos.

Moran tried to point out that the actual letters and numbers were Photoshopped onto the image Trump shared, but the president insisted Moran was wrong, that his tattoos actually said “MS13.” When Moran tried to move on, saying, “We’ll agree to disagree,” the president refused to let the point go and said Moran’s corrections were an example of “why people no longer believe the news.”

See the full exchange here:

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics, described the text in the photo as an “obvious digital manipulation” in an email to us.

“What was done here is that the Trump administration took what appears to be a real photo (although I’m not able to authenticate that because what we are seeing here is a printout of a photo), ‘interpreted’ the four tattoos to be MS13, and then digitally added that annotation to the image,” Farid said.

We asked the White House to clarify whether or not the photo had been annotated, but we didn’t receive an answer. Instead, we got an emailed statement from White House spokesman Kush Desai saying, “Ask any law or immigration enforcement official who’s been on the ground about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s tattoos: they’re MS-13.”

The Washington Post asked eight law enforcement officials and gang researchers for their interpretations of the tattoos and got mixed responses, with some saying that the tattoos could be interpreted as showing an affiliation with MS-13 and others saying that they are not a code for gang affiliation. Other news outlets have also reported on expert analysis of the tattoos, with most concluding that the tattoos do not signify gang affiliation.

Even though we don’t know what the tattoos mean — if they mean anything at all — we do know that Abrego Garcia had only the depictions of a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull tattooed on his left hand when he was photographed at the prison in El Salvador in April. He did not have “MS13” displayed on his knuckles.

Intelligence Reports on Gangs and Venezuelan Government

Trump claimed the FBI has confirmed that the Venezuelan government has been emptying its jails and sending gang members to the U.S., which Trump has been saying for more than a year. Anonymous sources told one news outlet that the FBI backed up Trump’s claim, but other unnamed sources have said 17 intelligence agencies disagreed with that assessment.

In a presidential proclamation issued on March 15, Trump designated the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization and claimed the gang “is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus,” referring to the president of Venezuela.

While we have reported that Trump has provided scant evidence for this explosive claim, in his speech in Michigan, Trump said, “The FBI recently assessed that these vicious gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela to foment violence and instability in the United States of America.”

On April 23, Fox News Digital said it talked to an unnamed “senior administration official” who shared unclassified portions of an FBI assessment that “some Venezuelan government officials ‘likely facilitate’ the migration of members of the violent gang Tren de Aragua from Venezuela to the United States to advance the Maduro regime’s objective of undermining public safety in the U.S.”

According to the news report, “The FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan government officials likely will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to threaten, abduct and kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of Maduro and his regime.”

The Fox News report came a week after the Associated Press reported just the opposite.

Citing anonymous “U.S. officials,” the AP reported, “A new U.S. intelligence assessment found no coordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government, contradicting statements that Trump administration officials have made to justify their invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and deporting Venezuelan migrants.”

According to the AP, the classified assessment was the work of 18 agencies that make up the intelligence community. “It repeatedly stated that Tren de Aragua … is not coordinated with or supported by the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, or senior officials in the Venezuelan government. While the assessment found minimal contact between some members of the gang and low-level members of the Venezuelan government, there was a consensus that there was no coordination or directive role between gang and government,” the story stated.

The report noted that of the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. government’s intelligence community, “only one — the FBI — did not agree with the findings.” According to the Washington Post, which relied on “two people familiar with the matter,” the FBI “assessed a moderate level of cooperation between the gang and the Venezuelan government.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard criticized the National Intelligence Council report highlighted in the AP story, telling Fox News, “The weaponization of intelligence to undermine the President’s agenda is an assault on democracy. Those behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence, twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite finding, will be accountable under the full force of the law.”

Inflating Impact on Military Recruitment

Near the end of his Michigan speech, Trump turned to the military and took credit for recent increases in recruiting that began under his predecessor.

“After years of missed targets, our military suddenly has the best recruiting numbers in 30 years,” the president said.

He’s right that recruitment numbers have been up following a slump from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the increase predated his election in November.

At the end of the most recent fiscal year, which finished in September, the Defense Department announced that it had recruited 12.5% more people than it had the previous fiscal year.

Every branch of the military reached its recruitment goal for fiscal year 2024, except for the Navy, according to the Defense Department.

A chart complied by the Congressional Research Service shows that the Army, Air Force and Space Force exceeded their goals.

Taren Sylvester, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, told Military.com in March, “The incoming administration is claiming all of these upticks are a result of the election swing and people now thinking they want to go into the military after the policy changes.”

But, they said, “Whether or not that holds out, we won’t see for another six, 12, 18 months. The shifts that we’re seeing now are reflective of the work that’s been done over the past two to five years.”

Medicaid

In the Time interview, Trump was asked about the House Republican budget resolution that aims to cut about $800 billion from Medicaid over 10 years, as part of the process of extending expiring tax cut provisions and enacting some new tax cuts. “I don’t think they’re going to cut $800 billion. They’re going to look at waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump said, adding that “nobody minds that.” That’s misleading.

While it’s still unknown how specifically Republicans would trim the Medicaid budget, experts told us such large cuts in federal funding would have a significant impact, leaving states with tough choices on raising revenue, cutting other parts of their budgets or cutting their Medicaid programs.

As we’ve explained, the budget calls for the Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion in spending over 10 years, and the committee’s options for those reductions are mostly limited to Medicaid, a federal-state program that provides health care for low-income people. Medicare, the federal program that covers seniors, could also be cut, but that’s even more politically challenging.

“The place where they have the ability to make cuts is going to be in Medicaid,” Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us. Cuello said an $880 billion cut is “gigantic” and “orders of magnitude too large to not be destructive.” It would be about an 11% cut to federal Medicaid funding over the decade.

Native- and Foreign-Born Workers

In Michigan, Trump claimed that because of his administration, employment growth for U.S-born workers is now higher than for foreign-born workers.

“In three months, we have created 350,000 jobs,” Trump said. “For the first time in recent memory, job gains for native-born Americans now exceed job gains for foreign workers. This is for the first time in nobody even knows when. Americans now are doing better than foreign workers.”

Although he said in three months, Trump appears to be referencing the two-month increase in employment from January to March, which is the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In that period, native-born employment increased by 613,000 and foreign-born employment — which includes foreign-born American citizens — increased by 451,000. But it hasn’t been long since that last happened.

There were several times in 2024 when a two-month increase in native-born employment exceeded gains in foreign-born employment (August 2024-October 2024, May 2024-July 2024, March 2024-May 2024 and February 2024-April 2024). If Trump was just comparing previous periods of January to March, the last time it happened was January 2022 to March 2022. (The White House didn’t tell us which months Trump was comparing.)

Business Investments

Trump touted announcements of investments by private companies, wrongly claiming that under Biden “nobody was really investing in this country” and that Apple “never invested” in the U.S.

In his ABC News interview, Trump claimed that there has already been more private-business investment in the U.S. during his administration than there was in any year during Biden’s presidency.

“We’ve got $7 to $8 trillion being invested in our country in two months,” Trump said. “Biden didn’t have that over a year. I mean, if you look at Biden, nobody was really investing in this country.”

In his Time interview, Trump mentioned investments by chips companies, car companies and Apple. “Apple is investing $500 billion in building plants. They never invested in this country,” Trump said.

The White House said on April 29 that Trump “has secured over $5 trillion in new U.S.-based investments in his first 100 days.” These investments haven’t already happened; they’re announcements by companies of future investments, sometimes over several years.

Private companies also made such announcements when Biden was president. In a November 2024 statement, Biden announced that legislation he signed — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — had “helped attract over $1 trillion in announced private-sector investments.” In his final month in office, Biden’s administration issued a report on the results of his “Investing in America” agenda.

And Apple certainly has announced similar investments in the U.S. before. In April 2021, under Biden, the company announced a $430 billion investment over five years. That was after it announced a $350 billion investment under Trump in 2018. When it announced in February its latest plan to investment more than $500 billion in the U.S. over four years, the company said its “new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing.”

Misrepresenting Democrats on Deportation

The president also touted the deportation of about 250 immigrants his administration has accused of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The men were flown to a mega prison in El Salvador on March 15.

During the Michigan rally, Trump played a video that had originally been posted by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele showing the immigrants arriving in shackles and having their heads shaved.

“The radical left Democrats, who are so bad for this country, are fighting to protect [Tren de Aragua] — you just saw that — and MS-13 criminals,” Trump said. “But the second we try to deport them, the radical Democrat party is racing to the defense of some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth. … They’re racing to the courts to help them. … They’re claiming we’re not allowed to deport illegals.”

But that misrepresents what’s happened. Democrats who have opposed the administration’s action have largely expressed concern over the lack of due process for those who were deported, arguing that noncitizens who are targeted for deportation are, in most cases, entitled to a hearing beforehand.

“Due process is the language of a constitutional democracy, and so we have to speak that language so people can understand other people’s situations,” Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Politico in April. “And I do believe that if we don’t stand up for the due process rights of non-citizens, they will quickly trample the due process rights of citizens.”

A letter from Raskin and other House Democrats to administration officials echoed that sentiment. “Due process and separation of powers are matters of principle,” Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York told the Associated Press on April 17. “Without due process for all, we are all in danger.”

Food Dyes

In his speech, Trump said that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “announced that we’re banning eight major artificial dyes from our food supply.”

There’s less here than meets the eye. The administration wants food companies to eliminate the dyes, but there’s no agreement yet and no broad ban of synthetic food dyes.

According to an April 22 Food and Drug Administration news release, the agency is starting the process of revoking authorization for two food dyes, Citrus Red 2 and Orange B, which are only approved for very narrow purposes. The agency is “[w]orking with industry to eliminate six remaining synthetic dyes,” the release said. (The FDA announced a ban of a ninth synthetic dye, Red 3, in January, and the new FDA release said the agency was requesting that companies remove it from food sooner than required.)

In remarks at an April 22 press conference announcing the new measures to phase out synthetic food dyes, Kennedy praised food companies “for working with us to achieve this agreement or this settlement.” But, when pressed, he said, “I would say we don’t have an agreement. We have an understanding.”

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said at the same press conference, “I believe in love, and let’s start in a friendly way and see if we can do this without any statutory or regulatory changes, but we are exploring every tool in the toolbox to make sure this gets done very quickly.”

Kennedy subsequently incorrectly claimed a broad ban of synthetic food dyes. “We announced last week the ban on the nine petroleum-based synthetic dyes, food dyes,” he said in an April 30 Cabinet meeting.

Some companies have announced decisions to phase out synthetic dyes in certain products. For instance, PepsiCo on April 24 said that it would no longer include the dyes in certain snack foods by the end of the year. And a spokesperson for WK Kellogg last week told the New York Times that the company would phase out synthetic dyes from cereals sold in schools.

Right Direction/Wrong Direction

Citing popular support for his agenda, Trump said at the rally in Michigan that “as a result of our policies, for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction. … Has never happened before.”

Trump is referring to a Rasmussen Reports presidential approval poll released in mid-February that found — for the first time in over 20 years (not ever) — a plurality of Americans (47%) believed the country was headed in the right direction, more than the 46% who felt it was headed in the wrong direction. However, that lead is within the poll’s margin of error of 3 percentage points, and it comes via a polling firm many consider to be conservative-leaning. Also, more recent polling from Rasmussen in late April has the “right direction” camp falling to 42%.

And other recent polls found widely different results.

Marquette University surveys have found that while the right track/wrong track divide has been narrowing over the last six months, a majority of Americans still think the country is on the wrong track. An early February survey found 38% of Americans believe the country is on the right track, while 62% believed it is on the wrong track. That narrowed even further to 42-58 in late March.

Surveys from YouGov also indicate a majority of Americans believe America is “off on the wrong track.” The most recent poll in late April found 36.5% of Americans believed the country is “generally headed in the right direction,” while 54% said it was “off on the wrong track.”

Gallup poses its question slightly differently, but in its most recent poll in early April, 34% said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time, while 64% said they were dissatisfied.

Tourism

In his ABC News interview, Trump contradicted host Terry Moran’s claim that “travel is down into the United States from around the world.”

“We’re doing great,” Trump insisted.

“Tourism is gonna be way up,” Trump said. “Wait till you see the numbers. The tourism is way up. … Tourism’s doing very well. … Wait till you see the real numbers come out in about — in six months from now.”

We can’t predict what the tourism numbers will show in six months, but Moran was correct that travel to the U.S. is currently down. According to the Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office, there were 11.6% fewer overseas visitors to the U.S. in March than there were in March 2024. Those figures do not include data from Canada, nor land arrivals from Mexico.

Repeats

Inflation. Trump claimed that during the Biden administration the U.S. had “probably the worst inflation we’ve ever had.” Under Biden, the annualized rate of inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, which was less than 14.8% in March 1980 and 23.7% in 1920. When Biden left office in January, the rate was down to 3%, and it was down to 2.4% in March under Trump.

Gas and egg prices. Arguing that prices have declined, Trump claimed that “gasoline hit $1.98 in a few states … the last couple of days,” and the cost of “eggs are down 87%” since he took office. There are no states where the average cost of a gallon of regular grade gasoline has dropped below $2; the national average was $3.13 as of the week ending April 28, according to the Energy Information Administration. Also, the average retail price of eggs was up, not down, in March, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. Even the average wholesale price that retailers pay for eggs sold in stores has not decreased by as much as Trump said. As of April 25, it was down 61% from its peak in early March.

Trade deficit. Defending higher tariffs on imports of foreign goods, Trump, referring to the trade deficit, said, “We were losing $3 to $5 billion a day on trade. We were losing a trillion and a half to $2 trillion a year.” The trade deficit in goods and services was about $918 billion in 2024 and the trade deficit in goods alone was about $1.2 trillion. Divide either by 365 days, and you get an average per-day deficit of between $2.5 billion and $3.3 billion. Either way, economists have said a trade deficit doesn’t mean the U.S. is losing money.

U.S.-China trade. When talking about the 145% tariffs that he put on imports of Chinese goods, Trump said China was “making from us a trillion dollars a year,” appearing to again exaggerate the trade gap between the U.S. and China. The U.S. trade deficit with China in goods and services in 2024 was about $263 billion, and last year the U.S. imported a total of about $462.5 billion in Chinese goods and services combined.

No EV mandate. Trump claimed that he “terminated Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate,” but there was no such mandate. In March 2024, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency finalized new fuel efficiency standards for certain vehicles. The rules were expected to increase purchases of electric vehicles in the U.S., but there was no requirement for drivers to buy them. Carmakers could have met the new standards by also making more efficient cars that run on gas, experts told us.

Education. “Last month I signed a historic executive order to begin the process of eliminating the federal Department of Education,” Trump said. “We’re going to send it back to our states to run. I mean, how the hell bad can we do? We’re like in last place.” As we have written, U.S. high school students performed above average in science and reading, and a bit below average in math, according to the latest data compiled by the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And in other international assessments, elementary students in the U.S. scored above average in math, science and reading.

DOGE Savings. Trump said that his new Department of Government Efficiency had “found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.” The DOGE website now claims $160 billion in savings, providing a “Wall of Receipts” that purports to back up about $63 billion of that. It’s unclear how much, if any, of these savings amount to fraud or abuse, as opposed to spending that the administration deems wasteful.

WHO. In discussing his withdrawal from the World Health Organization, Trump repeated his claim that previously, China paid just $39 million, while the U.S. paid around $500 million. Those figures are inaccurate. While the U.S. has paid much more than China — most of it voluntarily — China has paid more than that. Trump also claimed that Biden “could have signed up for $39 million or less.” That’s not how the global health group’s funding works. Since 2020, the required dues for the U.S., based on GDP, have been more than $200 million for each two-year period.

Illegal immigration. Trump claimed that the Biden administration was allowing “gang members,” “murderers,” and people from “prisons, mental institutions” to illegally enter the U.S. “We had many murderers, 11,888, they think. Some murdered more than one person,” he said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said last year that there were 13,099 noncitizens convicted of murder who were in the U.S. and not being detained by ICE. But the Department of Homeland Security told us that the “vast majority” of them entered the country and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration.”

Jan. 6 committee. Trump attacked the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying, “Nobody mentions the fact that the unselect committee of political scum … they destroyed all evidence, they burned it, they got rid of it, they destroyed it, and they deleted all evidence.” In fact, the committee made public a nearly 850-page report with evidence from its investigation. It also published videos, transcribed interviews, depositions and other documents. But the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, did acknowledge in a July 2023 letter that the committee “did not archive temporary committee records that were not elevated by the Committee’s actions, such as use in hearings or official publications, or those that did not further its investigative activities.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

On the 2024 campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to launch a massive overhaul of the federal government if reelected president, and, he said, change would come fast.

To be sure, Trump’s first 100 days have seen a frenetic pace of change. But while Trump has boasted that some have called it “the most successful 100 days in the history of our country,” his agenda has also been challenged in the courts and by other economic and political realities.

Here, we look at a half dozen of Trump’s most consequential pledges – ones that he said would happen immediately — and the progress Trump has made toward fulfilling them.

Tariffs

In early April, Trump followed through on his August 2024 campaign promise that the U.S. was “going to have 10 to 20% tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years” — although the tariffs, a form of tax, are paid by U.S. importers, not foreign countries.

On April 2, Trump issued an executive order implementing a minimum 10% tariff on U.S. imports of foreign goods, as well as higher tariff rates for goods imported from certain countries. A week later, after stock market declines partly attributed to his new policies, Trump paused for 90 days some of the higher country-by-country tariffs.

However, Trump didn’t pause the higher tariff rates for goods coming to the U.S. from China. Instead, he incrementally increased them to 145%, after China retaliated to Trump’s tariff announcements by raising its own tariffs on imports of U.S. goods. During the election campaign, Trump had floated putting at least a 60% tariff on Chinese imports.

Trump also has kept in place 25% tariffs on certain goods imported from Canada and Mexico that went into effect in March — tariffs that Trump initially paused after announcing them in February. (Goods from the two countries aren’t subject to the 10% rate for other imports.) Other previously announced tariffs still in effect include 25% tariffs on imports of steel, aluminum, automobiles and certain auto parts.

How long the 10% universal tariff remains in place, and what happens to the higher rates after the 90-day pause, is still to be determined. In his April 22 Time interview, Trump claimed to have since negotiated “200 deals” on trade that he said will be announced at a later date. He also has signaled that the 145% tariff on Chinese goods will “come down substantially.”

Ukraine-Russia War

On March 4, 2023 — just over a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland that he could and would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours once he was elected and even before he was back in the White House.

“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly. Quickly. I will get the problem solved and I will get it solved in rapid order and it will take me no longer than one day,” Trump said.

It was a claim he made repeatedly during his third presidential campaign — at least 53 times, according to a search of his public remarks by CNN.

But over three months into his second term in the White House, Trump has found ending the conflict more difficult than he claimed. The fighting continues, with more than 160 Ukrainian civilians killed and over 900 injured by Russian attacks in March, according to monthly data compiled by the United Nations.

The Trump administration has brokered indirect negotiations between the warring nations, but the president’s frustration over the process has vacillated between wrongly blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war to chiding Russian President Vladimir Putin for a missile and drone strike on Kyiv on April 24 while ceasefire talks were underway.

In recent days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed “there are reasons to be optimistic” that a deal between the countries is getting closer, while also warning that the U.S. is ready to walk away if the war drags on. “We have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in or if it’s time to sort of focus on some other issues that are equally if not more important in some cases,” Rubio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 27.

As for his campaign promise that he’d easily and quickly make peace between Ukraine and Russia, Trump told Time magazine in an April 22 interview, “Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point. … Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest.”

Illegal Immigration

It was perhaps the most enduring of Trump’s campaign promises: “On Day 1, I will close the border and I will stop the invasion of illegal criminals coming into our country.” On his first days in office, Trump — among an array of other immigration actions — issued an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border and deploying military to help stem the flow of illegal migration.

In his first 100 days in office, illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle. Apprehensions of migrants who illegally crossed the border in February and March fell to 8,346 and 7,181 — the lowest monthly totals since at least the 1960s. That’s an 83% drop from November (46,615) and December (47,324) of 2024, the last two full months under President Joe Biden. The most recent monthly totals are a fraction of the figure in December 2023, when apprehensions of illegal border-crossers peaked under Biden at 249,740.

“Just as happened during the beginning of his first term, migration at the border has absolutely plummeted since January 20th,” Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, told us via email. “The main reason for that is first, migrants and smugglers always stop and go into ‘wait and see’ mode when they know that a crackdown is imminent, and Trump was elected promising an enormous crackdown.”

But, “perhaps even more importantly,” Isacson said, Trump issued a proclamation declaring “that an invasion is ongoing at the southern border” as justification for shutting down the right of migrants to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, the Trump administration boasts that just nine migrants were released into the U.S. between Jan. 20 and April 1, a 99.9% decrease from the same period in 2024 under Biden.

“That is illegal,” Isacson said, noting that a legal challenge of the Trump asylum policy is currently before the courts.

Trump also promised to launch the “largest deportation program in American history.” The White House says the U.S. has deported more than 135,000 people in Trump’s first 100 days. That pace lags the average number of deportations over a similar period in fiscal year 2024 under Biden, but the Trump administration argues the Biden figures are inflated because so many more people were illegally crossing the border.

On March 15, Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act — a rarely used law that dates back to 1798 — before sending hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The Supreme Court has said that detainees must get a court hearing before deportation, and in late April, the court temporarily blocked the administration from using the law to deport Venezuelan men being held in Texas.

Facing criticism for failing to provide due process rights, Trump has argued it’s not feasible to have hearings for all the migrants who want to challenge their deportation.

At a press conference on April 28, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt vowed the administration is “in the beginning stages of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in American history.”

Isacson said that while deportations are “nowhere near the million-a-year pace that the Trump people have been saying they expect to hit,” the House Judiciary Committee is beginning work on a spending bill, “which in the House version has $45 billion for detention and $14 billion for deportation.”

“Once that passes, they will have the resources—even if they have to call in the military to back it up—and we might see a gigantic increase in the tempo of mass deportation,” Isacson said.

Birthright Citizenship

In a May 30, 2023, video posted on Truth Social, Trump revived a pledge he hadn’t fulfilled in his first term: If elected, he would “sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”

And on Jan. 20, he did exactly that, signing an executive order that argues the longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment to grant birthright citizenship to all children born in the U.S. is incorrect. The order said that it’s U.S. policy to not issue or accept documents recognizing citizenship if a person’s mother was in the U.S. unlawfully, or in the country lawfully but only temporarily, and the father was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.

In signing the order, Trump acknowledged when asked by a reporter that the issue could face legal challenges (and several lawsuits were soon filed). “We think we have good grounds, but you could be right. I mean, you’ll find out,” Trump said. “It’s ridiculous. We’re the only country in the world that does this with birthright, as you know.” (The U.S. isn’t the only country with birthright citizenship. As we’ve written, about 30 countries have similar policies, including Canada and Mexico. The CIA World Factbook lists 38 countries, many of them in Latin America and the Caribbean.)

Within a few weeks of Trump’s order, four federal judges in four different states had issued preliminary injunctions, blocking the executive order from taking effect. The case is now on the Supreme Court docket, with oral arguments slated for May 15. A decision is likely to come this summer, as SCOTUSblog explained.

Most constitutional scholars have said that changing the birthright citizenship policy in the U.S. would require a constitutional amendment. A few experts disagree and have said Congress could pass legislation to change it. In 1898, the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision in a case involving a man born to parents who were citizens of China but legally living in the U.S. The court hasn’t specifically ruled on this issue concerning parents living in the U.S. without legal authorization.

Stock Market

Back in August 2024, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank more than 1,000 points, Trump blamed his presidential campaign rival, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, for the decline. “Of course there is a massive market downtown,” Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social on Aug. 5. “You can’t play games with MARKETS. KAMALA CRASH!!!”

Then, at a rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, the eve of his first day back in office, Trump took credit for a rising stock market and referred to it, and other economic measures, as “the Trump effect.”

“Everyone is calling it the — I don’t want to say this. It’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway, the Trump effect. It’s you. You’re the effect. Since the election, the stock market has surged,” Trump said.

But the glow was short-lived, due partly to the uncertainty over Trump’s tariff policy. The S&P 500, an index that tracks the performance of the leading companies on U.S. stock exchanges, has had its “worst first-100-day performance for a new administration in over 50 years,” MarketWatch reported on April 29. At that time, the S&P 500 was down nearly 8%; the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 7.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite had fallen 11.5% since Jan. 20.

Trump has typically touted the stock market as a measure of his economic prowess. But in a March 9 interview on Fox News, Trump said, “You can’t really watch the stock market,” and suggested a longer-term view. “If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective. We have a quarter. We go by quarters. You can’t go by that.”

Prices

At another campaign rally in August 2024, Trump promised, “Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down and we will make America affordable again.” Then, in a December interview after he was elected, Trump said, referring to prices, “I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.”

Indeed, the price of many products hasn’t declined under Trump, according to the latest federal data. For one, egg prices, which Trump frequently claims are down by large percentages, were still increasing, on average, for consumers, as of March. Average wholesale prices, which retailers pay for the eggs they sell in stores, have declined by 46% since Trump was sworn in. In March, the Department of Agriculture credited “no significant outbreaks” of the bird flu for declining wholesale prices. But that hasn’t yet translated to lower prices for grocery shoppers.

Average grocery prices overall, which Trump has claimed “are down,” were up in March as well, according to the Consumer Price Index for at-home food items.

For drivers, the average price of gas, which Trump also mentions often, hasn’t declined, either, according to the Energy Information Administration. The EIA said the national average price of a gallon of regular grade gas was $3.14 for the week ending April 21 — up from $3.11 during the week ending Jan. 20, which is the day that Trump began his second term. The price of crude oil, however, has dropped, after OPEC+ announced it would move up a planned production increase due to recent tariffs imposed by the U.S. and China.

Inflation growth has come down since Trump took office, leading Trump to claim on April 14 that “we’ve already solved inflation.” The inflation rate of 2.4% for the 12 months ending in March was lower than the annualized rate of 3% in January, but that doesn’t mean prices are going down. It means prices are increasing at a slower pace. Economists also said that the tariffs Trump announced in April could cause inflation to rise again, as importers pass along most of the tariff costs to consumers in the form of higher prices.

In a campaign rally last July, Trump had said, “Starting on Day One, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.”

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The Supreme Court ruled on the evening of April 10 that the Trump administration must comply with a lower court’s order to “facilitate” the release from custody of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an immigrant who was deported without a hearing to a mega prison in El Salvador. The case underscores the issue of due process and what legal protections are afforded to noncitizens.

Here, we’ll explain what due process means, any limitations in its application to noncitizens, and the details of the Abrego Garcia case. In the process, we’ll fact-check some comments officials have made about the case.

The Trump administration, which has said that Abrego Garcia was accidentally deported due to an “administrative error,” has stalled on bringing him back despite court orders, arguing that U.S. agencies do “not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.” Abrego Garcia was among the more than 250 immigrants who were deported by the administration to El Salvador on March 15.

“That’s up to El Salvador, if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said during an Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on April 14. At the same meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized the diplomatic implications, saying, “The foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court.”

But the case highlights what some legal scholars see as an effort by the Trump administration to erode due process — or the constitutional right to contest an arrest by the government — and set a precedent for making people unreachable by imprisoning them outside of the U.S.

“Why hasn’t the Trump administration acted to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release? After all, he is there because of a government screw-up,” law professors Erwin Chemerinsky and Laurence H. Tribe asked in an April 9 opinion piece published by the New York Times.

“The answer can only be that it is using this case to establish a truly chilling proposition: that no one can stop the Trump administration from imprisoning any people it wants anywhere else in the world,” they answered.

We reached out to the White House for a response to that proposition, but we didn’t receive a reply.

Some Trump administration officials, though, have suggested that there may be limits to due process. Border czar Tom Homan, for example, said that immigration agents are the “principal” judges of whether or not a detainee has gang affiliations and, if they determine that there is an affiliation, that detainee’s rights to due process are limited.

“People who are enemies of the United States don’t have the same level [of] due process [as in] the normal process,” Homan told Axios in an April interview, making an apparent reference to the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel immigrants it alleges are gang members. A challenge to the use of that law is currently working its way through the courts, as we’ve explained.

And Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, posted on X on April 1: “Friendly reminder: If you illegally invaded our country the only ‘process’ you are entitled to is deportation.”

But immigrants — including those who crossed the border without authorization — have a right to due process, legal experts say.

“The thing about due process is that it either applies to everyone present in the United States or it applies to no one,” Amy Grenier, of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told us by email.

What Is Due Process?

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution establish the right to due process — the Fifth Amendment says that “[n]o person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment extends this obligation to the states.

“There is no way to have due process and decide a group of people are not entitled to it. Due process includes the opportunity to know the charges against you and to argue against them. If a government is ensuring due process, every individual removed will know why they are removed, and they will have an opportunity to make their case on why they should not be prior to removal,” Grenier said. “This is true even for the undocumented, even if someone is here without authorization.”

She noted that the Constitution uses the word, “person,” not, citizen — meaning that it applies to everyone.

“If due process applied only to citizens, or people who are here lawfully, yet at no point is there an opportunity to be heard or prove your case, how would a citizen prove they are a citizen prior to removal?” she asked.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, agreed. “Constitutional protections apply to everyone and that’s the baseline,” she told us in a phone interview.

But, Bush-Joseph said, the legal process can differ, depending on how a person entered the country. For example, someone who overstayed a visa and has been present in the U.S. for years generally would go to immigration court before they could be deported, while someone who has been in the U.S. illegally for less than two years could be subject to an expedited removal process. Under that process, an immigration officer can order a noncitizen to be removed, unless that person expresses a credible fear of returning to their home country and seeks asylum.

Previously, the expedited removal process had applied to those who were apprehended within 100 miles of the border within 14 days of having entered the country. However, Trump expanded expedited removal shortly after taking office to include anyone who illegally crossed the border within the prior two years and is apprehended anywhere in the country. The policy is being challenged in court as a violation of due process.

Bush-Joseph also noted that some other actions the Trump administration has taken suggest it may be trying to speed up the deportation of immigrants: namely, the executive order Trump signed on Jan. 20 calling the arrival of immigrants in the U.S. an “invasion” and the requirement that “all foreign nationals present in the United States longer than 30 days” must register with the government.

“President Trump and I have a clear message for those in our country illegally: leave now,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement urging compliance with the registration rule.

“So, the Trump administration is saying that immigrants affected by these announcements don’t have the same protections as U.S. citizens,” Bush-Joseph said.

Abrego Garcia

In Abrego Garcia’s case, he came to the U.S. without authorization in 2012, fleeing gang violence from Barrio 18, which had targeted his family’s pupusa business in El Salvador, according to court documents.

He went to live with his brother, a U.S. citizen, in Maryland and, in 2019, was arrested while waiting outside of a Home Depot to be hired as a day laborer. The Department of Homeland Security then moved to deport him under Title 8 — which codifies immigration laws, including those that govern asylum, removal and naturalization — because he was in the U.S. without having been legally admitted. Abrego Garcia then applied for asylum.

The Trump administration has highlighted a claim made in the arguments over whether he should be detained or let out on bond while awaiting the outcome of his asylum case. At the time, Abrego Garcia argued that he should be freed on bond, saying that he wasn’t a flight risk since he had lived in the U.S. for eight years and intended to marry his then girlfriend who was a U.S. citizen and was five months into a high-risk pregnancy. He also argued that he wasn’t a danger to the community, citing his lack of a criminal record.

DHS, however, argued that he should be kept in custody pending the outcome of the case because, it alleged, he was a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13. Abrego Garcia and his now wife denied the allegation at the time and continue to do so today.

Two pieces of evidence were presented to support the claim that he was a member of MS-13. First, what he was wearing at the time of his arrest — “a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations. Officers know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture,” the arrest record said. Second, a statement from a now suspended officer who cited an unnamed informant who said that Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang’s “Westerns clique,” which is based in New York — a state, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers say, he’s never been to.

The docket for his 2019 immigration case isn’t public, but documents from it have been filed in the current case. Bondi posted some documents from it on social media. They show that an immigration judge who handled his bond hearing found that DHS’ contention that he was a member of MS-13 “appears to be trustworthy,” while also acknowledging that there were inconsistencies in the report DHS relied upon. The judge denied Abrego Garcia’s bond, and an immigration court appeals board issued a two-page order upholding her ruling.

Bondi overstated the findings from the bond hearing when she said in the Oval Office meeting, “In 2019, two courts — an immigration court and an appellate immigration court — ruled that he was a member of MS-13.” The courts didn’t “rule” on the issue; rather, they said that the report relied upon by DHS was inconsistent but “appears to be trustworthy” enough to deny bond.

A different immigration judge handled Abrego Garcia’s asylum claim. That judge didn’t rule on the issue of whether or not the government had proved Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, but the judge reviewed all the evidence presented in the case and found that Abrego Garcia “provided credible responses to the questions asked” and that his testimony was “consistent with his asylum application and other documents.” The judge didn’t grant asylum because Abrego Garcia had filed his application seven years after entering the U.S., “well-beyond the one-year filing deadline.”

However, the judge did grant him “withholding of removal,” which is a form of relief for migrants who fear persecution, as explained by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Such a ruling prevents deportation to a person’s home country and allows that person the right to remain in the U.S. and work legally, but according to the American Immigration Council, “the government is still allowed to deport that person to a different country if the other country agrees to accept them.” It does not allow a path to permanent residence or citizenship in the U.S.

The judge found that Abrego Garcia had “suffered past persecution as he was threatened with death on more than one occasion” and that “the facts here show that the Barrio 18 gang continues to threaten and harass the Abrego family over these several years, and does so even though the family has moved three times.” The judge ruled that he could not be sent back to a country where he would be likely to suffer persecution.

The government did not appeal that ruling, and Abrego Garcia has been living and working in Maryland ever since.

When Abrego Garcia was arrested on March 12, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers didn’t provide a warrant and “told him only that his ‘status had changed,’” according to U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis’ explanation of her April 4 decision that he should be returned from El Salvador. He was shuttled between detainment facilities before being flown to El Salvador on March 15, without having seen a judge.

“Although the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal,” Xinis wrote, concluding that “his detention appears wholly lawless.”

Vice President JD Vance misrepresented the situation when he posted on X, “Because he is not a citizen, he does not get a full jury trial by peers. In other words, whatever ‘due process’ he was entitled to, he received.” It’s true that Abrego Garcia received due process after being apprehended in 2019 — ultimately getting a judgment of withholding from removal — but he was not given due process before being removed from the country in March.

“The government could have presented its evidence before an immigration judge, the federal district court in Maryland, or in criminal proceedings as it has done in prosecuting cases of other alleged MS-13 members,” foreign affairs expert Tom Joscelyn and law professor Ryan Goodman recently explained in the online publication Just Security.

Since Abrego Garcia was removed under Title 8, that case would have been brought to an immigration court, which doesn’t have jury trials. Rather, those cases are decided by immigration judges.

At this point, the Supreme Court has upheld Xinis’ April 4 order that the government should “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia and said it should “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The high court instructed the District Court to clarify the order to “effectuate” his return, “with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” and said the federal government “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

So far, the government hasn’t explained such steps. In a court filing on April 21, lawyers for the administration maintained that since Abrego Garcia got to El Salvador “his detention was no longer a matter of the United States’ confinement, but a matter belonging to the government of El Salvador.”

Bukele, the country’s president, said in the Oval Office meeting on April 14 that he wouldn’t release Abrego Garcia and suggested the man was a “terrorist.”

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In his first speech since leaving office, former President Joe Biden criticized the Trump administration’s staffing cuts and other changes at the Social Security Administration, but he made several misleading claims in the process.

• Biden made the misleading claim that during his presidency some Republicans “wanted to let Social Security expire every five years … unless reauthorized by the Congress.” A 2022 proposal from Sen. Rick Scott called for sunsetting all federal programs after five years, unless Congress extended them. But Scott said he wanted to “fix,” not end, Social Security, and a later proposal specifically exempted Social Security.

• The former president claimed that Republicans “threatened to raise the retirement age.” The conservative Republican Study Committee has proposed gradually raising the full retirement age for years, but that hasn’t gained enough support in Congress, even among Republicans.

• Biden said the Social Security Administration had its “lowest staffing levels in 50 years” when he took office as president. He failed to mention that staffing ended up even lower his last year in office.

• He said that staffing cuts and other changes under the Trump administration had caused concern that “Social Security benefits may be delayed or interrupted.” It’s true that experts have shared that concern over possible administrative errors. But a few of Biden’s comments could leave the misleading impression that monthly benefits for millions of people had nearly been, or were about to be, cut off.

Biden spoke April 15 in Chicago at the Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled conference.

Old Chestnut on Letting Social Security Expire

Biden repeated a familiar talking point in misleadingly claiming that during his presidency some Republicans in Congress “wanted to let Social Security expire every five years. That was the proposal, let it expire every five years unless reauthorized by the Congress.”

That’s a reference to a 2022 policy proposal, called “An 11-Point Plan to Rescue America,” from Republican Sen. Rick Scott to sunset all federal programs after five years, unless Congress voted to extend them. “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” Scott’s plan said. But there was never any serious effort to implement that policy, especially as it pertains to Social Security.

Scott, who then was the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said at the time that he didn’t want to sunset those programs — and he didn’t know anyone who did — but rather he wanted to “review,” “fix” and “preserve” them so that they are financially solvent for the long term. Shortly after Scott introduced his plan, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that a bill sunsetting Social Security (and Medicare) in five years “will not be part of a Republican Senate majority agenda.”

By the following year, Scott had revised the language in his plan to specifically exclude Social Security and Medicare, and other programs. “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years, with specific exceptions of Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans benefits, and other essential services,” the 2023 version of Scott’s plan said.

Democrats have gotten a lot of mileage out of that proposal, particularly during the 2022 midterms, making false and misleading claims about Republicans wanting to “end” these popular programs, as we’ve written. In his remarks in Chicago, Biden said this five-year-expiration plan was part of the “constant threat” his administration faced from Republicans who wanted to “cut and gut Social Security.” But there was no threat of Social Security being terminated, as Scott has made clear.

Retirement Age

Biden misleadingly claimed that Republicans “threatened to raise the retirement age as well. Now, that might not be a hardship for someone working in a comfortable job, but if you’re on your feet all day, you’re doing manual labor all day, you’re working with a disability, it’s a very different matter.”

As we wrote when Biden made a similar claim in his reelection announcement in 2023, the conservative Republican Study Committee has proposed budgets for years that have included gradually increasing the full retirement age, to either 69 or 70, and indexing it after that for life expectancy. The “full retirement age,” when a beneficiary can get full benefit payments, is age 66 to 67, depending on the beneficiary’s birth year. (Early retirement, with reduced Social Security benefit payments, is available starting at age 62.)

The most recent RSC proposal, for fiscal 2025, said it would “make modest adjustments to the retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy.”

But raising the retirement age has failed to attract enough support in Congress, even among Republicans. In late December, Sen. Rand Paul introduced an amendment to raise the full retirement age, and it garnered just three “yes” votes.

Legislators will need to take some action in the near future if they want the program to continue to pay all of its promised benefits, and it’s possible that raising the retirement age, or raising taxes, will be under discussion. The trust fund for retirees’ and survivors’ benefits is expected to be depleted in 2033, at which point SSA will only be able to pay 79% of benefits, according to the Social Security trustees’ latest estimate.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said he “will not raise the retirement age by one day” and wouldn’t cut “one penny” from Social Security. Since taking office, he has said that he’s only interested in getting rid of fraud. “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud,” Trump said in a February interview.

More to the Story on Staffing Level

The former president said: “When we came into office, the Social Security Administration had its lowest staffing. … Lowest staffing levels in 50 years. And demand was going through the roof because of my generation, the Baby Boomer generation, reaching the retirement age.” He didn’t say anything more about a change in SSA staffing during his administration, but it’s worth noting that the number of full-time staffers was even lower his last year in office.

Full-time staffing at the SSA was 58,952 in fiscal year 2021, which began nearly four months before Biden took office. That was the lowest dating back to at least 1995, the earliest year in an SSA table on staffing levels. A report from the Associated Press from last year indicates that it was also probably the lowest level since the early 1970s.

But the total full-time staff was 57,148 in fiscal 2024, which ended on Sept. 30, 2024. The peak under Biden was 60,026 in fiscal 2023.

Under Trump, the SSA announced in February it will cut 7,000 jobs, with an agency-wide offer of early retirement and incentivized resignations, and the Washington Post has reported that thousands more in reductions are planned.  

Misleading Claims on the Threat to Monthly Benefits

Biden criticized the Trump administration for staffing cuts, website crashes and computer glitches at the Social Security Administration that the former president said had left beneficiaries “genuinely concerned for the first time in history, for the first and only time in history, that Social Security benefits may be delayed or interrupted.” As we’ve written, experts are concerned about SSA reorganizations, rushed changes and false fraud claims leading to administrative problems with Social Security, including the delivery of benefits. But a few of Biden’s comments could leave the misleading impression that monthly benefits for millions of people had nearly been, or were about to be, cut off.

“In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the Social Security system, people have always gotten their Social Security checks. They’ve gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during the pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now, for the first time ever, that might change. There’ll be calamity for millions of families, millions of people,” Biden said.

There is no plan to stop monthly benefits, but, as we said, experts are worried that abrupt changes at the SSA, in the name of cutting staffing or finding fraud, could lead to operational mistakes. “I genuinely have never been this concerned about the ability of that agency to function,” Pamela Herd, a professor of social policy and faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research’s Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, told us for an earlier story on the issue. “Yes, I think people are right to be worried about it.”

The former president also was largely accurate in citing comments by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, but one line by Biden could leave the wrong impression that there was a “possibility of Social Security checks not going out this month.”

Biden said of Lutnick: “But the current secretary of commerce doesn’t seem to get it, or based on his comments, he doesn’t seem to even care. … But when he talked about the possibility of Social Security checks not going out this month, he shrugged it off. Here’s what he said. He said that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t complain. It wouldn’t bother her.”

Lutnick, in an interview on the All-In Podcast on March 20, raised the hypothetical of checks not going out that month, saying that a “fraudster” would be the one to complain about it.

Lutnick said: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining. … Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing.”

Biden also said Lutnick, a billionaire, was “paying 8.5% in taxes.” We don’t know what rate Lutnick pays in federal taxes, but Biden’s figure refers to a White House calculation for the 400 wealthiest families in the U.S. that factors in earnings on unsold stock as income, as we’ve explained.

Alan Jaffe contributed to this story.

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Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency he leads claim to have unearthed evidence to prove a longstanding conspiracy theory about Democrats orchestrating illegal voting by noncitizens on a scale large enough to swing national elections in their favor. But voting experts say the claims are highly dubious, and DOGE hasn’t released any evidence.

The allegation is pretty straightforward — but DOGE’s data may not be telling the whole story. Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who is working with DOGE, said the DOGE team matched Social Security numbers given to noncitizens with work visas against voter registration rolls in four sample states, and found thousands of crossovers.

Gracias said “many” of those people actually voted. Moreover, he and Musk allege that it is all part of a Democratic plot to influence federal elections.

DOGE says it provided the data to federal prosecutors for criminal investigation, but nothing has been shared publicly.

Without DOGE’s data, we can’t determine how many cases of noncitizen votes may have been uncovered. But voting and data experts warn that when matching millions of numbers in databases, even a small percentage of errors can distort things. That’s not to say there aren’t any noncitizens who wrongly register to vote, and that there aren’t some who actually do vote. But states that have performed detailed audits of voting records have found such instances to be relatively rare.

In some cases, officials in those states have found hundreds of noncitizens on voter registration rolls, a fraction of whom also voted. But hardly enough to have come close to swinging a national election.

And, voting experts say, the conspiracy falls apart when you weigh the benefit of any single vote against the potential legal consequences faced by someone who votes illegally as a noncitizen — fines, jail time and deportation.

“The evidence is that the number of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extremely low, not high enough to have changed the party outcome of any federal election in recent years,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute told us. “Audits and investigations in states like Ohio, Nevada, and North Carolina have found the numbers to be tiny in relation to votes cast. Analysis of voting statistics in parts of the country in areas with large noncitizen populations do not find results consistent with Musk’s claims, and do find results consistent with near-zero attempts by this population to participate in elections. States have many ways to cross-check databases and simply presenting a Social Security card or number will not make you a voter. The consistent experience has been that very few persons in this category mistakenly or deliberately vote.”

The DOGE Claims

In a town hall ahead of an April 1 Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, Musk and Gracias drew attention to a dramatic rise during the Biden presidency in the number of people provided Social Security numbers through the Enumeration Beyond Entry system, a program that provides Social Security numbers and cards to noncitizens who are granted work authorization by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The EBE program, begun in 2017 under the Trump administration, provided an expedited process for immigrants who obtained work permits to be assigned Social Security numbers (and thereby allow the federal government to track their earnings for taxation). That includes immigrants granted humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status due to civil unrest, violence or natural disasters in their home countries and immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally but who initiated an asylum application and were granted a work permit pending their asylum hearing.

As the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General explained in 2019, the EBE program allowed SSA to quickly offer Social Security numbers to these immigrants “because the information needed to assign the SSN” had already been “collected and verified by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for conferring lawful status and work authorization.” (The Trump administration recently suspended the EBE program.)

Here’s a version of the data Gracias posted on X:

We reached out to the Social Security Administration to confirm those numbers, and did not get a response. But it’s not surprising they would have risen dramatically under Biden, who expanded protections for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine and Venezuela. The number of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. also soared during the Biden years.

“When we saw these numbers, we were like, ‘What is this?’ In ’21 you see 270,000 people goes all the way to 2.1 million in ’24,” Gracias said at the town hall. “These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security numbers.”

“Yeah, this is a mind-blowing chart,” Musk said.

“This is worth just reiterating,” Musk said. “People sometimes think that under the Biden administration that he was simply asleep with the switch. They weren’t asleep with the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people, and make it a permanent deep blue one-party state from which there would be no escape.”

Gracias claimed DOGE found that many of the more than 5 million who had gotten Social Security numbers through the EBE program since its inception in 2017 were also getting various government benefits, including more than 1 million receiving Medicaid. He said he went a step further and decided to match the EBE list against voter records, and discovered many of those people had registered to vote.

“And who did vote,” Musk added.

“And we found some by sampling that actually did vote,” Gracias concurred. “And we have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation service. Already. Already. That is already happening right now.” (We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to confirm an investigation but did not get a response.)

Musk said that once a noncitizen has obtained a Social Security number “from there you get on the voter rolls and then the basically Dem operatives will farm the vote.”

In an interview on “Fox & Friends” on April 2, Gracias provided a bit more detail, saying that DOGE “found in a handful of cooperative states that they were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted.” He noted that the search it performed was made possible by an executive order signed by Trump allowing inter-agency data-sharing.

“It’s never been done before where agencies could talk to each other and databases could talk to each other,” Gracias said. “That allowed us to connext all this data to find these people across the system, across the benefits system, all the way to the voting records.”

Privacy activists told NPR that despite the executive order, the search may have violated privacy laws and a court order.

Gracias provided still more detail about the alleged illegal noncitizen voting in an interview on the All-In Podcast on April 4.

“I’m talking about four states,” Gracias said, though he did not name the four “friendly states” DOGE sampled. “We looked at the voter rolls, we found these people, thousands of them, on the voter rolls. And we found many of those people had voted. In one state in particular well over a thousand voted. Yeah, I think this was a move to import voters.”

Asked in an April 1 interview about those DOGE findings, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds said, “My reaction is the disgust that every American has because we knew that what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the left were doing in the darkness of night was shoving illegal immigrants into every role possible, whether it be entitlements or voting rolls across the country. Now, we have the proof.”

The DOGE findings were also cited by Republican Rep. Aaron Bean in support of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, a bill aimed at preventing voting by noncitizens. (Opponents of the legislation, including voting rights advocate groups, say it could prevent voter registration by U.S. citizens by instituting hurdles.)

On the floor of the House, Bean said: “We are here because this previous administration, the Biden administration, imported 10 to 15 million illegal aliens who have come here and we have evidence that they are participating in our elections. … It ends today when we vote on the SAVE Act.”

The bill passed the House on April 10 mostly along party lines, 220-208.

Experts Dubious

Voting experts, however, say the DOGE findings likely aren’t the smoking gun Musk and Gracias make it out to be.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said what Musk and Gracias cited “isn’t evidence, it’s garden-variety conspiracy theory, and a very old and overplayed one at that.”

“It is possible that a handful of noncitizens have been mistakenly registered to vote – and by a handful, I really mean tiny numbers,” Levitt said. “I don’t know what records DOGE is referring to when they say they ‘took a sample’ of noncitizen immigrants and looked at voter registration records to see if they had registered and voted, but every time I’ve seen claims like this with any specificity, the results vanish into smoke when people actually look at the results: either it’s bad data, or bad matching, or bad assumptions, or all three. But it’s impossible to really evaluate at this level of specificity, which they know full well.”

Indeed, states that have looked into noncitizens voting or registering to vote have found the issue to be relatively rare. 

• In March, the Iowa Secretary of State announced that an audit had found 277 noncitizens had registered to vote in the state. And 35 of those noncitizens cast ballots that were counted in the 2024 election; five such ballots were rejected.

• In May 2024, the Ohio Secretary of State announced it had found 137 people on the state’s voter registration rolls who had twice confirmed their noncitizenship status to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. The press release did not indicate how many, if any, had tried to actually vote. But a grand jury indicted six people who legally and permanently immigrated to the U.S. for voting illegally as noncitizens between 2008 and 2020.

• In 2022, Georgia conducted a citizenship review of state voter rolls and found that 1,634 people had attempted to register to vote between 1997 and 2022 and could not be verified as citizens by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. None, however, voted. In October, the Associated Press reported that Georgia election officials said 20 out of the 8.2 million on the state’s voter registration rolls were not U.S. citizens, and that nine had voted in previous elections.

• In 2021, the Nevada Republican Party filed a complaint alleging that as many as 3,987 noncitizens had voted in the 2020 election. The allegation was based on people who presented an immigration document while obtaining a driver’s license over the previous five years. But a 13-page report issued by the Nevada Secretary of State concluded the allegation failed to account for a large number of noncitizens who were naturalized — and therefore became legal voters — in the time between obtaining their driver’s license and the election. “Without specific evidence to establish that identified individuals were foreign nationals when they voted in the November 3 election, there is nothing further that can be investigated,” the report stated. “In summary, the generalized information acquired from DMV cannot serve as a basis for an investigation into alleged voter fraud.”

“Multiple credible sources have documented that there is no evidence that unauthorized immigrants, green-card holders, or immigrants on temporary visas have registered and voted in U.S. federal elections in significant numbers,” Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal in all states and, since 1996, has criminal penalties” that can include federal incarceration for even registering to vote, he said.

“There have been a small number of people who have wrongfully registered to vote, often by mistake, and far fewer actually casting ballots,” Ruiz Soto said, adding that “clearly more can be done to reduce the likelihood of immigrants erroneously registering to vote.” But, he said, “this is not a problem of millions of immigrants, and the scale is often blown out of proportion by critics. Musk’s and Gracias’ remarks oversimplify the process of migrants obtaining temporary status and work authorization, and they promote the inaccurate idea that most recent migrants would vote for the Democratic Party even if they were to lawfully become U.S. citizens in the future.”

A Brennan Center for Justice review found that of the 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 general election in 42 jurisdictions in 12 states, there were “only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting” that were referred for further investigation or prosecution. “The absence of fraud reinforces a wide consensus among scholars, journalists and election administrators: voter fraud of any kind, including noncitizen voting, is rare.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed a database of fraud cases compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and found “only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023,” the BPC said in a 2024 post on this issue. “Illegal voting, including by noncitizens, is routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

Many states’ voter registration rolls do not even include Social Security numbers, and so matches in those cases — which would involve matching based on data such as names, addresses, birthdates or driver’s license numbers — can result in bad matches, experts said.

Experts: Risks Outweigh Rewards

The idea that large numbers of noncitizens are voting illegally is also highly dubious, experts told us, given the consequences faced by those immigrants for the payoff of a single vote.

Although it has long been illegal for noncitizens to vote, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 added some teeth to the prohibition against noncitizens registering to vote or voting in national elections. Violation can result in fines, up to a year in prison, deportation and revocation of legal status.

“Ockham’s razor says that noncitizens aren’t intentionally registering or voting, because it’s just not worth it,” Levitt told us, referring to the theory that the simplest explanation is usually the best. The conspiracy theory Musk and Gracias have “laid out for registering nets a noncitizen exactly one incremental vote. And in exchange, they’ve created a permanent paper record of a federal and state crime that’s an absolutely standard part of any record check for any change in immigration status, subjected themselves to deportation,” fines and potential prison time “and ensured that they’ll never get citizenship. The reason you don’t see actual evidence of noncitizen voting in any volume is that it doesn’t make any sense for any noncitizen to commit the crime.”

Olson, of the Cato Institute, said that while “Elon Musk has been spreading unverified and unverifiable claims about illegal voting by noncitizens for a year or more. … The actual political trends of recent years have been exactly the opposite of what Musk claims. As the share of foreign born persons resident in the U.S. has risen in recent years, the Republican share of the vote has risen, not fallen. Some of this is because new citizens who achieve naturalization have shifted in their voting propensity toward Republicans. But mostly it is because, by overwhelming majorities, those who lack citizenship neither attempt to vote nor succeed in voting.”

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While presenting a series of executive orders conceived to increase electricity generation from coal, President Donald Trump misleadingly suggested that environmental regulations were to blame for the industry’s decline, wrongly said that coal plants are being opened “all over Germany,” and misleadingly, and repeatedly, referred to coal as “clean.”

Experts agree the main culprit for the decrease in coal-fired power in recent decades was the surge of more cost-effective and cleaner kinds of energy, especially natural gas. In Germany, a handful of old plants were fired back up in 2022, but were closed again in 2024. Germany plans to end coal-fired power generation by 2038. Also, coal combustion emits more carbon emissions than any other fossil fuel used to produce power, not to mention other pollutants.

“This is a very important day to me because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was just about the best — it is certainly the best in terms of power,” Trump, who promised and failed to revive the coal industry during his first term, said on April 8, surrounded by coal miners. “Today we’re taking historic action to help American workers, miners, families and consumers — we’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all.” 

Coal consumption and production in the U.S. have declined over the last two decades, according to the Energy Information Administration. Although coal fueled most of the country’s power plants until a decade ago, in 2023 only 16% of the electricity produced in the U.S. was generated by coal-fired plants. The coal workforce went from nearly 90,000 in 2012 to about 40,000 this year, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Trump’s new plan to boost the industry includes a series of actions that, as a Department of Interior press release details, include reopening federal lands in Montana and Wyoming to coal leasing, removing “regulatory burdens” for mines, and lowering the amount coal producers pay the government for extracting coal on federal lands. The plan also grants coal power plants a two-year reprieve from regulations that limit mercury and other toxic emissions. The administration said there was a need for an increase in electricity generated by coal to satisfy a growing demand for electricity for domestic manufacturing and artificial intelligence data processing centers.

During his speech, the president praised coal’s reliability and durability but also called it “clean,” “cheap” and “incredibly efficient,” adding that people have bemoaned and decimated the industry “for absolutely no reason.” He also criticized “the green new scam,” a phrase he used to refer to “restrictions” and climate change policies generally, and he blamed former President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers for trying “to abolish the American coal industry” and “destroying” the lives, and jobs, of “thousands and thousands of coal miners.” 

(During Biden’s presidency, however, the number of coal mining jobs increased slightly, by 3,400, to 41,300. In January, employment was 4,700 below the pre-pandemic level in February 2020. Coal mining jobs decreased by 13,100 over the entirety of Trump’s first term. Job losses were exacerbated by the pandemic, but even prior to the pandemic, there was a loss of 5,000 coal mining jobs under Trump.)  

“We will end the government bias against coal and we’re going to unlock the sweeping authorities of … the Defense Production Act to turbocharge coal mining in America,” he said, referring to a law first enacted in 1950 during the Korean War to give the president broad authority to “influence domestic industry in the interest of national defense,” as explained by the Library of Congress. 

But several experts told us blaming environmental regulations and claiming coal is cleaner, cheaper or more efficient than its alternatives is misleading. 

“The coal industry’s decline is due first and foremost to cheaper alternatives, namely natural gas but also renewable energy,” Sanya Carley, faculty director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, told us in an email. “It is more economically efficient and less carbon intensive to build gas units or renewable energy such as wind and solar than it is to build a coal plant.” 

Environmental Regulations Didn’t Kill Coal

Trump’s comments about “bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” ending “government bias” and “slashing unnecessary regulations that targeted the beautiful, clean coal,” leave a misleading impression about why coal production has decreased.

Studies analyzing the factors that led to the decline of the coal industry have concluded that although environmental regulations have played a role, it hasn’t been a significant one. 

As we reported in 2017, after Trump’s claims on reviving coal then, a Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy study found the main culprit for the collapse of the industry was cheaper natural gas production driven by the shale revolution, followed by lower-than-expected demand and the growth in renewable energy. 

Similarly, a 2017 policy brief by Charles D. Kolstad, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, concluded that “environmental regulations did not kill coal”; progress did. 

Kolstad explained that the main environmental law affecting coal combustion is the Clean Air Act of 1970, signed by President Richard Nixon. Strong demand and a lack of competition fueled a boom in new coal-fired plants in the 1970s and 80s, despite the regulations, which resulted in an expansion of coal production. Plants met the limits on sulfur emissions by burning low-sulfur coal and then, after a requirement of a 1977 Clean Air Act amendment, by adding devices, known as scrubbers, that remove sulfur from smokestacks.

But coal-fired plants built before 1970 were exempt from sulfur regulations, which, as Kolstad explained, provided an incentive to keep them operating for longer rather than retire them. The eventual retirement of these old plants is what marked the decline of coal in electricity generation starting in 2015, he explained, not the additional environmental rules set to limit the pollution coming from them. 

At the same time, Kolstad explained, productivity in the coal industry increased due to innovations, which led to a reduction in the workforce. And the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the development of shale deposits led to a revolution in the oil and gas industry that resulted in a big drop in the price of natural gas. 

Kolstad told us his analysis still stands today. 

“While coal might be beautiful to some, the main reason production is down is that demand is down, mostly because of cheap gas,” he said in an email. “Employment is down further because of productivity gains (coal output per miner).”

Christine Shearer, project manager of the global coal plant tracker at the nongovernmental organization Global Energy Monitor, which compiles and analyzes energy data, agreed. “[T]he main thing that killed coal in the U.S. was gas,” she told us in an email.

“Low natural gas prices, capital costs, and build times of combined cycle gas-fired power plants in the 1990s led to a large expansion in U.S. gas-fired capacity in the beginning of this century. As new gas plants were built, aging coal plants were shut down,” she told us. Fracking further lowered the price and increased the use of natural gas to produce electricity, she added. 

Shearer shared a report co-authored by Global Energy Monitor that shows more coal power capacity was retired under Trump in his first term than under Presidents Barack Obama or Biden. That’s “because coal plants closing has primarily been a function of economics, and it is hard to reverse,” she said. 

Globally, coal power plants in the world have retired on average when they’re 37 years old, Shearer told us. Coal plants in the U.S. are now, on average, 43 years old, she added. 

“Not enforcing existing environmental regulations and further delaying pending regulations on carbon dioxide emissions,” she added, “might squeeze a few extra years of life out of these old coal plants, but it won’t bring back a coal renaissance.”

Germany Is Not Going ‘Back to Coal’

In his remarks on April 8, Trump referred to two other countries’ use of coal in recent years. While he correctly noted China’s continued reliance on coal and its construction of new plants, the president wrongly claimed that Germany is “back to coal” and that coal plants are being opened “all over Germany.”

Germany brought four previously closed coal plants back online in 2022, likely due to concerns about energy availability after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those plants were closed again in 2024, and Germany has not opened a new coal plant since 2020, according to Global Energy Monitor. Germany is planning to end coal-fired power generation in the country by 2038 or earlier.

But at the opening of his remarks at the signing of his executive orders, Trump said, “Other countries went to beautiful, clean coal, and they’ve stayed there for many years like China. China is opening two plants every week. Germany went green, very green. They went so green they almost went out of business. Germany was finished; they went to wind. The wind wasn’t blowing too much, and they went to all sorts of other things.”

Trump continued: “You know, the green new scam hit Germany too and guess what? Now they’re back to coal. They’re opening up coal plants all over Germany.”

It is true that China began construction of 94.5 gigawatts of new coal power projects and resumed 3.3 GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in that country in 10 years, according to a collaborative report issued in February by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor. That’s likely not “two plants every week,” as Trump said, since an average coal plant generates 1 GW but it takes a couple of years for a plant to be built and come online in China, Shearer, of Global Energy Monitor, told us in an email.

“Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas,” Flora Champenois, an analyst at Global Energy Monitor and one of the report’s co-authors, told NPR.

But Trump misrepresented Germany’s current and future plans for the use of coal.

Shearer explained that in recent years the U.S. has been replacing old coal plants with lower-cost natural gas, as well as solar and wind power. Germany, however, did not have “a big expansion in gas power like the US, and on top of that Germany has been phasing out its nuclear power. So what has been replacing coal (and nuclear) in Germany is solar and wind power.”

Germany did reopen four mothballed coal plants in 2022 to operate through 2023, “most likely to fill in for high gas prices following [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Shearer said. But those coal plants “were all retired in 2024. The year 2024 was actually a record year for coal power retirements in Germany, totaling 6.7 GW – 2 GW above U.S. retirements” under Biden.

Asked about Trump’s claim that coal plants are opening throughout Germany, Shearer said, “No, Germany has not opened a new coal plant since 2020.”

“Germany’s July 2020 Coal Power Exit Law established an end to coal-fired power generation in the country by 2038 at the latest, and possibly by 2035,” Shearer said. “A follow-up analysis expressed ambition to phase out coal ‘ideally’ by 2030.”

A spokesperson for the German economy ministry, responding to Trump’s remarks, said, “No new coal-fired power plants will be built” in Germany, the Associated Press reported.

We reached out to the White House for information to support Trump’s statements about Germany’s coal plants, but we didn’t receive a response.

‘Clean Coal’? Not Really 

On top of incorrectly suggesting that environmental regulations caused the downfall of the coal industry, Trump insisted on calling coal “clean.”  

“I call it beautiful, clean coal,” he said during his speech on April 8. “I tell my people, never use the word coal unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.” 

But the reality is that coal is not clean. As the Energy Information Administration explains, producing and using coal has several negative effects on people’s health and the environment. When coal is burned to produce electricity, it emits pollutants, including gases and particulates. Coal mining sometimes requires removing mountain tops with explosives or altering valleys and waterways. Streams can be polluted by runoff from the mines.  

Coal combustion puts out more carbon emissions than any other fossil fuel used to produce power, the Environmental Protection Agency explains. Although carbon dioxide is naturally present in the atmosphere and is not directly harmful when breathed in normal concentrations, CO2 is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. In 2022, coal combustion accounted for 55% of carbon emissions from the electric power sector, while representing only 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S. that year, according to the EPA. 

As the EIA explains, burning coal also emits toxic pollutants linked to respiratory illnesses and lung disease, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter — criteria air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act —  and other pollutants such as coal ash and mercury. 

“At the present time, coal is not cleaner than its alternatives,” Joost de Gouw, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told us in an email, noting that most coal-fired plants already use systems to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. “Compared with natural gas power plants that use combined cycle technology (the industry standard), current coal-fired power plants emit roughly 10 times more nitrogen oxides and 100 times more sulfur dioxide per kWh of electricity produced,” referring to kilowatt-hours.

A study published in Science in 2023 showed that exposure to the fine particulate pollution from coal plants is associated with 2.1 times greater mortality risk than exposure to such pollution from other sources. Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor of environmental and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University and one of the authors of the study, told us that although there are devices that can remove up to 99% of certain pollutants emitted during the combustion of coal, they don’t make coal “clean.”

Scrubbers, or flue gas desulfurization units, can remove about 95% of sulfur dioxide emissions from a coal plant before they’re released into the atmosphere. The installation of these devices, the closure of coal-fired plants and the decline of the industry have resulted in a significant decrease of pollution from coal-fired plants, as a separate study by Henneman and colleagues showed. 

But although these devices can reduce pollution from coal power plants “they do not eliminate them,” Henneman told us, adding that as his second study showed, “most of the exposure to power plant air pollution emissions after 2015 was from power plants with scrubbers.” 

The waste created from scrubbers, which needs to be stored near the power plants or placed in landfills, can also cause a problem when it spills and contaminates groundwater, he said. The trains used to transport coal also pollute, he added.

Trump said his administration will be “crushing Biden-era environmental restrictions” that target mercury and other toxic emissions because the regulations make it “impossible to do anything.” His plan includes a two-year delay (from July 2027 to July 2029) for coal plants to comply with a revision of the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards finalized last year. Trump said that the technologies needed to control emissions are “not commercially viable.” 

At the same time, the president said he directed Energy Secretary Chris Wright to use billions of federal dollars “to invest in the next generation of coal technology — which is an amazing technology in terms of getting the full potential of coal and also doing it in a very clean environmental way.”

We reached out to the White House to ask which technology Trump was referring to. In response, a press officer from the Department of Energy directed us to an April 8 CNBC interview in which Wright mentioned scrubbers. 

“Scrubbers do not do anything about carbon dioxide, so even a coal plant with a scrubber will still warm the planet,” Shearer, from Global Energy Monitor, told us.

Some carbon dioxide can be removed from coal power plants, but Shearer told us none of the techniques used globally result in coal being cheaper or cleaner than natural gas. 

“China now primarily builds ultra-supercritical coal plants that it calls ‘high efficiency, low emissions’ but at the end of the day they still emit more CO2 than a gas plant,” she wrote. “Japan and South Korea have also been pushing for ammonia co-firing at their coal plants, calling it ‘clean coal’, but again even 50% co-firing ammonia at a coal plant results in higher CO2 emissions than a gas plant, and it’s far more expensive.”

As we‘ve written previously, it’s possible to capture some carbon emissions and either store it or use it for another purpose. But experts told us that such carbon capture utilization and storage, or CCUS, technologies are very expensive, energy-intensive and haven’t been used on a large scale.  

“Coal without CCUS is already not competitive economically, so adding CCUS makes no sense economically,” Shearer added.

Despite his focus on the term “clean coal,” Trump also indicated in his remarks that climate change isn’t a problem.  

“You don’t have to worry about the air is getting warmer. The ocean will rise one-quarter of an inch within the next 500 to 600 years, giving you a little bit more waterfront property,” he said, repeating once again his absurdly low estimates of sea level rise. As we’ve explained, the current rate of sea level rise is already a bit more than one-eighth of an inch each year.

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Before President Donald Trump paused some new tariffs that he unveiled on April 2, several economic groups estimated that tariffs he has announced this year could raise between roughly $2 trillion and more than $4 billion in federal revenue over a 10-year period. But that’s well short of the $6 trillion or $7 trillion that White House trade adviser Peter Navarro claimed the tariffs would raise to help pay for tax cuts, including an extension of the 2017 tax law.

On April 6, during an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Navarro talked about the revenue-generating potential of Trump’s tariffs on imports. Trump announced on April 9 that he was suspending some of his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs for 90 days. (We’ve written about how the tariffs aren’t really reciprocal.)

“These tariff revenues, by the way, Jackie, $600, $700 billion they are going to raise a year, $6 trillion to $7 trillion over the 10-year period,” Navarro told Jackie DeAngelis, who hosted the Fox News show that day. “They’re going to help pay for the tax cuts. I’ll tell you this, Jackie. Every single dollar that comes in, in tariff revenues that we take from the foreigners who have been cheating us, are going to go right to the American public in terms of tax cuts and debt reduction.”

Navarro is wrong to suggest that the tariffs would be paid by “foreigners,” though foreign businesses could decide to “lower their prices to absorb some of the tariffs,” as the Tax Foundation explains. He also ignored the fact that tariffs, also known as customs duties, are a tax increase on the U.S. importers who pay the tariffs – not foreign countries. And because those importers often pass at least some of those costs on to U.S. consumers through price hikes, tariffs are considered to be regressive taxes that affect lower-income households more than others as a percentage of income.

“If you raise $600 billion more a year in revenue for the federal government, you are taking that amount away from individuals and businesses in the private economy,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in a late March piece.

Multiple economic analyses project that Trump’s tariffs will reduce the after-tax income of households by potentially thousands of dollars a year, on average.

Independent analyses also show that Navarro may be exaggerating the amount of money that the government may collect from the tariffs.

We asked the White House to explain Navarro’s revenue projection, but we did not receive a reply. We also inquired if Navarro’s estimate was the basis for the president’s April 8 claim that his tariffs are bringing in “$2 billion per day” to the U.S., which would add up to more than $7 trillion over 10 years, but the White House didn’t tell us that, either. (So far, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said that it has collected about $200 million per day in “additional associated revenue” from 13 of the president’s tariff-related executive actions this year.)

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow for the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, guessed that Navarro’s claim was based on “some simple math.” In an April 8 blog post, he said that the senior trade official may have taken the $3.3 trillion in U.S. imports of goods in 2024 and multiplied it by a tariff rate of 20%, “a rough estimate of all the Trump tariffs,” producing a revenue total of over $600 billion annually, or more than $6 trillion over 10 years.

“Simple. But wrong,” wrote Gleckman. He said that “Trump’s tariffs are likely to fall far short of Navarro’s prediction,” making it highly doubtful that there would be enough revenue to cover the cost of parts of Trump’s economic agenda, specifically an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, as well as other tax-cutting proposals, such as the elimination of taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits.

Indefinitely extending tax cuts for individuals in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act alone would cost $4 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

In fact, the Tax Policy Center has estimated that all tariffs Trump announced through April 2, including a tariff of at least 10% on all U.S. imports of foreign goods and higher tariff rates on specific countries, would raise about $3.5 trillion – $189.5 billion in 2025 and then $3.3 trillion from 2026 to 2035. That estimate, Gleckman said, doesn’t include the economic impact of any retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, which some countries have already announced, nor does it account for an anticipated decline in corporate profits and wages because U.S. firms have to pay the tariffs.

“If it did, tariff revenues would be even lower,” Gleckman noted.

And the TPC isn’t the only organization with tariff revenue estimates lower than Navarro’s.

• In an analysis updated on April 9, the Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s 2025 tariffs, altogether, “will raise $2.2 trillion in revenue over the next decade on a conventional basis ($1.6 trillion on a dynamic basis) and reduce US GDP by 0.8 percent, all before foreign retaliation.” Projected revenue is lower on a dynamic basis, the Tax Foundation said, because that estimate reflects “the negative effect tariffs have on US economic output, reducing incomes and resulting tax revenues.”

• Meanwhile, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has said on April 7 that all of Trump’s announced tariffs, if made permanent, could raise $3 trillion from 2025 to 2034. Because the tariffs could reduce real gross domestic product by 0.6%, CRFB said its revenue estimate would decline to $2.7 trillion once those macro-dynamic economic effects are factored in.

• Likewise, the Budget Lab at Yale University said on April 2, “All tariffs to date in 2025,” if they remain in place, “raise $3.1 trillion [from 2026 to 2035], including the effect of retaliation to date.” That estimate falls to about $2.5 trillion when factoring in “$582 billion in negative dynamic revenue effects,” the Budget Lab said.

• And the Penn Wharton Budget Model, based on all tariffs announced prior to Trump’s April 9 pause, said it “estimates that the Combined Trump Tariffs will generate $4.6 trillion in revenue over 10 years, using recent time-varying demand elasticity estimates.” That’s based on imports declining by 29%. On the other hand, “If baseline import demand in the United States across all goods and services further stagnates over the next decade due to lower economic growth, total new tariff revenue will decrease to $4.13 trillion.” Those estimates include “partially dynamic” economic effects, Kent Smetters, a University of Pennsylvania economics and public policy professor, and the university’s PWBM faculty director, told us in an interview.

None of those analyses predicts as much as $6 trillion to $7 trillion in federal revenue, as Navarro claimed.

We don’t know exactly what tariffs will be put into place by the Trump administration after the 90-day pause on the April 2 tariffs. For now, goods imported from China will face a 125% tariff, and there’s a universal 10% tariff on all imported goods from other countries.

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Abrupt changes in staffing and some procedures at the Social Security Administration, coupled with false and misleading claims about widespread fraud, have prompted heated criticism from Democrats, with some statements leaving the wrong impression that benefits are being cut. Experts share a concern that disorderly actions by the Trump administration could cause administrative errors and disruptions, but there has been no proposed change to benefits mandated by law.

Democrats have cited several concerning actions taken by the Trump administration with regard to the Social Security Administration. In late February, the SSA announced it would cut 7,000 jobs (out of 57,000) as part of “massive reorganizations” that included reducing the number of regional offices from 10 to four. Meanwhile, White House adviser Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump have made exaggerated claims about people over 100 years old fraudulently getting Social Security benefits, suggesting there are significant savings to be had by going after waste, fraud and abuse in the system. And this month, changes in identify verification procedures that end some phone-based services could create burdens for some beneficiaries.

“They’re setting the groundwork to ‘eliminate’ Americans’ hard-earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare all to fund tax breaks for their ultra-wealthy backers,” the Democratic National Committee claimed in a March 17 statement that came after news of the identity verification changes.

A link on the word “eliminate” went to a story about an interview of Musk making unfounded claims about fraud and saying that eliminating “waste” from “entitlement spending,” including Social Security and Medicare, could yield $500 billion to $700 billion a year.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a March 21 rally in Colorado, referred to Musk in saying: “We will not accept the richest guy in the world running all over Washington making cuts to the Social Security Administration.” But he then went further, charging that the administration is “prepared to destroy Social Security,” along with Medicaid, Medicare and the Department of Veterans Affairs “in order to make themselves even richer.”

Several Democrats have speculated that the goal of the administration is to privatize some aspect of Social Security, or the entire agency. Rep. John Larson of Connecticut told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on March 20: “The plan, unlike previous plans to privatize Social Security, is to scuttle the agencies themselves.” Larson said the Republicans wanted to “make it appear that it’s not working and not answering people’s concerns” and then privatize it.

Senate Democrats have made similar claims. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote in a March 23 letter to Frank Bisignano, the nominee to head the SSA, that they were “deeply concerned that DOGE and the Trump Administration are setting up the SSA for failure—a failure that could cut off Social Security benefits for millions of Americans—and that will then be used to justify a ‘private sector fix.’”

In a March 25 statement, Sen. Chuck Schumer said: “DOGE has claimed these efforts are to get rid of fraud and abuse but it is clear after a few months that their actions are little more than smoke and mirrors designed to rip away benefits from hardworking Americans.”

Most of these comments are speculative, and as other news organizations have reported, and as experts told us, there is reason to be concerned about rushed changes and false fraud claims leading to problems with Social Security. But despite those concerns, the administration hasn’t put forth any plan to privatize the SSA, nor any plan to change the amount of benefits now promised to retirees, as many of these claims suggest.

Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, told us that concern is “warranted” that some of the administrative changes could affect people’s ability to apply for benefits, especially for disability benefits, which already face very long delays, sometimes years, before eligibility is approved. But that’s different from rules set in law that determine eligibility and the size of someone’s benefits. The administrative changes that are happening “won’t affect the statutory eligibility of people,” she said. That would have to go through Congress.

“A lot of the writing on the left on this is intentionally conflating these two issues to engage in fearmongering,” Boccia said. She said it was “dishonest” to imply there had been cuts to benefits.

At the same time, experts say there may be good reason to fear the actions taken by the Trump administration could harm the operations of the Social Security program.

“I genuinely have never been this concerned about the ability of that agency to function,” said Pamela Herd, a professor of social policy and faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research’s Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, in an interview. “Yes, I think people are right to be worried about it.”

Herd cited the agency’s tasks of managing retiree and disability benefits (for more than 68 million Americans), issuing Social Security numbers to newborns, and keeping track of workers’ earnings, calling it an “enormous” amount of work. “And we’ve seen a fairly careless, and I think that’s generous, treatment of that agency over the past six weeks,” she said.

Cuts, Changes and Concerns at Social Security

In the interview of Musk cited by the DNC — which aired on Fox News on March 10 — Musk made unsupported claims about Democrats using Social Security and Medicare to “attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here.” He also repeated an incorrect suggestion that Social Security payments could be going to millions of people listed as deceased, and he claimed that hundreds of billions of waste per year — up to $700 billion — could be cut from the programs.

“The waste report in entitlement spending, you know, which is … most of the federal spending is entitlements,” Musk said. “So that’s like the big one to eliminate, that’s the sort of half trillion maybe $600, $700 billion a year.”

In response to those comments, the White House pointed to a Government Accountability Office report that estimated the entire federal government “could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.”

Reports from the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General have estimated significantly smaller amounts of Social Security improper spending — which includes mistakes, not only fraud. A July 2024 report from the IG’s Office of Audit said the rate of improper Social Security payments was 0.84% over fiscal years 2015 to 2022, which added up to $71.8 billion — or about $9 billion per year. Billions of overpayments were also recovered by the agency.

In February, the IG released a report on overpayments in the retirement and disability programs, finding that 3% of them, or nearly $102 million a year on average, were due to fraud. The report covered fiscal 2020 to 2023.

These reports indicate that while SSA could find some savings from fraud or abuse, the amount is relatively small. Social Security benefit payments in fiscal 2024 totaled $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the federal budget that year.

“I think a lot of the statements of fraud that Elon Musk has put forth are exaggerated as well,” Boccia told us. While there are opportunities to streamline the SSA, she said, the question is whether DOGE was thinking of the long-term impact or “almost randomly slashing and cutting where they can.”

“It’s not clear to me that the DOGE team implementing these changes is talking to experts that understand how the Social Security system works,” Boccia said, and whether the changes will be effective. This “chaotic approach to cuts” could lead to mistakes and “undermine the bigger reform effort that will be necessary to ensure that vulnerable seniors don’t face automatic benefit cuts” when the Social Security trust fund is depleted.

The trust fund for retirees’ and survivors’ benefits is expected to be depleted in 2033, at which point SSA will only be able to pay 79% of benefits, according to the Social Security trustees’ latest estimate.

Spokespeople at Sanders’ and Larson’s offices pointed to more reports about changes at the SSA when we inquired about the lawmakers’ claims.

For instance, the reduction of 7,000 jobs, with an agency-wide offer of early retirement and incentivized resignations, and a reorganization were announced in February. The SSA said the changes were being made to “prioritize customer service by streamlining redundant layers of management” and “reducing non-mission critical work.” It said, “SSA is committed to ensure this plan has a positive effect on the delivery of Social Security services.” The Washington Post reported on April 4 that there are plans in the works for additional layoffs of potentially thousands of staffers. (The SSA press office hasn’t responded to our inquiry about that report and other questions about Democrats’ claims.)

The Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity was closed in late February, though Lee Dudek, the acting SSA commissioner, said that the office’s legally required tasks would be reassigned. The Office of Transformation, whose work included initiatives on the SSA website, was also closed.

There have been news reports of upcoming field office closures, but those remain unconfirmed. The Associated Press analyzed a DOGE list of federal real estate leases it wanted to cancel, finding the list included 47 SSA field offices, with 26 of them expected to be closed in 2025. But on March 27, the SSA said it hadn’t closed or announced the closure of any field offices, adding that it “works closely with local congressional delegations before closing any office permanently.” The SSA said it had provided a list of “underutilized office space,” mostly “small hearing rooms with no assigned employees,” to the General Services Administration for closure.

New ID Verification Procedures

There’s also a change to identity verification practices for some beneficiaries, starting April 14. Those applying for retirement and survivors’ benefits for the first time, and anyone wanting to set up or change their direct deposit information, will have to do so through a “my Social Security” account online or in person at a field office, rather than over the phone, which has been an option.

The SSA has said the ID verification changes are part of an effort to combat fraud. But advocates for beneficiaries have argued it could hurt those who can’t use the online system and have trouble traveling to a field office, which for rural beneficiaries could be far away.

Herd, at the University of Michigan, told us that a lot of people struggle with the online system and there’s evidence that it doesn’t prevent fraud.

The SSA’s Office of Audit reported in 2019 that $33.5 million in benefits for nearly 21,000 beneficiaries was diverted over about a five-year period because of unauthorized changes made to their direct deposit information through the online “my Social Security” system.

The ID verification changes, for those who can’t use the online system, will mean having to go to field offices, which “are already overwhelmed,” Herd said.

Dudek told reporters in March that the SSA “is losing over $100 million a year in direct deposit fraud,” which would be a fraud rate of about 0.007% of benefits paid. All but about 500,000 monthly benefit payments now go through direct deposit, and an executive order from Trump calls for the elimination of paper checks throughout the federal government by Sept. 30.

Herd said that a lot of the changes at the SSA, which have happened in a short period of time, “are further weakening an agency that was already operating on a kind of barebones administrative budget.” She pointed to SSA data showing the agency’s overhead is 0.5% of the combined trust fund cost.

The SSA could “effectively fail to deliver on promises” made to deliver benefits through administrative changes, she said. “The promise of Social Security benefits is only as good as the ability to deliver them.”

But, again, the Trump administration hasn’t proposed cutting legally required benefits, as some claims by Democrats imply.

Press reports have noted that the SSA website has been crashing, and beneficiaries have faced long wait times on customer service phone lines.

Boccia told us that fearmongering on the part of Democrats was contributing to the large call volumes. She noted a “political incentive to exaggerate the effect of the changes” at the SSA to increase support for Democrats.

Privatization

As for speculation by some Democratic lawmakers that the administrative changes at SSA are part of an effort to “privatize Social Security,” Boccia said she has seen no evidence for that at all. She said the claims were “not based in reality.”

Bisignano, the nominee for SSA commissioner who is the CEO of Fiserv, a financial technology services company, was asked about this at a March 25 confirmation hearing. “I’ve never thought about privatizing. It’s not a word that anybody’s ever talked to me about. And I don’t see this institution as anything other than a government agency that gets run for the benefit of the American public,” he said.

He later said, “I don’t believe anybody’s thinking about that,” when asked again about privatization.

And during questioning from Warren about beneficiaries potentially having trouble getting benefits they were entitled to, Bisignano said, “I will commit to have the right staffing to get the job done.”

Larson’s office pointed us to a March 23 article by MarketWatch in which some experts voiced concern about a path to privatization. Staffing cuts and other changes at the SSA “could erode customer service, impact benefits and — eventually, experts say — diminish consumer confidence to the point the federal government chooses to hand the program off to the private sector,” MarketWatch reported, quoting, among others, Jason Fichtner, who was an acting deputy commissioner at the SSA under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. However, the article said other experts didn’t agree with the privatization speculation.

Herd told us it was “not unreasonable that some folks in Congress are sort of questioning the end game here about Social Security.”

We can’t predict the future, but there has been no plan put forth by the administration to privatize some aspect of Social Security, or the entire agency.

The president, meanwhile, has repeatedly said that he’s only interested in getting rid of fraud. “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something we’re going to find. It’s going to be strengthened,” Trump said in a February interview on Fox News.

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In his Rose Garden announcement of sweeping new “reciprocal tariffs,” President Donald Trump held aloft a misleading chart that claimed to give a breakdown of the tariffs other countries charge the U.S. and the corresponding tariff that the U.S. will now impose against those countries.

“Reciprocal. That means they do it to us and we do it to them,” Trump said in his April 2 speech. “Very simple. Can’t get any simpler than that.”

Trump said the U.S. would begin charging a “minimum baseline tariff of 10%” on all imported goods. But he said the U.S. would also tariff countries at a rate equal to half of tariff rates that countries charged for U.S. goods “including currency manipulation and trade barriers.” That, according to Trump’s chart, would mean tariffs of 50% on imports from some countries.

The first column next to the list of countries purported to represent “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A.” as a percentage. A cursory look revealed, however, that the percentages are far higher than the average tariff rates published by the World Trade Organization. Smaller print under the “Tariffs Charged” heading notes — as Trump did — that the figures include “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.” Those last two factors are harder to quantify, but it turns out that’s not how the White House arrived at its figures anyway.

“You see the numbers, the numbers are so disproportionate, they’re so unfair,” Trump said.

According to a fact sheet provided by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the reciprocal tariffs were “calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners. This calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing. Tariffs work through direct reductions of imports.”

USTR said that while computing trade deficit effects for every country “is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

To approximate that, USTR said it divided the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation.

Take the European Union, for example. The chart lists its tariffs charged for U.S. imports (again, including currency manipulation or trade barriers) as 39%. Trump said the U.S. would charge countries half of what they are charging the U.S., because charging the full reciprocal amount “would have been tough for a lot of countries.” So in the case of the EU, the “USA Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs” is 20%, the chart states.

According to the World Trade Organization, the EU’s trade-weighted average tariff rate is 2.7%. Trump also noted that European countries charge a value-added tax of about 20% — it varies by country but that’s roughly accurate. But those taxes are levied on imports as well as domestic production, so the VAT does not provide any trade advantage. In any case, neither of those numbers factor into the White House’s math.

How does the White House arrive at 39%? In 2024, the U.S. goods trade deficit with the EU was $235.6 billion. That year, the U.S. imported $605.8 billion worth of goods from the EU. So, $235.6 divided by $605.8 is 38.9%, or, rounded up, 39%.

Economists told us that’s not a legitimate way to calculate reciprocal tariffs for countries.

“Those listed numbers are simply not tariffs, but some other made-up measure based on a formulaic trade deficit calculation,” Kimberly Clausing, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us via email. “In almost every instance, countries’ true trade barriers are far, far lower.”

“This is not a legitimate way to calculate trade barriers, and the vast majority of subject matter experts (I would wager >99% of international economists) would reject this methodology as profoundly flawed,” Clausing said.

“For example,” she said, “imagine you have completely free trade with an island that produces mangos but lacks sufficient income to buy US goods. The US buys $100 in mangos and sends only $20 in exports. This would imply a tariff rate of 40% by the Trump method, (80/100 divided by 2), but the imbalance of trade represents only the fact of distinct comparative advantage in trade, not any trade barriers.”

Or, as the New York Times put it, “The difference between exports and imports doesn’t necessarily reflect trade barriers; Americans may simply want to buy more stuff from, say, Japan than the Japanese want to buy from the United States.”

“The Trump administration’s calculations are a fundamentally nonsensical way to calculate ‘reciprocal’ tariffs,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told us. “Absolutely none of the factors the White House purports to be looking at, like tariffs, non-tariff barriers, or other unfair practices, factor in to the tariff rate they calculate in any way. They are invented numbers that have zero relationship to real policies.”

William Reinsch, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former president of the National Foreign Trade Council, concurred.

“We do not believe it is an appropriate or accurate measure of trade barriers,” Reinsch told us via email. “We believe their methodology basically has nothing to do with reciprocal tariffs as the administration had previously discussed. The most charitable interpretation of what they are saying is ‘this is the tariff rate that would be necessary to balance bilateral trade with each partner.’”

Countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus – such as the U.K. and Singapore – are still listed on the chart as charging 10% tariffs.

According to York, if the aim is to balance trade with every country, these proposed tariffs won’t work.

“Tariffs will not reduce the US trade deficit because tariffs, either through their effects on the US dollar or through retaliation, will also reduce US exports,” York said. “That’s a result borne out in economic literature, and in recent US experience with the 2018-2019 tariffs.”

Economists also noted that the White House equation focuses only on goods, and ignores trade in services, where the U.S. enjoys a trade surplus.

“That skews the results. A lot,” Clausing, of the Peterson Institute, told us. “The US has a comparative advantage in services, and this ignores our substantial trade surpluses in that sector.”

“Excluding services is simply wrong and doesn’t give the full picture,” Stuart Malawer, a professor emeritus of policy and government at George Mason University, told us via email.

U.S. Trade Representative Fact Sheet

The USTR fact sheet on the reciprocal tariff calculations cited a handful of academic studies, but when we reached out to the authors of several of them, they balked at the Trump administration’s conclusions.

“The tariffs charged to the USA column certainly does not represent legislated tariffs faced by the US,” Anson Soderbery, an economics professor at Purdue University and author of the research paper “Trade elasticities, heterogeneity, and optimal tariffs,” told us via email. “Those are much smaller than reported and take into account bilateral agreements (e.g., USMCA, WTO preferential duties, etc).  

“If they are using the USTR formula proposed this morning to adjust those numbers, I am even less sure how to go about evaluating what they mean,” Soderbery said. “That is, suggesting trade imbalances are only due to trade barriers is not founded in any economic theory or methodology. And, further suggesting the reductionist formula exports-imports/imports can be used to back out all trade barriers and equivalent tariff rates is misguided.”

Ina Simonovska of the University of California, Davis, and co-author of “The elasticity of trade: Estimates and evidence,” told us via email, “The formula that the administration uses is correct under the assumption that the objective is to arrive at a zero bilateral trade balance with a given trade partner, holding fixed any other effects.” But there will be other effects, she said, including “the changes in exports that would occur due to the domestic price increases caused by the tariff as well as changes in trade flows with other trade partners than the one that the tariff targets. … These effects are harmful so they would result in a lower optimal tariff compared to the reported one” in the White House chart.

The USTR fact sheet also cites as a reference for its estimates a paper published in American Economic Review, “The Long and Short (Run) of Trade Elasticities.” One of the authors of that paper, Andrei Levchenko, a professor of international economics at the University of Michigan, told us via email that the “elasticity estimate” in the paper and used by the USTR “should not be directly applied in this tariff calculation.”

“The key reason is that the concept of the trade elasticity holds everything else constant,” he explained. “In practice, everything else will not be constant. In particular, US exports could change. That can come from a variety of channels, but one important one is tariff retaliation by trading partners. If a trading partner puts tariffs on US exports to it, they will fall, (at least partially) un-doing the impact of lower imports on the trade deficit.

“Beyond this, there are many other ways in which the change in US imports and exports will differ from the formula that directly applies a partial equilibrium trade elasticity,” he said. “For example, trade elasticity estimates do not account for any impact of the change in tariffs on wages, prices, exchange rates, and the stock market. Those can go in different directions depending on the country, the product, the production technology used, etc. For small tariff changes on individual products from individual countries, these changes might be small and could reasonably be ignored. However, the change in imports and in the bilateral trade balance implied by the partial equilibrium trade elasticity is likely to be
unreliable when the tariff change is large and comprehensive (covering all goods), as is the case today.”

Repeated Claims

Trump got other things wrong in his tariff announcement. He continued to wrongly frame his tariffs as a way to raise “trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes.” Tariffs are a tax. And because U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and often pass at least some of their increased costs onto consumers through higher prices, tariffs are considered to be regressive taxes, affecting lower-income households more than others as a percentage of income.

A Tax Foundation analysis projected that the tariffs announced on April 2, combined with earlier tariffs announced by Trump, would raise nearly $3.2 trillion in revenue over 10 years. But the tariffs would also reduce Americans’ after-tax income, amounting to “an average tax increase of more than $2,100 per US household in 2025,” the Tax Foundation said.

Trump also repeated false or misleading trade claims that we’ve already covered. 

He said Canada “imposes a 250 to 300% tariff on many of our dairy products,” referring to rates that would only be charged if U.S. exports to Canada ever exceeded predetermined quotas. He said tariffs made the U.S. “proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” between 1789 and 1913, even though  real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product per capita is many times higher today than it was more than a century ago. And he claimed that during his first term he “took in hundreds of billions of dollars” from tariffs on China, which he said “never paid 10 cents to any other president.” But the U.S. has long collected billions from customs duties on Chinese imports — and the tariffs are paid by U.S. importers, not China. 

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Misinformation is nothing new. It has, however, become ubiquitous and, in some cases, more difficult and time-consuming than ever to debunk. 

When we first started publishing in 2003 — which predated Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006) — viral misinformation took the form of chain emails. Although they were a problem at the time, chain emails were to misinformation what the Pony Express is to ChatGPT.

As the popularity of social media platforms has grown, so too has the scope of viral misinformation and the speed with which it travels. And this falsehood-fraught environment is increasingly where people get their news.

In a survey of U.S. adults last year, the Pew Research Center found that “just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media.”

The incredible growth of podcasts also has helped spread misinformation on social media. According to the Pew Research Center, 42% of Americans 12 and older said they had listened to a podcast in the past month in 2023 — up from only 9% in 2008. In February, YouTube — the largest video platform — announced that it had more than 1 billion monthly podcast users. 

The emergence of artificial intelligence, or AI, makes it even more difficult for social media users to separate fact from fiction. 

“AI technologies, with their capability to generate convincing fake texts, images, audio and videos (often referred to as ‘deepfakes’), present significant difficulties in distinguishing authentic content from synthetic creations,” Cathy Li and Agustina Callegari of the World Economic Forum wrote last year in an article on how to combat AI misinformation. 

Our work aims to inform the public and debunk political falsehoods. But we can’t fact-check everything. Here’s our advice on how to identify bogus posts and factual distortions.

Think before sharing. We have long advised our readers, “Be skeptical, not cynical.” When it comes to online content, that means: Think twice before you share that social media post.  

“Don’t hit reshare until you stop and think to yourself, ‘Am I reasonably sure that this is accurate … does this seem plausible?’” David Rand, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, told PBS Newshour last year. 

We know that this can be hard to do, particularly if the content evokes a powerful response in you and aligns with your beliefs — which is often the case. There’s two reasons for that: 

• Seeking clicks, content providers give us text, images and videos that often provoke a reaction from us. 

• Using algorithms, social media platforms feed us what they think we want to see and hear.

As a result, social media posts often play to our emotions, and, as humans, we are susceptible to confirmation bias — which is the tendency to give too much weight to information that confirms our beliefs. The combination of the two makes misinformation go viral. 

But resist the urge to immediately reshare. 

Consider the source. Who shared the claim? What do you know about this person or organization? Do they have any partisan or financial conflicts? What qualifies them to write or speak about the subject?

We’ve seen a lot of misinformation from people who draw conclusions and share opinions, despite a lack of expertise in the subject or a clear conflict of interest, or both.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we debunked bogus claims about the virus from several chiropractors. A multiple offender, chiropractor Eric Nepute, was sued by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission for violating the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act. In a settlement, Nepute agreed to pay a fine and stop making false claims about supplements that he advertised and sold as preventatives and treatments for COVID-19. The civil complaint said Nepute and his companies “have earned a substantial amount of money from selling these and other Wellness Warrior Products.”

If someone is making claims in an effort to sell you something, that’s a red flag to be skeptical.

Of course, we also see a lot of misinformation from partisans — so be wary of liberal and conservative social media accounts making claims about the other side. 

For example, we recently debunked the misleading claim spread by President Donald Trump and conservative commentators that Politico, an online news outlet, was being “completely” or “massively funded” by the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Biden administration. In fact, the media payments were for subscriptions that were common at many federal agencies under the Trump and Biden administrations. 

Evaluate the evidence. Does the person making the claim provide any evidence, such as links to articles, published research or other sources? Are some sources mentioned, but no links provided? How credible is the evidence provided?

It’s a red flag if no sources are provided. If sources are cited, find the source material and see if the evidence supports the claim. You would be surprised how often the “evidence” doesn’t support the claim. (Be careful in clicking on links. Make sure they lead to a legitimate website.)  

Last month, we did a story on social media posts that falsely claimed Trump ordered former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s release from the International Criminal Court. The posts cited “Executive Order 2025-03” — which doesn’t exist. That’s not even the numbering system for executive orders. 

You should also check the credibility of the source material provided in the social media post. 

We recently debunked misleading claims about measles in a video posted to X by Mary Holland, the CEO of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense that was founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Holland based her claims on an article written by Sayer Ji, the founder of an alternative medicine website who was named in the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “Disinformation Dozen,” a list of top spreaders of vaccine misinformation on social media. Ji has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Rutgers University.

Ji’s history of spreading misinformation and his lack of expertise in the area of infectious diseases are red flags. 

In another case, we wrote about an article in a peer-reviewed journal that made numerous false claims about COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The article — which was later retracted — was written by known vaccination opponents who have spread misinformation about the mRNA vaccines, and it was published in a journal that did not have the same standards as more reputable journals.

If the social media post includes an image that you suspect might be a fake, then you can use reverse image search engines, such as Google and TinEye, that may help you find the original image and where and when it appeared online. We have used such tools numerous times over the years.

Evidence or opinion? Cable TV commentators, podcasters and columnists have blurred the line between news and opinion. 

If the evidence cited in the social media post comes from a news source — or purports to come from a news source, sometimes falsely labeled “breaking news” — you should consider if the social media post is sharing fact-based reporting or someone’s opinion of the news. 

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but we’ve found that many partisan websites, podcasters and commentators – whether they are pushing a liberal or conservative agenda — aren’t telling the full story. Their version of the facts is often slanted to benefit their side. 

Consult the experts. If you are still uncertain about the veracity of a social media claim, then you should consult the experts. That includes FactCheck.org — we’re on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, BlueSky, WhatsApp and TikTok.

A good place to start is Google or the search engines of FactCheck.org and other fact-checking websites.

The search should include keywords or a short excerpt of the social media post, podcast or video. For example, social media posts claimed the Department of Government Efficiency stopped “royalties” to former President Barack Obama for “Obamacare,” formally known as the Affordable Care Act. The top two results of a recent Google search of “royalties + Obama + Affordable Care Act” turned up articles by FactCheck.org and AFP Fact Check, a France-based fact-checking organization.  

Google has also created a tool called “Fact Check Explorer” — a searchable database of fact-checking articles from around the world. The same search for “royalties + Obama + Affordable Care Act” on Google’s Fact Check Explorer turned up six fact-checking articles – all debunking the claim about Obama. 

Fact-checking articles take time to produce, so in some cases you may not immediately find a fact-checking article on the topic. You may, however, find some news articles on the subject — but make sure you are using trusted sources, such as the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Associated Press, New York Times and other established news outlets. 

We know that trust in the media is low, but the fact is that legitimate news organizations, such as the Washington Post and New York Times, have written policies and procedures for such things as newsgathering, editing and corrections, as well as standards for ethical conduct and conflicts of interest. 

Even when using such trusted sources, you might want to check more than one source to see what others are reporting. Multiple news outlets will report on breaking news and major news developments, so be wary if only one news organization is reporting on the “news” that you are seeing on social media.

AI-Generated Images  

As we mentioned earlier, online content may be created by generative AI, which “can create original content — such as text, images, video, audio or software code — in response to a user’s prompt or request,” as IBM explains on its website. 

We’ve already covered text in the section above. The same rules apply to text created by humans or AI services. Here we focus on AI-generated images, videos and audio.

We have been writing about fake photos for years. In the early years, the fakes were real images that were altered using Photoshop or other editing programs. 

In 2008, for example, we wrote about an image that purportedly showed then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wearing a red, white and blue bikini and holding a rifle. But it wasn’t her. Her head had been Photoshopped onto the body of another woman. 

Using AI, people looking to entertain or cause mischief can create entirely new images, video and audio. Experts say you may be able to spot a fake by looking closely for red flags.

“It is possible to create realistic appearing images, audio, and video with today’s generative AI tools,” Matthew Groh, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told us in an email. “One of the best ways to spot a lie (and likewise AI-generated media) is to search for contradictions.”

Groh and his colleagues published a research paper in February that measured the accuracy of more than 50,000 participants who were asked to identify whether images were real or AI-generated. The participants were given “unlimited time, 20 seconds, 10 seconds, 5 seconds, and 1 second.” The paper found that “longer viewing times” improved the participants’ accuracy.

Unnatural body parts. Groh and his Northwestern colleagues identified telltale signs of AI-generated photos for an article last year in Kellogg Insight, a school publication. They advised social media users to look closely at various body parts for “anatomical implausibilities.” 

“Are there missing or extra limbs or digits? Bodies that merge into their surroundings or into other nearby bodies? A giraffe-like neck on a human? In AI-generated images, teeth can overlap or appear asymmetrical. Eyes may be overly shiny, blurry, or hollow-looking,” the article said.

If the person is a public figure, you can compare facial features with existing news photos to spot discrepancies, the article also noted. 

Odd objects. There may also be oddities in the way that body parts interact with objects, or even problems with the objects themselves.

For example, the Kellogg Insight article included an AI-generated image that showed a person’s hand inside a hamburger. The hamburger itself is improbably large.

“When there’s interactions between people and objects, there are often things that don’t look quite right,” Groh told Kellogg Insight, referring to these oddities as “functional implausibilities.”

Irregular shadows and reflections. AI also has difficulty with shadows and reflections. Shadows may be cast in different directions, and reflections may not match the object they pretend to reflect, Groh and his colleagues said.

For example, an AI-generated image in the Kellogg Insight article shows a person wearing a short-sleeved shirt, while his mirror image is wearing a long-sleeved shirt. The Northwestern research paper describes these irregularities as “violations of physics.”

The researchers also identified two other telltale signs of AI-generated images: “stylistic artifacts,” which refer to “overly glossy, waxy, or picturesque qualities of specific elements of an image,” and “sociocultural implausibilities,” which are “scenarios that violate social norms, cultural context, or historical accuracy.”

Nonsensical words. Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, explained in an article on the university’s website last year that AI-generated images have trouble with words. In his article, Jarry asked an AI service to create a photo of Montreal circa 1931. One problem, however, was that the lettering displayed on background signage was “gibberish.”

(Think you can tell real photos from bogus AI-generated images? Take the “Detect Fakes” test on Kellogg School’s website.)

AI-Generated Video and Audio

Unlike fake images, bogus video and audio are fairly new phenomena.   

We recently wrote about an audio clip circulating on social media that purported to show Donald Trump Jr. saying “the U.S. should have been sending weapons to Russia,” instead of Ukraine. But we found no evidence that Trump ever made such a comment, and a digital forensic expert told us it was likely fake.  

Look for contextual clues. Determine if the text of the post or the audio or video clip itself offers some contextual clues — such as where and when the words were allegedly spoken.

In the case of the fake Trump audio, one red flag was the claim that the president’s son made his remark about Russia on a Feb. 25 episode of his podcast, “Triggered with Donald Trump Jr.” However, Trump did not make any such comment about Russia during that episode.

Listen for audio anomalies. The European Digital Media Observatory, a project of the European Commission, offers tips for detecting AI-generated audio and video. When listening to audio, it says to “[p]ay attention to choices of words, intonation, breaths, unnatural pauses and other elements that can manifest anomalies.”

Watch for quality of video. The EDMO suggests checking “the quality of the video” to spot “out of focus contours, unrealistic features” and poor “synchronization of audio and video,” i.e., when the lips don’t match the audio.

Look for disclaimers. Some social media platforms — including Meta, YouTube and TikTok — require users to add a label on AI-generated content. Check to see if the platform you are using has such a policy and, if so, look for the disclaimers.

For example, Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads and Instagram, uses an “AI info” label “for content we detect was generated by an AI tool and share whether the content is labeled because of industry-shared signals or because someone self-disclosed.”

Groh, the Northwestern assistant professor, said that Community Notes on X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — can be useful at flagging AI-generated content.

“Community notes can be very useful for adding context and directing people’s attention to possible tells,” such as this note in response to an image posted following Hurricane Milton, Groh said. “Likewise, context and insights from trusted sources like fact checkers or digital forensics experts can be useful for helping people on social media make up their minds about whether what they’ve seen online is AI-generated or real.”

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The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift a District Court judge’s order blocking the use of an obscure 18th century law to summarily expel Venezuelan immigrants. Earlier this month, the administration sent hundreds of immigrants to an El Salvador prison because, officials alleged, they were members of a dangerous gang.

In response to a lawsuit, the lower court temporarily blocked any further deportations while the court considers the merits of the case, and it ordered planes carrying migrants deported under the law to be returned, which the administration did not do.

The lack of due process and the apparent disregard for the court order has led some legal experts to forecast a deterioration of the rule of law in the U.S., while the Trump administration maintains that it is within its rights to deport dangerous criminals.

We’ll lay out the facts as we know them regarding the key issues.

On Saturday, March 15, the Trump administration sent three planes carrying more than 250 immigrants to El Salvador, bound for the country’s largest prison.

The administration claimed that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which is active primarily in South America, but has had an increasing presence in the U.S., were on board. The Treasury Department designated it as a transnational criminal organization in July 2024, and the State Department designated it as a terrorist organization on Feb. 20.

The same day as the deportations, the White House posted a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act — a rarely used law that dates back to 1798 — to expel members of Tren de Aragua. It said that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA” and aren’t U.S. citizens or permanent residents “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” According to the Federal Register, the proclamation was signed the day before the administration posted it.

The secrecy and pace of the deportations could suggest that the administration was trying to avoid preemptive legal challenges, the judge handling the case disputing the deportations said. “Why is this proclamation essentially signed in the dark on Friday night, early Saturday morning, when people [were] rushed on the plane?” U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg asked at a March 21 hearing. “To me, the only reason to do that is if you know the problem and you want to get them out of the country before a suit is filed.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward had filed a lawsuit on the same day of the deportations on behalf of five Venezuelan men who were being held in Texas and “threatened with imminent removal under the President’s expected Proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act.” The suit sought class action status for all affected immigrants and asked the judge to block the administration’s use of the act.

Boasberg granted both of those requests on March 15. He issued a ruling from the bench ordering any planes carrying immigrants being deported under the Alien Enemies Act to be returned to the U.S.

The planes did not return and, when Boasberg requested details from the Trump administration about when the planes took off and landed, lawyers for the administration withheld that information and invoked the state secrets privilege.

What is the Alien Enemies Act?

The Alien Enemies Act was one of four laws passed in 1798 as the newly formed U.S. prepared for a potential war with France. That conflict, which entangled the U.S. in a dispute between France and Britain, took place at sea and never became a declared war. It is often called the Quasi War.

The four laws that came from it are referred to collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. They include:

• The Naturalization Act, which extended the amount of time it would take immigrants to become citizens. It was repealed in 1802.
• The Alien Act, which allowed the government to deport noncitizens who were deemed to be dangerous. It expired in 1801.
• The Sedition Act, which censored speech that was critical of the government. It expired in 1801.
• The Alien Enemies Act, which allowed the government — in times of war — to detain, relocate or remove those who were from the enemy nation.

The Alien Enemies Act is the only surviving law of the group.

It says that in times of war or during an “invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government,” the president can apprehend, restrain, secure and remove any immigrants who came from the enemy country.

It has been used three times throughout U.S. history — first, during the War of 1812 when British immigrants were required to move away from the coast to areas designated by federal marshals; second, during World War I, when German immigrants were required to register with the government and comply with restrictions on where they could work and live; third, during World War II, when the government rounded up Japanese, German and Italian immigrants, leading to the use of internment camps.

Can Trump use the act this way?

This is a question for the courts, which haven’t yet conclusively ruled.

As we said, there’s a class action lawsuit on behalf of the deported immigrants challenging the administration’s use of the act. The federal judge handling the case — Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia — issued an opinion on March 24, saying, “The President’s unprecedented use of the Act outside of the typical wartime context … implicates a host of complicated legal issues, including fundamental and sensitive questions about the often-circumscribed extent of judicial power in matters of foreign policy and national security.”

Boasberg went on to say that the court probably wouldn’t have to decide that question since the immigrants who brought the case are likely to prevail on a different issue. “Before they may be deported, they are entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all,” he said. “As the Government itself concedes, the awesome power granted by the Act may be brought to bear only on those who are, in fact, ‘alien enemies.’”

However Boasberg ends up ruling, though, the case will almost certainly be appealed. The government, in fact, already appealed Boasberg’s initial order blocking further use of the Alien Enemies Act. A split panel of the appeals court upheld Boasberg’s order, and the administration on March 28 filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

Legal experts have described the administration’s use of the wartime act as an overreach, noting that the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela.

“The legal problems with the deportations are obvious: The US is not at war with Venezuela; the gang isn’t a government; and in any case it’s not threatening the US with invasion or incursion in any ordinary English language sense of those words,” wrote Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman in a March 17 column.

The Trump administration, however, had endeavored to link Tren de Aragua to Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president. Tren de Aragua “is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus,” the proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act says, going on to call Venezuela a “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.”

Gangs have flourished in Venezuela as Maduro’s government has struggled, but it’s worth noting that his administration conducted a raid on Tren de Aragua’s home base — the Tocorón prison — in 2023.

“If our government has evidence of a coordinated invasion into this country that was engineered by a foreign nation, it must have proof. Otherwise, it is fiction,” Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill constitutional law professor, told PolitiFact.

For years, President Donald Trump has been claiming without evidence that other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending people to the United States. In particular, he has targeted Venezuela. Experts in the country told us last year that there’s no support to back up Trump’s claim.

And other legal experts have weighed in on the implications of the proclamation. “The president is invoking the Alien Enemies Act to try to dispense with due process. He wants to bypass any need to provide evidence or to convince a judge that someone is actually a gang member before deporting them,” Katherine Yon Ebright, a lawyer in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said in a statement.

“Trump is trying to use the post 9/11 terrorism playbook for immigration,” Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent and current associate dean at Yale Law School, wrote on Substack. By using the Alien Enemies Act, “Trump may try to ignore or sidestep the courts altogether, giving him immense ‘wartime’ authority (in peacetime) without any judicial check,” she said.

Tren de Aragua in the U.S.

Tren de Aragua began around 2014 in Venezuela’s Tocorón prison in the state of Aragua and, by 2023, had grown to be one of the county’s most powerful criminal organizations, according to the investigative reporting think tank InSight Crime.

“Tren de Aragua’s expansion turned transnational around 2018, when the gang attempted to establish itself on the Venezuela-Colombia border between the Venezuelan state of Táchira and the Colombian department of Norte de Santander,” according to InSight Crime. “Between 2018 and 2023, Tren de Aragua built a transnational criminal network, setting up cells in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, with further reports of a sporadic presence in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil.”

As of 2021, the gang had about 4,000 members in Latin America, according to the anti-corruption advocacy organization Transparencia Venezuela.

Estimating the size of Tren de Aragua in the U.S. is difficult, in part because members don’t adhere to traditional gang behavior, like wearing specific tattoos, Mitchel P. Roth, a professor at Sam Houston State University who researches organized crime, told us in an interview.

In October, the Department of Homeland Security had reportedly identified about 600 members across the U.S., although that number may be too low.

We reached out to DHS asking for updated figures, but we didn’t receive a response.

Of the 194 migrants with gang affiliations who have been apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection between October and February, 16 have been members of Tren de Aragua, according to CBP statistics. For context, that’s about half the number of MS-13 members who have been apprehended in the same time frame, and, assuming all 16 were from Venezuela, that’s .02% of the roughly 64,000 Venezuelans who were apprehended.

Who was deported?

There’s been little official information made available about those who were deported on March 15. But CBS News published 238 names from an “internal government list,” and an unnamed official told the network that 137 of them were deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a March 17 press briefing that the administration wasn’t releasing names due to “privacy concerns.”

News outlets have reported on a handful of deportees, revealing that their families, lawyers and even judges presiding over their asylum cases have almost no information on their detention by the U.S. government.

As USA Today reported on March 21, a judge presiding over an asylum hearing was unaware that the claimant, Jefferson José Laya Freites, wouldn’t be present. A lawyer with an immigrant rights organization told the judge that Laya Freites’ wife believed he’d been sent to El Salvador after he was detained following a traffic stop because she saw him in a video the president of El Salvador posted of deportees being taken to the prison there. She said he’s never been in a gang.

Similar stories were reported by the Washington Post, which described how Henrry Albornoz Quintero was arrested and detained after a routine check-in with immigration officials in January, then didn’t show up to a bond hearing. Neither the judge nor the government’s attorney knew where he was. His wife, pregnant with their first child, identified him in one of the photographs released by the El Salvadoran government.

Another case that has been widely reported in the media is that of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and coach who was seeking asylum in the U.S. after he was allegedly tortured in Venezuela for demonstrating against Maduro, according to his lawyer, Linette Tobin. In a declaration filed in the case before Boasberg, Tobin said that a tattoo Barrios has depicting the logo of his favorite soccer team — Real Madrid — and a social media post in which he was showing the sign language hand gesture that means “I love you” were misinterpreted by Department of Homeland Security officers as indicating he was a member of Tren de Aragua. He has no criminal record, Tobin said.

The Trump administration, however, has maintained that those who were deported were gang members and criminals, whom Leavitt described as “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country.”

Trump has repeatedly referred to the deportees as simply “criminals.” A declaration filed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in the case challenging the deportations said that many of those who were deported did not have criminal records, adding that this was “because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time.”

The ICE declaration maintained that all of them were members of the Venezuelan gang. “Agency personnel carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact members of TdA,” it said. “ICE did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

As fallout from a Trump administration group chat about a military attack in Yemen continues to unfold, some Democrats are saying the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist in the chat goes beyond incompetence — they say it was criminal.

Legal experts on national security issues say Democrats may have a point, that a case could be made that the chat violated a provision of the Espionage Act. But they say it is highly unlikely such a prosecution would be initiated by the Trump administration against one of its own.

Speculation about culpability for the chat that included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and whether any of the Trump administration officials involved in the chat should face any consequences continues to percolate on Capitol Hill. The chat between top administration national security officials took place on Signal, a private encrypted messaging app. Goldberg reported on March 24 that he had received a connection request through the app from National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who then added him to the chat.

On March 26, after several administration officials insisted the information shared in the chat was not classified, the Atlantic published more of the messages. In one of them, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to provide a timeline for impending U.S. military strikes in Yemen on March 15.

Department of Defense regulations specifically prohibit use of the app to share “non-public DoD information.”

“Unmanaged ‘messaging apps,’ including any app with a chat feature, regardless of the primary function, are NOT authorized to access, transmit, process non-public DoD information. This includes but is not limited to messaging, gaming, and social media apps. (i.e., iMessage, WhatsApps, Signal),” according to a 2023 DoD memo. NPR reported that just days after the Signal chat on March 15, the Pentagon issued a warning that a “vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application” and that “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the use of Signal for the chat was “a mistake,” and President Donald Trump said that Waltz — who took “full responsibility” for the inadvertent inclusion of Goldberg in the chat — “has learned a lesson.” But Democrats say that’s not enough. Some have called for a formal investigation. On March 25, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent Trump a letter calling on him to fire Hegseth “immediately.”

Some leading Democrats have gone even further, saying the chat was illegal or that its participants ought to be prosecuted.

• “This is blatantly illegal and dangerous beyond belief,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted on X on March 24. “Our national security is in the hands of complete amateurs.”

• “I am horrified by reports that our most senior national security officials, including the heads of multiple agencies, shared sensitive and almost certainly classified information via a commercial messaging application, including imminent war plans,” Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement on March 24. “If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way.”

• “At this moment, the White House and Secretary Hegseth are trying desperately to underplay a extraordinary blunder,” Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a press conference on March 25. “We cannot overstate how serious of a disaster it is. If an American service member texted classified information about an active military operation to an unknown number on an unclassified app, they would be dismissed, investigated and prosecuted.”

• “Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally – that would normally involve a jail sentence,” Sen. Chris Coons said in an X post that appears to have since been deleted.

Warren’s press office pointed us to stories that suggest participants in the Signal exchange may have violated a part of the Espionage Act that makes it illegal to inadvertently share “through gross negligence” sensitive national security information.

The section of the law related to the handling of defense information states: “Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense” and “through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed … Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

Kevin Carroll, a lawyer who specializes in national security litigation and previously worked as a CIA officer, told us in a phone interview that the Signal chat was “100%” a violation of that law.

“In a society of laws, the FBI director would read this in the Atlantic Monthly, and … tell the FBI Washington field office to start an investigation of people, and the investigation would be managed by the counterespionage section of the national security division” in the Department of Justice, Carroll said. “And there’s just no question, zero question, that in any administration other than this, that is what would happen.”

“It’s absolutely the kind of thing where if Hegseth and others were junior military personnel, they would absolutely be court-martialed,” Carroll said. “If they were civilians, they’d absolutely be prosecuted by the counter espionage section of the Justice Department. … Hegseth and these other guys would absolutely be sent to prison if we were living in a society of laws, which we’re no longer living in.”

In a press conference on March 26, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who participated in the chat — said that while “obviously someone made a mistake” by adding a journalist to the chat group, he was assured by the Pentagon that “none of the information on there at any point threatened the operation or the lives of our servicemen. And, in fact, it was a very successful operation.”

The same day, Hegseth posted on X, “So, let’s me get this straight. The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information. Those are some really shitty war plans.”

According to the Atlantic, two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing in Yemen, Hegseth shared this with the chat group:

• TIME NOW (1144ET): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w Centcom we are a GO for mission launch.
• 1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
• “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”
• “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
• “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
• “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

For Hegseth to claim that “the impending target and time and method of a manned aircraft attacking something is not classified is preposterous,” Carroll said. And in any case, he said, the information need not to have been marked as classified to run afoul of the Espionage Act.

“It’s obviously national defense information,” Carroll said. “So that’s the controlling criteria: Is it or is it not national defense information that could be helpful to an adversary.”

“Yes, it’s possible that the Espionage Act was violated here,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor who teaches criminal law at Stanford University, concurred in an email. “That depends on two things: first, whether the information carelessly disclosed to Jeffrey Goldberg was ‘information relating to the national defense’ within the meaning of the statute, and second, whether the information was provided to Jeffrey Goldberg through gross negligence.

“The first requirement is probably satisfied,” Sklansky said. “Courts generally treat information as falling within the protection of this statute if it relates to military facilities or activities, and if it is ‘closely held’ by the government, as opposed to being made generally available to the public. The information posted on the Signal chats appears to qualify.

“So the question comes down to whether one or more of the officials participating in the chat exhibited gross negligence in the handling of this information–in other words, whether they departed egregiously from the standard of care that would be expected,” Sklansky said. “That’s hard to assess definitively without knowing more about how all this happened, but there certainly are grounds for suspecting that gross negligence was involved. If the case were prosecuted, this would be a question for the jury.”

But neither Sklansky nor Carroll thinks any charges will be filed against anyone involved in the Signal chat.

“It is highly unlikely that this case will be criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted, because that would be the job of federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents, and the Trump Administration has, to put it mildly, shown little interest in holding itself to account for violations of the law,” Sklansky said.

Carroll put it more bluntly: “It would be more likely that a Jim Crow South sheriff would prosecute a murder by the Klan than that [FBI Director] Kash Patel and [U.S. Attorney General] Pam Bondi are going to investigate this.”

Trump was asked in a White House meeting on March 25 if he planned to investigate the matter.

“It’s not really an FBI thing,” Trump said. “It’s really something having to do with security — security like will somebody be able to break in? Are people able to break into conversations? And if that’s true, we’re going to have to find some other form of device. … But we’ll look into it.” Trump said he asked Waltz “to immediately study that and find out.”

In a press briefing on March 26, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the National Security Council, the White House counsel’s office and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team” were looking into the issue. “Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat, again, to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt said.

There’s another legal issue being debated about the use of Signal, which allows messages to be deleted after a set amount of time. Messages in the chat in question were set to be automatically deleted in four weeks.

Federal open-records laws, including the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act, require records to be kept of all communication involving official government business, Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, told NextGov in February.

According to the National Archives and Records Administration: “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” Guidance from NARA in 2015 stated, “Employees create Federal records when they conduct agency business using personal electronic messaging accounts or devices. This is the case whether or not agencies allow employees to use personal accounts or devices to conduct agency business. This is true for all Federal employees regardless of status.”

An update of the federal records laws in 2014 allows federal employees “using a non-official electronic messaging account” to provide records of those communications to federal archivists within 20 days. So as Josh Gerstein wrote for Politico on March 25, “That means the officials involved in these discussions on Signal still have time to comply since these messages came about 10 days ago.”

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