President Trump signed three more executive orders on Monday, including one targeting local jurisdictions that the administration says are not cooperating with its aggressive immigration crackdown.
One order directs Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, to publish a list of state and local jurisdictions that the Trump administration considers “sanctuary cities,” meaning they limit or refuse to cooperate with federal officials’ efforts to arrest undocumented immigrants. It calls for pursuing “all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures” against jurisdictions that continue to oppose the administration’s immigration crackdown.
A second order instructs the Trump administration to provide legal resources to police officers accused of wrongdoing; review and attempt to modify existing restraints on law enforcement, such as federal consent decrees; provide military equipment to local law enforcement; and use enforcement measures against local officials who “unlawfully prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties.”
Earlier in the day, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the order would “unleash America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals.”
A third executive order seeks to enforce existing rules requiring professional truck drivers to be proficient in English. The order requires the Transportation Department to place any driver who cannot speak and read English “out of service.”
“Proficiency in English,” Mr. Trump’s order states, “should be a non-negotiable safety requirement for professional drivers.”
One of the orders also could hinder undocumented immigrants from getting in-state tuition for higher education. It directed federal agencies to stop the enforcement of state and local laws “that provide in-state higher education tuition to aliens but not to out-of-state American citizens.”
The orders represent Mr. Trump’s latest salvo against so-called sanctuary cities. As the president attempts to increase the pace of deportations, his administration has grown increasingly frustrated that some jurisdictions will not hold migrants in jail beyond their release dates to make it easier for federal officials to detain them.
Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown has prompted significant outcry.
“Let’s be clear: Trump continues to position his anti-immigrant agenda at the very center of his action,” said Hector Sanchez Barba, the president of Mi Familia Vota, a pro-immigration advocacy organization. “Trump’s inhumane attacks on law-abiding, tax-paying immigrants are both morally repugnant and deeply unpopular with the American people. We know this because in just four months, Trump has reached historically low levels of unpopularity with voters.”
The Trump administration has already sued the city of Rochester, N.Y., accusing officials there of illegally impeding immigration enforcement. And the Justice Department is prosecuting a Milwaukee judge on charges of obstructing immigration agents.
Rochester’s mayor, Malik D. Evans, and City Council president, Miguel Meléndez, released a joint statement on Friday criticizing the lawsuit.
“On its face, the complaint is an exercise in political theater, not legal practice,” the statement said, adding, “The City of Rochester is committed to investing its resources on public safety for all, not doing the federal government’s work of immigration enforcement.”
Meanwhile, a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the government from enforcing part of an executive order directing agencies to withhold funds from cities and counties that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
“It’s quite simple,” Ms. Leavitt said Monday. “Obey the law, respect the law, and don’t obstruct federal immigration officials and law enforcement officials when they are simply trying to remove public safety threats from our nation’s communities.”
The executive orders were signed a day before Mr. Trump celebrates the 100th day of his second term. The White House has scheduled a week of events promoting his actions so far, beginning with his immigration crackdown.
The White House lawn was lined Monday morning with mug shot-style posters of undocumented migrants who were arrested and accused of committing crimes.
In his first term, Mr. Trump targeted so-called sanctuary cities by threatening to withhold federal funding from mayors and governors who did not comply with his anti-immigration agenda. The administration has ramped up pressure on the jurisdictions just three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, using bellicose language to describe the tension with Democratic leaders.
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, said Democratic governors and mayors were waging a “war” against federal law enforcement.
“They don’t recognize the supremacy of federal law enforcement to protect the lives and livelihoods of American citizens against a foreign nation,” Mr. Miller said.
Mr. Miller said those Democratic-led cities were allowing “illegal aliens to go free and rape and murder.”
Even before Mr. Trump signed the new executive orders on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was reviewing billions of dollars in grants for cities and states to make sure recipients complied with Mr. Trump’s priorities on immigration enforcement and other domestic policies.
For Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers, the sanctuary city policies are one of the primary hurdles standing in their way of making good on Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to record the most deportations in U.S. history. The label of “sanctuary jurisdiction” applies broadly to cities and counties that block their local jails from cooperating with federal immigration officials.
The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, prefers to pick up undocumented immigrants from local jails, rather than from their homes, workplaces or out in public. In order to do so, it needs collaboration from local officials, like county sheriffs. In some cities and counties, this collaboration is outright blocked or severely limited.
At a morning news conference, Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, said the administration had carried out 139,000 deportations. That figure lags behind the pace of the final year of the Biden administration, which seemed to annoy Mr. Homan.
He said the number would be higher but, because border crossings had fallen so significantly, there were fewer people to turn back.
“Am I happy with that? The numbers are good,” he said, adding: “I read the media, ‘Oh, ICE deportations are behind Biden administration.’ Well, why? Because they counted border removals.”
Mr. Homan said the administration would, as of Tuesday, begin to enforce its plan to make undocumented immigrants ages 14 and older register and provide their fingerprints to the U.S. government or potentially face criminal prosecution.
The Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts working to compile the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country, the National Climate Assessment.
Here are some of the other major developments from Monday:
President Trump signed several executive orders designed to ramp up his immigration crackdown, including one targeting so-called sanctuary cities and another bolstering legal support for police officers accused of wrongdoing.
The Trump administration said it plans to announce measures as early as Tuesday to ease the impact of tariffs on imported cars and car parts to give automakers more time to relocate production to the United States.
An advocacy group sued the Trump administration over its policy of allowing immigration enforcement agents to act in spaces like schools and houses of worship, seeking to settle a legal debate over whether those areas should be off limits.
Mexico and the United States jointly announced an agreement under which Mexico will send water to the United States and temporarily channel more water to the country from their shared rivers to meet its obligations under a 1944 treaty.
The head of a Peace Corps alumni group said he had learned that, at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, the agency was planning to reduce the number of full-time staff who support some 3,000 volunteers working in developing countries overseas.
Hundreds of lawyers and other staff members are leaving the Justice Department’s civil rights division, with veterans there saying Trump administration officials want to drop the department’s traditional work in order to aggressively pursue cases against the Ivy League, other schools and liberal cities.
Harvard announced that it was revamping its diversity, equity and inclusion office, even as the Department of Education said the Harvard Law Review, an independent student-run journal, was being investigated for racial discrimination.
The Education Department announced that the University of Pennsylvania had violated sex discrimination laws by allowing a transgender woman, Lia Thomas, to participate in women’s swimming events and demanded a number of steps, including stripping individual athletic records from her.
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The Trump administration said it plans to announce measures as early as Tuesday to ease the impact of tariffs on imported cars and car parts to give automakers more time to relocate production to the United States.
Tariffs of 25 percent on imported vehicles and on auto parts will remain in place. But the tariffs will be modified so that they are not “stacked” with other tariffs, for example on steel and aluminum, a White House spokesman said. Automakers will not have to pay tariffs on those metals, widely used in automobiles, on top of the tariffs on cars and parts.
In addition, automakers will be reimbursed for some of the cost of tariffs on imported components. The reimbursement will amount to up to 3.75 percent of the value of a new car in the first year, but will be phased out over two years, the spokesman confirmed.
A 25 percent tariff on imported cars took effect April 3. On Saturday, the tariffs are set to be extended to include imported parts.
“President Trump is building an important partnership with both the domestic automakers and our great American workers,” Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said in a statement. “This deal is a major victory for the president’s trade policy by rewarding companies who manufacture domestically, while providing runway to manufacturers who have expressed their commitment to invest in America and expand their domestic manufacturing.”
But even with these changes, there will still be substantial tariffs on imported cars and auto parts, which will raise prices for new and used cars by thousands of dollars and increase the cost of repairs and insurance premiums.
The modification to the tariffs was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Lutnick helped automakers secure a major exemption from tariffs in March and has taken on a role advocating relief for some industries hit by the levies.
Automakers welcomed the change. “We believe the president’s leadership is helping level the playing field for companies like G.M. and allowing us to invest even more in the U.S. economy,” Mary T. Barra, the chief executive of General Motors, said in a statement on Monday. “We appreciate the productive conversations with the president and his administration and look forward to continuing to work together.”
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Harvard is revamping its diversity, equity and inclusion office in a move that seemed to accede to the Trump administration, even as the university has sued the administration and accused it of unlawfully interfering in the university’s affairs.
An email to the Harvard community on Monday announced that the office had been renamed the Office of Community and Campus Life.
The decision follows similar reorganizations across the country by universities, which appeared to be aimed at placating conservative critics who have attacked diversity offices as left-wing indoctrination factories.
Harvard’s announcement stood out, though, because it came just hours after lawyers for the university and the Trump administration held their first conference in a lawsuit in which Harvard accuses the administration of invading freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration also opened another front in its fight with the university on Monday, accusing the Harvard Law Review, an independent student-run journal, of racial discrimination in journal membership and article selection.
In a news release announcing that the law review was under investigation, Craig Trainor, the Department of Education’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said the journal “appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race, employing a spoils system in which the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission.”
Responding to the announcement, Harvard Law School emphasized its commitment to ensuring that programs it oversees comply with the law, but pointed out that the journal is legally independent. A similar claim against the Harvard Law Review was dismissed in federal court in 2019.
In announcing that Harvard's diversity office was being revamped, Sherri Ann Charleston, formerly the chief diversity officer, said the university should bring people together based on their backgrounds and perspectives and “not the broad demographic groups to which they belong.”
Dr. Charleston’s title has been changed to chief community and campus life officer.
The Trump administration included abolishing D.E.I. efforts in a long list of demands it sent to Harvard two weeks ago, which the university would have to meet to continue receiving federal funding. Among other requirements, the administration ordered Harvard to appoint an external overseer to monitor students, faculty and staff for “viewpoint diversity,” to ban international students hostile to “American values,” and to eliminate activist faculty.
The list of demands was sent by mistake, according to two people familiar with the matter, but the White House has continued to stand by the requirements.
Harvard responded to the demands by filing the lawsuit in federal court.
“No government, regardless of which party, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in a statement to the university.
In retaliation, the administration has frozen more than $2.2 billion in university grants and contracts.
Miles J. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.
Incorporating lessons from a variety of already filed lawsuits so far, a coalition of labor unions and nonprofits has asked a federal judge to essentially declare President Trump’s entire effort to reduce the federal workforce illegal, including all the input and maneuvering to date by Elon Musk’s team, the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday evening, describes the “wholesale transformation of the federal government” as unlawful because it was done without the approval of Congress. The suit seeks to broadly roll back the layoffs and restructurings with which the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Personnel Management have become synonymous, and aims to force those and other federal agencies to work with Congress in making any further such moves.
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Mexico has agreed to send water to the United States and temporarily channel more water to the country from their shared rivers, a concession that appeared to defuse a diplomatic crisis sparked by yearslong shortages that left Mexico behind on its treaty-bound contribution of water from the borderlands.
Earlier this month, President Trump threatened additional tariffs and other sanctions against Mexico over the water debt, amounting to about 420 billion gallons. In a social media post, Mr. Trump accused Mexico of “stealing” water from Texas farmers by not meeting its obligations under a 1944 treaty that mediates the distribution of water from three rivers the two countries share: the Rio Grande, the Colorado and the Tijuana.
In an agreement announced jointly by Mexico and the United States on Monday, Mexico will immediately transfer some of its water reserves and will give the country a larger share of the flow of water from the Rio Grande through October.
The concession from Mexico averted the threat of more punishing tariffs and diplomatic enmity with the United States amid the rollout of Mr. Trump’s new trade policies.
But fulfilling the agreement is expected to significantly strain Mexico’s farmlands and could revive civil unrest triggered by previous water payments to the United States. Much of the Mexican borderlands are enduring extreme drought conditions, according to Mexico’s meteorological agency and water commission, and Mexico’s water reserves are at historic lows.
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has taken a conciliatory approach in negotiations with the Trump administration. Hours after Mr. Trump’s threat of tariffs over the water dispute earlier this month, Ms. Sheinbaum acknowledged that her country had fallen short of its treaty commitments, citing the extreme drought and saying that Mexico had been complying “to the extent of water availability.”
In a statement on Monday, the State Department lauded Ms. Sheinbaum “for her personal involvement” in negotiating the agreement, and spoke of “water scarcity affecting communities on both sides of the border.” A statement from the Mexican foreign ministry on the agreement noted that the United States had agreed not to seek a renegotiation of the 1944 water treaty.
Longstanding tensions over water have simmered between Mexico and the United States. In 2020, those tensions exploded into violence in Mexico, as farmers rioted and seized control of a dam in the border region in an effort to shut off water deliveries to the United States.
Rising temperatures and drought have made the water from rivers Mexico and the United States share all the more valuable.
According to data provided by the International Boundary and Water Commission, which mediates water disputes between the two countries, Mexico has fallen well short of its treaty commitments on water delivery in the last five years. Between October 2020 and October 2024, Mexico provided just over 400,000 acre-feet of water, far less than the roughly 1.4 million acre-feet called for under treaty stipulations. The debt has only grown since.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City.
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A 45-year-old Iraqi man was charged on Monday with voting illegally in the 2020 presidential election, a prosecution that federal officials said had been assisted by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The case against the man, Akeel Abdul Jamiel, appeared to be the first announced by the Justice Department in which Mr. Musk’s unit, also known as DOGE, is credited with aiding in the investigation that led to the charge. The department did not respond to an inquiry about what form the unit’s help had taken.
Mr. Jamiel lived in South Glens Falls, N.Y., about an hour north of Albany in Saratoga County, when he cast the illegal ballot, officials said. He was prohibited from voting because he was not a U.S. citizen but did so anyway, according to a charging document.
He registered as a member of the Conservative Party about a month before the election, public records show. It appears to be the first time he had registered to vote in the United States, where records show he had lived since at least 2005.
President Trump has argued since 2020 that rampant voter fraud caused him to lose that year’s election to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. In what could be considered an ironic twist, court filings in a lawsuit suggest that Mr. Jamiel is a Trump supporter.
Mr. Jamiel was not in custody on Monday, and a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of New York declined to comment on when he might be. The charge he faces, voting by aliens, is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison and a fine of as much as $100,000. He could not be reached for comment.
In a statement, John A. Sarcone III, the interim U.S. attorney for the district, called Mr. Jamiel’s vote “a callous and illegal act.”
“We will continue to investigate and prosecute illegal schemes aimed at corrupting the election process,” Mr. Sarcone added.
It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and studies have found that the practice is virtually nonexistent. Still, Mr. Trump and his allies have long claimed that large numbers of noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, vote or try to vote in U.S. elections.
In an executive order issued on March 25, Mr. Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security, “in coordination with the DOGE administrator,” to review state voting records alongside federal immigration records, “including through subpoena where necessary and authorized by law, for consistency with federal requirements.”
DOGE, whose work to date has largely focused on slashing the federal work force and on dismantling federal agencies, said in a message posted on Mr. Musk’s social media site, X: “Great job by @TheJusticeDept for prosecuting voter fraud where a noncitizen voted in a federal election.”
“This individual was also previously arrested for first-degree assault and was receiving federal benefits,” the message also said.
The benefits claim could not be verified on Monday, but local news reports and court filings by Mr. Jamiel in a federal lawsuit indicate he was charged with first-degree assault in a 2017 shooting in Monticello, N.Y., and was held in the Sullivan County Jail for some period of time. It was unclear how the case was resolved.
In his lawsuit, one of several unsuccessful legal actions he has filed in federal court in New York, he accused the county sheriff and several members of the jail staff of abusing him.
In another suit, filed in 2019 against Bill de Blasio, New York City’s mayor at the time, Mr. Jamiel accused him of having violated his constitutional rights “by providing sanctuary for illegal immigrants who are placing a hardship on me.”
“I am unable to find and keep a job and provide for my self,” he wrote. “Nor will I be able to keep a roof over my head.”
As an exhibit attached to the suit, Mr. Jamiel included an April 2019 letter he had written to Mr. Trump, referring to him as “the great president” and complaining about the issue of illegal immigration.
In a second exhibit, a letter to a federal judge overseeing a separate lawsuit, Mr. Jamiel closed by writing: “May God Bless America and its Great President Mr. Donald J. Trump.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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The Trump administration on Monday kept up its pressure campaign on elite universities by announcing that the University of Pennsylvania had violated sex discrimination laws by allowing a transgender woman to participate in female sports.
The finding was from an Education Department investigation opened two months ago by the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, a probe that was centered on the university’s decision to let Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, participate on the swim team. The administration halted about $175 million in federal research grants at the time.
On Monday, the administration made no mention of that funding. Instead, the Education Department said it would require Penn to strip individual athletic records from Ms. Thomas and to send a letter of apology to female athletes whose individual records would be restored. The administration also said it had demanded that the university publicly state its compliance with Title IX, the civil rights law that ensures equal access for women to education.
A university spokesman declined to comment. J. Larry Jameson, the president of Penn, said last month that the university has never had a transgender athlete policy and instead complied with N.C.A.A. policies. Mr. Jameson said his school complied with those policies when Ms. Thomas was on the swim team — and remains compliant now. The NCAA revised its rules to limit participation in women’s sports to athletes who are assigned female at birth, following Mr. Trump’s executive order in February, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
“We now comply with the N.C.A.A. policy and the law as they exist today,” Mr. Jameson said in his March statement. “We expect to continue to engage with OCR, vigorously defending our position.”
Ms. Thomas swam for two years on the men’s team at Penn. She started transitioning using hormone replacement therapy in May 2019 and met the NCAA hormone therapy requirements to swim on the women’s team in 2021. In March 2022, Ms. Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an N.C.A.A. Division I title when she won the women’s 500-yard freestyle event.
The Trump administration has targeted universities, particularly Ivy League schools, in an attempt to shift the ideological tilt of the education system, which the president views as hostile to conservatives. The administration has halted billions in university research funding as it investigates multiple schools over transgender issues, diversity, equity and inclusion policies and alleged antisemitism.
Vimal Patel contributed reporting.
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The House on Monday overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation to criminalize the nonconsensual sharing of sexually explicit photos and videos of others — including A.I.-generated images known as “deepfakes” — and to mandate that platforms quickly remove them.
The vote of 409 to 2 cleared the measure for President Trump, who was expected to quickly sign it.
The legislation, known as the Take It Down Act, aims to crack down on the sharing of material known as “revenge porn,” requiring that social media companies and online platforms remove such images within two days of being notified of them.
The measure, which brought together an unlikely coalition of conservatives and liberals in both parties, passed the Senate unanimously in February. The support of Mr. Trump, who mentioned it during his joint address to Congress last month, appears to have smoothed its path through Congress.
The legislation, introduced by Senators Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, is the first internet content law to clear Congress since 2018, when lawmakers approved legislation to fight online sex trafficking. And though it focuses on revenge porn and deepfakes, the bill is seen as an important step toward regulating internet companies that have for decades escaped government scrutiny.
Ms. Klobuchar said she brought the bill to the attention of Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, while speaking with them at an inauguration-day lunch.
The senator said she was moved by the stories of families whose children had experienced harassment, bullying or mental and emotional harm because of these images.
The legislation, Ms. Klobuchar said in an interview, “was one of the first times that we’ve actually gotten something done on consumer tech issues that is meaningful.”
The Take It Down Act’s overwhelming support highlights mounting anger among lawmakers toward social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X for hosting disinformation and harmful content, particularly images that hurt children and teenagers.
Though revenge porn and deepfakes affect adults and minors alike, both have been particularly potent for teenage girls as the spread of widely available “nudification” apps has spurred boys to surreptitiously concoct sexually explicit images of their female classmates and then circulate them.
Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican who introduced a companion bill in the House, said on Monday that the bill would stop the abuse and harassment of young girls that was “spreading like wildfire” online.
“It is outrageously sick to use images — the face, the voice, the likeness — of a young, vulnerable female, to manipulate them, to extort them and to humiliate them publicly just for fun, just for revenge,” Ms. Salazar said.
The bill’s passage also echoes similar efforts in statehouses across the country. Every state except South Carolina has a law criminalizing revenge porn. And at least 20 states have laws that address sexually explicit deepfakes.
The measure that passed on Monday is part of a yearslong bipartisan effort by lawmakers to address deepfake pornography. Mr. Cruz and Ms. Klobuchar first introduced the bill last year, when it passed the Senate but died in the Republican-led House. It was reintroduced this year and appeared to gain momentum after it drew support from Mrs. Trump, who has focused on youth mental health issues, cyberbullying and social media use.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a millennial Democrat from New York, also introduced legislation last year that would have allowed those depicted in sexually explicit deepfakes to sue the people who created and shared them. That bill has not been reintroduced this year.
Lawmakers have in recent years rallied around several bills aimed at protecting children online from sexual exploitation, bullying and addictive algorithms. In January 2024, chief executives of Meta, TikTok and other tech firms testified before angry lawmakers, defending their platforms.
In the hearing, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, was forced to apologize to parents who had lost their children from online harms.
Some speech advocates have warned that the measure could chill free expression, saying such a law could force the removal of legitimate images along with nonconsensual sexual imagery.
“The best of intentions can’t make up for the bill’s dangerous implications for constitutional speech and privacy online,” said Becca Branum, the deputy director of the Free Expression Project for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a research group.
Ms. Branum added that the Take It Down Act was “a recipe for weaponized enforcement that risks durable progress in the fight against image-based sexual abuse.”
Two Republican representatives voted against the bill: Representatives Eric Burlison of Missouri and Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Mr. Massie said in a social media post that he believed the legislation was a “slippery slope, ripe for abuse, with unintended consequences.”
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The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.
The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.
Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.
On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.
“We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles,” the email said. “As plans develop for the assessment, there may be future opportunities to contribute or engage. Thank you for your service.”
For some of the authors, that appeared to be a fatal blow to the next report.
“This is as close as it gets to a termination of the assessment,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who specializes in climate adaptation and was a co-author on the last climate assessment. “If you get rid of all the people involved, nothing’s moving forward.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The climate assessment is typically compiled by scientists and expert contributors around the country who volunteer to write the report. It then goes through several rounds of review by 14 federal agencies, as well as a public comment period. The entire process is overseen by the Global Change Research Program, a federal group established by Congress in 1990 that is supported by NASA.
Under the Trump administration, that process was already facing serious disruptions. This month, NASA canceled a major contract with ICF International, a consulting firm that had been supplying most of the technical support and staffing for the Global Change Research Program, which coordinates work among hundreds of contributors.
President Trump has frequently dismissed the risks of global warming. And Russell Vought, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote before the election that the next president should “reshape” the Global Change Research Program, because its scientific reports on climate change were often used as the basis for environmental lawsuits that constrained federal government actions.
Mr. Vought has called the government’s largest climate research unit, a division inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a source of “climate alarmism.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration tried, but failed, to derail the National Climate Assessment. When the 2018 report came out, concluding that global warming posed an imminent and dire threat, the administration made it public the day after Thanksgiving in an apparent attempt to minimize attention.
In February, scientists had submitted a detailed outline of the next assessment to the White House for an initial review. But that review has been on hold and the agency comment period has been postponed.
It remains to be seen what happens next with the assessment, which is still mandated by Congress. Some scientists feared that the administration might try to write an entirely new report from scratch that downplays the risks of rising temperatures or contradicts established climate science.
“There may well be a sixth National Climate Assessment,” said Meade Krosby, a senior scientist at the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group and a contributor to the assessment. “The question is whether it is going to reflect credible science and be of real use to our communities as they prepare for climate change.”
Scientists involved in earlier climate assessments have said the report is invaluable for understanding how climate change would affect daily life in the United States.
“It takes that global issue and brings it closer to us,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, said this month. “If I care about food or water or transportation or insurance or my health, this is what climate change means to me if I live in the Southwest or the Great Plains. That’s the value.”
Many state and local policymakers, as well as private businesses, rely on the assessment to understand how climate change is affecting different regions of the United States and how they can try to adapt.
And while the scientific understanding of climate change and its effects hasn’t changed drastically since the last assessment in 2023, Dr. Keenan of Tulane said, there has been a steady progression of research on what communities can do to prepare for worsening wildfires, higher sea levels and other problems exacerbated by rising temperatures.
Decision makers forced to refer to the last assessment would be relying on outdated information on what adaptation and mitigation measures really work, scientists said.
“We’d be losing the cornerstone report that is supposed to communicate to the public the risks we face with climate change and how we can move forward,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University who was an author on the southwest regional chapter. “It’s pretty devastating.”
Harvard announced Monday that it was renaming its diversity and inclusion office to the office of Community and Campus Life, joining scores of schools across the country that have overhauled diversity offices in an effort to placate critics who say they are left-wing indoctrination factories, and who also criticize their cost. The announcement, which comes weeks after the Trump Administration demanded that Harvard’s DEI office be dismantled, was made in an email to the Harvard community Monday from Sherri Ann Charleston, previously the school’s diversity officer. Her new title is “chief community and campus life officer.”
David A. Fahrenthold is an investigative reporter who writes primarily about nonprofit organizations.
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The head of a Peace Corps alumni group said on Monday he had been informed that the agency was planning to reduce the number of full-time staff who support volunteers overseas.
The official, Dan Baker, president and chief executive of the National Peace Corps Association, said he had heard the news the same day from Cheryl Faye, who is the Peace Corps’ acting deputy chief executive. He said he was told that the cuts were planned at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and other foreign-aid agencies.
The Peace Corps confirmed in a statement that the Musk team was assessing its operations and “working to identify additional efficiencies in our staffing structure.”
“The agency will remain operational and continue to recruit, place, and train volunteers, while continuing to support their health, safety and security, and effective service,” the Peace Corps said.
Mr. Baker said he had been told that the Peace Corps would not close any offices in foreign countries or reduce the numbers of volunteers it takes per year. The agency, which operates independently within the executive branch, was founded under President John F. Kennedy. It has about 3,000 volunteers who serve for two years in one of 60 developing countries.
“The Peace Corps has received guidance that they’re not going to cut volunteers and countries, but the staffing impact is going to be significantly stressful for their operations,” Mr. Baker said, recounting the conversation.
The Peace Corps has about 970 full-time American employees who recruit new volunteers and oversee their training, health care and security. Of those employees, about 790 work in the United States.
Mr. Baker said he was not told how many of those jobs the Peace Corps intended to cut.
To begin the reductions, Mr. Baker said, the agency on Monday offered employees a chance to take “early retirement,” to be paid through the end of this year. The agency confirmed in its statement that staff members had until May 6 to apply for the administration’s “deferred resignation” offer.
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House Republicans are proposing to charge migrants $1,000 to claim asylum, one of a series of new or increased fees on immigrants seeking to gain legal entry into the United States that is part of their effort to curb immigration and pay for the Trump administration’s border crackdown.
The fees on immigrants are one of several proposals in legislation released on Monday by the House Judiciary Committee to be included in the major domestic policy bill Republicans are putting together to implement President Trump’s domestic agenda.
The application fee would be the first time the United States specifically charged migrants who are seeking asylum, a status meant for people who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted in their home country because of their race, religion or nationality. Typically, migrants who claim asylum are released into the United States to wait for court appearances. But a huge backlog in such claims has kept many of those seeking asylum in the country for years, waiting for their cases to be heard. Under the bill, applicants would also pay $100 a year while their application is pending,
The bill would also require a $1,000 fee for most immigrants who are paroled into the United States and a $3,500 fee for those sponsoring children — large sums that could make it more difficult for minors who cross the border alone to be released from federal custody and taken in by family members in the United States.
Asylum seekers and people under temporary protected status — meant to protect them from being sent back to countries facing conflict or natural disasters — would have to pay a $550 fee when applying for authorization to work.
Those fees, likely to be burdensome to many immigrants, would serve as a further deterrent to those considering crossing the border illegally. Such crossings are currently at their lowest level in years.
Though the Republicans’ budget blueprint generally calls for slashing taxes and government spending, it provides for increased funding for immigration enforcement, deportations and border security initiatives.
The plan being considered by the House Judiciary Committee calls for $45 billion to build and expand immigrant detention centers, $8 billion to hire Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff and $1.25 billion to help the Justice Department immigration judges, their staff and their courts.
Portions of many of the new or expanded fees for migrants would be directed toward supporting the new spending.
The judiciary panel is set to consider the proposal this week, and several other House committees are also scheduled to meet to lay out their portions of the domestic policy package. Democrats have said they expect those sessions to provide substantial fodder for attacks against Republicans, given that the G.O.P. budget would require major cuts to popular federal programs including Medicaid.
Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.