News

Yesterday evening, Tesla reported first-quarter earnings for 2025, and they were abysmal: Profits dropped 71% from the same time last year.

Musk sounded bitter on the call with investors that followed, blaming the company’s misfortune on protesters who have raged at Tesla dealerships around the world over his role running DOGE and his ardent support of far-right politicians.

“The protests that you’ll see out there, they’re very organized. They’re paid for,” he said, without evidence.

Non-paywall link

Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife says she fears for her safety since the Trump administration deported him to a prison in El Salvador.

The wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration, was forced to move to a safe house with her children, after the government posted their home address to social media.

White House officials have spent weeks trying to justify their deportation of Abrego Garcia, even after admitting in court that sending him to El Salvador was an “administrative error,” claiming with no evidence that he is a violent criminal and gang member.

At one point, the Department of Homeland Security posted online an order of protection that Jennifer Vasquez Sura had sought, but later abandoned, against her husband. That order contained Vasquez Sura’s home address, unredacted.

Workers say girl’s death is an example of what they feared from Providence closing the unit

• The New York State Police have quietly built a database of over 5,000 alleged gang members using speculative criteria like tattoos, clothing, and associations.
• Governor Kathy Hochul has said the State Police, which she controls, won't cooperate with President Trump's mass deportation campaign — yet the agency funnels the gang database into a federal system that makes it instantly available to ICE.
• The Trump administration is carrying out extrajudicial mass deportations of immigrants with alleged gang ties — justified, in cases like Kilmar Abrego Garcia's, by gang databases maintained by local police departments.

Summary

Trump had to reverse his aggressive tariff rhetoric after CEOs from Walmart, Target, and Home Depot warned of empty shelves and higher prices due to supply chain disruptions.

Investors reacted negatively to his threats against Fed Chair Jerome Powell, prompting a market sell-off.

Trump backtracked, expressing optimism on a China trade deal and now denying plans to fire Powell.

Global markets remain volatile, and the IMF cited Trump’s trade war as a “major negative shock” to global growth.

Five facilities near schools and houses in LA County fumigate produce shipped from overseas with methyl bromide. But the air agency doesn’t plan to monitor the air or take any immediate steps to protect people from the gas, which can damage lungs and cause neurological effects.

Experts say Pentagon chief has endangered secrets of US defense department and given assistance to foreign spies

As more develops about the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his repeated disclosures of sensitive military intelligence in unsecured Signal group chats, there are growing concerns his behavior has weakened the Pentagon in the eyes of its foreign adversaries and made him and his entourage a top espionage target.

Allies, already concerned by Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs, have also begun to see the US as an intelligence-sharing liability. There are fears that the mounting firings and leak inquiries in Hegseth’s orbit, along with his inability to manage these internal crises, exposes the entire global US war footing – especially, if a geopolitical and external crisis comes across his desk.

“[What if] a foreign entity, whether it be a state actor or non-state actor, is able to intercept the movements of troops or department personnel, or something like that, capture them and hold them to ransom,” said Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq war veteran and CEO at Task Force Butler. “That kind of thing could very easily happen.”

Trump administration officials are suggesting their immigration crackdown could expand to include deporting convicted U.S. citizens and charging anyone — not just immigrants — who criticizes Trump's policies. Here are 3 tactics the administration has teased that legal analysts say would challenge Americans' rights:

1. Sending convicted U.S. citizens to prisons abroad.

2. Putting critics of the administration's policies in jeopardy.

3. Questioning the authority of court orders.

In late January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan immigrant working in a delivery job in Detroit, picked up an order at a McDonald’s. He was heading to the address when he erroneously turned onto the Ambassador Bridge, which leads to Canada. It is a common mistake even for those who live in the Michigan border city. But for Mr. Prada, 32, it proved fateful.

The U.S. authorities took Mr. Prada into custody when he attempted to re-enter the country; he was put in detention and ordered deported. On March 15, he told a friend in Chicago that he was among a number of detainees housed in Texas who expected to be repatriated to Venezuela.

That evening, the Trump administration flew three planes carrying Venezuelan >migrants from the Texas facility to El Salvador, where they have been ever since, locked up in a maximum-security prison and denied contact with the outside world.

But Mr. Prada has not been heard from or seen. He is not on a list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador that day. He does not appear in the photos and videos released by the authorities of shackled men with shaved heads.

...

On Tuesday, after the story published, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that Mr. Prada had been sent to El Salvador on March 15.

The failure to list his deportation and location on any publicly accessible records may have been a simple oversight, but the matter continues to raise alarm among immigrant advocates and legal scholars, who say Mr. Prada’s case suggests a new level of disarray in the immigration system, as officials face pressure to rapidly fulfill President Trump’s pledge of mass deportations. While hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been deported under various administrations in recent years, it is extraordinarily unusual for them to disappear without a legal record.

“I have not heard of a disappearance like this in my 40-plus years of practicing and teaching immigration law,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.

“It’s unconscionable that it took a New York Times article and more than one month before the government indicated where and why he was deported,” Mr. Yale-Loehr said.

Archived at https://archive.is/Lhy3D

Related, "He disappeared after detention. Now ICE is silent on the fate of Venezuelan man" (arc)

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250423112922/https://time.com/7279068/trump-administration-autism-research-cuts/

According to Gutierrez, federal agents detained Leon Rengel in the parking garage of their Irving, Texas, apartment, as he was leaving for a hair-cutting gig.

“They didn’t have an arrest warrant,” Gutierrez said. “They asked him to lift his shirt to show his tattoos, and when they saw them, they claimed he was affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang. They took his documents — and took him away.” That was the last time she saw him.

Leon Rengel was briefly held at East Hidalgo Detention Center, a private facility in La Villa, Texas, used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Then — nothing. His alien number, a way to track his whereabouts, vanished two days later from ICE’s online system. He disappeared.

ICE agents told Gutierrez her boyfriend had been deported to his home country. But the family has searched in Venezuela, and he isn’t there, she said.

“I’ve been to the ICE office. I’ve contacted the FBI. The DEA. Everyone told me the same thing: He was deported,” Gutierrez said. “But where to? He never arrived in Venezuela.”

It’s possible that the Trump administration deported Leon Rengel to a mega-prison in El Salvador, where hundreds of other Venezuelans were sent last month — but there is no official record to confirm it.

Archived at https://archive.is/XGkmh

Related, "An Immigrant Held in U.S. Custody ‘Simply Disappeared'" (arc)

Pocatello, Idaho, officers shot [Victor Perez] nine times within seconds of arriving at his home, according to the law firm representing Perez’s family. The Latino teenager was on the other side of a fence when officers repeatedly told him to drop the knife as he was moving toward them. He was in the midst of a mental health crisis, his aunt Ana Vazquez told NBC News. She added that while he was holding a knife, the family did not see him as a threat. He died last week, several days after being shot.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250423112827/https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/killing-autistic-teen-highlights-potential-police-violence-people-disa-rcna201313

Archived at https://archive.is/rppqC

Summary

Faced with inflation, taxes and concerns over the size of Social Security benefits, most Americans are more afraid of going broke in retirement than they are of death.

In total, 64% of respondents across generations said they are more stressed about running out of funds in their golden years than the prospect of death.

Americans say they need $1.26 million to finance a comfortable retirement, yet the median amount saved is $87,000. “Certainly for boomers...inflation is a big deal.”

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250423113125/https://boltsmag.org/texas-jail-death-investigations/

Archived at https://archive.is/pIi3D

Elijah Manley was still a teenager when his frustration with President Trump pushed him to get involved in politics. Today, he's finally old enough to run for Congress. Upset with how his own Democratic Party is responding to Trump, he's decided to do just that.