Inmates the Trump administration alleges are linked to criminal organizations are lined up by guards in their cells at the Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum security prison, on March 16, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. (Photo: Salvadoran Government via Getty Images)
“How the government reacts will tell us so much about how far down the road to autocracy we are,” said one lawyer.
A U.S. judge on Friday ordered the return of a Maryland resident who the Trump administration mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador last month, according to The Associated Press.
Prior to issuing the ruling, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis called the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia “an illegal act.”
The judge, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, gave the Trump administration end of the day of the day on Monday to bring him back to the United States.
Supporters outside the courtroom cheered as the judge handed down her order, according to The Washington Post.
Responding to the ruling on social media, U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said: “This is a big win. Now Trump must comply with the judge’s order.”
Immigration lawyer Ava Benach wrote: “The right decision. How the government reacts will tell us so much about how far down the road to autocracy we are.”
The right decision. How the government reacts will tell us so much about how far down the road to autocracy we are.
Abrego Garcia was among hundreds of people the administration expelled in mid-March to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador after targeting them for alleged gang ties.
In a court papers filed earlier this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting field office director admitted that the removal of Abrego Garcia on March 15 “was an error.”
Abrego Garcia was deported despite the fact that in 2019, a U.S. immigration judge ruled that he could not be deported to his native El Salvador because he would likely face gang persecution there.
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Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during morning trading on April 3, 2025 in New York City. (Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Instead of strategically imposing tariffs, Trump has chosen to “give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis.”
As stocks “nosedived” on Thursday, economists, policymakers, and campaigners around the world continued to warn about the impacts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, which includes a 10% universal tariff for imports and steeper duties—that he claims are “reciprocal”—for dozens of countries, set to take effect over the next week.
“This is how you sabotage the world’s economic engine while claiming to supercharge it,” wrote Nigel Green, CEO of the international financial consultancy deVere Group. “Trump is blowing up the post-war system that made the U.S. and the world more prosperous, and he’s doing it with reckless confidence.”
As Bloomberg detailed after the president’s “Liberation Day” remarks from the White House Rose Garden:
China’s cumulative tariff rate of 54% includes both the 20% duty already charged earlier this year, added to the 34% levy calculated as part of Trump’s so-called reciprocal plan, according to people familiar with the matter. The European Union’s rate is 20% and Vietnam’s is 46%, White House documents showed. Other nations slapped with larger tariffs include Japan with 24%, South Korea with 25%, India with 26%, Cambodia with 49%, and Taiwan with 32%.
In Europe on Thursday, “the regional Stoxx 600 index provisionally ended down around 2.7%,” while “the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 1.6%, with France’s CAC 40 and Germany’s DAX posting deeper losses of 3.3% and 3.1%, respectively,” according to CNBC.
In the United States, CNBC reported, “the broad market index dropped 4%, putting it on track for its worst day since September 2022. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 1,200 points, or 3%, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 5%. The slide across equities was broad, with decliners at the New York Stock Exchange outnumbering advancers by 6-to-1.”
However, as Economic Policy Institute (EPI) chief economist Josh Bivens noted last week, “because most households depend overwhelmingly on wages from work as their primary source of income and not returns from wealth-holding, the stock market tells us nothing about these households’ economic situations.”
And Trump’s tariffs are expected to hit U.S. households hard, as the cost of his taxes on imports are passed on to consumers.
“Tariffs can be a legitimate and useful tool in industrial policy for well-defined strategic goals, but broad-based tariffs that significantly raise the average effective tariff rate in the United States are unwise,” Bivens and EPI senior economist Adam Hersh stressed in a Thursday statement—which also called out Trump for mischaracterizing one of the think tank’s 2022 analyses.
“Further, the second Trump administration’s rationale, parameters, and timeline for tariffs have been ever-shifting,” Bivens and Hersh continued. “As the original post cited by the administration argues, tariffs should not be a goal unto themselves, but a strategic tool to pair with other efforts to restore American competitiveness in narrowly targeted industrial sectors.”
Instead of strategically imposing tariffs, Trump has chosen to “give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis, which comes to $7,000 per household,” warned Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder and senior economist Dean Baker. “And this tax hike will primarily hit moderate and middle-income families. Trump’s taxes go easy on the rich, who spend a smaller share of their income on imported goods.”
Baker—like various other economists and journalists—also took aim at Trump’s claims that the tariffs are reciprocal, explaining:
Trump’s team calculated our trade deficit with each country and divided it by their exports to the United States. Trump decided that this figure was equal to that country’s tariff on goods imported from the U.S.
Trump’s method of calculating tariffs is comparable to the doctor who assesses your proper weight by dividing your height by your birthday. Any doctor who did this is clearly batshit crazy, and unfortunately so is our president. And apparently none of his economic advisers has the courage and integrity to set him straight or to resign.
However, outside Trump’s administration, the intense criticism continued to mount, including from groups focused on combating the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, which also endangers the global economy.
Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and Campaigns at 350.org, said Thursday that “Trump’s tariffs won’t slow the global energy transition—they’ll only hurt ordinary people, particularly Americans.”
“Despite his claims he ‘gets’ economic policy, his record tells a different story: Tariffs are tanking U.S. stocks and fueling inflation,” Sieber added. “The transition to renewables is unstoppable, with or without him. His latest move does little to impact the booming clean energy market but will isolate the U.S. and drive up costs for American consumers.”
Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. campaign manager at Oil Change International, similarly emphasized that “Trump’s tariffs will hurt working families first and foremost, raising costs for essentials we depend on and threatening to plunge the U.S. economy into a recession. Though Trump pretends to care about the cost of living for ordinary people, his real loyalties lie with his fossil fuel industry donors.”
“If he actually cared about energy affordability, he would stop bullying other countries into buying more U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG), which boosts the fossil fuel industry’s profits, but results in increased prices for domestic consumers and pushes us further toward climate catastrophe,” she asserted. “The one step countries can take to hit Trump where it hurts most is wean off their dependency on fossil fuels from the United States.”
The impact of Trump’s new levies won’t be limited to working-class people in the United States. Nick Dearden, director of U.K.-based Global Justice Now, pointed out that “Trump has set light to the global economy and unleashed a world of pain, not least on a group of developing countries that will suffer tremendous impoverishment as a result of his punitive tariffs.”
“All those affected must come together and stand up to this bully by building a very different international economy that promotes the interests of ordinary people rather than the oligarchs standing behind Trump,” he argued. “For all its scraping and crawling, the U.K. got no special treatment here, and the government should learn this lesson fast: They need to stop giving away our rights and protections in a futile effort to appease Donald Trump.”
Leaders in the United States are also encouraging resistance to Trump. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Wednesday that “this week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense. That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.”
Murphy made the case that “the tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”
“But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs,” he added, referring to a resolution that would undo levies on Canadian imports. “The people still have the power.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump stands with White House staff secretary Will Scharf before signing executive orders imposing sweeping tariffs on April 2, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
“What Republicans are trying to jam through Congress right now is a level of economic recklessness we’ve never seen before,” said a group of Democratic lawmakers.
A new analysis indicates Republicans’ plan to extend soon-to-expire provisions of their party’s 2017 tax law, as well as their push to tack on additional tax breaks largely benefiting the rich and big corporations, would cost $7 trillion over the next decade, a figure that a group of congressional Democrats called “staggering.”
The analysis from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), published on Thursday, updates previous estimates that suggested the GOP effort to extend expiring provisions of the 2017 law would cost $4.6 trillion over a 10-year period. The new assessment shows that extending the law’s temporary provisions—which disproportionately favored the wealthy—would cost $5.5 trillion over the next decade.
“The Republican handouts to billionaires and corporations will come at a staggering cost, and it’s unconscionable that their plan to pay for those handouts includes kicking millions of Americans off their health insurance, hiking the cost of living with tariffs, and driving up child hunger,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), and Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) said in a joint statement issued in response to the JCT figures.
“Even after making painful cuts that will inflict hardship on typical American families, Republicans will still risk sending us into a catastrophic debt spiral that does permanent harm to our economy,” the Democrats added. “What Republicans are trying to jam through Congress right now is a level of economic recklessness we’ve never seen before.”
In an appearance on MSNBC on Thursday, Boyle—the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee—said Trump’s tariffs represent “the single largest tax increase in American history.”
“It’s a tax that everyone will pay in this country, based on the goods that they buy,” said Boyle. “However, it’s also a tax that is highly regressive—the poorest amongst us will end up paying a higher percentage of their income.”
A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the analysis was conducted by the Congressional Budget Office. It was conducted by the Joint Committee on Taxation.
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Reform UK’s Arron Banks. Credit: Oxford Union / YouTub
The multi-millionaire Brexit funder has claimed “CO2 and climate change is the ultimate hoax”.
Arron Banks, who is standing as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK candidate for West of England Mayor, has repeatedly rejected elemental climate facts.
The right-wing populist Reform UK describes itself as an “environmentalist” party. However, its leaders and candidates – including Banks – have frequently attacked the science of human-induced climate change.
In a trail of social media posts on X (formerly Twitter), Banks has attacked the notion of climate change as “rubbish”, “absolute cock”, “a scam”, and “the ultimate hoax”.
Reform is standing in several regional mayoral contests in May and has talked up its chances of gaining large numbers of council seats in the local elections.
Banks, the businessman who helped to fund Farage 2016 Brexit campaign, is standing for West of England Mayor, which encompasses Bristol, South Gloucestershire, Bath, and North East Somerset.
Reform UK, an anti-immigration party, campaigns to scrap the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target and to expand fossil fuel extraction.
As DeSmog revealed, the party received £2.3 million between the 2019 and 2024 general elections from climate science deniers, fossil fuel interests, and major polluters.
However, the views of Reform UK and Banks don’t appear to match those of voters in the West of England.
Polling from the area in 2022 found that 65 percent of people supported net zero, while only 11 percent opposed the 2050 target. And while Reform UK has pledged to strip renewable companies of state subsidies, an overwhelming 87 percent of people said they supported renewable projects in their local area.
Reform UK and Banks were approached for comment.
Climate Denial Posts
In his social media posts, Banks has publicly attacked the science of human-induced emissions causing climate change.
In January 2024, responding to Conservative MP Chris Skidmore resigning over the government’s support for new oil and gas projects, Banks posted: “CO2 & climate change is the ultimate hoax.”
In December 2023, Banks made the familiar argument that the climate has always changed regardless of human emissions. He posted: “Climate change has been in constant flux since the planet was created. A miniscule amount of CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t the likely driver.”
In January 2024, he mocked the notion that carbon emissions were causing climate change and extreme weather. “The climate is in permanent flux”, he posted, “20,000 years ago an Ice sheet covered Scotland & half of England.” Banks added an attack on climate activist Greta Thunberg, writing: “Luckily we didn’t have Greta around to tell us a tiny bit of CO2 was the cause. We’ve always had floods & extreme weather like 1953 floods.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate science body, has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, and has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.
Climate scientists working for the IPCC have also said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
As stated by Dr Philipp Breul, a climate scientist from Imperial College London: “We are causing the climate to change significantly faster than it has, to the best of our knowledge, in the last million years.”
‘Snow on the Ground’
Banks – who attended Donald Trump’s inauguration as U.S. President in January – has also suggested that cold weather disproves the rise in global temperatures.
In December 2022, Banks posted: “I’ve got to say global warming is coming on a treat, snow on the ground and shaping up to be the coldest December on record. It would be very funny if they got it all wrong and we entering a new ice age.”
When challenged, he dismissed climate models as “worthless”.
“The climate is in constant flux and always changing”, he posted. “The sheer number of mathematical variables in any climate model render them worthless. Scientists can forecast all they like but guesses remain guesses… enjoy the snow and ice.”
In fact, climate models have accurately predicted global temperature rises, and observed warming has tracked with the forecasts.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and deputy leader Richard Tice. Photo: Sipa US / Alamy
In January 2024, Banks responded to reports of cold temperatures in Sweden by posting: “-43c … global warming knocking it out of the park. Let’s hope the windmills can keep us warm.”
Despite cold weather in winter, global average temperatures have been rising over the past century, with some of the hottest years on record taking place in the last decade.
In October 2022, Banks shared a post by Reform UK’s then leader Richard Tice, with a (now deleted) article from the Daily Skeptic, which falsely claimed that “global warming has largely stopped in its tracks”.
Banks commented: “It would be almost amusing to find after bankrupting the western world in pursuit of the net zero cult that the climate is cooling… just like [Covid] lockdown everybody lost their mind.”
Net Zero ‘Scam’
Banks has also attacked efforts to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, which scientists agree is the only way to limit temperatures to 1.5C.
The Reform UK candidate has attacked net zero as a “religion”, a “cult”, and a “scam”.
In July 2021, he posted: “Net zero is the new religion for stupid people” and, in April 2023 he said: “Net zero and climate change have all the hallmarks of a scam.”
When the UK was hosting the COP26 climate summit in November 2021, Banks posted that “protecting the environment is essential but totally different to the absolute cock that is climate change”. He added: “The climate has been changing since the start of time!”
A few weeks earlier, Banks had posted: “I own a country park with tens of thousands of trees and have seen no ill affects of climate change.”
The following summer, Banks once again pitted environmentalism against climate action, posting: “There is a huge difference between global climate change & looking after the natural world. One is complete rubbish the other is an absolute necessity.”
Bankrolling Farage
Banks was a major funder of campaigns for the UK to leave the European Union.
A former Conservative Party donor, he gave £1 million in 2014 to Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP), which also campaigned against climate policies.
During the 2016 EU referendum, Banks gave £8.4 million to Leave.EU, the unofficial Brexit campaign, which was led by Farage and chaired by Tice.
In January this year, Farage helped to launch a new UK/Europe branch of the Heartland Institute, a notorious U.S. climate denial think tank.
Interviewed at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in February, the Reform UK leader claimed it was “absolutely nuts” that CO2 is considered to be a pollutant, while admitting that he is “not a scientist”.
“We cannot stand by and allow this to happen. We need to hold this administration accountable.”
This op-ed was written by a group of current and former employees of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who have asked to remain anonymous due to concerns about retaliation. It was originally published by Environmental Health News and is republished with permission.
The Trump administration is making accusations of fraud, waste, and abuse associated with federal environmental justice programs under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as justification for firing federal workers and defunding critical environmental programs. But the real waste, fraud, and abuse would be to strip away these funds from the American people.
As current and former employees at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who developed and implemented the agency’s environmental justice funding and grant programs, we want to offer our first-hand insights about the efficiency and importance of this work. This is not about defending our paychecks. This is about protecting the health of our communities.
IRA funding is often described as a “once-in-a-generation investment,” putting billions of dollars toward improving the lives of American families in red, blue, and purple states. Working with communities, we’ve been placing these resources directly into their hands, supporting people to better protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land where we live, learn, work, play, and grow — including key protections from natural disasters.
As civil servants, we took an oath to protect and invest in the American public. We are committed to providing effective programs and being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, and there are many policies in place to ensure our accountability. But despite our careful planning and oversight, the new administration is halting programs Americans depend on for their health and wellbeing.
We should work together to demand that the Trump administration restore this critical funding back to the people.
The Risks of Losing a Once-in-a-generation Investment
The Bush administration introduced environmental equity (and justice) programming to the EPA in the 1990s. EPA staff working on environmental justice programs partnered with communities to meet their needs and used rigorous systems to track funds and results.
The Trump administration recently paused many of these environmental justice programs that fund community-led projects like air, water, and soil testing; training and workforce development; construction or cleanup projects; gardens and tree planting; and preparing and responding to natural disasters. Other examples of the EPA’s environmental justice programs include providing safe shelters during and after hurricanes, land cleanups to reduce communities’ exposure to harmful pollutants, and providing water filters to protect residents from lead in drinking water.
Global Investigations
This administration has halted funds, claiming “the objectives of the awards are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” In reality, these funds were approved by Congress, and these grants remain in alignment with the agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment. Even though there are court orders to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal grants, the Trump administration continues to withhold this critical money from the people who need it most.
We cannot stand by and allow this to happen. We need to hold this administration accountable to serving the American people, applying the same mandates that we have held our federal workforce and grant recipients to: follow the law, follow the science, and be transparent.
Terminating the EPA’s Environmental Justice Programs Is Hurting Our Communities and the Economy
Some grant recipients who have lost access to EPA funding had already been working for more than a year on projects that must now be paused. Many recipients have hired local employees and made commitments in their communities.
Now that funds are being pulled back, these organizations have had to lay off staff, pause local contracts with private companies and small businesses, and shut down community-driven projects. These attacks will impact the integrity of programs funded by our hard-earned tax dollars and take money away from communities across the country.
By withholding promised funding and terminating existing contracts, the Trump administration is exposing the EPA to increased risks of litigation. Relationships that were built through years of meaningful engagement between communities and the federal government are being jeopardized. Organizations, institutions, and companies will likely shy away from future federal grant or contracting opportunities because no one wants to work with someone who doesn’t pay their bills and backs out on their promises.
It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. Government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors. It is fraud for the U.S. Government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.
How to Take Action to Restore Funding to the American People
It can feel impossible to keep up with the news right now, but this story touches all of us. We should pay attention to what’s going on in our communities and find ways to stay engaged, like attending town halls to hear about the local impacts of federal policies and making your voice heard.
If you are interested in advocating for the return of federal funding to the American people, we urge you to:
Share on social media. Share our story or similar news stories on social media with #federalfundingfreeze, #federalcuts, or #truthtopower.
Advocate for funding to be restored in your community. Take part in local town hall and other events in your area to advocate for federal funding to be returned to the people. Make your voice heard and claim your right to clean water, clean air, and a safe environment.
Learn how the EPA’s environmental justice programs are investing in your state, city, or community.View this environmental justice grants map to see where IRA dollars and funding from the EPA’s environmental justice programs were invested.
Learn how federal cuts are impacting your communities. Stay tuned to view a Federal Cuts Tracker Map (we’ll add a link here when it’s live) to read and share stories about how federal cuts are currently impacting your communities.
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