Trump’s WashingtonHow President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics.Good evening. Tonight, we’re covering the White House’s escalating claims about its political opponents in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We’re also answering one of your questions about race and immigration. The headlines are first.
What does ‘real unity’ mean to the White House?
Investigators have said little so far about the motive for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, although the Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has said, without providing specifics, that the shooter held a “leftist ideology” and acted alone. On Monday, though, Trump administration officials united in an effort to pin the blame for the killing of the right-wing youth organizer on something much larger: a network of their political enemies. Speaking on Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance vowed that the administration would “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” without offering any evidence that any such network exists or was involved in Kirk’s death. Behind the scenes, two senior administration officials told my colleagues Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, federal officials were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they reported, was to categorize such activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism. It was the latest escalation of a blame game that began last week when Trump, speaking just hours after the shooting, said that rhetoric from the “radical left” had contributed to Kirk’s killing, before anything was known about the shooter. The assassination, my colleagues Tyler Pager and Nick Corasaniti wrote this weekend, has added fuel to Trump’s campaign against his political opponents in a presidency he has already used to pursue retribution against his enemies. Democratic officials have widely condemned Kirk’s killing and political violence more broadly, which afflicts figures on both sides of the aisle. But some are beginning to warn that the crackdown could be a pretext for something even more expansive. “Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat, wrote on X over the weekend. During a conversation on Kirk’s podcast with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, Vance dismissed the idea that the White House would target “constitutionally protected speech.” Yet, as he spoke, he appeared to define a broad swath of speech as potentially problematic, seemingly suggesting that even people who simply criticized Kirk could be blamed by the administration for political violence. “By celebrating that murder, apologizing for it and emphasizing not Charlie’s innocence, but the fact that he said things some didn’t like, even to the point of lying about what he actually said, many of these people are creating an environment where things like this are inevitably going to happen,” Vance said. Vance said he planned to “explore every option to bring real unity to our country” and then implored regular Americans to take up the fight, urging them to call up the employers of anyone seen celebrating Kirk’s death. The question now might be how the administration — one led by a president who, as my colleague Peter Baker wrote, has never embodied the role of unifier — defines “real unity.”
ANSWERING YOUR QUESTIONS America’s deportation historyLast month, I asked readers of this newsletter to send in your questions about immigration. Today, we’re taking on a question that gets at something several of you wanted to know: How is race connected to this country’s policies on immigration enforcement? My colleague Jazmine Ulloa, who covers immigration, obtained exclusive research data to help us understand the answer. We tend to think of immigration policy as the set of rules that regulate the flow of people into the country. But in his second term, President Trump has pushed migrants to self-deport, sought to end temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of people and carried out sweeps in major cities across the country. That has left those of us on the immigration beat not only trying to understand who the country is and is not letting in — but also who it is casting out. At least one report from a libertarian think tank has found that one in five people arrested by immigration agents have been Latinos with no criminal record or removal order. In a project unveiled exclusively to The New York Times on Monday, a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, released a sweeping new look at that picture. The researchers mapped the eight million deportation orders that the United States issued between 2022 and 1895, the time range for when the earliest and latest data was available. Of course, federal immigration authorities have changed their terminology, data practices and policies over the years. But what the researchers found was that the vast majority of the orders have sought to deport people to Mexico and nonwhite countries across Latin America. Even at turn of the 20th century, at the height of European immigration to the United States, immigrants from nonwhite countries were a disproportionate share of deportees. “For me, when I look at what’s happening right now, it’s important to see that largely the current administration has not created anything new,” said Kelly Lytle Hernández, a U.C.L.A. professor who worked on the project. “They’re interpreting, and they’re enforcing what’s already in place, and they’re pressing extraordinarily hard.” The team of researchers included Ahilan Arulanantham, who has challenged the Obama, Biden and both Trump administrations in court, and Mariah Tso, a cartographer and data specialist for the Ralph J. Bunche Center and the Million Dollar Hoods project, a data initiative tracking the impact of mass incarceration. They contend their findings show immigration has always been deeply entwined with race. Some of the earliest immigration restrictions, for example, were passed by Southern states in the 1800s and sought to prohibit the entrance of Black maritime workers from Haiti, who were seen as bringing dangerous ideas of Black liberty to American shores as they were overthrowing their French masters. In the modern era, starting in the 1910s, the immigrants most frequently targeted for removal have been Mexican and Latin American laborers, and Mexico became the single highest country for deportation from 1916 onward. Arulanantham, a faculty co-director at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, and others said they began their analysis under the Biden administration in part as they sought to understand the stark difference between how Ukrainians were being treated, as compared to Haitians, Afghans and other non-European immigrants. Arulanantham has been among the lawyers who have challenged some of the second Trump administration’s actions on immigration. He and other lawyers are arguing in one case that efforts by Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, to terminate temporary legal status programs for Venezuelans and Haitians were being pursued on the basis of racial bias. Trump administration officials have rejected the accusations, saying their operations are highly targeted and geared toward removing unauthorized immigrants they see as a threat to public safety and national security. But Tso, the specialist who analyzed the data, said the long view reveals harsh truths, regardless of who is in power. “That’s the thing that really stands out to me is how rooted that racial discrimination has been since the very beginning,” she said. Got a tip? IN ONE GRAPHIC
The anatomy of two giant dealsTwo blockbuster agreements illustrate how profitable the extreme deal-making of the Trump era has become for the president and people in his inner circle. One involved a $2 billion transaction by a government-backed firm in the United Arab Emirates using a cryptocurrency offered by World Liberty Financial — a company founded by the families of President Trump and a close adviser, Steve Witkoff. The other is a pending sale of the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence chips to the U.A.E. There is no evidence that one was explicitly offered in return for the other. But an investigation by a team of my colleagues found that they were being negotiated at the same time and by some of the same people — and were intertwined in ways that have not been previously reported. Read their key takeaways here.
BY THE NUMBERS $326That’s the amount of money that, when spent by the government on cancer research, extends a human life one year, according to a recent study by The Journal of Clinical Oncology. The Trump administration, though, has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in cancer-related research grants and contracts. My colleague Jonathan Mahler took a deep look at what those cuts mean for the future. He found that an extraordinarily successful scientific research system — one that has saved millions of lives and generated enormous profits — is being dismantled before our eyes. It’s left researchers like Rachael Sirianni, who studies childhood brain cancer, struggling to do their work. The cuts have forced her to shrink her lab and suspend one of her most promising studies. Two more grants she applied for last year have yet to come through. “When you remove me from the ecosystem,” Sirianni said, “you are removing something that can’t be replaced.” Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at |
