Several prominent Democrats who are mulling a bid for the White House in 2020 have sought to bolster their progressive credentials by calling for major changes to immigration enforcement, with some pressing for the outright abolition of the federal government’s chief immigration enforcement agency. 

President Donald Trump responded on Twitter Saturday that it will “never happen!” 

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has “become a deportation force,” telling CNN late Thursday “you should get rid of it, start over, re-imagine it and build something that actually works.”

Her comments follow similar sentiments expressed by Sen. Kamala Harris of California over the past week. In interviews with multiple outlets, she has said the government “maybe” or “probably” should “start from scratch” on an immigration enforcement agency.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who sought the Democratic nomination in 2016 and is mulling another run, has stopped short of his colleagues’ calls to dismantle ICE. But he has also been quick to note his vote opposing the 2002 law that paved the way for ICE to replace the old Immigration and Naturalization Service following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Trump tweeted Saturday morning from New Jersey that Democrats “are making a strong push to abolish ICE, one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen.” He noted the agency’s work to counter MS-13 gang members.

He urged ICE agents to “not worry or lose your spirit,” adding: “The radical left Dems want you out. Next it will be all police. Zero chance, It will never happen!”

Balancing act

Housed within the Department of Homeland Security, ICE is in charge of executing hundreds of federal immigration statutes. The debate over the agency’s future follows the widespread outcry in recent weeks after the Trump administration separated more than 2,000 migrant children from their parents. Marches took place across the country Saturday to protest the policy, which Trump later reversed.

The Democratic calls to scrap the agency underscore the balancing act the party is facing on immigration issues. Such rhetoric could prove unhelpful to the 10 Democratic senators seeking re-election this fall in states Trump carried in 2016, where conservative views on immigration prevail. But calling for an end to ICE could be a winner for Democrats seeking to rally the party’s base in the 2020 presidential primaries.

Trump seems to relish the prospect of Democrats making the abolishment of ICE a campaign issue. 

“Well I hope they keep thinking about it. Because they’re going to get beaten so badly,” he said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo,” according to an excerpt released Saturday. He added: “get rid of ICE you’re going to have a country that you’re going to be afraid to walk out of your house. I love that issue if they’re going to actually do that.”

Many anti-Trump activists, who are driving the Twitter hashtag #abolishICE, have celebrated the moves by Gillibrand, Harris and others.

Nelini Stamp, the national organizing director for the Working Families Party, one of many progressive groups that ratcheted up its activity after Trump’s election, called it a “critical moment” in the early maneuverings for 2020.

“Any Democrats who want to be the nominee need to stand on the right side of this,” Stamp said. “Even if they don’t say ‘abolish ICE,’ they can’t not address it.”

Angel Padilla, policy director at the grassroots group Indivisible, said ICE “terrorizes communities” and that Gillibrand’s move “demonstrates where the progressive base is.”

Still, not every immigrant advocacy group takes the same view.

No litmus test

Cristobal Alex, president of the Latino Victory Project, a political action group that backs pro-immigration candidates, rejected ICE as a “litmus test.” But he said it’s “heartening” that immigration policy in general “is at the forefront of the conversation ahead of 2020.”

Alex said his group has met privately with several potential presidential candidates.

Their focus, Alex said, should be on “stopping the long-standing culture of corruption” in U.S. immigration policy and “the appalling practices” of the Trump administration, not on a move that by itself “amounts to rebranding.”

Indeed, the would-be presidential candidates haven’t yet detailed what they propose in ICE’s place. Before the border separation crisis, Harris had introduced legislation that would curb the expansion of immigration detention centers. She and Gillibrand and others have at least hinted that they would want the Justice Department’s prosecutorial power less involved in border security.

Whatever the details, the focus on ICE could cause problems for some potential candidates with more conservative records on immigration.

Former Vice President Joe Biden voted as a senator from Delaware for the 2002 law, the Homeland Security Act, that paved the way for ICE to replace the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He also voted in 2006 for a Bush administration-backed border security measure. Biden, however, has been critical of Trump’s immigration policy as he considers a 2020 run. Earlier this year, Biden headlined a private event with the Latino Victory Project in Miami.

The activists pushing for ICE abolition, meanwhile, said they aren’t worried about potential blowback or any difficulties for Democrats facing more conservative voters, including those potentially swayed by Trump’s repeated charges that Democrats favor “open borders.”

At the Working Families Party, Stamp said she sees the activists taking a position that “offers space” to other Democrats activists who won’t agree with them.

“We give them room to talk about better immigration policy,” she said, comparing the circumstances to the civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King Jr., was viewed more favorably by white power brokers than more strident leaders like Malcolm X.

“Martin Luther King never said, ‘Black power,’” Stamp said. “But having the left flank that did made the right folks willing to at least talk to King.”
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For evangelical Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., this is their political holy grail.

Like many religious conservatives in a position to know, the Liberty University president with close ties to the White House suspects that the Supreme Court vacancy President Donald Trump fills in the coming months will ultimately lead to the reversal of the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade. But instead of celebrating publicly, some evangelical leaders are downplaying their fortune on an issue that has defined their movement for decades.

“What people don’t understand is that if you overturn Roe v. Wade, all that does is give the states the right to decide whether abortion is legal or illegal,” Falwell told The Associated Press in an interview. “My guess is that there’d probably be less than 20 states that would make abortion illegal if given that right.”

Falwell added: “In the ’70s, I don’t know how many states had abortion illegal before Roe v. Wade, but it won’t be near as many this time.”

The sentiment, echoed by evangelical leaders across the country this past week, underscores the delicate politics that surround a moment many religious conservatives have longed for. With the retirement of swing vote Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate plan to install a conservative justice who could re-define the law of the land on some of the nation’s most explosive policy debates — none bigger than abortion.

And while these are the very best of times for the religious right, social conservatives risk a powerful backlash from their opponents if they cheer too loudly. Women’s groups have already raised the alarm for their constituents, particularly suburban women, who are poised to play an outsized role in the fight for the House majority this November.

Two-thirds of Americans do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, according to a poll released Friday by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Among women of reproductive age, three out of four want the high court ruling left alone. The poll was conducted before Kennedy’s retirement was announced.

“The left is going to try very hard to say this is all about overturning Roe,” said Johnnie Moore, a Southern Baptist minister who was a co-chairman of the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board. The more significant shift on the high court, he said, would likely be the help given to conservatives in their fight for what they call religious freedom.

Tony Perkins, who leads the socially conservative Family Research Council, said abortion was simply “a factor” in evangelicals’ excitement over a more conservative Supreme Court. He suggested that public opinion was already shifting against abortion rights, although that’s not true of the Roe v. Wade ruling, which has become slightly more popular over time.

Perkins agreed with Moore that the broader push for religious freedom was a bigger conservative focus.

Many evangelicals, for example, have lashed out against Obama-era laws that required churches and other religious institutions to provide their employees with women’s reproductive services, including access to abortion and birth control. Others have rallied behind private business owners who faced legal repercussions after denying services to gay people.

Yet sweeping restrictions to abortion rights are certainly on the table, Moore noted.

“There is a high level of confidence within the community that overturning Roe is actually, finally possible,” Moore said. He added: “Evangelicals have never been more confident in the future of America than they are now. It’s just a fact.”

In Alabama, Tom Parker, a Republican associate justice on the state Supreme Court who is campaigning to become the state’s chief justice, explicitly raised the potential of sending cases to Washington that would lead to the overturning of key rulings, including Roe v. Wade.

“President Trump is just one appointment away from giving us a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court,” Parker said in an interview on the radio program Wallbuilders Live. “And they are going to need cases that they can use to reverse those horrible decisions of the liberal majority in the past that have undermined the Constitution and really just abused our own personal rights.”

Despite Trump’s struggles with Christian values in his personal life at times, skeptical evangelical Christians lined up behind him in the 2016 election, and they remain one of his most loyal constituencies.

The president’s standing with white evangelical Christians hit an all-time high in April when 75 percent of evangelicals held a favorable view of Trump, according to a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute.

The unlikely marriage between the thrice-married president and Christian conservatives has always been focused on Trump’s ability to re-shape the nation’s judicial branch.

On the day she endorsed candidate Trump in March 2016, the late iconic anti-abortion activist Phyllis Schlafly first asked him privately whether he would appoint more judges like the conservative Antonin Scalia, recalled Schlafly’s successor Ed Martin, who was in the room at the time. Trump promised he would.

The president followed through with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch less than a month after his inauguration, delighting religious conservatives nationwide. And the Trump White House, while disorganized in other areas, made its relationship with the religious right a priority.

The first private White House meeting between evangelical leaders and senior Trump officials came in the days after the Gorsuch nomination, said Moore, who was in attendance. He said the White House has hosted roughly two dozen similar meetings since then in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.

A senior administration official such as Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump or Kellyanne Conway — if not Trump himself — has always been present, Moore added. Each meeting featured a detailed briefing on the administration’s push to fill judicial openings.

“The courts have been at the very center of the relationship,” Moore said.

And now, as the focus shifts toward the president’s next Supreme Court nomination, evangelical leaders who once held their noses and voted for Trump have little doubt he will pick someone who shares their conservative views on abortion, same-sex marriage and other social issues.

Falwell insisted only that Trump make his next selection from the list of prospective nominees he released before his election. All are believed to oppose the Roe v. Wade ruling.

Any deviation from the list, Falwell said, would be “a betrayal.” He noted, however, that he’s in weekly contact with the White House and has supreme confidence that the president will deliver.

“This is a vindication for the 80 percent of evangelicals who supported Trump. Many of them voted on this issue alone,” Falwell said. “Today’s a day that we as evangelicals, and really all average Americans, can say we told you so.”
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The U.S. ambassador to Estonia says he has resigned over frustrations with President Donald Trump’s comments about the European Union and the treatment of Washington’s European allies.

In a private Facebook message posted Friday, James D. Melville wrote: “For the President to say EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go.”

Melville is a senior U.S. career diplomat who has served as the American ambassador in the Baltic nation and NATO member of Estonia since 2015. He has served the State Department for 33 years.

The U.S. Embassy in Tallinn did not immediately comment.
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As Americans debate the Trump administration’s hardened immigration policies, one group of citizens has first-hand experience with the process: the more than 43 million Americans who lawfully immigrated to the country.

VOA reporters in Los Angeles spoke with a range of immigrants from all around the world about the Trump administration’s policies, the treatment of children who enter the United States illegally with their families, and the rights of asylum seekers.

While many remain divided on the issues surrounding illegal immigration and Trump’s handling of it, these foreign-born citizens who make up some 14 percent of the U.S. population said legitimate refugees and asylum seekers should get the help they need.

VOA’s Elizabeth Lee contributed to this report.
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U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the coming U.S. Supreme Court vacancy, his chief of staff, the upcoming summit with Russia, tariffs and NATO on Friday while aboard Air Force One en route from Washington to his private golf club in New Jersey.

Trump said he plans to announce his nominee for the high court on July 9 and that he has identified five finalists, including two women.

He also said he may interview two contenders for the nomination this weekend.

He said he will not ask candidates whether they would overturn a 1973 ruling in the Roe v. Wade case, which established a woman’s right to an abortion, nor would he discuss gay rights with them.

The president’s nominee must win confirmation by the Senate.

Republicans control the chamber but only by a slim majority, making the views of moderates, including some Democrats, important.

Trump met Thursday with senators from both parties at the White House to discuss the court vacancy created by the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, which was announced Wednesday.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Friday he hoped the confirmation process would be done “in time for the new justice to begin the fall term of the Supreme Court … the first Monday in October.”

Chief of staff

Trump said he is not looking for a new chief of staff to replace John Kelly, but at some point “things happen.”

Kelly, a retired general, is nearing a year in the job and could be leaving soon, a source familiar with the situation said Thursday.

Among possible choices for Trump are Mick Mulvaney, who is the White House budget director and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Nick Ayers, who is Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, the source said.

Trump has occasionally chafed at the restrictions Kelly has placed on who gets access to see him and has wondered aloud whether he needs someone with more political experience for the job as congressional elections approach, two sources said.

But he frequently praises Kelly publicly and has expressed admiration of him.

Kelly was picked as chief of staff last summer to bring order to the West Wing in place of Reince Priebus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee who presided over the chaotic early months of the Trump presidency.

Russia summit

Trump said he would raise the issue of alleged Russian meddling in U.S. elections during his planned meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki next month.

He also said he would discuss the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine and other international issues during the July 16 summit.

“I’ll talk to him about everything,” Trump said.

“We’re going to talk about Ukraine, we’re going to be talking about Syria. We’ll be talking about elections … we don’t want anybody tampering with elections.”

Russia has denied U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment that Moscow sought to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election to boost Trump’s prospects of becoming president.

After Trump and Putin met briefly in Vietnam in November 2017, Trump was criticized in the United States for saying he believed Putin when he denied Russian meddling.

Trump denies wrongdoing and calls an investigation into possible collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia a “witch hunt.”

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, the sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States in response, and Russia’s military intervention in the war in Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad are major causes of strain in the two countries’ relations.

Asked if the United States would recognize Crimea as part of Russia, Trump said: “We’re going to have to see.”

He gave a similar answer when he was asked if he would lift the sanctions on Russia. “We’ll see what Russia does,” Trump said.

Tariffs

Trump said his administration’s investigation into whether to increase tariffs on cars from the European Union and other trading partners would be completed in three to four weeks.

He also said the United States has been treated very badly by the World Trade Organization, but he is not considering withdrawing from it at this point.

Asked when the probe would be concluded, he said: “Very soon. It’ll be done in three, four weeks.”

Trump ordered the “Section 232” national security probe into autos on May 23, and his unusually fast timeline calls for it to be possibly completed in just over two months. Similar national security probes ordered last year that led to import tariffs of 25 percent steel and 10 percent on aluminum took about 10 months to complete.

NATO

Trump said that Germany and other European nations need to spend more on NATO, reiterating a complaint that U.S. allies are not pulling their weight on defense spending.

“Germany has to spend more money. Spain, France. It’s not fair what they’ve done to the United States,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
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U.S. President Donald Trump touted the Republican tax cut plan Friday, six months after he signed it into law, saying it was strengthening the U.S. economy and helping average Americans by increasing investment, jobs and wages.

“It is my great honor to welcome you back to the White House to celebrate six months of new jobs, bigger paychecks and keeping more of your hard-earned money where it belongs: in your pocket or wherever else you want to spend it,” he said.

A recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, projects a gloomy fiscal outlook in the U.S., which is experiencing rising debt under the Trump administration.

The CBO report predicts the country’s debt burden will double in 30 years, exceeding even the U.S. debt load during World War II.

The tax law, officially titled the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, was the largest overhaul of the country’s complex tax laws in three decades. It cut the corporate tax rate, which was among the highest in the industrialized world, from 35 to 21 percent. It trimmed rates for millions of individual taxpayers as well, with the biggest cuts mostly benefiting the wealthiest earners, although some taxpayers saw bigger tax bills because of various changes in the tax regulations.

The CBO report, which cautioned the high debt levels also increase chances of a fiscal crisis, projects the tax cuts could spur short-term economic growth, but it quickly would fall back to a long-term average of 1.9 percent.

While most of the rising debt is due to increasing entitlement spending and other problems that existed before Trump’s 2016 election, the report said the new tax law is contributing to the short-term debt by cutting government revenue. Spending increases approved by both Republicans and Democrats are also raising deficits.

The Republicans’ $1.5 trillion in tax cuts and $1.3 trillion in spending enacted earlier this year have already helped push the CBO’s debt projections higher through 2041, the report said.

Some analysts say the country’s fiscal health is quickly deteriorating because of higher spending for entitlement programs such as Social Security, insufficient government revenue and spiraling interest payments on debt.

“The massive deficits caused by policymakers’ recent tax and budget decisions have drastically worsened the country’s long-term finances,” said Bipartisan Policy Center economic policy director Shai Akabas. 

The Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center concluded in a June 13 report that “the new tax law will raise deficits and make the distribution of after-tax income more unequal.”

Former Federal Reserve Bank chair Janet Yellen, a Democratic appointee whom Trump replaced with Republican Jerome Powell, said Thursday that the tax cuts would probably provide only a meager boost to the growth of the U.S. economy.

“The calculations that I’ve seen and seem reasonable to me suggest that the payoff is likely to be in tenths of a percent, which in growth is a lot, but may not be what some people are hoping for,” she said.

Tariffs

Any benefits for individuals and corporations from the tax cuts may be undermined by Trump’s imposition of tariffs on foreign countries.

Tariffs have already been announced on Chinese products, foreign aluminum and steel imports from Canada, Mexico and the European Union, and on solar panels and washing machines and Canadian lumber and paper. Trump has also threatened tariffs on automobile imports and on other foreign products and materials.

“Tariffs on steel and aluminum imports are a tax hike on Americans and will have damaging consequences for consumers, manufacturers and workers,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Republican, said May 31.

The Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Kevin Brady of Texas, said last month that the tariffs “hurt our efforts to create good-paying jobs by selling more ‘Made in America’ products to customers in these countries.”

Retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada, China, the EU and Mexico could hinder the ability of U.S. companies to sell products to other countries, which could in turn kill American jobs and suppress wages.
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The United States is accepting an increasingly large share of Christian refugees, primarily from Africa, while the number of total arrivals remains on track for a historic low this fiscal year, federal data show.

With three-quarters of the fiscal year over, and amid massive cuts to the U.S. refugee program under the Trump administration, nearly 68 percent of arriving refugees this fiscal year are Christian — a 16-year high, according to State Department statistics reviewed by VOA. Prior to this year, the highest proportion was in fiscal 2007, at 60 percent.

But researchers and advocates are quick to highlight that while Christian refugees hit a historic high proportionally, the number of Christians, Muslims and people of all other religions are low compared with previous years.

“I don’t know a single Christian who is in any way consoled” by that higher proportion, said Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization for World Relief, one of nine national resettlement organizations in the U.S. “I think it’s a tragedy for Christians, Muslims and every other religion. Most every group you could look at is down at least 60 percent.”

In a conference call last week that was reported by the Christian Post, members of the Evangelical Immigration Table, a broad coalition of evangelical groups, also signaled grave concerns that acceptance of Middle Eastern Christians was nearing zero.

“These persecuted Christians have almost been entirely shut out in the past six months, during which time just 21 Christians from the Middle East have been admitted to the U.S. as refugees,” said Kathryn Freeman, the director of public policy for the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission. “I think it is also important to note that we feel the national slowdown in refugee resettlement is affecting refugees of all faiths.”

Since Donald Trump took office, partially on a platform of barring Muslims from coming to the United States, the share of Muslim refugee arrivals to the country has dwindled to a never-before-seen nadir, as VOA reported earlier this year. That figure currently hovers at around 15 percent, despite ongoing resettlement needs from majority-Muslim countries.

Muslim refugee flows fell 94 percent from January to November 2017, a Cato Institute report from December further noted. And refugees weren’t the only travelers affected — there was also a 26 percent drop in immigrants and a 32 percent decrease in temporary visa issuances from majority-Muslim countries, according to the report.

“We have a president whose rhetoric has made it very clear [regardless of what the latest Supreme Court decision says] that Muslim populations from particular countries are not welcome in the United States,” said Maria Cristina Garcia, a Cornell University professor who has written about the history of refugees in the U.S. in the decades since the end of the Cold War.

Promises

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network a week after his 2017 inauguration, Trump said Christian refugees would be prioritized. The first travel ban, which would be released later that same day, carved out special allowances for Christian refugees. That part was dropped in later iterations.

In the interview, however, Trump also pointed out that the U.S. had been making it “very tough” for Syrian Christians to be resettled in the country. 

“If you were a Muslim, you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible, and the reason that was so unfair — everybody was persecuted, in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody, but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair,” he said.

But the administration has not followed through. Seventeen Christian Syrians have been resettled in the U.S. since October, a number that is unlikely to budge after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban this week, which bars all Syrian entries except in the case of special waivers.

Similarly, 22 Iraqi Christians have arrived since October; the country was initially included in the travel ban, but later removed. During the same period in then-President Barack Obama’s last full year in office, hundreds of Iraq Christian refugees came to the U.S.

Not about faith

“Religion should be a factor in resettlement only to the extent that it determines your vulnerability,” said Soerens of World Relief. “It should never be a preference of … one religion over another.”

The Trump administration has pushed back on allegations that refugee admissions are based on religion, or even that levels of Christians or Muslims are affected by Trump’s policy decisions.

“Let me start by first noting, and really, really strongly here — our admissions has nothing to do with religion in any way, shape or form,” a senior administration official said during a media call in January, in response to a question from VOA about the drop in Muslim arrival numbers during the first months of the fiscal year.

“The slowdown in many places is a result of many different factors, including security checks and medical checks and the number of resources that [the Department of Homeland Security] is able to commit and, frankly, learning new procedures and the elements of coordinating different parts of the bureaucracy. So I think that partially answers the question,” a State Department official said on the same call.

And there are Americans who support fewer refugee arrivals.

The Pew Research Center reported in May that while 51 percent of Americans favor accepting refugees, 43 percent of Americans oppose it. There is a noticeable shift, however, among Republicans — a year ago, about 1 in 3 said the country had a responsibility to resettle refugees; that’s now dropped to 1 in 4.

Moreover, when the fiscal year ends September 30, the U.S. is on track to welcome just under half the 45,000-refugee ceiling imposed by the president. The resettlement cuts come during an unrelenting need for resettlement, according to recent data from the United Nations. 
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U.S. and Russian leaders have agreed to meet July 16 to discuss long-standing disagreements on global issues such as conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. elections and NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe. The summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin comes on the heels of the NATO summit in Brussels, but the two leaders have chosen neutral territory to meet. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Official Washington is preparing for another major political battle in the months ahead as President Donald Trump prepares to nominate a successor to retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to appoint reliable conservatives as justices, and the president’s next appointment could have an impact on the court and American society that will last a generation. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone previews the fight from Washington.
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A federal judge in Chicago on Thursday ordered the U.S. government to release a 9-year-old Brazilian boy who was separated from his mother at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying their continued separation “irreparably harms them both.”

Judge Manish Shah mulled his decision for just a few hours before finding that Lidia Karine Souza can have custody of her son, Diogo, who has spent four weeks at a government-contracted shelter in Chicago. Shah ordered that the child be released Thursday, but didn’t specify a time. Souza’s attorneys said she would pick up her son Thursday afternoon.

The mother, who has applied for asylum, was released from an immigrant detention facility in Texas on June 9 and is living with relatives outside Boston.

“Judge Shah has vindicated the rule of law and taken a definitive step to allow Lidia’s son to finally be with her again. We are hopeful that this outcome will benefit other families facing similar circumstances,” attorneys Jesse Bless and Britt Miller said in a written statement.

Four hours

Shah, the son of immigrants from India, took just four hours before posting his written ruling after a hearing Thursday morning.

“Continued separation of … (the) 9-year-old child, and Souza,” he wrote, “irreparably harms them both.”

The decision came two days after a different judge ordered the government to reunite more than 2,000 immigrant children with their families within 30 days, or 14 days for those younger than 5. White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters declined to say Thursday whether the administration will be able to abide by the deadline. She said more than 500 children have been reunified with their families.

In Washington Thursday, police arrested nearly 600 people after hundreds of loudly chanting women demonstrated inside a Senate office building against Trump’s immigration policy. Among those arrested was Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Democrat from Washington state, she said on twitter.

Meanwhile, Melania Trump spent time with children at a complex in Phoenix where dozens of migrant children separated from their parents at the border are being held.

Weeks in quarantine

Souza’s son has spent four weeks at a government-contracted shelter in Chicago, much of it alone in a room, quarantined with chickenpox. He spent his ninth birthday on Monday without his mom. Even after Tuesday’s ruling in California, Souza’s attorneys nonetheless moved forward with an emergency hearing in their lawsuit against the Trump administration.

Shah wrote that he understood that volume of paperwork, filings and forms normally required before the government can release a child in its custody are intended to ensure the child’s well-being. But, he said, “the government’s interests in completing certain procedures to be sure that (Souza’s child) is placed in a safe environment and in managing the response to ongoing class litigation do not outweigh the family’s interest in reuniting.”

The fitness of the mother in this case isn’t questioned, he said, so dragging out processing “only serves to interfere in the family’s integrity with little to no benefit to the government’s interests.”

Souza has been allowed to phone her son for just 20 minutes per week. She has said he would beg her through tears to do everything in her power to get him back to her. The 27-year-old woman searched for weeks to find Diogo after the two were separated at the border in late May. When she was released, she filled out nearly 40 pages of documents that U.S. officials told her were required to regain custody.

‘This … is a nightmare’

Then they told her that the rules had changed and that she needed any family members living with her in the United States to be fingerprinted and still more documents.

Government attorney Craig Oswald told Shah that U.S. officials have been “raked over the coals … before” for not being thorough about such background checks, which he said are meant to ensure a child’s safety.

Souza was seeking safety by coming to the U.S., but it’s not the safety she sought for herself and her son. This was not the American dream.

“This … is a nightmare,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday.

For days and weeks now, some of the hundreds of parents separated from their children at the Mexican border by the Trump administration have been battling one of the world’s most complex immigration systems to find their youngsters and get them back.

For many, it has been a lopsided battle, and a frustrating and heartbreaking one. Most do not speak English. Many know nothing about their children’s whereabouts. And some say their calls to the government’s 1-800 information hotline have gone unanswered.

Children spread out

Huge logistical challenges remain, and whether the U.S. government can manage to clear away the red tape, confusion and seeming lack of coordination and make the deadline remains to be seen.

Among the complicating factors: Children have been sent to shelters all over the United States, thousands of miles from the border. And perhaps hundreds of parents have been deported from the U.S. without their children.

Jesse Bless, an attorney from Jeff Goldman Immigration in Boston, one of two firms representing Souza, said some parents who are trying to get their children placed with friends or relatives in the U.S. are being asked by the government to provide, along with fingerprints of relatives, utility bills and lease information, which many newly arrived immigrants don’t have.

Souza and her son were separated after she requested asylum, arguing her life was in danger in her native Brazil. 

“I came out of necessity,” she told the AP.

After her son was taken, she had no idea where he was until another detained mother said her child knew a boy named Diogo in a Chicago shelter. She had been told the soonest he could be released would be in late July.

Souza visited Diogo for the first time since May on Tuesday. They embraced, and she kissed him several times on the head and face, then grabbed his cheeks gently with her hands as they both cried.

“I missed you so much,” she said in Portuguese.

Asked how he was, Diogo said: “I am better now.”

Their visit lasted an hour. Then he returned to U.S. government custody.

“He cried a lot when the time came to say goodbye,” she said. “He thought we would be taking him home.”
…

Melania Trump is heading back toward the southern border of the United States. And this time, she’s not wearing any particular message.

The first lady boarded her plane wearing a black shirt and white slacks for the flight. She was expected to visit centers Thursday housing migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman declined to immediately release details about her planned stops.

The visit comes a week after Mrs. Trump traveled to the border town of McAllen, Texas, to meet with officials there dealing with detained families. She also met with children at one of the facilities.

But that trip was overshadowed by a jacket the first lady wore to and from Texas that said on the back:  “I really don’t care, do u?” The first lady’s spokeswoman said it was just a jacket, with no hidden message, but interest in her baffling fashion choice was a distraction from Mrs. Trump’s trip. Her husband, President Donald Trump, undercut the no-message message by tweeting that his wife was saying she really doesn’t care about the “fake news” media.

This time, Mrs. Trump travels amid upheaval over her husband’s hard-line approach to immigration and evidence of increasing urgency over how that’s playing out.

More than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents at the border in recent weeks and some were placed in government-contracted shelters hundreds of miles away from their parents.

The president last week signed an executive order to halt the separation of families at the border, at least for a few weeks, but the order did not address the reunification of families already separated.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered that thousands of migrant children and parents be reunited within 30 days – and sooner if the youngster is under 5. The order poses logistical problems for the administration, and it was unclear how it would meet the deadline.

 
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The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the key swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court, gives President Donald Trump a coveted opportunity make the second high court appointment of his term and sets the stage for one of the most contentious confirmation battles in decades.

During his 30 years on the bench, Kennedy, an 81-year old, Republican appointee, has often broken ranks with his conservative colleagues to cast the decisive vote in a string of consequential cases, including those involving abortion, gay rights and voting rights.

His retirement becomes effective at the end of July and whoever Trump picks to replace him could push the bench further to the right.

While conservatives see a rare opening for another right-leaning high court appointment, liberals, are vowing to stop it, fearing a conservative-dominated court could reverse precedents on abortion and gay rights, among other decisions.

Abortion ruling

Among his most noteworthy decisions, Kennedy co-authored a 1992 ruling that reaffirmed women’s constitutional right to abortion, and in 2015 he wrote the majority opinion in a landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States.

Sarah Warbelow, legal director with the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based LGBTQ advocacy organization, said Kennedy “was really the architect behind some of the most critical decisions impacting our lives.”

President Trump has called Kennedy a man of “tremendous vision” and said he’d “immediately” begin the search for a replacement.

The minimum number of votes required for a Supreme Court justice nomination used to be 60. But Republicans changed the rules last year to reduce the minimum to a simple majority of 51, the number of members they have in the Senate.

Gorsuch nomination

Last year, Trump nominated conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to replace the late Antonin Scalia, reinstating the court’s 5-4 conservative majority and winning a string of favorable rulings.

Democrats fear that Trump may try to force a nomination through the Senate before the November Congressional election, which could decide which party gets to control the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urged Republicans on Wednesday not to consider a vote for Trump’s next Supreme Court pick before the elections, reminding them of their refusal to hold a vote in 2016 for then President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

“Millions of people are just months away from determining the senators who should vote to confirm or reject the president’s nominee, and their voices deserve to be heard now, as Leader (Mitch) McConnell thought they deserved to be heard then. Anything but that would be the absolute height of hypocrisy,” Schumer said in a statement.

Deciding vote

In recent years, the Supreme Court has decided about 20 percent of cases by a 5-4 vote, with the outcome often turning on Justice Kennedy’s vote, according to Charles Geyh, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law.

Justice Kennedy “was at the center of many of those decisions and many of those decisions are among the most important decisions that the Supreme Court has made,” Geyh, who is an expert on judicial selection, said.

Whoever ends up joining the court, he said, Chief Justice Roberts is likely to serve as a force of moderation.

“Roberts is concerned about the legacy of the court, he’s concerned about a court that is perceived as upholding the court of law, and he’s concerned about a public perception that court is just a group of politicians in robes,” Geyh said.
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The U.S. House of Representatives failed to pass major immigration legislation Wednesday, after weeks of debate and mixed messages of support from President Donald Trump. The bill’s failure leaves 1.8 million undocumented young people without a solution, while the problem of addressing the family separation crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border that has galvanized American public opinion remains. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more.
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Several Republican candidates supported by U.S. President Donald Trump swept to victories in party primary elections Tuesday, while a 10-term New York congressman was defeated in a stunning upset by a first-time Latina politician in a Democratic party contest.

Trump seemed to take particular delight in the defeat of a fellow New Yorker, veteran Congressman Joe Crowley, a frequent Trump critic who had been mentioned as a possibility to someday replace Nancy Pelosi as the leader of the minority Democratic bloc in the House of Representatives.

Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, was upset by another vocal Trump critic, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She was outspent by Crowley in the campaign by a 10-to-1 margin, yet still won.

Trump campaigned for South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster at a Monday night rally in the southern state. After the vote, Trump congratulated him in a Twitter comment “on your BIG election win!” adding, “South Carolina loves you.” 

Trump also applauded the Senate primary election win in the western state of Utah by Mitt Romney, a sometimes Trump critic who was the unsuccessful 2012 Republican presidential nominee, losing to former President Barack Obama who won a second term in the White House.

​”Big and conclusive win by Mitt Romney,” Trump declared. “… A great and loving family will be coming to D.C.,” referring to the District of Columbia, as Washington is sometimes called.

The president also cheered the primary victory for New York Congressman Dan Donovan, saying he “showed great courage in a tough race!” Donovan defeated a former congressman, Michael Grimm, who was trying to return to Congress after serving a prison term for tax fraud. 

Political primary elections in the U.S. are scattered over several months, all leading to congressional and gubernatorial elections in November, when the winning Democratic and Republican nominees face off against each other.
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Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt is proposing to yield some of the agency’s veto power over mining and other development.

The EPA released Pruitt’s proposal Wednesday.

The Clean Water Act allows the EPA to veto permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that allow companies to dump waste into waterways. Pruitt is directing his agency to look at surrendering its authority to exercise that veto before permits are applied for or after they’re approved.

Pruitt says EPA veto power over dumping waste into waterways could “chill economic growth.” He cites Obama-era EPA decisions on Alaska’s proposed Pebble Mine. Developers there want to mine gold and copper near a salmon fishery.

Kyla Bennett of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility accuses Pruitt of shirking his environmental duty.
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The Trump administration on Wednesday began dismantling the sanctions relief that was granted to Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal, a step that follows President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the international accord.

The Treasury Department announced it had revoked licenses that allowed U.S.-controlled foreign firms to export commercial aircraft parts to Iran as well as permitted Americans to trade in Iranian carpets, pistachios and caviar. It said businesses engaged in any such transactions have to wind down those operations by Aug. 6 or face penalties under U.S. sanctions. Another set of licenses covering other types of commerce, including oil purchases, will be revoked in coming weeks, with firms given until Nov. 4 to end those activities.

The step had been expected since May when Trump pulled the U.S. out of the landmark agreement under which Iran was given relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear program. Trump said the accord, a signature foreign policy achievement of his predecessor, President Barack Obama, was the worst deal ever negotiated by the United States because it gave Iran too much in return for too little. Trump also complained that the agreement did not cover Iran’s non-nuclear malign behavior.

Other parties to the deal — Britain, China, Germany, France, Russia and the European Union — have criticized the U.S. withdrawal, which has left the agreement at risk of collapse. The Trump administration is stepping up efforts to isolate Iran and its faltering economy from international financial and trading systems.

On Tuesday, the administration said it was pushing foreign countries to cut their oil imports from Iran to zero by Nov. 4. Previously, the administration had said only that countries should make a “significant reduction” in their imports of Iranian oil or be subject to separate U.S. sanctions prohibiting all transactions between their central banks and Iran’s central bank.

A senior State Department official said the administration is now telling European and Asian countries that the U.S. expects their imports to hit zero by the time the grace period ends. A U.S. team from the State Department and the National Security Council is currently in Europe delivering the message, said the official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity. The official added that the U.S. is working with other Middle Eastern countries to increase production so the global oil supply isn’t harmed.

Some close U.S. allies are among the largest importers of Iranian crude oil, including India and South Korea. Japan and Turkey also import significant amounts of Iranian oil, according to statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Agency. The biggest importer of Iranian oil last year was China.
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U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton is expected in Moscow on Wednesday for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and possibly Vladimir Putin, part of an effort to lay the ground for a summit between Putin and President Donald Trump.

Bolton, whom the Kremlin regards as an arch Russia hawk, is due to give a news conference after his meetings at 1630 GMT, where he might name the date and location of a summit, which the Kremlin has been trying to make happen for months.

Trump congratulated Putin by phone in March after the Russian leader’s landslide re-election victory and said the two would meet soon. However, the Russians have since complained about the difficulty of setting up such a meeting.

Relations between Washington and Moscow are languishing at a post-Cold War low. They are at odds over Syria, Ukraine, allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and accusations Moscow was behind the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain in March.

Expectations for the outcome of any Putin-Trump summit are therefore low, even though Trump said before he was elected that he wanted to improve battered U.S.-Russia ties and the two men occasionally make positive statements about each other.

The Kremlin said on Tuesday it wanted to talk about international security and stability, disarmament, regional problems and bilateral ties. It did not rule out a meeting between Bolton and Putin, but did not confirm one either.

Details unclear 

The summit is expected to take place around the second half of July after Trump attends a NATO summit in Brussels and visits Britain. It is unclear where it would be held, with Vienna and Helsinki cited as possible venues.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the weekend he expected Bolton’s Moscow visit to lead to a summit “in the not too distant future.” He said Washington was “trying to find places where we had overlapping interests, but protecting American interest where we do not.”

Such a summit, if it happened, would be likely to cause irritation in parts of the West, where countries such as Britain want to isolate Putin. It would also go down badly among Trump’s foreign and domestic critics, who question his commitment to NATO and fret over his desire to rebuild ties with Russia even as Washington continues to tighten sanctions on Moscow.

The United States initially sanctioned Russia over its 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and its backing for a pro-Russian uprising in eastern Ukraine. Subsequent sanctions have punished Moscow for what Washington has called its malign behavior and meddling in U.S. politics, something Russia denies.

Some Trump critics say Russia has not significantly altered its behavior since 2014 and should therefore not be given the prestige that a summit would confer.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday endorsed U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s measured approach to restricting Chinese investments in U.S. technology companies, saying a strengthened merger security review committee could protect sensitive American technologies.

Trump, in remarks to reporters at the White House, said the approach would target all countries, not just China, echoing comments from Mnuchin on Monday amid a fierce internal debate over the scope of investment restrictions due to be unveiled Friday.

“It’s not just Chinese” investment, Trump told reporters when asked about the administration’s plans.

Mnuchin and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro sent mixed signals on Monday about the Chinese investment restrictions, ordered by Trump on May 29. Mnuchin said they would apply to “all countries that are trying to steal our technology,” while Navarro said they would be focused specifically on China.

The restrictions are being developed to help put pressure on China to address the administration’s complaints that it has misappropriated U.S. intellectual property through joint-venture requirements, unfair licensing policies and state-backed acquisitions of U.S. technology firms.

Enhanced reviews

Mnuchin would prefer to use new tools associated with pending legislation to enhance security reviews of transactions by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), some administration officials have said.

A government official told Reuters on Sunday that Treasury had been working on a proposal to ban acquisitions of U.S. firms with “industrially significant technology” by companies with at least 25 percent Chinese ownership.

Asked about the pending restrictions at a White House meeting with Republican lawmakers on Tuesday, Trump said: “We have the greatest technology in the world. People copy it. And they steal it, but we have the great scientists, we have the great brains and we have to protect that and we’re going to protect it and that’s what we’re doing.

“And that can be done through CFIUS. We have a lot of things we can do it through and we’re working that out,” he said.

Prior to the meeting, Mnuchin was seen by reporters in the West Wing of the White House. A Treasury spokesman did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on Tuesday to strengthen the authority of CFIUS by a 400-2 vote, with many similarities to a Senate-passed bill. Both versions would expand CFIUS reviews to minority stakes in U.S. companies and investments that may reveal information on critical infrastructure to foreign governments.

​Signs of Fed shift

Trump’s intensifying list of trade disputes with China, the European Union, Canada and Mexico showed signs of influencing Federal Reserve policy on Tuesday. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said in Birmingham, Alabama, that increased tensions could cause him to oppose a fourth rate increase this year.

Trump said earlier on Twitter that his administration was “finishing up” its study of tariffs on U.S. car imports, suggesting that he would take action soon.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group, said it would file written comments in the study warning that a 25 percent tariff on imported passenger vehicles would cost American consumers $45 billion annually, or $5,800 per vehicle.

Tariffs of 25 percent on an initial $34 billion worth of Chinese imports are due to take effect on July 6, with a further $16 billion undergoing a vetting process for activation later this summer.

Should China follow through on its vow to retaliate in equal measure with tariffs on U.S. soybeans, cars and other goods, Trump has threatened to impose 10 percent tariffs on a further $400 billion worth of Chinese goods.

A Reuters analysis of the tariff lists found that most of the Chinese products targeted thus far are classified as intermediate or capital goods — avoiding a direct tax on voters — but many consumer goods have been caught up in the net, and will be targeted in future rounds.

Trump on Tuesday also threatened Harley-Davidson with higher taxes if it proceeded with a plan to move some production out of the United States to avoid the EU’s retaliatory tariffs on American motorcycles.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has narrowly upheld the Trump administration’s travel restrictions on citizens of five Muslim-majority countries, handing the president a victory on one of his most controversial policies. As White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara reports, reaction to Tuesday’s ruling was swift.
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Lawyers for Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former presidential campaign manager, said on Monday they plan to appeal a judge’s decision to jail Manafort while he awaits a criminal trial in Washington this fall.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with prosecutors from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office this month, agreeing to send Manafort to jail after he was hit with new criminal charges that he tampered with witnesses while under house arrest.

Manafort’s attorneys also said on Monday they plan to appeal an April 27 decision by Jackson dismissing a related civil lawsuit that had challenged the scope of Mueller’s authority.

Manafort is facing two indictments in Washington and Virginia arising from Mueller’s investigation into potential collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

His Washington trial is scheduled for September.

Manafort has pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiring to launder money, bank and tax fraud and failing to register as a foreign agent for the pro-Russia Ukraine government.

He has been held in a jail in Virginia since Jackson revoked his bond on June 15, after prosecutors presented evidence during a court hearing about Manafort’s alleged efforts to influence witnesses’ testimony.

On Monday, Manafort asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to agree that he not attend a motions hearing, according to a court filing.

His lawyers said in the filing that transport between jail and court would take at least two hours each way, and Manafort was waiving his right to attend Friday’s hearing and agreed to be represented by his attorneys instead.

To date, Manafort has not prevailed in any efforts to dismiss the charges or suppress evidence against him in the Washington case.

In April, when Jackson dismissed his civil case challenging Mueller’s authority, the judge found that using a civil case to challenge criminal charges “is not the appropriate vehicle” for attacking prosecutors’ actions.
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The United States’ top border enforcement official acknowledged Monday that authorities are currently unable to carry out the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy of detaining and prosecuting everyone entering the country illegally, as officials work to develop a policy that would allow prosecutions without family separations. 

Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters in Texas he stopped sending cases of parents charged with illegally entering the country to prosecutors after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week to stop the separation of migrant parents and children. 

McAleenan insisted the administration’s policy remains in effect despite the current challenges, and said he is working on a plan to resume prosecutions.

Last week, Trump signed an executive order maintaining his “zero tolerance” policy of detaining and prosecuting everyone entering the country illegally, but ending the practice of separating immigrant parents and children.

The move has led to logistical questions, including how to keep families together while also prosecuting migrant parents. It has also sent multiple government agencies in search of ways to house the migrants who are detained. 

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the military would help to house migrants at military bases, including two in Texas. 

Mattis told reporters during a trip to Alaska Monday that the military would provide logistics support and would not get into the “political aspect” of the situation. He said the U.S. military has a long history of providing logistical support to people affected by natural disasters or “escaping tyranny.”

Trump used a political rally Monday night in South Carolina to portray himself as tough when it comes to security.

“We’re defending our borders because if you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country,” he said. “Democrats want open borders and they don’t mind crime.”

Earlier in the day, Trump assailed judicial review for illegal border crossers, contending that the migrants entering the country illegally ought to be immediately sent back to their homelands.

“We want a system where when people come in illegally, they have to go,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We want strong borders and we want no crime.”

In a tweet, he wrote “Hiring manythousands (sic) of judges, and going through a long and complicated legal process, is not the way to go – will always be disfunctional (sic),” he said. “People must simply be stopped at the Border and told they cannot come into the U.S. illegally.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders argued Monday that “it makes no sense that an illegal alien sets one foot on American soil and they would go through a three to five year judicial process to be removed from the country.”

She said there are designated points of entry that asylum seekers can use to apply for asylum.

“Anyone that goes to a point of entry seeking asylum will not be prosecuted. We would encourage people to use the correct system and not break the law,” she said. 

The American Civil Liberties Union said Sunday that Trump’s call to end hearings for undocumented immigrants who enter the country illegally and seek asylum in the U.S. was unconstitutional.
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Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush is welcoming a new member of the family: a yellow Labrador retriever who’ll be his first service dog.

The 94-year-old and his new companion named “Sully” got acquainted Monday at the Bush family compound on the coast of Maine.

The two hit it off.

A photo sent via Twitter shows Sully lounging at the feet of Bush and former President Bill Clinton, who had been visiting on Monday.

Sully can open doors, pick up items and summon help but “more than anything else the dog will be a wonderful companion,” said an aide, Evan Sisley.

The nation’s 41st president uses a wheelchair and an electric scooter for mobility since developing a form of Parkinson’s disease. Bush is recovering from a recent hospitalization and is without his wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush, who died in April.

Sully was trained by America’s VetDogs, a nonprofit that provides service dogs.

“He’s a really sweet dog,” said Sisley, who hopes that Bush’s use of a service dog will call attention to the organization and to service dogs. Sully has his own Instagram account that’ll help in the effort to raise awareness, Sisley said.

Bush is a dog lover who has had dogs since he was a boy, and dogs are always welcome at the family home. Two of his kids, Neil Bush and Dorothy Bush Koch, together have five dogs there, and other family members bring pets with them when they visit, Sisley said.
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America has waited a year to hear what special counsel Robert Mueller concludes about the 2016 election, meddling by the Russians and — most of all — what Donald Trump did or didn’t do. But how much the nation will learn about Mueller’s findings is very much an open question.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may end up wrestling with a dilemma similar to the one that tripped up fired FBI director James Comey: how much to reveal about Trump’s actions in the event the president is not indicted. Rosenstein, who lambasted Comey for disclosing negative information about Hillary Clinton despite not recommending her for prosecution, may himself have to balance the extraordinary public interest in the investigation against his admonition that investigators should not discuss allegations against people they don’t prosecute.

The quandary underscores how there’s no easy or obvious end game for the investigation, which last month reached its one-year anniversary. Though Mueller is expected to report his findings to Rosenstein, there’s no requirement that those conclusions be made public. And whatever he decides will unfold against the backdrop of a Justice Department inspector general report that reaffirmed department protocol against making detailed public statements about people who aren’t charged.

“Those are going to be the hard questions at the end of Mueller’s investigation: what is the nature of that report, and which if any parts are provided to Congress and the public,” said Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman, a former official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. “There’s just no way for us to know what if any parts of those reports can be made public or should be made public or will be made public.”

The investigation has hit a critical phase. A forthcoming decision by Trump and his lawyers on whether to sit for an interview with Mueller, who is examining whether the president sought to obstruct justice, could hasten the conclusion of the investigation with regard to the White House. What happens next is unclear, though Mueller has been closely conferring along the way with Rosenstein, the No. 2 Justice Department official who appointed him special counsel.

If he decides a crime was committed, it’s theoretically possible he could seek a grand jury indictment, though that outcome is seen as highly questionable given a Justice Department legal opinion against charging a sitting president. Trump’s lawyers say Mueller’s team has indicated that it plans to follow that guidance. Depending on his findings, he also could seek to name Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case against other defendants, an aggressive step taken by the special prosecutor who investigated President Richard Nixon.

The regulations require Mueller to report his findings confidentially to Rosenstein, who would then decide how and whether to share with Congress. Lawmakers and the public would almost certainly demand access to that report, no matter the conclusion; a determination of wrongdoing would presumably be forwarded to Congress to begin impeachment proceedings, while a finding that no crime was committed would be publicly trumpeted by Republicans as vindication of the president.

Spokespeople for Mueller and the Justice Department declined to comment on the options under consideration.

The easiest avenue for public disclosure in any criminal investigation is an indictment in which prosecutors lay out their allegations. But options are much trickier when cases close without prosecution.

In Clinton’s case, Comey held an extraordinary news conference in which he said Clinton did indeed have classified information on her private email server and branded her and her aides as “extremely careless.” But he concluded his remarks by recommending against charges, saying no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case.

That decision was condemned last May by Rosenstein, who said “we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.”

Inspector General Michael Horowitz echoed that criticism in a report this month that accused Comey of breaking from protocol. And Comey’s successor, Christopher Wray, further rebuked Comey at a congressional hearing last week, saying, “I think the policies the department has governing commenting publicly about uncharged conduct are there for good reason.”

Solomon Wisenberg, the deputy independent counsel in the 1990s investigation involving President Bill Clinton, said he struggled to envision Rosenstein making public the extent of Mueller’s findings if there’s no indictment “because it would be completely inconsistent with the criticism of Comey — and it wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”

“It’s long been considered unethical to not charge someone but smear them,” he said.

Lederman, however, said he thought it made sense to publicly release what investigators found about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, especially if it could be relevant to helping combat the problem in the future.

“I don’t think there’s a problem to the extent the report would be less focused on what Trump did wrong in the past and is focused on his ability or willingness to deal with the Russia threat in the future,” he said.

As the investigation inches toward resolution, there’s not much reliable precedent to predict the outcome here.

Independent counsel Ken Starr issued a public report on Bill Clinton, but his appointment came under a different law. A special counsel investigation into the 2003 leak of a CIA officer’s identity resulted in criminal charges against a Bush administration White House official, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby,” but produced no public report summarizing all the findings of probe.

Regardless of the conclusion, the public clamor for a full accounting may make it impossible for Mueller to wind up his investigation with only minimal comment, said Bill Jeffress, one of Libby’s lawyers.

“If that conclusion is simply Mueller announcing, `I’ve wound up my investigation and haven’t indicted anyone else,’ nobody’s going to be satisfied with that.”

 
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A Texas charitable organization says 32 immigrant parents separated from their children after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border were freed into its care, but they don’t know where their kids are or when they might see them again despite government assurances that family reunification would be well organized.

The release on Sunday is believed to be the first, large one of its kind since President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that preserved a “zero-tolerance” policy for entering the country illegally but ended the practice of separating immigrant parents and children. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offered no immediate comment.

Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House in El Paso, said the group of both mothers and fathers includes some from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras who arrived to his group after federal authorities withdrew criminal charges for illegal entry. He didn’t release names or personal details to protect the parents’ privacy, and Homeland Security officials said they needed more specifics in order to check out their cases.

A Saturday night fact sheet by the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies said authorities know the location of all children in custody after separating them from their families at the border and are working to reunite them. It called the reunification process “well coordinated.”

It also said parents must request that their child be deported with them. In the past, the fact sheet says, many parents elected to be deported without their children. That may be a reflection of violence or persecution they face in their home countries.

It doesn’t state how long it might take to reunite families. Texas’ Port Isabel Service Processing Center has been set up as the staging ground for the families to be reunited prior to deportation.

How the government would reunite families has been unclear because they are first stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, with children taken into custody by the Department of Health and Human Services and adults detained through ICE, which is under the Department of Homeland Security. Children have been sent to far-flung shelters around the country, raising alarm that parents might never know where their children can be found.

At least 2,053 minors who were separated at the border were being cared for in HHS-funded facilities, the fact sheet said.

The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee hedged Sunday when pressed on whether he was confident the Trump administration knows where all the children are and will be able to reunite them with their parents.

“That is what they’re claiming,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The fact sheet states that ICE has implemented an identification mechanism to ensure ongoing tracking of linked family members throughout the detention and removal process; designated detention locations for separated parents and will enhance current processes to ensure communication with children in HHS custody; worked closely with foreign consulates to ensure that travel documents are issued for both the parent and child at time of removal; and coordinated with HHS for the reuniting of the child prior to the parents’ departure from the U.S.

As part of the effort, ICE officials have posted notices in all its facilities advising detained parents who are trying to find or communicate with their children to call a hotline staffed 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday.

A parent or guardian trying to determine if a child is in the custody of HHS should contact the Office of Refugee Resettlement National Call Center at 1-800-203-7001, or via email at information(at)ORRNCC.com. Information will be collected and sent to an HHS-funded facility where a minor is located.

But it’s unclear whether detained parents have access to computers to send an email, or how their phone systems work to call out. Attorneys at the border have said they have been frantically trying to locate information about the children on behalf of their clients.

Garcia, the Annunciation House director, said his experience has been that telephone contact doesn’t provide any information.

“If we bring in 30 cellphones, they’re going to call that number, they’re not going to reach 30 children,” said Garcia, whose organization has been working with federal authorities to assist immigrants for 40 years. “Actually [they’re] not going to be able to give them any information on what to expect.”

Customs and Border Patrol said it had reunited 522 children and that some were never taken into custody by Health and Human Services because their parents’ criminal cases were processed too quickly. Officials have said as many as 2,300 children had been separated from the time the policy began until June 9. It’s not clear if any of the 2,000 remaining children were taken into custody after June 9.

The “zero-tolerance policy” of criminally prosecuting anyone caught illegally crossing the border remains in effect, officials have said, despite confusion on the ground on how to carry out Trump’s order. Justice Department officials asked a federal judge to amend a class-action settlement that governs how children are treated in immigration custody. Right now, children can only be detained with their families for 20 days; Trump officials are seeking to detain them together indefinitely as their cases progress. Advocates say family detention does not solve the problem.
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