U.S. National Security and Military News Review

U.S. Military Plane Deports Migrants to India

Suhasini Raj — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 06:47:04 -0500

The flight appeared to be the first use of an American military aircraft to deport people to India, which is one of the top sources of illegal immigration to the United States.

Global Snapshot: The Middle East and North Africa Defense Environment

, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 06:00:00 -0500

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) collectively spent $220.6 billion on defense in 2024, amounting to about 9.5 percent of the global total for the year. Nearly all states in the MENA region that publish their annual defense spending data increased their budget year-on-year from 2023, expanding at an average rate of 15.6 percent -- the fastest rate in the world, even above that of Europe.

Underpinning the strong growth in MENA defense spending is a challenging security environment, heavily defined by the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent Israeli offensive into the Gaza Strip. The conflict widened in 2024, as Israeli troops skirmished with Hezbollah and southern Lebanon and traded missile strikes with Iran directly. The Yemeni militant group Ansar Allah, meanwhile, began attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, disrupting commercial traffic through the Suez Canal.

The Israeli government reached a ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah in November 2024, followed by a separate arrangement with Hamas two months later. Successful implementation of these deals would stabilize the situation on Israel's northern and southern borders, but regional tension is unlikely to abate quickly.

MENA defense spending is likely to remain on the upswing even as Israel's conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah wind down. While Middle Eastern governments have largely sought to avoid entanglement in the broader stand-off between Israel and Iran, the region's militaries remain concerned about blowback from the fighting. Dynamics of the recent wars have moreover exposed gaps in regional force structures and capabilities, requiring new procurement.

On top of persistent state rivalries in MENA, the region's frozen conflicts are at perennial risk of re-opening. Towards the end of 2024, a new shock hit the Middle East, as Syria's dormant civil war reignited with a rebel offensive that toppled the Assad regime, forcing Syria's neighbors to rapidly reconfigure their political approach to the country. The sudden collapse of the Assad regime has also put a spotlight on other frozen wars, such as in Libya.

MENA Military Market

At $71.4 billion in 2024, the Saudi defense budget is by far the largest in the Middle East, and the fourth largest in the world, behind only the U.S., China, and Russia. Riyadh added about 8.5 percent to its defense budget in 2024 compared to 2023. The expansion to the budget continues a growth trend begun in 2022 that snapped a multi-year period of stagnation in Saudi defense outlays.

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A Legal Counteroffensive to Beat Back Trump’s Government Purges

Mattathias Schwartz and Charlie Savage — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 05:58:05 -0500

A raft of new lawsuits contend that President Trump and Elon Musk are breaking the law to ransack the F.B.I. and other federal agencies. The courts will now decide.

Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab

Charlie Savage — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 05:01:49 -0500

In the radical opening weeks of his second term, President Trump has appeared to feel little constraint by any need to show respect for the rule of law.

Migrants Are Deported to India on U.S. Military Plane

Suhasini Raj — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 04:43:42 -0500

The flight appeared to be the first use of an American military aircraft to deport people to India, which is one of the top sources of illegal immigration to the United States.

USAID shutoff will hurt US interests around the globe, including Ukraine

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:31:07 -0500

The Trump administration's assault on USAID will help China and Russia and hurt countries friendly to the United States, current and former government officials say. And it will undermine Ukraine's efforts to fend off invasion and lead to the unnecessary deaths of troops and civilians, Ukrainian military leaders said on a recent visit to Washington, D.C.

“We should understand that it's not only about some small projects in some NGOs. It's about people's lives,” one Ukrainian commander said Monday.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is best known as an organization that provides humanitarian assistance to people around the world—including to governments under direct military attack, such as Ukraine, or ones targeted for election interference, such as Moldova.

USAID does not—and cannot—provide direct military support to Ukraine. But because all of Ukraine is under attack, the country’s civilian and military healthcare systems overlap significantly, with some civilian medical facilities located less than a kilometer from the front line. So supporting the civilian healthcare system in Ukraine indirectly supports the country’s fight against Russia.

A January memo from USAID obtained by Defense One outlines $35 billion in development assistance the agency provided to Ukraine since the start of the invasion, including money to enable the “government to provide emergency services and support to public employees—such as frontline health workers—undertaking essential duties at a time of crisis.” But the assistance also funds energy initiatives, helping the government pay workers, and other items.

Having medical supplies readily available is crucial not just for keeping soldiers alive, but also for doing military planning, since predicted casualty numbers are part of the operation planning process, the commander said. Ukraine is reportedly talking to European allies about replacing the assistance USAID has provided if the funds are cut off, but finding a new source of support makes things more difficult.

Countering Chinese and Russian influence

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was named acting director of USAID on Monday, said in a letter to lawmakers that USAID will “move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law,” the Washington Post reported. Employees on Tuesday began receiving notices that they would be placed on administrative leave.

The agency’s headquarters in DC was also closed, with employees locked out their online work accounts and dozens of senior staff put on leave. Elon Musk, the billionaire defense contractor at the head of the recently created Department of Government Efficiency, has targeted the agency, and in a live stream Monday on X, which he owns, called it a “criminal organization.”

USAID officials reported that individuals working for DOGE, some of whom have previously worked Musk’s companies, attempted to gain access to classified materials in USAID’s possession.

Katie Miller, wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, is serving as a spokesperson for DOGE. She posted on X on Monday that, “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”

A January 20 executive order grants Trump the ability to extend security clearances to whomever he sees fit, for a period of six months. But Miller did not respond to a Defense One query asking for clarification on whether DOGE workers attempting to access classified information had passed any sort of formal background check.

Democratic lawmakers have voiced serious concerns about the effects of shuttering the agency so abruptly.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., on Monday told CNN that “Congress writes a law that dictates how USAID spends money, to make sure that we're countering Chinese influence inside Africa, to make sure that we don't lose access to critical mineral supplies, so that we're fighting back against Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

In Ukraine, the agency has done far more than provide emergency medical supplies, according to the memo. For example, USAID also worked to offset the costs to the global food supply caused by Russia’s attacks on Ukraine farmers and grain producers.. Other investments include sovereign loan guarantees allowing Ukraine to access “$20 billion in immobilized Russian sovereign assets,” essentially helping Ukraine’s economy continue to grow. The agency played a big role in helping Ukraine transform its economy to be more resilient, and emerge as a “potential as a world leader in digital innovation” despite the ongoing conflict, according to the memo.

One former senior government official said USAID has been an essential part of the effort to account for U.S. weapons and other aid to Ukraine. The agency is “enabling Ukrainian oversight over that direct budget support, and in the Ministry of Finance. And as a result, I think other Ukrainian ministries have taken on that example to expand their own oversight, building their own systems, because those systems and that oversight is critical to retaining U.S. support.”

A current U.S. government official who has worked directly with USAID said agency workers are able to apply for special waivers from the State Department to unfreeze vital aid, such as for Ukraine. But they might be competing against a variety of other USAID teams.

A third U.S. government official said USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which responds to the most urgent needs, could get a waiver specifically to carry out key support functions in places like Ukraine. The official described the bureau as similar to a special operations force: small but able to quickly maneuver in and out of countries to contend with crises that could escalate quickly. In regard to Ukraine, the official said, “I would expect that they're probably focused on would-be payroll assistance for the government, a lot of things that were going through, aid to pay for keeping Ukraine running.”

All of the current and former officials emphasized the importance of USAID efforts in countering Chinese influence around the globe, such as in Eastern Europe where the Russian government is actively attempting to undermine free elections in order to install officials sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It's just critically important that we help those countries grow more resilient, to withstand Russian aggression. And if you undercut the programming that USAID has, you're inviting a free hand for Russian meddling,” one of the officials said.

USAID is also critical to combating growing Chinese influence in other places in the world. For example, in Africa, where AFRICOM Commander Gen. Michael Langley in October specifically highlighted the agency’s role in stabilizing regions, which facilitates continued U.S. operations.

USAID and Congress

The role of USAID in countering Russian and Chinese influence isn’t lost on many lawmakers—including some Trump allies.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss, said Monday: “I have felt for a long time that USAID is our way to combat the Belt and Road Initiative, which is China's effort to really gain influence around the world, including Africa and South America and the Western Hemisphere. So we need an aid program to match the Chinese effort.” But Wicker is concerned about allegations of mismanagement at the agency, and wants to make sure aid efforts reflect what “policy makers of the United States have decided [they] ought to be doing, so I'm eager to see an audit,” he said.

But the second official said Congress is actually a big part of the reason USAID gets a bad rap.

The agency has been “regulated and has been picked to pieces by Congress,” they said. Specifically, many of the agency’s new programs must be approved by Congress. But the process is highly inefficient and results in money going to areas that are less urgent.

For example, the official said, USAID was pursuing a program to provide solar power for one community, but Congress killed the initiative out of fear that the chips in the solar panels might have to come from China. The end result: USAID had to spend the money on another area, before it expired altogether.

“You’ve got to throw it into something that exists already,” like a job program, they said.

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Prosecutors Charge Man They Say Is Tied to Burglary of Joe Burrow’s Home

Santul Nerkar — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 20:11:58 -0500

The home of Joe Burrow of the Cincinnati Bengals was burglarized in December. The authorities said a man detained in Manhattan was part of a related fencing operation.

U.S. Begins Flying Migrants to Guantánamo Bay

Hamed Aleaziz and Eric Schmitt — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 20:04:24 -0500

The decision to send migrants from the United States to Guantánamo Bay is a change in how the country handles people it deports.

WEAPONS: USA Adopts Ukraine War Drone Technology

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:53:59 -0500

WINNING: Algorithms Managing Elections

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:51:40 -0500

The Most Indefensible Aspects of DOJ’s Briefs in the Birthright Citizenship Cases

Marty Lederman — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:58:18 -0500

The Citizenship Clause, which is the first sentence of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, famously provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14160, Section 1 of which declares that neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the federal statute incorporating similar language (8 U.S.C. 1401(a)) confers U.S. citizenship upon two categories of persons who were “born … in the United States”:

(i) any person born to a mother who was unlawfully present in the United States on the date of birth if the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident on that date of birth; and

(ii) any person born to a mother whose presence in the United States on the date of birth was lawful but temporary (such as a mother legally in the U.S. on a student, work or tourist visa) if the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident on the date of birth.

Section 2 directs Executive Branch personnel not to issue or accept citizenship documents for persons in those two categories if they are born after Feb. 19, 2025. (The Executive Order is suspiciously silent about how Executive agencies are expected to treat persons who are deemed by Section 1 not to be citizens but who were born before Feb. 19.)

Trump’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause breaks with well over a century of consensus understandings throughout the U.S. government. And it’s mistaken.

The persons described in Section 1 of the Executive Order were born in the United States and they were, at the moment of their birth, subject to U.S. jurisdiction, in the sense that they were bound to comply with U.S. law and are “in the allegiance and under the protection of the country,” U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 693 (1898), by virtue of their presence in the United States. Therefore, they fall within the plain terms of the Fourteenth Amendment. Moreover, Congress had that same understanding of the Citizenship Clause in 1940, when it enacted what is now 8 U.S.C. 1401(a), and when it re-enacted that provision in 1952. Therefore such “birthright” citizenship is established as a matter of statute, regardless of how a President today might read the Fourteenth Amendment—and Executive Branch officials may not act in contravention of that statute.

Several lawsuits have already been filed challenging the legality of E.O. 14160. On Friday, the Department of Justice Civil Division filed at least four briefs opposing motions for preliminary injunctions in those suits:

DOJ’s briefs raise a host of questions, most of which the plaintiffs presumably will address in the reply briefs they’ll file this week.[1] (Here’s the first of those reply briefs, filed yesterday by Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) in the Casa case in Maryland.) The function of this article, however, is merely to draw attention to two remarkable things about DOJ’s argument on the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, both of which demonstrate how seriously the Department’s professional standards have already been compromised in the first two weeks of the administration.

DOJ’s Failure to Square Its Reading With Binding Supreme Court Precedent

First, DOJ’s argument depends crucially on its jarring insistence that the term “jurisdiction” in the Citizenship Clause phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” does not refer to the national government’s regulatory power over such persons. (See, for example, p. 8 of the DOJ brief in the New Hampshire case brought by the ACLU.) According to DOJ (see p. 10), a person born in the U.S. is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States within the meaning of the Clause only if he or she is both bound to comply with U.S. law and also not subject to the jurisdiction of any foreign power. See also p. 11 (arguing that the person’s allegiance to the United States must be “unqualified by ‘allegiance to any alien power’”).

This argument is extremely broad, as it would deny Fourteenth Amendment citizenship even to persons born to parents who are lawfully in the United States, simply because those parents remain citizens of their home nations. (That explains the second category of the excluded persons in Section 1 of the Executive Order, quoted above, which would deny citizenship to, e.g., persons born to foreign nationals lawfully present in the U.S. on a work or student visa.) It is also a decidedly atextual argument. There’s no language in the Citizenship Clause providing (or so much as suggesting) that persons subject to the laws of a foreign state (or having some “allegiance to an alien power”) cannot be U.S. citizens. And there’s certainly nothing in the text or common understanding of the Clause that supports the notion that a person born in the United States is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction simply because she’s also subject to another State’s jurisdiction. Such a reading would have profound implications for countless persons who have, since 1898, been born to parents who were nationals of another State. (Among other things, it would appear to preclude dual citizenship unless Congress authorized it.)

As extraordinary as those aspects of DOJ’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause might be, what’s most remarkable about the DOJ briefs is that they do not even acknowledge that a governing precedent of the Supreme Court has already rejected that very reading. In U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court held that a person born in the U.S. to Chinese nationals who were not U.S. citizens was a citizen by virtue of the Citizenship Clause, even though he and his parents were “subjects of the Emperor of China.” 169 U.S. at 652; accord id. at 654, 695, 699, 705. (In his dissenting opinion, Justice Fuller explained that Wong Kim Ark and his parents had not, and could not, “renounce[] their allegiance to their native country” of China, and that they therefore could not be “completely subject to the jurisdiction of [the United States].” Id. at 725; see also id. (“Generally speaking, I understand the subjects of the Emperor of China—that ancient Empire, with its history of thousands of years and its unbroken continuity in belief, traditions and government, in spite of revolutions and changes of dynasty—to be bound to him by every conception of duty and by every principle of their religion, of which filial piety

is the first and greatest commandment; and formerly, perhaps still, their penal laws denounced the severest penalties on those who renounced their country and allegiance, and their abettors; and, in effect, held the relatives at home of Chinese in foreign lands as hostages for their loyalty.”). The majority did not question that understanding.)

Wong Kim Ark’s parents themselves, explained the Court, “must be held to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, within the meaning of the first sentence of [Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment],” even though they were “subjects of the Emperor of China” with a bond of allegiance to that nation; and it therefore followed a fortiori that Wong Kim Ark himself “cannot be less ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’” Id. at 696.

DOJ’s briefs acknowledge (p. 11) that Wong Kim Ark’s parents were subjects of the Chinese emperor. Yet DOJ does not argue that Wong Kim Ark was thus wrongly decided and ought to be overruled. Nor does DOJ make any effort at all to reconcile the Court’s decision in Wong Kim Ark with DOJ’s new argument that a person cannot be “subject to” U.S. jurisdiction if she is also a subject of—and owes allegiance to—a foreign State.

Such a conspicuous and inexplicable omission is, to say the least, not the sort of thing that has traditionally characterized DOJ briefs.

The Civil Division does attempt to distinguish Wong Kim Ark on another ground, based upon Wong Kim Ark’s parents’ lawful “domicile” in San Francisco. Such domicile wasn’t, however, the basis of the Court’s holding, and—as I explain in a footnote—it wouldn’t in any event be a ground for distinguishing Wong Kim Ark from many situations covered by the Trump E.O.[2] More importantly, such domicile is irrelevant to DOJ’s new account of what it means to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. And—perhaps most important of all—the U.S.-born children who are the subjects of the Executive Order have not acted unlawfully at all. They did not unlawfully enter (or remain in) the United States; and their domicile certainly is not unlawful. Therefore, even if the Court’s decision in Wong Kim Ark had turned upon whether or not the domicile of Wong Kim Ark or his parents was “lawful”—and it didn’t—that wouldn’t lend any support to the Executive Order.

DOJ’s Failure to Contend with the Department’s Own Longstanding, Authoritative View

Second, DOJ’s briefs casually dismiss the Department’s own longstanding, authoritative understanding of the Citizenship Clause—and more than a century of practice in the political branches.

In the 30 years between ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and Wong Kim Ark, the Executive Branch’s views on the question presented by Executive Order 14160 varied. (See Mike Ramsey’s article at pp. 420-21, 457.) Ever since Wong Kim Ark, however, the Department of Justice (and the Executive Branch more broadly, in its implementation of many laws that turn on citizenship) has embraced the Court’s understanding … until this past Inauguration Day.

Consider, for example, U.S. ex rel. Hintopoulos v. Shaughnessy, 353 U.S. 72 (1957). In that case, a husband and wife who were Greek nationals lawfully entered the United States as crew members of ships docked in a U.S. port. They both unlawfully failed to leave the county when their limited, authorized stay expired, after which the woman gave birth to a child in the United States. They then requested suspension of deportation because their citizen child would suffer economic hardship if his parents were deported. The Board of Immigration denied that request, and the Supreme Court held that the Board did not abuse its discretion.

For present purposes, what’s significant about Hintopoulos is that the Solicitor General conceded that the child was a U.S. citizen, despite the fact that his parents were subjects of a foreign nation and were unlawfully in the United States, see 1957 WL 87025, at *7, *11, and the Court agreed that “the child is, of course, an American citizen by birth.” 353 U.S. at 73. The SG and the Court agreed about such child citizenship in later, similar, cases, too—such as in INS v. Errico, 385 U.S. 214, 215 (1966) (see SG brief, 1966 WL 100686 at *5), and in INS v. Rios-Pineda, 471 U.S. 444, 446 (1985) (see SG brief, 1985 WL 669850, at *24).

Most importantly, in 1995 the Assistant Attorney General (AAG) for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Walter Dellinger, testified before Congress that legislative proposals to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented parents would be “unquestionably unconstitutional.” Indeed, Dellinger emphasized that although OLC “grapples with many difficult and close issues of constitutional law,” this is “not among them.”

Two years later, Acting OLC AAG Dawn Johnsen likewise testified that such legislation “would be flatly unconstitutional.” Citizenship Reform Act of 1997; and Voter Eligibility Verification Act: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims of the House Committee on the Judiciary, at 19 (June 25, 1997); see also id. at 27 (noting that in 1930, the State Department “found that a child born on Ellis Island to a woman who had not yet been admitted to the United States under the immigration laws was nonetheless a citizen of the United States” (citing Memorandum of the Office of the Solicitor for the Department of State on Ona Laszas (Feb. 6, 1930), in 3 Green Haywood Hackworth, Digest of International Law, § 221, at 10 (1942)).

That has long been the official, authoritative view of the Department of Justice, binding on the Executive Branch as a whole. It has governed extensive Executive practice, in every administration, for well over a century. Persons born in the United States to parents owing allegiance to another nation—including parents who entered or remained in the United States unlawfully—have been drafted, enlisted, voted, obtained passports, etc., by virtue of the fact that the government has (rightly) deemed them to be U.S. citizens. And Congress has (at a minimum) acquiesced in this uniform understanding and practice.

In the ordinary course, a Civil Division brief would have to be consistent with the authoritative DOJ views expressed by OLC and OSG—and with longstanding Executive Branch practice. So what explains the briefs that DOJ filed on Friday?

In those briefs, the Civil Division does not even bother to cite DOJ’s previous binding views. Nor do the briefs address the fact that their reading of the Citizenship Clause would call into question the legality of decades of Executive Branch practices. The briefs’ entire response to such precedent and practice is—I kid you not—the bald statement that “the scope of the Citizenship Clause turns on what it meant in 1868, not on what the Executive Branch assumed it meant during parts of the 20th century.”

Even putting aside the fact that the Supreme Court long ago rejected the brief’s argument about what the Citizenship Clause “meant in 1868,” this failure to address precedent and practice is an unconscionable and unprecedented deviation from DOJ norms.

Of course, an OLC opinion can be overruled by OLC itself, by the Attorney General, or by the President. And, in the absence of an OLC or Attorney General opinion, the Solicitor General may occasionally change the litigation position of the United States on a constitutional question. Such overruling or change, however, is very rare, and ordinarily occurs only after a very careful and elaborate process of debate and discussion, involving at a minimum OLC and OSG, about whether to disregard well-established DOJ precedent. Moreover, when a decision is made to overrule such precedent, the specific reasons for such change are typically explained to the public and the courts in some detail. (For example, if (hypothetically) Acting Attorney General James McHenry decided to overrule the longstanding OLC/OSG view, a Civil Division brief of this sort would ordinarily say so, and would explain the AG’s reasoning for doing so, addressing the merits of the arguments formerly adopted by DOJ.)

There’s no indication that any of that happened in this case. (And as Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer explain, this is hardly the only situation in which established procedural norms, including the role of OLC, have been disregarded in the past three weeks.) From all that appears, the Civil Division simply took it upon itself to disregard the longstanding DOJ views with a dismissive wave of its hand.

[1] Perhaps most notably, DOJ is right to note that if the term “subject to the jurisdiction [of the United States]” means being bound to comply with U.S. law and being “in the allegiance and under the protection of the country,” Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. at 693, it is difficult to square that reading with some of the “exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself)” to the “ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory” that the Fourteenth Amendment “affirms,” id,—particularly for persons born in the U.S. to Native American parents on Indian territory and persons born in the U.S. to foreign ministers. There’s no dispute that the framers of the Citizenship Clause intended that such persons would not be citizens by virtue of their place of birth—perhaps because the federal government has consented to some limits on its authority to enforce federal law against them. Even so, DOJ is right that such persons are subject to federal law in some respects—in the sense that they have a legal obligation to comply with it and that they’re protected by certain aspects of it—and therefore it’s a challenge to explain just why the plain terms of the Clause were thought to be sufficient to establish such exceptions.

That said, the historical exceptions do not extend to the categories of persons described in Section 1 of the Trump Executive Order. What’s more, and in contrast to persons covered by those exceptions, the federal government may and does enforce all of its laws against the persons described in the Executive Order, just as it does with respect to other citizens.

[2] DOJ emphasizes the fact that the Court described Wong Kim Ark’s parents as having had “a permanent domicile and residence in the United States,” 169 U.S. at 653, when Wong Kim Ark was born in 1873. (That characterization was taken from stipulated facts offered by the parties. As the Court knew, however, see id. at 652, Wong Kim Ark’s parents did not reside in the U.S. “permanently”—they returned to China in 1890. Thus, the Court’s use of the word “permanent” presumably meant indefinite.) That will also be true, however, of many of the parents of persons described in the Trump Executive Order: They will have had children after living in the United States for an extended period—in many cases even longer than Wong Kim Ark’s parents (who are unlikely to have entered the United States many years before the birth in 1873)—with no plans to leave.

DOJ asserts (p. 11) that the term “domicile” was understood in 1898 “to have two components—presence that is both permanent and lawful.” DOJ cites no authority at all for that assertion—let alone to support the notion that the Court’s holding in Wong Kim Ark depended upon residence that was either “permanent” or “lawful.” In any event, as noted above, Wong Kim Ark’s parents’ residence was no more “permanent” than that of many parents described in the Trump Executive Order. Moreover, the “domicile” of the parents covered by E.O. 14160 is not unlawful. Although some of those parents might have entered the United States unlawfully (8 U.S.C. 1325(a) makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to enter the United States “at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers”), they violate no law by living in a particular place.

IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order on birthright citizenship in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC

Ethics concerns surround Musk's dual role as defense CEO and federal employee

Natalie Alms and Nick Wakeman — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500
Elon Musk's recent designation as a “special government employee” only adds to the potential for conflicts of interest in the Trump administration, ethics experts said.

Musk, who is running the White House's DOGE effort, is also CEO of SpaceX, which has received about $3.3 billion in unclassified prime revenue over the past 12 months, according to USASpending.gov. Ethics rules require federal employees to recuse themselves from any decision that they know can affect their financial interests.

In general, a special government employee serves in an advisory capacity to lend their expertise on a temporary basis. They can serve up to 130 days per year.

Richard Painter, a former White House lawyer and prominent government-ethics expert, said Musk might be susceptible to criminal prosecution if he does not recuse himself.

“I don’t think the ethics lawyer is following Elon Musk all over the place to make sure he is following the rules, but it is a criminal statute, so we better be careful,” said Painter, now a professor at MidAmerican Nazarene University. “He’s got to watch himself on this.”

President Trump can give Musk a waiver of the criminal conflict-of-interest law. But Painter said that move is very rare and should be publicly disclosed.

The White House has said that Musk has “abided by all applicable federal laws.”

Musk’s financial-disclosure forms are confidential, but the databases of the federal Office of Government Ethics should indicate whether he has filed Form 450 disclosures. Those forms are not showing up so far.

The disclosure form requires a wide range of information on assets and sources of income, including for a spouse and dependent children. Other required information includes liabilities and gifts and travel reimbursement.

In the past 12 months, SpaceX and its Starlink satellite-communications subsidiary have received contracts worth $1.7 billion from NASA, $1.3 billion from the Air Force, and $199.2 million from the Defense Information Systems Agency. No other agency has had more than 0.01% of SpaceX’s contract obligations, according to USASpending.gov. The X social-media platform does not appear to have significant federal revenue.

Musk’s activity as a special government employee is uncharted territory, because he has moved well beyond the advisory role most such employees play. As leader of the Department of Government Efficiency effort, he has sent people into a wide variety of agencies. He is targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Education Department is also a target of Musk. DOGE officials also won a standoff with the Treasury Department and gained access to U.S. financial systems, which allows them to see any unclassified financial transaction by the government. This includes Social Security payments, payroll and benefits for federal employees, and payments to contractors.

Within the past two days, the White House has started to call Musk a special government employee after receiving questions about his legal authority for his actions.

Painter said a court could compel the release of Musk's financial-disclosure forms if the government were sued by someone who could prove standing to press the case. Such an argument might focus on Musk working more than the number of days allowed and “he’s carrying out functions that aren’t really special government employee functions,” he said. “Therefore, under the Ethics of Government Act of 1978, his financial disclosure form should be publicly available.”

Painter expects that kind of challenge to come if Musk's actions continue to go beyond consulting and advice.

“I could see some judge saying, 'This is not a special government employee',” he said.
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Ethics concerns surround Musk's dual role as defense CEO, federal employee

Natalie Alms and Nick Wakeman — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:00:00 -0500
Elon Musk's recent designation as a “special government employee” only adds to the potential for conflicts of interest in the Trump administration, ethics experts said.

Musk, who is running the White House's DOGE effort, is also CEO of SpaceX, which has received about $3.3 billion in unclassified prime revenue over the past 12 months, according to USASpending.gov. Ethics rules require federal employees to recuse themselves from any decision that they know can affect their financial interests.

In general, a special government employee serves in an advisory capacity to lend their expertise on a temporary basis. They can serve up to 130 days per year.

Richard Painter, a former White House lawyer and prominent government-ethics expert, said Musk might be susceptible to criminal prosecution if he does not recuse himself.

“I don’t think the ethics lawyer is following Elon Musk all over the place to make sure he is following the rules, but it is a criminal statute, so we better be careful,” said Painter, now a professor at MidAmerican Nazarene University. “He’s got to watch himself on this.”

President Trump can give Musk a waiver of the criminal conflict-of-interest law. But Painter said that move is very rare and should be publicly disclosed.

The White House has said that Musk has “abided by all applicable federal laws.”

Musk’s financial-disclosure forms are confidential, but the databases of the federal Office of Government Ethics should indicate whether he has filed Form 450 disclosures. Those forms are not showing up so far.

The disclosure form requires a wide range of information on assets and sources of income, including for a spouse and dependent children. Other required information includes liabilities and gifts and travel reimbursement.

In the past 12 months, SpaceX and its Starlink satellite-communications subsidiary have received contracts worth $1.7 billion from NASA, $1.3 billion from the Air Force, and $199.2 million from the Defense Information Systems Agency. No other agency has had more than 0.01% of SpaceX’s contract obligations, according to USASpending.gov. The X social-media platform does not appear to have significant federal revenue.

Musk’s activity as a special government employee is uncharted territory, because he has moved well beyond the advisory role most such employees play. As leader of the Department of Government Efficiency effort, he has sent people into a wide variety of agencies. He is targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Education Department is also a target of Musk. DOGE officials also won a standoff with the Treasury Department and gained access to U.S. financial systems, which allows them to see any unclassified financial transaction by the government. This includes Social Security payments, payroll and benefits for federal employees, and payments to contractors.

Within the past two days, the White House has started to call Musk a special government employee after receiving questions about his legal authority for his actions.

Painter said a court could compel the release of Musk's financial-disclosure forms if the government were sued by someone who could prove standing to press the case. Such an argument might focus on Musk working more than the number of days allowed and “he’s carrying out functions that aren’t really special government employee functions,” he said. “Therefore, under the Ethics of Government Act of 1978, his financial disclosure form should be publicly available.”

Painter expects that kind of challenge to come if Musk's actions continue to go beyond consulting and advice.

“I could see some judge saying, 'This is not a special government employee',” he said.
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Marines aim to buy more carrier-based F-35s, fewer VTOLs

Audrey Decker — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:55:17 -0500
The Marine Corps plans to double its buy of the carrier-borne F-35C variant and scale back its buy of the short-takeoff-vertical-landing F-35B, according to a new aviation plan from the service.

The service’s total F-35 buy of 420 aircraft remains unchanged, but the service will now buy 280 F-35Bs instead of the planned 353 jets, and 140 F-35Cs instead of the planned 67 jets, according to the 2025 Marine Aviation Plan released Monday. This means the Marines will field 12 F-35B squadrons and eight F-35C squadrons. Notably, the plan also expands the size of F-35 squadrons from 10 to 12 fighters.

In a statement, Lockheed Martin said, “We support the U.S. Marine Corps’ decision to adjust to an F-35 fleet configuration that best allows them to fulfill their critical missions with the world’s most advanced aircraft.”

The decision to buy more F-35Cs suggests a “greater prioritization of carrier-based operations”, and a desire to fast-track the integration of the jets with forces in the Indo-Pacific region, said Jon Hemler, a military aerospace analyst with Forecast International.

But there were a few surprises in the plan, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The plan calls for no cuts to overall F-35 purchases, even though former Commandant Gen. David Berger signaled that the aircraft’s cost and vulnerabilities might make it a poor fit for Force Design 2030, Cancian said.

The plan also lacks any expansion of plans to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, Cancian said.

“At one time, the Marine Corps was saying that 40 percent of its aircraft would be uncrewed. Whereas the Army has about 200 MQ-9s, the Air Force about 250, while the Marine Corps has only 18,” he noted.

The document, which is the service's first public update to its aviation plans in three years, details an effort called “Project Eagle”—a “strategic path” for Marine aviation over the next 15 years.

“Our strategy, Project Eagle, marks Marine Aviation’s future path requiring a focus on sustaining and enhancing the aviation capabilities the Marine Corps trusts and relies on. As multiple platforms transition, we will continue to modernize our fixed, rotary, and unmanned fleets to deliver the sustained reach and lethality combatant commanders need,” deputy commandant for aviation Lt. Gen. Bradford Gering said in the document.
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Was a Guantánamo Confession Voluntary? A Judge Will Soon Decide.

Carol Rosenberg — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:26:33 -0500
The 9/11 case is at a crossroads in the long running challenge over whether a key confession is tainted by C.I.A. torture

F.B.I. Agents File Suit to Prevent Trump Team From Disclosing Their Identities

Charlie Savage — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:02:43 -0500
Employees who participated in the Jan. 6 investigations contended in two lawsuits that they believed the administration intended to reveal their identities, endangering them and their families.

EE. UU. se dispone a trasladar a Guantánamo a personas migrantes vía aérea

Hamed Aleaziz and Eric Schmitt — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 16:33:21 -0500
La decisión de enviar a migrantes de Estados Unidos a Guantánamo supone un cambio en la forma en que el país trata a las personas que deporta.

Defense One Radio, Ep. 172: The Air Force's force-design leader

Audrey Decker — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 16:11:50 -0500

Google Pla Apple Podcasts

Guest:

Air Force Maj. Gen. Joseph Kunkel, director of Force Design, Integration and Wargaming at Air Force Futures; he's interviewed by Defense One air warfare reporter Audrey Decker.

Related viewing:

"AI in the Skies," January 28, 2025.

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Trump’s anti-DEI efforts damage national security, former officials say

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0500
In the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. government embarked on sweeping purges of federal employees deemed security risks. While the Red Scare targeted suspected communists, the lesser-known "Lavender Scare" saw the mass dismissal of gay and lesbian federal workers, especially within the State Department.

Under the pretext that their sexual orientation made them susceptible to blackmail and disloyalty, thousands of government employees were investigated, fired, or forced to resign.

More than a half-century later, echoes of the Lavender Scare are reverberating through federal agencies as President Donald Trump and his appointees scuttle programs that focus on recruiting and retaining members of marginalized communities. The president, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others argue that DEI efforts have divided and demoralized the members of Defense Department and the intelligence community.

But some national-security observers and former officials say that the anti-DEI efforts themselves are doing harm.

“I think what we’re seeing now is just too hard of a swing of the pendulum,” said Mark S. Zaid, a prominent national-security attorney. “What’s happening now is devastating to morale and so harmful to national security because it’s hurting the individuals inside the agencies.”

A diverse workforce is essential to effective cybersecurity, which requires not just technical but also human and cultural factors, one former senior White House cybersecurity official said. By understanding how people’s behaviors and societal dynamics interact with technology, the U.S. can better identify risks and craft solutions, they said.

“If DEI-focused staff and programs don’t create pathways for people from rural communities, women, people of color and other underrepresented groups into national-security spaces, we lose out on the benefit of the innovation and increased effectiveness that comes from differing viewpoints and lived experiences,” said the former official. “Having a diverse team is the best way to see beyond ‘normal’ behavior.”

Being an outsider in the national security establishment is extremely challenging, said one former Pentagon official who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. In their first year on the job handling communications for a defense secretary, they described colleagues being “incredibly brusque” with them.

“I got a lot of comments that boiled down to ‘my wife’s hair dresser is a homosexual,’ or ‘my cousin’s a homosexual and interior designer,’” the former official said. “Ok, cool. Are you also going to tell me that your accountant is a Jew or that your dry cleaner is Chinese?”

They said the purge of DEI initiatives presages the return of a monoculture in the U.S. armed forces. “It’s raising the premise that if you’re not a straight white man…you should not in fact be there.”

In 1950, around 93 percent of veterans were white, according to Census Bureau data published in late 2023. That figure is now around 74 percent.

One former State Department official described the moves as “corrosive” to the reputation of the nation on the world stage because it doesn’t demonstrate a willingness to value contributions of people with heritage from other nations and cultures. Foreign adversaries could use anti-DEI efforts to undermine U.S. credibility on human rights and portray American institutions as hypocritical on issues of equality and inclusion, they said.

Soviet propagandists routinely used images of racial discrimination in America — notably, police brutality against Black civil rights activists in the 1960s — to argue that the U.S. was hypocritical in its promotion of democracy.

“We provided the truth that [the Soviets] used against us in many parts of the world from the treatment of some Americans. This will do the same,” said the ex-State official.

Eliminating employee-resource groups that support members of diverse communities will decrease retention, said Zaid and former officials.

“Historic cultural affinity groups are really important inside the agencies and other organizations. As humans … it helps us develop security, one-on-one, of being able to talk and associate with like-minded people,” Zaid said.

He said those groups are especially important for agents working on a non-official cover basis — used to describe operatives who work undercover without official ties to their government — meaning that they have especially intensive jobs with highly classified markings whose details can’t even be shared with close family or a therapist.

As well, employee-resource groups can open opportunities for leadership, skill development, and networking, which can help advance careers and reduce turnover, according to data compiled by the U.S. Commerce Chamber.

A homogenous national-security workforce would severely hamper U.S. intelligence operations in several ways, former officials said. In the field, spies would struggle to blend into diverse populations, compromising their ability to gather crucial information. Recruiting or retaining linguists with native-level fluency in nuanced languages like Russian or Chinese — often cultivated in specific cultural contexts and family settings — would become a major obstacle, these people add.

Ultimately, anti-DEI efforts will narrow U.S. understanding of global challenges and hinder effective foreign policy strategies, they argued.

My identity "wasn’t even a consideration when I was hired,” said one former member of the intelligence community who is LGBTQ+. “The reality of the situation is that if you want to be competitive in a global world, you need to find people who have an understanding of backgrounds, languages, customs and cultures. You can’t build an intelligence community that’s capable of recruiting assets in different countries by being isolationist and xenophobic."

The White House did not return a request for comment asking whether it has weighed these concerns in its decision to slash these programs.
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U.S. Set to Fly Migrants to Guantánamo Bay

Hamed Aleaziz and Eric Schmitt — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 14:19:17 -0500
The decision to send migrants from the United States to Guantánamo Bay is a change in how the country handles people it deports.

‘Accidental’ F.B.I. Chief Builds a Following as Agency’s Defender

Adam Goldman — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 12:42:49 -0500
Brian Driscoll was accidentally catapulted into the acting director’s chair on Jan. 20 and has defended the bureau from the potential of mass firings, inspiring memes and satirical clips.

Accidental’ F.B.I. Chief Builds a Following as Agency’s Defender

Adam Goldman — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 12:42:48 -0500
Brian Driscoll was accidentally catapulted into the acting director’s chair on Jan. 20 and has defended the bureau from the potential of mass firings, inspiring memes and satirical clips.

The D Brief: China’s retaliatory tariffs; ‘Constitutional crisis’ in DC; ‘No improvement’ in F-35 software; Latest natsec nominees; And a bit more.

Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 11:20:15 -0500
President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico have been delayed 30 days, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa announced Monday afternoon, several hours after Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum forged a similar agreement with the White House.

What’s new…sort of: Trudeau agreed to appoint a border security chief and to proceed with a $1.3 billion border plan, which officials in Ottawa had already announced on December 17. The plans call for “new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl,” Trudeau said. “Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border” with the U.S., he added.

Canada also agreed to “list cartels as terrorists” and “launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering,” said Trudeau. “I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million,” he said.

ICYMI: Mexico agreed to send 10,000 troops to its border with the U.S. in order to delay Trump’s 25% tariffs for 30 days. Trump wasted little time congratulating himself for extracting the concession from America’s southern neighbor, but he neglected to mention Monday that Mexico already had 15,000 troops along its border with the U.S., as Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post pointed out.

Mexico also agreed to send 10,000 troops to the U.S. border back in 2021, under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and just three months into President Biden’s tenure. That decision resulted from multi-national talks on regional migration, a notable contrast from Trump’s choice to economically coerce America’s closest neighbors—and send stocks around the world tumbling in the process.

Big-picture consideration: “Ultimately, it seems Mexico conceded very little in order to stave off potential economic doom,” the New York Times reports. What’s more, “The U.S. government even agreed to do something Ms. Sheinbaum has repeatedly called for, even if the agreement was light on details: working together to stop the flow of arms into Mexico.” Trump did not emphasize that development in public remarks following his conversation with Sheinbaum.

Developing: Trump’s tariffs on China are still in place. His 10% tariffs affect all Chinese products coming into the U.S. and officially began at midnight.

China responded with “a 15% tariff on coal and liquefied natural gas products as well as a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars imported from the U.S.,” the Associated Press reports. Those tariffs are set to begin next Monday.

Beijing also announced new export controls on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium. Those “could put some significant harm on our economy,” one expert told AP. U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to speak sometime later today, the New York Times reports.

Relatedly:

“China announces measures against Google, other US firms, as trade tensions escalate,” Reuters reports;

And “S&P 500 rises as investors shake off Trump's trade battles, Nasdaq gains 1% led by Palantir,” CNBC reported Tuesday morning.

New: Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been made acting administrator of USAID, ABC News reported Monday amid the fallout of how the richest man in the world shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, over the weekend.

Related reading: “Rubio unveils plan to review and potentially abolish USAID,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday in a dispatch long on talking points but short on detail.

Opposition says: “We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,” said Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, standing before the USAID building on Monday. “And that’s going to become real clear,” he said.

Another perspective on Musk’s USAID takeover: “There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest: their belief that if they can make us weaker in the world, if they can elevate their business partners all around the world, they will gain the benefit,” said Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, standing beside Raskin on Monday.

“But there’s another reason this is happening,” said Murphy. “They’re shuttering agencies and sending employees home in order to create the illusion that they’re saving money, in order to…pass a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations.”

A note on procedure: “If [Republicans] wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development, for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change,” said historian Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College. “But they are not doing that,” she wrote Monday.

“The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and [Elon Musk] a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.” However, she said, “Republicans are allowing Musk to run amok.”

Why this is problematic: “Permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution” and “makes Congress itself superfluous,” Richardson said.

“This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today,” Sen. Murphy declared. “Let's call it what it is,” he said, and stressed, “The people get to decide how we defend the United States of America. The people get to decide how their taxpayer money is spent. Elon Musk does not get to decide.”

Sen. Schumer: Elon Musk is leading “an unelected shadow government [that] is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” the minority leader said on the floor of the Senate Monday. “Trump does not have the authority to erase an independent agency created by Congress. Nor can the Department of State absorb USAID,” he said. “Republicans in Congress must join us to take action to restore the rule of law and stop any potential lawbreaking” by Musk and his allies, Schumer added—though it’s unclear at best if any Republicans are willing to reach across the aisle to preserve the rule of law.

For what it’s worth, Musk is now officially a “special government employee,” the White House announced Monday. What that means exactly, however, is not quite clear in terms of his weekend efforts to shut down a congressionally authorized U.S. agency. The Justice Department classifies such an employee as “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.”

“I can confirm he's a special government employee,” said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking to reporters on Monday. “I can also confirm that he has abided by all applicable federal laws,” she alleged, and added, “As for his security clearance, I'm not sure, but I can check.”

Another wrinkle for Musk’s classification: Conflict-of-interest laws are murky, because as a SGE, Musk isn’t required to publicly file financial disclosures. As one government-ethics professor explained to Reuters, “If they do not make public his financial disclosure, it may make it impossible for the public and nongovernmental organizations and journalists to hold him and the government accountable and make sure he does not participate in matters where he has conflicts.”

Why it matters: “Critics have argued that [Musk’s] ownership of Tesla and SpaceX represents a conflict of interest in his review of government spending and regulation,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday, “particularly in his dealings with government agencies that have in the past decided whether to award contracts to his companies or laid out rules that influence his companies’ actions and profits.”

Developing: Senate Approps Dem vows a “blanket hold” on Trump’s State Department nominees. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations’ Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, announced in a statement Monday, “Until and unless this brazenly authoritarian action is reversed and USAID is functional again, I will be placing a blanket hold on all of the Trump administration’s State Department nominees. This is self-inflicted chaos of epic proportions that will have dangerous consequences all around the world.”

If that sounds familiar, “During the Biden administration, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.) blocked Defense Department nominees because he opposed the Pentagon paying troops so they could travel for abortion-related services,” the Wall Street Journal reminds readers. That’s not all. “Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) also slowed down the State confirmation process because former President Joe Biden allowed Germany to complete a pipeline to receive Russian energy.”

Busting a stubborn U.S. foreign-aid myth: Going back at least 15 years, Americans have often thought that the country’s foreign aid takes up an astounding 25% of the U.S. federal budget. That’s not true, however. “The real figure is closer to 1%,” or $68 billion, the Economist reported late last week after Trump and his surrogates froze U.S. foreign aid ahead of Musk’s USAID takeover. That $68 billion is in fact “a very modest 0.25% of [U.S.] GDP,” the British publication points out.

Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1958, the keel of USS Enterprise (CVN 65), the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was laid at Newport News, Virginia.

Around the Defense Department

Navy P-8s surveillance planes are monitoring the U.S.-Mexico border, the service’s 3rd Fleet announced in a social media post Monday.

Update: More than 150 soldiers and Marines arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities, U.S. Southern Command officials said in a statement Monday. “The deployed service members include U.S. Marines with 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2d Marine Division and elements from U.S. Southern Command, and U.S. Army South,” SOUTHCOM said.

Related reading: “Trump plans to invoke obscure 18th century wartime law in bid for mass deportations,” Reuters reported Monday.

A recent report from the Pentagon's test office found the F-35 program is still struggling to develop and test software, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reported Monday.

Background: Development issues have plagued Technology Refresh-3, a software and hardware upgrade vital for Block 4 improvements. Originally slated to be ready in April 2023, the upgrade has been delayed multiple times, and officials have been hesitant to nail down a date for full combat capability. Software challenges led the Pentagon to pause Lockheed jet deliveries for a year. And while deliveries have since resumed, the new planes have a "truncated" version of TR-3.

According to the latest annual report, the program “has shown no improvement in meeting schedule and performance timelines for developing and testing software designed to address deficiencies and add new capabilities.” Additionally, the report found the F-35 Joint Program Office has not “adequately planned” for combat testing of TR-3, and that full “operational testing” of TR-3 won’t happen until next year, Decker writes. Continue reading, here.

Obscure Yemeni official discussed Houthi operations, propaganda with CENTCOM. The exiled Yemeni government’s Information Minister Moammar bin Mutahar Al-Eryani visited the U.S. military’s Central Command recently, but it’s not clear when because CENTCOM did not specify in its Monday statement regarding the visit. “The visit and discussion are part of an effort to combat the Houthi's systematic use of disinformation and propaganda to destabilize Yemen and the broader region,” CENTCOM said in its brief remarks.

Trump 2.0

Fired Trump speechwriter tapped to run the State Department’s worldwide public diplomacy efforts. AP: “Darren Beattie confirmed in a message to readers of the conservative website Revolver for which he worked that he would be taking up the post of acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. It was not clear if he would be formally nominated to take the job on a more permanent basis, which would require Senate confirmation.

In 2020, Trump’s appointment of Beattie to a federal commission on heritage abroad was harshly criticized by the Anti-Defamation League, whose CEO said, “It is downright shocking that the White House has appointed Darren Beattie, who once attended an event with white supremacists and participated in a panel discussion with white nationalist Peter Brimelow, to serve as a member of a commission specifically created to help preserve the memory of Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust.” (The page no longer appears on the ADL website; find an archived copy here.)

His open association with white supremacists isn’t the only concern, according to Sen. Schumer: “Beattie has long pushed the Chinese Communist Party line on the Uyghur genocide. He has repeated Russia’s propaganda on the Ukraine war. He even advocated that the U.S. make a deal to allow China to take over Taiwan. And now he has one of the most senior positions within the Department of State and oversees a large swath of American diplomatic work.”

Trump picks ex-CIA officer to lead the National Counter Terrorism Center. Joe Kent is a two-time political candidate in Washington state, former Green Beret and CIA officer, Oregon’s KGW8 reported Tuesday. “During his 2022 congressional campaign, he called for defunding the FBI and described the COVID-19 vaccine as ‘experimental gene therapy.’ He also supported lawsuits claiming vote-flipping in his district, though these were dismissed by federal courts as ‘frivolous.’” Read on, here.

Sean Parn

The Just Security Podcast: Diving Deeper into DeepSeek

Brianna Rosen — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:05:47 -0500

The tech industry is calling this AI’s “Sputnik Moment” – and President Donald Trump has said it’s a “wake-up call” for U.S. companies. We’re talking about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that has rapidly emerged as a formidable contender in the global AI race.

DeepSeek is making waves for developing powerful open-source language models that rival leading U.S. competitors – at a fraction of the cost and with far lower computational requirements.

The DeepSeek saga raises urgent questions about China’s AI ambitions, the future of U.S. technological leadership, and the strategic implications of open-source AI models. How did DeepSeek get here? What does its rise mean for competition between China and the United States? And how should U.S. policymakers respond?

Today, we’re going beyond the headlines to dive deeper into DeepSeek. We’ll explore popular myths and misconceptions surrounding DeepSeek, the technology behind it, and what it means for national security and U.S. policy going forward. Joining the show to unpack these developments are leading experts in the field: Dr. Keegan McBride, Lauren Wagner, and Lennart Heim

Keegan is a Lecturer at the University of Oxford and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Lauren is a researcher and investor, now with ARC Prize, previously worked at Meta and Google. And Lennart is a researcher at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

This episode was hosted by Dr. Brianna Rosen, Director of Just Security’s AI and Emerging Technologies Initiative and Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford.

Show Notes:

Lennart Heim (LinkedIn – Website – X)

Keegan McBride (LinkedIn – X)

Brianna Rosen (LinkedIn – X – Bluesky)

Lauren Wagner (LinkedIn — X)

Lennart’s Just Security article with Konstantin F. Pilz (Bluesky – LinkedIn – Website – X) “What DeepSeek Really Changes About AI Competition”

Keegan’s Just Security article “Open Source AI: The Overlooked National Security Imperative”

Just Security’s Artificial Intelligence coverage

Just Security’s Tech Policy under Trump 2.0 Series

Music: “Broken” by David Bullard from Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/david-bullard/broken (License code: OSC7K3LCPSGXISVI)

Listen to the episode, with a transcript available soon, by clicking below.

The post The Just Security Podcast: Diving Deeper into DeepSeek appeared first on Just Security.

What Happens After the Most Powerful Media Institutions Keep Surrendering to Trump

Jameel Jaffer — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:05:07 -0500

Over the past few weeks, many of the largest American media institutions and technology companies have prostrated themselves, one after another, before Donald Trump, offering obscene sums of money to settle feeble or frivolous lawsuits that they had previously insisted they would contest. American media institutions—including newspapers, broadcasters, and social media companies—enjoy constitutional freedoms that are the envy of their counterparts around the world, but it seems that many of these institutions simply lack the will or courage to assert them. I wrote about this dispiriting and ominous phenomenon for the New York Times:

Mr. Trump captured the spirit of our times when he observed in December that, “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” but “in this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” Certainly, some of the nation’s most powerful media institutions seem to have concluded that it is simply not in their commercial interests to inconvenience the president, even if sparing him inconvenience means abandoning their own First Amendment rights.

As I write in the essay, the settlements that media organizations are entering into with Trump weaken the liberties on which the media organizations depend. They will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits. And each settlement also increases the pressure on other media organizations to settle their own disputes with Trump or find other ways of ingratiating themselves with him. Soon, I fear, “it may be unusual and even more perilous for a news organization to protest when it is accused by the president of reportorial recklessness, however outlandish the charge might be.”

Please read the whole essay here.

IMAGE: President Donald J Trump speaks with reporters and signs executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on Thursday, Jan 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The post What Happens After the Most Powerful Media Institutions Keep Surrendering to Trump appeared first on Just Security.

Early Edition: February 4, 2025

Weronika Galka — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 07:55:52 -0500

Signup to receive the Early Edition in your inbox here.

A curated weekday guide to major news and developments over the past 24 hours. Here’s today’s news:

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACTIONS

President Trump yesterday said that Elon Musk “can’t do and won’t do anything without [White House] approval.” Separately, White House sources said that Musk is a “special government employee” and has a top secret security clearance. Sareen Habeshian reports for Axios; Kaitlan Collins and Tierney Sneed report for CNN.

Elon Musk and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees do not control the Treasury payment system, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Republican lawmakers in a closed-door meeting yesterday. Jasper Goodman and Michael Stratford report for POLITICO.

FBI executives will turn over the names of FBI personnel involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack cases to the Justice Department to comply with what the FBI General Counsel deemed a lawful order, according to FBI officials. Ken Dilanian, Jonathan Dienst, Ryan J. Reilly, and Tom Winter report for NBC News.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin (IL), received “credible information” that at least 25 FBI special agents in charge might be removed this week and that a loyalty test asking about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol attack is being implemented in the leadership hiring process, according to a letter to the acting Attorney General and the acting FBI Director signed by all Democratic members of the committee. Derek Hawkins, Perry Stein, and Jeremy Roebuck report for the Washington Post.

The acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C, Ed Martin, yesterday stated that he is probing reports of individuals committing “acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.” Martin also asked Musk to “utilize [Martin] and [his] staff to assist in protecting DOGE work.” Martin made the public announcement on X. Andrew Goudsward reports for Reuters; Rebecca Beitsch reports for the Hill;

The State Department has fired about 60 contractors working for its democracy, human rights, and labor bureau, former and current U.S. officials said. Edward Wong, Michael Crowley, and Alan Rappeport report for the New York Times.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday named Darren Beattie, who claimed the FBI was responsible for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, as acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Beattie was previously dismissed from his job as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration after he spoke at a White nationalist meeting. Tavleen Tarrant and Dareh Gregorian report for NBC News.

Trump yesterday appointed Michael Ellis as CIA Deputy Director. Isaac Stanley-Becker and Warren P. Strobel report for the Washington Post.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACTIONS — USAID DEVELOPMENTS

Rubio yesterday announced that he has taken over as the acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and notified Congress that USAID is currently under review pending potential reorganization. Laura Kelly reports for the Hill; Michael Crowley, Karoun Demirjian, and Edward Wong report for the New York Times.

A group of House and Senate Democrats were denied entry to the USAID headquarters yesterday, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) said. Andrew Solender reports for Axios.

U.S. FOREIGN AFFAIRS

El Salvador has offered to house violent U.S. criminals and receive deportees “including those of US citizenship and legal residents” in exchange for a fee, Secretary of State Rubio said yesterday. It is unclear whether the U.S. government will accept the offer, which legal experts say could be unlawful. Stefano Pozzebon, Jessie Yeung, Marlon Sorto, and Lex Harvey report for CNN.

Trump yesterday agreed to pause the imposition of tariffs on Mexico and Canada for 30 days after both countries pledged they would intensify efforts to prevent migrants and illicit drugs from entering the United States. David J. Lynch and Mary Beth Sheridan report for the Washington Post.

China today retaliated against Trump’s tariffs by imposing levies on a number of U.S. goods and opening an antitrust investigation into Google. Katrina Northrop, Lyric Li, and Vic Chiang report for the Washington Post.

Trump will sign an executive order today withdrawing the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council and stopping funding for the U.N. aid agency for Palestinians (UNRWA), a White House official said. Megan Messerly reports for POLITICO.

New U.S. intelligence suggests Iran is exploring a faster, cruder approach to develop an atomic bomb, U.S. officials said, adding that Teheran has not yet decided to develop such a weapon. David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes report for the New York Times.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LITIGATION

A D.C. federal judge yesterday issued a restraining order temporarily blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze federal funding, saying the move is potentially unconstitutional “by interfering with Congress’s appropriation of federal funds.” Charlie Savage reports for the New York Times.

Unions representing federal workers yesterday sued the Treasury Department and its head, Scott Bessent, alleging that Elon Musk’s access to the federal payment system amounts to an unlawful disclosure of the personal and financial information of millions of people. Chris Cameron reports for the New York Times.

Immigrant advocacy groups yesterday filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order purporting to suspend migrants’ ability to apply for asylum in the United States. Maria Sacchetti reports for the Washington Post.

[Editor’s note: Readers may be interested in Just Security’s Litigation Tracker aggregating the legal challenges to the Trump administration’s actions.]

OTHER U.S. DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENTS

The Senate yesterday voted 59-38 to confirm Chris Wright as Energy Secretary. Kati Perry and Szu Yu Chen report for the Washington Post.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) yesterday said he would place a “blanket hold” on all of Trump’s State Department nominees until the Trump administration stops undermining USAID. Alexander Ward reports for the Wall Street Journal.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) yesterday requested the NPR and PBS CEOs to testify before a DOGE panel over what she described as the “systemically biased content” produced by the federally-funded outlets. Erin Doherty and Andrew Solender report for Axios.

Trump’s Commerce Department nominee Howard Lutnick yesterday said he would review the former Biden administration’s restrictions on firearms exports. David Shepardson reports for Reuters.

Some migrants arrested in the Trump administration’s crackdown have already been released back into the United States on a monitoring program due to detention facility space constraints, sources say. Julia Ainsley reports for NBC News.

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR — U.S. AND REGIONAL RESPONSE

The Trump administration has asked Congress to approve new transfers of roughly $1 billion worth of bombs and other military hardware to Israel, according to U.S. officials. Jared Malsin and Nancy A. Youssef report for the Wall Street Journal.

The Foreign Ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, together with a senior Palestinian official this week sent a joint letter to Secretary Rubio opposing plans to displace Palestinians from Gaza and demanding Palestinian involvement in its reconstruction. Barak Ravid reports for Axios.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

A Moscow explosion yesterday killed the leader of a pro-Russian paramilitary group in eastern Ukraine, according to Russian media. Ukraine has yet to comment on the blast. Laura Gozzi reports for BBC News.

Trump yesterday said he wants to strike a minerals-for-aid deal with Ukraine, with Kyiv “secur[ing]” U.S. aid with its “rare earths and other things.” Constant Méheut reports for the New York Times.

Russian armed forces have reportedly killed an “alarming” number of Ukrainian POWs in the last 6 months, the United Nations’ Human Rights Monitoring Mission said yesterday, citing photo material analysis and interviews with witnesses. Csongor Körömi reports for POLITICO.

SYRIA

A car bomb attack killed at least 20 people in northern Syria yesterday, the Syrian presidency said. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack, the second to strike the town of Manbij in a week. Reuters reports.

Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan are expected to discuss a bilateral defense pact today, sources say. Suleiman Al-Khalidi, Maya Gebeily, and Khalil Ashawi report for Reuters.

OTHER GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS

The rebel alliance fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo unilaterally declared a “humanitarian ceasefire” starting today. Will Ross and Hafsa Khalil report for BBC News.

Rwandan President and commander-in-chief of the Rwandan Defense Force Paul Kagame yesterday said he “doesn’t know” if Rwandan troops are in east Congo. Larry Madowo, Catherine Nicholls, Nimi Princewill, and Sarah Dean report for CNN.

The mayor of the occupied West Bank’s Jenin city yesterday compared Israel’s assault on the Jenin Refugee Camp to the war in Gaza, stating that 15,000 people have been displaced in the offensive. Kareem Khadder, Zeena Saifi, and Mostafa Salem report for CNN.

Greenland’s lawmakers will today vote on a bill to ban foreign political donations ahead of its April elections. Rebecca Falconer reports for Axios.

The post Early Edition: February 4, 2025 appeared first on Just Security.

Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions

Just Security — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 01:26:19 -0500

This public resource tracks legal challenges to Trump administration actions. If you think we are missing anything, you can email us at lte@justsecurity.org. Special thanks to Just Security Student Staff Editors, Rick Da and Jeremy Venook, and to Matthew Fouracre.

The Tracker is part of the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions

The Tracker was first published on Jan. 29, 2025 and is continually updated.

Topic Executive Action Case Name Complaint Date Filed Case Summary Last Updated

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Birthright Citizenship (Executive Order) New Hampshire Indonesian Community Support v. Donald J. Trump (D.N.H.) Complaint Jan. 20, 2025 Trump’s executive order seeks to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants on the basis that people in the United States illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The ACLU sued the Trump administration on behalf of individuals in New Hampshire who would have their childrens’ citizenship revoked. The ACLU argues that the plain text of the 14th Amendment, as confirmed in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), explicitly grants birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States.

Update 1: On Jan. 23, 2025, responding to State of Washington et al v. Donald J. Trump et al, Judge John Coughenour of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order against the Executive Order. Jan. 31, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Birthright Citizenship (Executive Order) O. Doe; Brazilian Worker Center, Inc; La Colaborativa v. Donald J. Trump et al (D. Mass.) Complaint Jan. 20, 2025 Trump’s executive order seeks to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants on the basis that people in the United States illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” A group of pregnant women whose children would not receive citizenship sued; the plaintiff identified as “O. Doe” lives in Massachusetts and has temporary protected status in the United States. The suit argues that the plain text of the 14th Amendment, as confirmed in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), explicitly grants birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States.

Update 1: On Jan. 23, 2025, responding to State of Washington et al v. Donald J. Trump et al, Judge John Coughenour of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order against the Executive Order. Jan. 31, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Birthright Citizenship (Executive Order) State of New Jersey et al v. Donald J. Trump et al (D. Mass.) Complaint Jan. 21, 2025 Trump’s executive order seeks to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants on the basis that people in the United States illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The attorneys general of 22 states, the District of Columbia, and the City of San Francisco sued to protect residents who would lose their citizenship under the executive order. The suit argues that the plain text of the 14th Amendment, as confirmed in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), explicitly grants birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States.

Update 1: On Jan. 23, 2025, responding to State of Washington et al v. Donald J. Trump et al, Judge John Coughenour of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order against the Executive Order. Jan. 31, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Birthright Citizenship (Executive Order) Casa v. Donald Trump (D. Md.) Complaint Jan. 21, 2025 Trump’s executive order seeks to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants on the basis that people in the United States illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The plaintiffs, including immigrant rights organizations CASA and ASAP, as well as individual immigrant parents, argue that the Executive Order violates the Fourteenth Amendment and federal statute 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a), both of which guarantee citizenship to all persons born in the U.S. The complaint asserts that the executive order exceeds presidential authority and causes irreparable harm by stripping constitutionally protected rights from children born to immigrants (e.g., the right to remain in the United States, access public benefits, and participate fully in civic life) and destabilizes their families, potentially leaving children stateless and separating them from their parents.

Update 1: On Jan. 23, 2025, responding to State of Washington et al v. Donald J. Trump et al, Judge John Coughenour of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order against the Executive Order.

Update 2: On Jan. 27, 2025, Franco Aleman v. Trump (complaint) was consolidated with this case. Feb. 4, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Birthright Citizenship (Executive Order) State of Washington et al v. Donald J. Trump et al (W.D. Wash.) Complaint Jan. 21, 2025 Trump’s executive order seeks to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants on the basis that people in the United States illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Four states sued to protect residents who would lose their citizenship under the executive order. The suit argues that the plain text of the 14th Amendment, as confirmed in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), explicitly grants birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States.

Update 1: On Jan. 23, 2025, Judge John Coughenour of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order against the Executive Order. Feb. 3, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Birthright Citizenship (Executive Order) OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates v. Marco Rubio et al (D.D.C.) Complaint Jan. 30, 2025 Trump’s executive order seeks to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and for the children of parents on lawful temporary visas on the basis that they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. OCA sued Marco Rubio and the heads of other departments and agencies on behalf of at least two pregnant women expected to give birth to children denied citizenship by the order. Both women reside in the United States on lawful, temporary, nonimmigrant visas. OCA argues that the order violates the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment, statutes (8 U.S.C. § 1401 et seq.), and the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706(2). The suit identifies an injured “subclass” of “Targeted Children” denied the privileges and public benefits afforded to U.S. citizens, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. Jan. 31, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Birthright Citizenship (Executive Order) County of Santa Clara v. Trump, et al (N.D. Cal.) Complaint Jan. 30, 2025 Trump’s executive order seeks to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and for the children of parents on lawful temporary visas on the basis that they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. The County of Santa Clara sued to protect residents who would lose their citizenship or whose U.S.-born children will not receive citizenship and to prevent administrative burdens and loss of tax revenues associated with that prospective loss of citizenship. Santa Clara argues that the order violates the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment, statutes (8 U.S.C. § 1401 et seq.), and the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706(2), and seeks declaratory and injunctive relief. Jan. 31, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Immigration policy — punishment of sanctuary cities and states Organized Communities Against Deportations et al v. Benjamine Huffman (Acting Secretary of Homeland Security) et al (N.D. Ill.) Complaint Jan. 25, 2025 Acting Attorney General Benjamine Huffman issued policy guidance that, among other immigration-related policies, instructs the Civil Division of the Department of Justice “to identify state and local laws, policies, and activities that are inconsistent with Executive Branch immigration initiatives and, where appropriate, to take legal action to challenge such laws.” The plaintiffs, Chicago-based immigrant-advocacy organizations, allege that the guidance, and subsequent raids “specifically for the purpose of ending the Plaintiffs’ Sanctuary City advocacy and movement building,” violate the Administrative Procedure Act and the First Amendment. The lawsuit seeks an injunction against the Department of Justice’s guidance. Jan. 31, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Immigration Policy – “Expedited Removal” (Executive Order) Make the Road New York v. Benjamine Huffman (Acting Secretary of Homeland Security) et al (D.D.C.) Complaint Jan. 22, 2025 Trump’s executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security to expand the use of expedited removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to include noncitizens located anywhere in the U.S. who cannot prove they have been continuously present for more than two years. The plaintiff, Make the Road New York (MRNY), argues the rule violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, the INA, and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by subjecting individuals to summary deportation without adequate procedural safeguards. The suit claims the rule is arbitrary, exceeds statutory authority, and disregards legal and constitutional protections against wrongful removal. Jan. 31, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Immigration Policy – “Expedited Removal” (Executive Order) Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services v. Noem (D.D.C.) Complaint Feb. 3, 2025 Trump’s executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security to expand the use of expedited removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to include noncitizens located anywhere in the United States who cannot prove they have been continuously present for more than two years. The plaintiffs, three nonprofit organizations in Texas and Arizona providing legal services and assistance to undocumented individuals or asylum seekers, argue that the order violates the following statutory and constitutional provisions:

the Asylum Statute in the INA, 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1) (by barring noncitizens from applying for asylum in direct contradiction to congressional protections);

the Withholding of Removal Statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3) (by preventing noncitizens from seeking protection from persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion);

the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act (FARRA), 8 U.S.C. § 1231, and the Convention Against Torture (CAT) (by depriving noncitizens of a meaningful opportunity to present CAT claims and shielding them from potential torture);

the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), 8 U.S.C. § 1232(a)(5)(D) (by denying unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries their statutory right to regular removal proceedings);

the INA’s procedural protections for removal, 8 U.S.C. §§ 1101, 1229a, 1225(b) (by overriding mandated removal proceedings and eliminating procedural protections, including credible fear screenings);

the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A) (by implementing policies that are arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law) and § 706(2)(D) (by failing to follow the required rulemaking process before enacting sweeping changes to statutory protections); and

the constitutional separation of powers (by exceeding presidential authority and unlawfully overriding congressionally enacted immigration protections).

The Plaintiffs seek a declaratory judgment that the executive order is unlawful and an injunction stopping its implementation. Feb. 4, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Immigration Policy – Discontinuation of CBP One app (Executive Order) Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center et al v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (D.D.C.) Complaint
Motion for TRO (Jan. 23, 2025) June 12, 2024 The Trump administration executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security to cease operation of the CBP One app, which was created by the Biden administration to enable asylum seekers to schedule appointments to request asylum. The Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the ACLU had previously sued to challenge a Biden administration rule that limited asylum access to those presenting at a port of entry or falling under another narrow exception. In response, the government argued that the CBP One app remained as a pathway by which asylum-seekers could request appointments. In light of the discontinuation of the CBP One app, Las Americas, et al, filed a motion for a temporary restraining order and requested an immediate status conference and leave to file supplemental briefings to address the government’s position. Jan. 31, 2025

Immigration and Citizenship Executive Action: Access of Lawyers to Immigrants in Detention (Executive Order)

The F-35 program’s software development isn’t getting any better, Pentagon report finds

Audrey Decker — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:32:42 -0500
A recent report from the Pentagon's test office found the F-35 program is still struggling to develop and test software, highlighting persistent challenges.

The program “has shown no improvement in meeting schedule and performance timelines for developing and testing software designed to address deficiencies and add new capabilities,” according to the annual Operation Test and Evaluation report, released Jan. 31.

Development issues have plagued Technology Refresh-3, a software and hardware upgrade vital for Block 4 improvements. Originally slated to be ready in April 2023, the upgrade has been delayed multiple times, and officials have been hesitant to nail down a date for full combat capability. Software challenges led the Pentagon to pause Lockheed jet deliveries for a year. And while deliveries have since resumed, the new planes have a "truncated" version of TR-3.

DOT&E said the program “cannot simultaneously work out solutions” to fix software problems on the current TR-2 systems while also developing the software needed to operate the upgraded TR-3 avionics.

[[Related Posts]]

Delays in TR-3 development have also impacted plans to retrofit existing TR-2 jets with new capabilities.

“Challenges added with the TR-3 avionics upgrades, both in development and testing, have caused additional delays to the planned schedules for delivering capabilities in Block 4 for the aircraft in the TR-2 configuration,” the report said.

Additionally, the report found the F-35 Joint Program Office has not “adequately planned” for combat testing of TR-3, and that full "operational testing” of TR-3 won’t happen until next year.

“DOT&E assesses that dedicated operational testing of these aircraft will not occur until mid to late fiscal year 2026, approximately two years after the configuration began delivery to the field,” the report said.

While operational testing is being pushed to 2026, weapons programs can begin fielding systems before completing full operational testing, so it’s possible that TR-3 combat capability could still be deployed this year.

“The F-35 JPO remains focused on working through known risks to deliver TR-3 combat capability in 2025. The capability will continue to be improved in future lots to ensure warfighters have what they need to win in future conflicts,” according to a statement from F-35 Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt.

Beyond software and testing delays, the DOT&E report also identified quality defects in jets coming off Lockheed’s production line, and called for more extensive testing to address cybersecurity vulnerabilities across the fleet.
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Defense Secretary Vows to Use Thousands of Active-Duty Troops to Secure Border

Reyes Mata III and Eric Schmitt — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:25:45 -0500
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Thomas D. Homan, President Trump’s border czar, toured areas near Mexico.

Aircraft Wreckage Is Recovered From Potomac River

Reuters — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:20:19 -0500
Recovery teams worked to pull parts of an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army helicopter out of the Potomac River on Monday.

WINNING: Kursk Stalemate

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 19:24:26 -0500

AIR WEAPONS: Russian Decoy Drones

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 19:23:21 -0500

Guantánamo Bay Prepares for President Trump’s Migrant Surge

Carol Rosenberg and Eric Schmitt — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 18:55:53 -0500
About 300 servicemembers have arrived in recent days as the base faces its most drastic changes since the Pentagon opened a prison there after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Crews Move Closer to Recovering All Bodies in D.C. Crash

Campbell Robertson — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:19:04 -0500
Remains of 55 of the 67 victims have been recovered, officials said on Sunday as they prepared to lift the wreckage of the jet out of the Potomac River on Monday.

Canadian ‘Pirate’ Andean Medjedovic Stole Millions in Crypto, Prosecutors Say

Santul Nerkar — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 16:58:20 -0500
Andean Medjedovic, a former graduate student, is on the run.

‘Offensive bullshit’: Dem lawmakers slam Trump's ‘illegal’ USAID moves

Frank Konkel — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 16:50:00 -0500
Several Democratic lawmakers pushed back Monday at the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, promising to fight the administration and billionaire Elon Musk in court.

USAID headquarters was closed Monday, its website down and most of its employees barred from entering the building by federal law enforcement and unable to access email only hours after Musk — who Trump has designated as a “special government employee” — announced on X that he and Trump “agreed we should shut it down.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Monday he is the new acting administrator of USAID, which oversees humanitarian aid and development in more than 120 countries.

“I’m sorry that you have to put up with this offensive bullshit coming out of this White House,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., speaking directly to federal employees disaffected by Musk’s recent actions through the nascent Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Before setting their sights on USAID, Musk’s DOGE teams reportedly visited and took over operations and some IT systems at several federal agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration and the Treasury Department. “This is illegal, this is wrong, and this is unconstitutional,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyan, D-Va., told a crowd of several hundred. “It takes an act of Congress to shut down USAID, but you know what? Congress will not let this happen.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va, said Democrats would “fight in every way we can, in the courts, in public opinion, with the bully pulpit and in the halls of Congress.”

Connolly’s district, like Subramanyan’s, is home to tens of thousands of federal employees and federal contractors. Musk has vowed to use DOGE to make major reductions in federal spending and headcount.

“We’re here today not only to fight for federal employees who dedicate themselves every day to a humanitarian path, we’re here to save lives,” he added. “I want to say to all the employees: We are with you. We will stand with you, shoulder to shoulder. This may be a long and difficult struggle and fight, but we’re with you.”

The American Foreign Service Association, which represents the men and women of the United States Foreign Service, lambasted the administration’s decision to dismantle USAID.

“This will undermine U.S. national security, may subvert Congressional authority, and demonstrates a lack of respect for the dedication of the development professionals who serve America’s interests abroad,” the association said in a statement. “The abrupt placement of dozens of foreign service officers on administrative leave without notice and proper justification, combined with fear and confusion within the agency, signals a dangerous shift toward reducing a workforce indiscriminately — without considering the harm to U.S. interests and established agency procedures.”

Upon trying to enter USAID’s headquarters, a group of Senate and House Democratic lawmakers were told officials from the front office were not available to meet.
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Nine Experts on the Impact of President Trump’s Pardons and Commutations for January 6 Offenders

Dean Jackson — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 15:57:30 -0500

On the first day of his new administration, President Donald Trump granted clemency to the nearly 1,600 people convicted in connection with the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol. They included individuals convicted of violence against Capitol police officers and extremist leaders such as Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. Rhodes and Tarrio were sentenced to a combined forty years in prison after their convictions for seditious conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump has long cast those convicted and imprisoned for crimes related to the January 6 attack as victims. As a presidential candidate, he made clemency and securing their freedom a campaign promise. But Trump’s decision to release even the most violent figures, including those associated with organized militias, is also consistent with his history of providing support and legitimacy to armed right-wing extremists. Subsequent events, including the firing of Department of Justice prosecutors and a possible purge of Federal Bureau of Investigations agents who handled January 6 investigations, raise questions as to the extent Trump is willing to go to punish his perceived opponents.

Chillingly, The Washington Post has reported that FBI agents in the Washington field office were told “to prepare for the White House to publicly release the names of the agents who worked on the two Trump criminal cases,” which could set the stage for harassment or even violent reprisals against rank-and-file agents.

Beyond the immediate implications of these actions, there is reason for substantial concern about the longer-term effects on the rule of law, political violence, and extremism in the U.S. We asked nine experts to respond to a set of questions on what the clemencies might herald for the future:

How might these pardons and commutations influence future acts of political violence?

What are the risks that these pardons and commutations will embolden violent right-wing extremist militias or other organized groups to expand their activities?

How do these pardons and commutations affect the likelihood of future disruptions to democratic processes or other forms of political violence?

What individuals, communities, events, or other potential targets of violence are of most immediate concern due to Trump’s act of presidential clemency?

We received responses from the following experts:

Susan Benesch is the executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and an adjunct associate professor at American University’s School of International Service.

Cody Buntain is an assistant professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland with an affiliate appointment at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

Ryan Greer is president of Bedrock and a Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project.

Shannon Hiller is the executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University and a Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project.

Jared Holt is a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).

Tom Joscelyn is a senior fellow at Just Security and a senior fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security. He was most recently a senior professional staff member on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Nathan Kalmoe is the executive director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal (CCCR) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she runs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL).

Susan Benesch

Because of the pardons and commutations, we can expect the far right to push further and harder against the law. By excusing and even celebrating past illegal attacks, President Trump has given a tacit but clear endorsement of future violence. And in pardoning everyone, he declined to draw any line between acceptable and unacceptable or even unlawful conduct, so extremists will see no reason to abide by norms. On the contrary, they’ll see lawbreaking as virtuous or even heroic. They are grateful to Trump for rescuing them and want to return the favor, for example, by taking revenge on his real or perceived enemies. More than ever, some will do anything to keep Trump in power.

Therefore, I won’t be surprised by vigilante attacks on Trump’s opponents or anyone perceived by his loyalists as foreign, non-MAGA, or traitorous, from journalists and federal government employees to Jackson Reffitt, who turned in his father Guy for attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and went on to receive “death threats by the minute.”

Finally, a new tranche of people will embrace and even commit political violence in the United States – those who feared the law and its enforcement but are now disinhibited by the pardons and commutations.

Cody Buntain

President Trump’s recent large-scale pardons for those involved in the January 6 insurrection and its planning will, I think, increase the potential for future acts of political violence, both by lone wolf actors and by organized groups. Primarily, this clemency signals to future actors that if their chosen candidate wins, violence or law-breaking in service of that candidate will be forgiven.

This clemency is particularly concerning as it coincides with moves by tech companies and social media platforms to lower barriers against hate speech and discussion of the kinds of plans and actions we saw around January 6. Given Meta’s recent moves to weaken its internal fact-checking processes, coupled with X’s increasingly overt support of conservative voices, it seems likely to me that we will see more people, particularly vulnerable young men, exposed to the kinds of violent rhetoric we saw on fringe platforms in the lead up to January 6. This increased exposure is likely to lead to more radicalization among these audiences, leading to more isolated incidents of political violence and hate crimes.

As online social spaces become safer places to openly discuss violence and sedition, however, not only are we likely to see more isolated violence, but I see a potential for more organized political violence as well, as semi-radicalized individuals will have more opportunities to come together in mainstream online spaces and have their grievances weaponized and directed at supposed political foes. More concerningly, these spaces are global in nature. As we saw with the international spread of QAnon messaging, it seems likely that the violent and hateful rhetoric we will see more online has more opportunity to spill over as the platforms governing these spaces move into ideological alignment with President Trump and his tolerance for political violence.

Ryan Greer

The pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists send a dangerous signal, normalizing violence and reducing the fear of consequences. This action deepens the normalization of ideological violence. As it feels more normal, strong responses to counter violence—and the movements that inspire it—are less likely.

Individuals with an unfortunate cocktail of psychological, social, and ideological maladies may be more likely to take violent actions. That future violence will not only be tragic in itself but will also inspire vicarious trauma—the very real trauma of seeing traumatic acts perpetrated against someone with whom you identify—and increase Americans’ fear of “the other”—deepening polarization—thereby continuing this cycle of the normalization of hate and violence. And, of course, it makes it less likely that those in a position to stand up to hate and violence will do so for fear of being targeted themselves.

As such, lone actors and violent movements will likely take cues from the perceived social permission and feel emboldened. Marginalized communities already targeted by hate are likely to be targeted even more than they are now. All Americans will suffer an absence of safety and belonging and increased suspicion and fear.

My organization issued a statement noting that the pardons were a threat to democracy. A colleague at a partner organization called it “brave.” That condemning violence used to be normal but now is brave is a signal that democratic norms are fraying and more violence is likely. Returning to an era of accountability for ideological violence is not just a laudable idea, it is a necessity – before it is too late.

Shannon Hiller

Taking this blanket approach to pardons for individuals who attempted to forcefully overturn the results of a fair election sets a dangerous precedent that raises the risk of future political violence.

Legal accountability played an important role in the decrease in offline mobilization by organized groups with a proven track record of using threats, intimidation, and physical force against political opponents over the last few years. These pardons have the potential to re-energize groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, who may again feel emboldened to use violence to close off civic space.

Pardoning or commuting the sentences of the most violent offenders also missed an opportunity, however slim it may have been, for the incoming President to move on from January 6 in the context of his re-election. Prior to these pardons, Vice President JD Vance himself pointed to a potential area of consensus — that protestors who use violence against others or against police should be held accountable. Pardons for non-violent offenders — especially those who expressed remorse or those who were already back in their communities — may have had a chance of moving the country slowly toward reconciliation in the long term. Instead, these blanket pardons continue to push divisive and factually inaccurate narratives of the attack, setting us even further back in any meaningful attempts to build a more unifying narrative.

Jared Holt

The decision to award pardons and commuted sentences to people jailed for the Capitol riot could be internalized by many extremist movements as permission to attempt openly organizing on a larger national scale again. Many movement groups had all but abandoned these aspirations after the Capitol riot, often citing a variety of reasons that included increased scrutiny from federal law enforcement. In the week since the pardons were issued, we’ve already seen extremist movement groups like the Proud Boys try to capitalize on the moment to recruit new members. The effects of these shifts largely remain to be seen, but I worry it will embolden groups with violent track records and work to help sanitize their image in the eyes of the public.

One big thing I’m watching for in the coming months is whether extremist movement groups will latch on to official efforts taken by the Trump administration—particularly those surrounding immigration. For example, I’m curious to see whether militia movement groups try to organize on larger scales at the US-Mexico border or rally to assist law enforcement in carrying out Trump’s promised “mass deportations.” Anti-Trump protests seem to be in short supply this time around, so I imagine we’ll likely see fewer instances where groups show up to antagonize those sorts of events. In the absence of that, some groups might seek other ways to negatively agitate the political environment.

Tom Joscelyn

President Trump’s pardons and commutations were based on his claim that the January 6th defendants were “hostages.” Of course, they were not “hostages” at all. Instead, they were defendants and convicts whose crimes were and remain, in many cases, well-documented. But Trump and his movement have turned this reality on its head, portraying the January 6th aggressors as victims of a supposedly corrupt and partisan criminal justice system. This is a very extreme idea — a fictional grievance that has now been normalized with the presidential seal of approval. And it is likely to embolden right-wing extremists, including both so-called long wolves and groups.

Lone wolves are often motivated by a mix of personal and political grievances. For lone right-wing extremists, the pardons could be viewed as a vindication of the belief that government officials are bad actors deserving of retribution. Similar grievances have already served as motivation for a series of threats against law enforcement and others.

Right-wing extremist groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters planned for violence on January 6th. In particular, the Proud Boys instigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol. In the months that followed, these groups lost many of their key leaders as they were convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, serious crimes. Trump’s decision has now returned these same leaders, including some with charisma and organizational skills, back into the fold. They are not only free to rejoin their comrades but can also do so with a presidential endorsement. Dozens of lower-level figures, if not more, could also rejoin their former groups as well. Trump has effectively said they were in the right and those who jailed them were in the wrong.

Not all these extremist leaders will seamlessly reintegrate with their former groups. But those who do will be perceived as heroes – martyrs for their cause. That can only help them grow their ranks and, ultimately, expand their footprint and activities.

Nathan Kalmoe

The pardons for violent insurrectionists make January 6th a dangerous template for future disruptive violence at the federal, state, and local levels. We’ve already seen extremist groups attempt to influence political outcomes through armed takeovers of state capitol buildings, armed demonstrations outside the offices of public officials, and violent threats. Following these recent pardons, political violence is more likely to manifest against wavering Republicans at the federal level rather than Democrats, who hold little power now. But Democratic officials at the state and local levels who resist federal overreach and participants in movements organizing against Trump’s policies might be targeted. Down the road, I’m especially concerned about actions against Democratic governors, Democratic Congressional candidates in competitive elections, and convenings of Electoral College voters in the state capitals in 2028.

But since violence is instrumental, we’ll mostly just see it deployed when government action (whether legal or not) is insufficient to accomplish Trump’s goals. It need not always involve physical violence. Violent threats against officials and other public-facing people are orders of magnitude higher than they were before Trump took office in 2017—many tens of thousands of threats per year. And many more people are made fearful by hearing about those threats and the few acts of violence. We saw this happen during Trump’s second impeachment trial, where Republican Senators who were considering voting to convict him (thus barring him from the presidency) were convinced not to with the reminder that their families would be threatened by enraged Trump supporters. In the future, a weaponized Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, or pro-Trump judiciary could persecute political enemies without the threat of physical violence, and that could be a more appealing and effective route to achieve the same goals.

Elected and appointed leaders changing their political and administrative decisions from fear of harm is antithetical to democracy—it’s rule by violence, not by the people. It was through political violence that white supremacists effectively ended fair elections in the South and condemned Black Southerners to segregation, a loss of civic rights, vulnerability to white violence, and many other harms during the Jim Crow era. That is an important lens through which to view these pardons.

Rachel Kleinfeld

On January 6, 2021, violent individuals harmed 140 police officers and caused millions in property damage. The legal conseque

Trump’s tariffs fit a growing global trend of hardball migration diplomacy

Nicholas R. Micinski, The Conversation — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 14:55:19 -0500
As diplomatic spats go, it was short-lived.

On Jan 26, 2025, Colombian President Gustavo Petro turned away American military planes carrying people being deported from the United States. In response, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened 25% tariffs and travel banson Colombian government officials. Despite insisting that “the U.S. cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals” and needed to “establish a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants before we receive them,” Petro’s government backed down and resumed cooperation with U.S. immigration officials.

All this took place in the span of just a few hours. [Editor's note: on Saturday, Trump announced a 25% tariff on most imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10% tariff on imports from China to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.

But “migration diplomacy” – the use of diplomatic tools and threats to control the number and flow of migrants – isn’t new. Indeed, it was a feature of Trump’s first administration. And it is not unique to Trump; it has been in the foreign policy playbook of previous U.S. presidents as well as the European Union and governments around the world.

As an expert on migration policy and international affairs, I have observed the evolution of this global trend, in which nations leverage migration policies for geopolitical ends.

Richer countries with increasingly populist, nationalist bases are putting in place anti-migrant policies. But these same nations depend on poorer countries to accept deportations and host the majority of the world’s refugees – governments can’t unilaterally “dump” deported immigrants back into the home country, or in a third country.

And while migration diplomacy can be cooperative, there’s always the possibility a disagreement will spiral into diplomatic spats or outright conflict.

Migration diplomacy is a relatively recent academic term. But the practice of using foreign policy tools to control migration is centuries old. Common tools of migrant diplomacy fall between the “carrots” of bilateral treaties, development aid and infrastructure investment, and the “sticks” of tariffs, travel bans and sanctions.

Trump, during his first term, focused more on the sticks, frequently threatening tariffs or cuts in aid to push through deals on migration. For example, in 2018, Trump posted on Twitter that if Honduras and other Central American governments did not stop migrant caravans to the U.S., he would cut all aid: “no more money or aid will be given … effective immediately!”

A few months later, Trump followed through with the threat, suspending US$400 million in aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Trump then upped the ante, posting: “Now we are looking at the ‘BAN,’ … Tariffs, Remittance Fees, or all of the above. Guatemala has not been good.”

Within three days, Guatemala signed a deal with the U.S. to cooperate on asylum and deportations. Honduras and El Salvador followed suit two months later.

Similarly, in 2019, Trump threatened Mexico that the U.S. would impose a 5% tariff on goods “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP.”

Within 11 days, Mexico signed the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, institutionalizing what human rights groups called “illegal pushbacks” that put people at risk of torture, sexual violence and death.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the U.S. government can stop granting visas to any country that “denies or unreasonably delays accepting an alien who is a citizen.”

And during his first term, Trump imposed visa restrictions on people from Cambodia, Eritrea, Ghana, Guinea, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan and Sierra Leone because those countries were deemed to be not cooperating with deportations.

Such visa restrictions worked with Guinea and Ghana, which both began accepting deportations of their citizens from the U.S.

Nations also use migration policy as tools to push other foreign policy goals not necessarily related to migration. As political scientist Kelly Greenhill explored in her book “Weapons of Mass Migration,” governments are using coercive engineered migration to create pressure against other rival nations. This was seen in 2021 when Belarus bused asylum seekers to the Polish border in an apparent effort to overwhelm the EU’s asylum system.

Similarly, Trump used migration policies to bully other nations into cooperating with the United States. The “Muslim ban” of his first administration – rebranded in later iterations as travel bans – banned entry of citizens from Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. While the first executive order pertaining to the ban was immediately criticized as Islamophobic, the administration changed legal reasoning in front of the Supreme Court, arguing that the ban stemmed from nations not sharing information about potential terrorists and due to their passports being vulnerable to fraud.

The travel bans were an attempt to coerce nations into sharing information with the U.S. and enforcing U.S. standards of identity documents. Indeed, Chad was later removed from the ban when it adopted these standards.

The use of migration diplomacy by the U.S. government predates Trump. Tit-for-tat restrictions on travel were common throughout the Cold War. In 2001, President George W. Bush applied visa sanctions to Guyana when its government refused to cooperate on deportations. In 2016, President Barack Obama also applied retaliatory visa restrictions on Gambia for failing to accept U.S. deportation flights.

The European Union tends to use carrots rather than sticks to encourage cooperation on deportations. For example, a 2016 EU-Turkey deal provided 6 billion euros (US$6.25 million) in aid for refugees in Turkey in exchange for accepting the deportation of what the EU describes as “irregular migrants.” In 2023, the EU also struck a 105 million euro ($109 million) deal with Tunisia in return for the North African country’s cooperation on preventing irregular migration.

But like Trump, the EU is not opposed to punishing states for refusing to cooperate on deportations. In April 2024, the EU tightened rules on visas for Ethiopians because their government refused to accept the return of citizens who had asylum claims denied. Earlier, the EU suspended 15 million euros ($15.6 million) in development aid to Ethiopia on similar grounds.

Trump’s threats and EU migration deals reveal a type of migration interdependence: Rich states in the Global North don’t want to host large numbers of migrants and refugees and need willing partners in the Global Southto accept deportations, enforce emigration restrictions and continue hosting the majority of the world’s refugees.

This interdependence is typically balanced by rich countries footing the bill and poor countries accepting deportations. But migration diplomacy is also used by less powerful nations aware of the opportunity of exacting concessions out of countries, blocs or international bodies. For example, the Kenyan government repeatedly threatened to close the Dadaab refugee camp and expel all Somali refugees unless it received more international aid. Similarly, Pakistan threatened to deport Afghan refugees unless the international community did more, but backed down after significant increases in aid.

Rwanda extracted around $310 million from the British government without resettling a single person after a 2022 plan aimed at deterring asylum seekers to the U.K. by deporting them to Rwanda – where their cases would be reviewed and eventually settled – was blocked by the European Court of Human Rightsand the U.K.’s Supreme Court.

Similarly, the small South Pacific island nation of Nauru was paid more than $118 million with the aim of hosting all asylum seekers to Australia. The policy broke down after reports of abysmal conditions in Nauru’s detention facilities.

While migration diplomacy does work both ways, richer countries by and large have the upper hand. And Trump’s threats against Colombia – and others – are just one example of this hardball migration diplomacy.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Welcoming Kathleen Claussen, Tom Dannenbaum, and Eliav Lieblich

Tess Bridgeman — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 11:48:59 -0500

We are thrilled to welcome distinguished scholars Kathleen Claussen, Tom Dannenbaum, and Eliav Lieblich as new members of our outstanding Editorial Board. Their expertise and analysis will already be familiar to many Just Security readers, and we are delighted that they are joining us in this new capacity.

Kathleen Claussen is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Economic Law with expertise in international law, trade, investment, international business and labor, and national security and cybersecurity law. Previously, she served on the Executive Council and Executive Committee of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and was Associate General Counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. She is the author of more than five dozen works concerning trade, investment, and international dispute settlement and has acted as counsel or arbitrator in over two dozen international disputes. Earlier in her career, she was Legal Counsel at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

She holds a BA from Indiana University, an M.A. from Queen’s University Belfast, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Tom Dannenbaum is Associate Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, where he is also Co-Director of the Center for International Law & Governance. Prior to joining Fletcher, he taught at University College London and Yale Law School. Dannenbaum writes on the law of armed conflict, the law governing the use of force, international criminal law, human rights, shared responsibility, and international judging. His articles have received multiple awards, including ASIL’s International Legal Theory Scholarship Prize in 2022 for his work on siege starvation and ASIL’s Lieber Prize in 2017 for his work on the crime of aggression.

He holds a BA from Stanford University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a PhD from Princeton University.

Eliav Lieblich is a professor of law at Tel-Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. He teaches and researches public international law, with a focus on the laws on the use of force, international humanitarian law, and the history and theory of international law. In recent years, he participated as an expert in various international forums, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross’ expert group on proportionality and the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons’ expert meeting on autonomous weapons systems.

He holds an LL.B. from Hebrew University, and a J.S.D. and LL.M. from Columbia Law School.

* * *

We are delighted to welcome these thoughtful scholars and practitioners to our Editorial Board.

IMAGE: businessman opening stage curtain (Getty Images)

The post Welcoming Kathleen Claussen, Tom Dannenbaum, and Eliav Lieblich appeared first on Just Security.

The D Brief: USAID lockout; Musk seizes US payment system; Global markets tumble; Army aviation’s bad year; And a bit more.

Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 11:34:51 -0500
Musk continues assault on USAID, seizes America’s purse
Just in: Staffers have been locked out of the U.S. Agency for International Development headquarters in downtown D.C., after Elon Musk said Donald Trump approved a shutdown of the congressionally established foreign-aid agency, the Associated Press reports.

Just Security: “Dissolving USAID would be a final assault on the foreign aid agency, where the administration already has issued a stop-work order for huge swaths of development assistance and other aid, abruptly put at least 56 of its senior career staffers on administrative leave, and laid off several hundred contractors working directly for the agency. Such an action, however, likely would go far beyond the executive branch’s actual legal authority.”

Musk announced the coming shutdown of USAID over the weekend after sharing a series of hostile posts toward the agency—simultaneously emphasizing support from certain Republicans to reduce the government costs and accusing Democrats of criminal behavior for expressing concern about how Musk and his aides may be breaking laws concerning unauthorized access to classified information.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk tweeted at 2:34 am ET Monday. “USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple you just need to get rid of the whole thing. That's why it's got to go. It's beyond repair,” Musk posted shortly afterward.

Background: Musk’s “comments come after the [Trump] administration placed two top security chiefs at USAID on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to Musk’s government-inspection teams” because they “lacked high enough security clearance to access that information,” the Associated Press reported Sunday. However, “Members of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, eventually did gain access Saturday to the aid agency’s classified information, which includes intelligence reports,” a former official told AP.

Senate Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee sent an urgent letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the episode at USAID. The lawmakers requested an “immediate update about the access of USAID’s headquarters, including whether the individuals who accessed the headquarters were authorized to be there and by whom, whether all individuals who accessed classified spaces have active security clearances at the appropriate level, what they were seeking to access, if any [personally-identifiable information] of American citizens was breached, and whether any review is underway regarding potential unauthorized access to sensitive personnel information and classified materials.”

“This incident as a whole raises deep concerns about the protection and safeguarding of matters related to U.S. national security,” the senators warned. Read more, here.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Dems shared their own message of alarm Sunday afternoon, writing on Musk’s social media platform, “DOGE’s attempt to bulldoze its way into classified systems is part of a broader agenda to dismantle US foreign aid and soft power.

“Broligarchs don’t get an all-access pass to America’s most sensitive info,” the House Democrats said. “Our security and global leadership are not for sale,” they added. Musk replied to the tweet, writing in accusation, “You have committed a crime.”

New: Musk is also “shutting down some payments to federal contractors” as part of his “effort to modernize federal information technology,” Bloomberg reports.

Musk was also given “direct access to a payment system that distributes trillions of dollars to Americans each year,” the Wall Street Journal reported, describing his latest moves as “the start of a far-reaching campaign by Musk to upend the federal government agency by agency.”

Two potential problems: Musk’s DOGE “is run by individuals with ties to the tech sector who haven’t been confirmed by the Senate and could benefit financially from the actions DOGE takes,” the Journal writes, noting, “Much about DOGE’s operations remains murky.”

But Trump said he supports Musk’s wrecking-ball approach. “I think Elon is doing a good job,” Trump told reporters Sunday night. “He’s a big cost-cutter. Sometimes we won’t agree with it, and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.” Trump also alleged that “radical lunatics” were in charge of USAID.

Historian’s reax: “The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it,” said Tim Snyder of Yale University, writing Sunday.

New: Markets around the world tumbled as Trump launched his global trade war, hitting Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs and China with 10% tariffs in the opening salvos, Reuters reported Monday morning. “Shares in Tokyo ended the day down almost 3% and Australia's benchmark—often a proxy trade for Chinese markets—dropped 1.8%...Around lunchtime in Europe, Germany's DAX index was down 1.8%, France's CAC down 1.9% and Britain's FTSE 100 down 1.5%.”

Developing: Trump said he’s paused tariffs on Mexico for one month, after drawing a concession from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to “immediately reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, particularly fentanyl,” she said on social media Monday morning.

By the way: “Trump used fentanyl to justify tariffs, but the crisis was already easing,” NPR reported Sunday.

Canada announced its own retaliatory tariffs of 25% on the U.S. Sunday. Products include chicken, turkey, flour, several dairy products, tomatoes, several fruits, coffee, tea, spices, and lots more.

“The Dumbest Trade War in History,” is how the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board described these developments, writing Friday (gift link).

Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1961 amid nuclear war contingency planning, the U.S. Air Force launched Operation Looking Glass.

Foreign policy under Trump 2.0

SecState Rubio’s Panama trip. After Sunday’s meeting and amid Trump threats to simply “retake” the Panama Canal, Panama’s president announced his government won’t renew a development agreement with China, and will also try to end it early.

BBC explainer: “There is no public evidence to suggest that the Chinese government exercises control over the canal, or its military. However, Chinese companies have a significant presence there,” including the contracts to operate two of the five nearby ports. BBC also quotes Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, as saying that the companies might be able to send to the Chinese government potentially useful strategic information on ships passing through the waterway flows through these ports. “There is an increasing geopolitical tension of economic nature between the US and China,” Berg said. “That kind of information regarding cargo would be very useful in the event of a supply chain war.” Read on, here.

Rubio’s message for American foreign policy: The world is broken into spheres of influence with the U.S. over one corner, and it’s time for Trump to consolidate America’s advantages at all costs, even if it comes at the expense of weaker states.

In his own words: “It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power,” Rubio said to former Fox host Megyn Kelly last week. “Eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet,” he said.

Ankit Panda’s stark interpretation: “Great power competition is over. It’s an era of great power politics now.” That means, he said, “essentially a world of ‘rogue’ great powers: economic coercion in service of annexation, wars of conquest, and hemispheric revisionism.”

Philippine president offers a deal to China: Stop sea aggression and I'll return U.S. missiles. Last April, the U.S. sent its Typhon missile—aka Strategic Mid-range Fires System–to the northern Philippines for training purposes, as the longtime treaty allies put it, drawing loud protests from Beijing. Asked about the situation on Thursday, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. responded that China has missile systems that “are a thousand times more powerful than what we have.” He continued: “Let’s make a deal with China: Stop claiming our territory, stop harassing our fishermen and let them have a living, stop ramming our boats, stop water cannoning our people, stop firing lasers at us and stop your aggressive and coercive behavior, and we’ll return the Typhon missiles.” more, here.

South Africa president fires back against Trump, Musk. On Sunday, the U.S. president threatened to cut off aid to the country because, he claimed without evidence, that its government " is confiscating land" and "certain classes of people" were being treated "very badly". His attack was “echoed on X by his South African-born billionaire backer Elon Musk, who suggested that white people were the victims,” Reuters reported, adding: “White landowners possess three-quarters of South Africa's freehold farmland, compared with 4% for Black landowners. Black people make up about 80% of South Africa's total population, while about 8% are white.” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that “his government had not confiscated any land and he looked forward to engaging with Trump to foster a better understanding over a policy he said ensures equitable public access to land.” More, here.

Europe scrambles

Officials from 27 EU countries plus Britain plus NATO are meeting today to figure out how to pay for efforts to improve European defense. NYT: “As Russia threatens from the East and Mr. Trump’s support wavers from the West, Europe’s leaders agree that they need a plan to both coordinate and expand their military resources. But diverging national interests and competing budget priorities mean that reshaping European defense will be difficult, expensive and lengthy.”

Go deeper: What will it take to deter Russia? A recent CSIS report looks at three questions: “What are the main security threats in Europe for the United States and its allies? What are U.S. interests in Europe? What is the appropriate U.S. force posture in Europe?” Read that, from Seth Jones and Seamus Daniels, here.

Allies view the White House as an economic threat: “Mr. Trump pledged on Sunday night to slap new tariffs on European trading partners ‘pretty soon.’ That is intensifying a sense in Europe that it needs to be able to fend more for itself in a world where the United States is a less reliable partner.” More, here.

And as an imperial threat: Trump “has refused to rule out the use of military force to take control of Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark,” AP reported. “Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that it would ‘be a cruel paradox, if during the time of this direct Russian threat and Chinese expansion’ that the EU and the United States might end up in a ‘conflict among allies’.”

Around the Defense Department

Army aviation was having a bad few years, even before Wednesday’s crash. The service’s fiscal 2024 mishap rate was the highest since 2007, making it “a year that Army Aviation looks back on in hopes of never repeating,” the Army Combat Readiness Center said in a damning annual assessment released just days before the mid-air collision near Reagan National Airport that killed 64 people on a jetliner and three soldiers in a UH-60 Black Hawk.

“The accident has elevated to a national tragedy the type of training accidents that rarely make many headlines, at a time when Army aviation is trying to rebuild its safety culture,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports. Read on, here.

The Army has now identified all three soldiers aboard the Black Hawk:

Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, 28, from Durham, North Carolina. Lobach, who had more than 450 hours of flight time the pilot; she was undergoing her annual night evaluation flight.

An evaluator, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland.

The crew chief, Staff Sergeant Ryan O'Hara, 29, from Lilburn, Georgia.

Moving out on Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” order. The Missile Defense Agency has issued a request for information from industry about how they might approach various anti-missile systems. The announcement says an Industry day is planned for Feb. 18 and responses to the RFI are due on Feb. 28.

Background:

“Trump’s ‘Iron Dome for America’ plan would put weapons in space, at a big cost,” D1’s Patrick Tucker reported on Thursday.

AEI’s Todd Harrison wrote recently that while that the costs and technical hurdles of putting missile interceptors in orbit are much lower than they once were, it remains far easier and cheaper for an enemy to penetrate such a shield by simply adding missiles to a salvo.

And longtime analyst Joe Cirincione, writing in D1 last year: “Can Donald Trump really build an Iron Dome over America? In a word, no. The president-turned-candidate is still selling the same old missile-defense snake oil.”

What DeepSeek Really Changes About AI Competition

Konstantin F. Pilz — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 08:56:04 -0500

The Initial Shock

Just months ago, China seemed far behind the frontier AI advances being made in the United States. Two new models from DeepSeek have shattered that perception: Its V3 model matches GPT-4’s performance while reportedly using just a fraction of the training compute. Its R1 reasoning model—akin to OpenAI’s o1 introduced last September—appears to match OpenAI’s o1 at a fraction of the cost per token.

Some have suggested that DeepSeek’s achievements diminish the importance of computational resources (compute). That narrative may be compelling, but it is misleading. If anything, these efficiency gains have made access to vast computing power more crucial than ever—both for advancing AI capabilities and deploying them at scale.

What DeepSeek’s emergence truly changes is the landscape of model access: Their models are freely downloadable by anyone. If Chinese companies continue to develop the leading open models, the democratic world could face a critical security challenge: These widely accessible models might harbor censorship controls or deliberately planted vulnerabilities that could affect global AI infrastructure.

A Close Look at DeepSeek’s Costs

One number that shocked analysts and the stock market was that DeepSeek spent only $5.6 million to train their V3 large language model (LLM), matching GPT-4 on performance benchmarks. While this appears dramatically lower than reported estimates for GPT-4’s training costs, two important caveats apply. First, the comparison is not apples-to-apples: U.S. companies have never publicly disclosed their actual training costs. When CEOs refer to staggering costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars, they likely include a more exhaustive view—hardware acquisition, staffing costs, and research expenses. In contrast, DeepSeek only reported the cost of the final training run, excluding crucial expenses like preliminary experiments, staffing, and the massive initial investment in hardware.

Second, V3’s efficiency improvement is not surprising. Algorithmic advances alone typically cut training costs in half every eight months, with hardware improvements driving additional efficiency gains. Using current cloud compute prices and accounting for these predictable advances, a final training run for a GPT-4-level model should cost around $3 million today. That means DeepSeek’s efficiency gains are not a great leap, but align with industry trends.

The story of DeepSeek’s R1 model might be different. This reasoning model—which thinks through problems step by step before answering—matches the capabilities of OpenAI’s o1 released last December. Since early 2024, DeepSeek has made significant strides in reasoning, particularly excelling at mathematical problem-solving. Its public release provides the first look into the details of how these reasoning models work. What is notable is that DeepSeek offers R1 at roughly four percent the cost of o1. While such improvements are expected in AI, this could mean DeepSeek is leading on reasoning efficiency, although comparisons remain difficult because companies like Google have not released pricing for their reasoning models.

Given all this context, DeepSeek’s achievements on both V3 and R1 do not represent revolutionary breakthroughs, but rather continuations of computing’s long history of exponential efficiency gains—Moore’s Law being a prime example. To be sure, direct comparisons are hard to make because while some Chinese companies openly share their advances, leading U.S. companies keep their capabilities private. Still, for those closely watching the field, DeepSeek’s improvements follow expected patterns.

Why Compute Actually Still Matters

Counterintuitively, DeepSeeks advances make compute more important, not less.

Here is why. Recreating existing capabilities requires less compute, but the same compute now enables building far more powerful models with the same compute resources (this is called a performance effect). When OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic apply these efficiency gains to their vast compute clusters (each with tens of thousands of advanced AI chips), they can push capabilities far beyond current limits. Indeed, if DeepSeek had had access to even more AI chips, it could have trained a more powerful AI model, made certain discoveries earlier, and served a larger user base with its existing models—which in turn would increase its revenue.

Second, new models like DeepSeek’s R1 and OpenAI’s o1 reveal another crucial role for compute: These “reasoning” models get predictably better the more time they spend thinking. As AI systems take on worker-like roles, compute capacity could directly determine both how many AI workers can be deployed and how skilled each one is.

Leading in Open Models, A Potential Security Concern

DeepSeek does highlight a new strategic challenge: What happens if China becomes the leader in providing publicly available AI models that are freely downloadable? That would not directly generate revenue for DeepSeek, but it creates soft power. More importantly, it raises serious national security concerns.

DeepSeek’s downloadable model shows fewer signs of built-in censorship in contrast to its hosted models, which appear to filter politically sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square. Most current censoring happens through additional filtering tools after the model generates its output. However, the downloadable model still exhibits some censorship, and other Chinese models like Qwen already exhibit stronger systematic censorship built into the model. As these models gain widespread adoption, the ability to subtly shape or restrict information through model design becomes a critical concern. What if such models become the foundation of educational systems worldwide?

Furthermore, DeepSeek presents at least two types of potential “backdoor” risks. The first is traditional security vulnerabilities, like remote code execution (as demonstrated in PyTorch incidents). The second, and more subtle, risk involves behaviors embedded within the model itself—what researchers call “sleeper agents.” Research from U.S. company Anthropic shows that a model could be designed to write secure code most of the time but insert subtle vulnerabilities when used by specific organizations or in specific contexts. Once a backdoor is present in a model, it becomes extremely difficult to detect or remove—even with extensive safety testing. Traditional red-teaming often fails to catch these vulnerabilities, and attempts to train away problematic behaviors can paradoxically make models better at hiding their backdoors.

The Path Forward

These developments force the United States to confront two distinct challenges. First, when efficiency improvements are rapidly diffusing the ability to train and access powerful models, can the United States prevent China from achieving truly transformative AI capabilities? Second, how can the United States manage the security risks if Chinese companies become the primary suppliers of open models? Policymakers should consider three priorities in response to DeepSeek:

First, strengthen rather than abandon export controls. While DeepSeek shows that determined actors can achieve impressive results with limited compute, they could go much further if they had access to the same resources of leading U.S. companies.

Second, restrict the integration of Chinese open models into critical U.S. systems and infrastructure. Just as the government tries to manage supply chain risks in tech hardware, it will need frameworks for AI models that could harbor hidden vulnerabilities. The U.S. Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion already requires validated end users to cut ties with intelligence and military actors from untrusted countries. Under some interpretations, this requirement could extend to prohibiting the hosting of these models.

Finally, there is a critical gap in AI security research. Without better tools to detect backdoors and verify model safety, the United States is flying blind in evaluating which systems to trust. This security challenge becomes particularly acute as advanced AI emerges from regions with limited transparency, and as AI systems play an increasing role in developing the next generation of models—potentially cascading security vulnerabilities across future AI generations.

IMAGE: In this photo illustration, the DeepSeek logo is seen on a phone in front of a flag of China on January 28, 2025 in Hong Kong, China. (Photo illustration by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)

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From Pardons to Purges: Pressing Questions that Bondi and Patel Must Answer Now

Mary B. McCord — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 08:29:17 -0500

President Donald Trump’s blanket absolution of everyone who was convicted or charged with crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol appears to have been just the opening move in a retribution playbook.

On its own, it was an assault against the legitimacy of the criminal legal system, at least 140 law enforcement officers injured in the attack, the members of congress and their staffs who had to flee for their lives, and the judges who handled nearly 1,600 cases over the last four years, working to ensure that every defendant received due process of law. Whether appointed by a Republican president, a Democratic president, or Donald Trump himself, the judges have condemned the criminal actions of those who were convicted in the effort to interrupt the peaceful transition of power. Several have noted that the pardons, commutations, and dismissals cannot change the truth of what happened on January 6. The lasting harm to the impartial application of the rule of law is immeasurable. As the former chief judge of the district court in D.C. put it, “No ‘process of national reconciliation’”—a phrase Trump used in the pardon proclamation after calling the prosecutions “a grave national injustice”—“can begin when sore losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity. That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other sore losers and undermines the rule of law.”

We now know that the pardons were just the beginning.

Since January 20, not only have career federal prosecutors who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team been fired, but dozens who worked on the prosecutions of the attackers have been terminated. The interim U.S. Attorney in D.C., (who fails to include “Interim” before his name on court filings, despite the fact that he has not been presidentially appointed or Senate-confirmed) has launched an internal investigation into the office’s charging hundreds of attackers with obstruction of an official proceeding, an offense that was narrowed by the Supreme Court last summer, but the use of which had been first brought by the Trump Justice Department and subsequently upheld by 14 out of 15 district court judges, as well as two of three appellate judges. And now the acting leadership of the Department of Justice (no one there has been Senate-confirmed yet), has ordered the firing of senior FBI leadership and an examination of thousands of FBI employees across the country who worked on January 6-related matters, explicitly “to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.” The White House reportedly may publicly release the names of agents who worked on the two criminal cases against Trump, in addition to firing them.

So much for the promises of Trump’s Attorney General nominee, Pam Bondi, and FBI director nominee, Kash Patel, not to target prosecutors or investigators with political retribution; it appears that is being done before they even come up for a vote.

The Senate must act now to delay any vote on Bondi until she explains how she will redress the damage already done. And the Senate Judiciary Committee must bring Patel back before the committee to do the same. Not only are many of the firings in violation of law, and will cause an “extreme disruption” (in the words of Michael Clark, President, Society of Former Agents of FBI) in the ability of the DOJ and FBI to protect public safety and national security across the country, but they also put a target on the backs of career government prosecutors and investigators who have simply done their jobs over the last four years. This would be dangerous enough, but in combination with the blanket absolution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol, and the praise that President Trump has heaped upon them, the potential for vigilante retribution just went up precipitously.

IMAGE: (L) Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing for U.S. Attorney General in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on January 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. U.S. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images); (R) Kash Patel, U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to be Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

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Early Edition: February 3, 2025

Weronika Galka — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 07:39:29 -0500

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A curated weekday guide to major news and developments over the weekend. Here’s today’s news:

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACTIONS

Elon Musk yesterday claimed that Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) workers are shutting down payments to a Lutheran charity providing social services to refugees. The announcement suggests that Musk’s representatives have gained access to the federal payment system after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent greenlit their involvement on Friday. Gregory Korte and Viktoria Dendrinou report for Bloomberg; Andrew Duehren, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer, and Alan Rappeport report for the New York Times.

DOGE representatives have locked some career civil servants out of Office of Personnel Management (OPM) computer systems containing the personal data of millions of federal workers, two OPM officials said. Tim Reid reports for Reuters.

Several heads of FBI field offices are pushing back on the Justice Department’s instruction for FBI employees to fill out a survey detailing their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack investigations, sources say. Separately, lawyers for prosecutors and FBI agents yesterday threatened legal action over the potential dismissal or public release of names of agents who worked on the investigations in a letter to senior DOJ officials. Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney report for POLITICO; Josh Campbell, Danya Gainor, Jim Sciutto, and Dan Berman report for CNN.

The Trump administration is seeking to give immigration officers access to an Office of Refugee Resettlement database containing unaccompanied migrant children’s information, White House border czar Tom Homan said on Friday. Homan said the data “won’t be used for enforcement work.” Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti report for the Washington Post.

The Defense Department on Friday announced a new “annual media rotation program,” effectively removing NBC News, the New York Times, National Public Radio and Politico from their Pentagon offices in favor of One America News Network, the New York Post, Breitbart News Network, and HuffPost. Amanda Terkel reports for NBC News.

More than 8,000 web pages across sixteen U.S. government websites have been taken down since Friday afternoon, a New York Times analysis has found. Ethan Singer reports.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACTIONS — USAID DEVELOPMENTS

Trump agreed that USAID needs to be “shut down,” Elon Musk announced on X early today. Separately, incoming administration officials said the Trump administration is considering moving USAID under State Department control. Jennifer Hansler, Alex Marquardt, and Lex Harvey report for CNN; Robbie Gramer, Nahal Toosi, and Daniel Lippman report for POLITICO.

USAID staffers received a notice to stay out of the agency’s Washington headquarters today “at the direction of the Agency leadership.” AP News reports.

The USAID director of security and his deputy were placed on administrative leave on Saturday after attempting to deny access to secure USAID systems to DOGE representatives, according to sources. The officials believed they were legally obligated to refuse access because the DOGE employees lacked the necessary security clearances, two officials said. A DOGE advisory board member said that no classified material was accessed “without proper security clearances.” Abigail Williams, Vaughn Hillyard, Yamiche Alcindor, and Dan De Luce report for NBC News; Ellen Knickmeyer reports for AP News.

Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and several Democratic Senators yesterday wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressing alarm over reports of potentially unauthorized access to USAID’s classified material and plans to fold USAID into the State Department.

U.S. FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Trump on Saturday imposed tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China, set to begin tomorrow. The move was quickly followed by the announcement of retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico. China announced it would file a complaint against the United States at the World Trade Organization and issue “corresponding countermeasures.” David Lynch, Mary Beth Sheridan, and Amanda Coletta report for the Washington Post; Jessica Murphy, Will Grant, and Michael Race report for BBC News; Keith Bradsher reports for the New York Times.

Venezuela will take in citizens deported by the United States, Trump said on Saturday. The move would clear the way for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans to be sent back to the authoritarian regime that many of them fled. Samantha Schmidt, Peter Jamison, and Maria Sacchetti report for the Washington Post.

The Trump administration has ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Venezuelans in the United States, leaving them vulnerable to potential deportation, government documents reviewed by the New York Times show. Hamed Aleaziz and Maggie Haberman report.

Six U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela have been freed after Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell met with President Nicolás Maduro, Trump said Friday. The United States does not officially recognize Maduro’s presidency. Alejandra Jaramillo and Chris Lau report for CNN.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday told Panama’s President Jose Raul Mulino that Washington sees China’s presence in the Panama Canal as a violation of the U.S.-Panama treaty and will take “necessary measures” under the treaty if it persists, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said. Simon Lewis and Elida Moreno report for Reuters.

Trump on Saturday ordered airstrikes against the Islamic State in northern Somalia that killed “multiple operatives,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. Eric Schmitt reports for the New York Times.

The Trump administration is considering sending 24,000 assault rifles to Israel, according to a U.S. official. The sale was previously halted by former Secretary of State Antony Blinken over concerns that the rifles could be used in acts of violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Edward Wong reports for the New York Times.

OTHER U.S. DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENTS

A federal judge on Friday issued a temporary order restraining the Trump administration from blocking the flow of Congress-allocated funds to government programs in 22 Democratic-leaning states which filed a lawsuit against the federal funding freeze. Mattathias Schwartz reports for the New York Times.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is scrambling to keep its employees from leaving after the Trump administration’s buyout offer. In an email seen by CNN, the NTSB chair on Friday claimed the agency was granted a “full exemption” from the program. Pete Muntean reports.

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR

Israel and Hamas on Saturday swapped three more hostages and 183 Palestinian prisoners, the fourth exchange under the ceasefire deal. Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon report for the New York Times.

The Rafah border crossing reopened on Saturday for the first time in nine months, allowing 50 sick and wounded Gazans to cross into Egypt, the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry said. Adam Rasgon reports for the New York Times.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will start negotiations on the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire when he meets with Trump’s Middle East Envoy, Steve Witkoff, in Washington today, Netanyahu’s office said. Netanyahu is also expected to meet Trump tomorrow. Reuters reports; CBS News reports.

An Israeli strike on a vehicle in Gaza wounded at least four Palestinians yesterday, medics said. The Israeli military said it fired on a “suspicious vehicle.” Nidal Al-Mughrabi and James Mackenzie report for Reuters.

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR — REGIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE

Thousands of Egyptians on Friday demonstrated against Trump’s proposal for Egypt and Jordan to accept Gazan refugees in a rare state-sanctioned protest at the Rafah border crossing. Reuters reports.

The United Kingdom, France, and Germany on Friday issued a joint statement reiterating “grave concern” over Israel implementing a law forbidding contacts between Israeli officials and UNRWA. Reuters reports.

OTHER GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS

More than 700 people have been killed and 2,800 others were injured in the last five days in the escalating violence in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the U.N. Secretary-General’s spokesperson said on Friday citing an assessment by the World Health Organization. Jennifer Hauser reports for CNN.

Rwanda-backed M23 rebels are likely to encounter thousands of troops from Burundi stationed in eastern DRC as they push south toward the city of Bukavu, a development that analysts say could prompt a descent into a full-blown regional war. David Lewis and Sonia Rolley report for Reuters.

The Rapid Support Forces paramilitary killed at least 54 people and wounded 158 others in an attack on an open market in Sudan, Sudanese health authorities said on Saturday. Samy Magdy and Fatma Khaled report for AP News.

The Israeli military yesterday demolished at least 20 buildings in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, the Palestinian state news agency said. According to the Israeli military, the “dismantled” buildings contained laboratories, weapons, and observation posts. No casualties were reported. Reuters reports.

The recent fighting in eastern Congo has led to a surge in human rights violations, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said on Friday citing cases documented by the agency and reports from DRC officials. Reuters reports.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

A Russian airstrike on a residential building in central Ukraine killed at least 14 people on Saturday, emergency services said. Maria Kostenko, Kostyantyn Hak, Kareem El Damanhoury, Mariya Knight, and Billy Stockwell report for CNN.

The United States wants Ukraine to hold elections if Kyiv agrees to a truce with Russia, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg said. The move could force Ukraine to suspend its martial law decree, in force since 2022. Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay report for Reuters.

SYRIA

Syria’s interim President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, yesterday arrived in Saudi Arabia on the first foreign trip of Damascus’ rebel-led government. Ismaeel Naar and Christina Goldbaum report for the New York Times.

The Israeli military is building multiple outposts on Syrian territory, according to satellite imagery reviewed by the Washington Post. Loveday Morris, Zakaria Zakaria, and Meg Kelly report for the Washington Post.

The post Early Edition: February 3, 2025 appeared first on Just Security.

What’s Lost if the Government Pushes People Like Me Out of the Military

Bree Fram — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 05:01:02 -0500
I’m trans and I serve my country.

Army Identifies Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach as Helicopter Co-Pilot Killed in D.C. Crash

Eric Schmitt — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 22:54:36 -0500
Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach’s family issued a statement that described her many achievements in the service.

Top F.B.I. Agent in New York Vows to ‘Dig In’ After Removals at Agency

Adam Goldman, William K. Rashbaum, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 21:14:50 -0500
James E. Dennehy, the highly respected leader of the largest and most important field office in the bureau, said in an email to staff that the F.B.I. was in “a battle of our own.”