The Supreme Court has ordered a pause on the deportation of Venezuelan migrants being held in Texas, whom the Trump administration is seeking to remove under an 18th century wartime law.

In a brief order issued early Saturday, the court directed the federal government to halt deportation proceedings for a group of men that the government alleges are members of the Tren de Aragua gang “until further order of this court.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

It is the second time that Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act has landed before the Supreme Court. The administration has deported scores of migrants it accuses of being gang members under the law, many of whom were sent to El Salvador with little to no due process.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency appeal at several courts, including the Supreme Court, saying that “dozens or hundreds” of men at the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Texas were at imminent risk of being removed from the U.S. “without notice or an opportunity to be heard.” Many of the men had been “loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport,” the ACLU said in its appeal, having been told that they could be removed from the U.S. as soon as that afternoon or Saturday.

That effort, the organization’s attorneys said, was “in direct contravention” of the court’s April 7 ruling that allowed the administration to remove alleged gang members under the Alien Enemies Act — but only if they are given due process.

Clarissa-je Lim

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking/trending news blogger for BLN Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.

The trade deficit with China in the current tariff war is overshadowing another important shortfall — our country’s education deficit with China.

As the Trump administration threatens American universities, guts crucial research programs, slashes education spending and threatens to kill the Department of Education, Chinese leaders are steaming ahead to improve their vast nation’s education standards and outcomes. And China is doing this with a laserlike focus on programs around science, technologyindustrial innovation and ai.

As the Trump administration slashes education spending, Chinese leaders are steaming ahead to improve their nation’s education standards and outcomes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon confused the abbreviation for artificial intelligence with A-1the popular steak sauce brand. The contrast could not be more stark, and the consequences should worry all of us.

China graduates almost twice as many STEM-oriented Ph.D.s in science and technology programs than the U.S. — an estimated 77,000 versus 40,000 according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. If you exclude international students from that count, then China outpaces the U.S. 3 to 1.

Their advantage doesn’t end with science and technology Ph.D.s. China has also been forging ahead to create stronger undergraduate engineering programsand vocational engineering disciplines to create a massive workforce of factory and innovation, with workers that have mastered specialized hands-on technological, problem solving and math skills.

There is a 2015 video with Apple CEO Tim Cook that has been re-circulating recently that explains why China is so attractive to foreign manufacturers. Here’s the newsflash: It’s not just about cheap labor. In that interview with former Fortune executive editor Adam Lashinsky at the Fortune Global Forum, Cook spells out why China is so important to Apple’s global supply chain for computers, iPads, iPhones and other products. He says, “The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor costs…. but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago.  That is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.”

Cook said in that video that “the products we do require really advanced tooling and … the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers … and I am not sure you could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. It is that vocational expertise is very deep, very very deep here, and I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational.”

He said workers there demonstrate an “intersection of craftsman kind of skill and sophisticated robotics and sort of the computer science world, that intersection that is very rare to find anywhere.”

Trump defends his torrent of tariffs by promising that such economic saber rattling will bring American manufacturing roaring back. However, his team does not seem to have a plan to rebuild a new model of American manufacturing that is based on brains as much as brawn, as well as the ability to keep up with rapid technological and engineering changes that require precise skills and advanced training.

Whether companies are creating washing machines or weather instruments, the manufacturing models that have become so attractive in China (and also increasingly in places like Vietnam and Indonesia) are based on those advanced skills Cook was talking about. That requires prioritizing academics and investing more in education at all levels — pre-K, K-12, vocational programs and higher education. It also requires investing in the government research programs that partner with universities. But Elon Musk’s DOGE brigade is enthusiastically ravaging the agencies and departments that support such partnerships.

Trump has been all bark and no long-term strategy.

Trump has been all bark and no long-term strategy. What’s sad is that America could continue to be the greatest economic global powerhouse. The ingredients for success are here, but Trump and his team seem hell-bent in destroying the educational and research infrastructure that could insure growth and dominance in the economic sphere. It’s like attacking the fuse box with a blow torch and expecting that the lights and the oven and the computers will all keep running.

It just doesn’t make sense.

In truth, America’s struggles with education predate Trump. Tuition rates have soared to levels that are hard to justify, and almost impossible for most families to finance without steep sacrifice. American students lag behind their international counterparts in several disciplines. A 2019 study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics found that American 8th graders ranked 16th in math and 14th in science. As the Asia Times put it, our kids “were outclassed by students from Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Canada, Dubai and several European countries.”

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found China to rank first — and far ahead of the U.S. — in reading, math and science, but even if we eliminate China’s cherry-picked data, the Asia Times reported, “the US still ranks 34th in math and 15th in science.” It rightly calls that “an appalling result for a country with the world’s best universities.”

Even though China has sometimes presented an overly flattering portrait of its students’ academic achievements, the truth remains that the country has put muscle into building a world-class compulsory education program for young people at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. They’re no longer primarily plowing the best resources into educating the social elite class at the expense of everyone else.

Kishore Mahbubani, the Singapore-based scholar and author of several books on Asia, including “Has China Won?,” argues that the economic standoff between the U.S. and China will be won and lost in the heartland of both countries and that education is the thing that will make the biggest difference.

“At the end of the day, the outcome of the geopolitical contest between the US and China will not be determined by which society is doing a better job at taking care of its bottom 50 percent and by which society’s kids can read, write and count,” Mahbubani argued in the Asia Times.

When you poll voters about what matters to them, they always put education high on the list, but our spending and strategic priorities as a nation don’t reflect that. The education stories that break into the news cycle are more often about school shootings, book bans, restrictions on transgender athletes and debates over critical race theory.

Instead of building America’s world-class education system, President Trump spends his time picking fights with universities or threatening to withhold funding from schools that allegedly teach concepts like white privilege or have what he considers to be “illegal DEI programs.” We have an administration that acts like America’s educational infrastructure is more of a whipping post than a whopping piston of growth.

A country that wants to stay ahead of or even keep up with China doesn’t treat its advanced education system with this kind of disdain and scorn.

Michele Norris

Michele Norris is a senior contributing editor for BLN and the author of “Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race & Identity.”

These local leaders won’t go quietly

As President Donald Trump pushes the limits of executive power — from threatening programs for low-income students to wielding tariffs like political cudgels — some Democratic state officials are pushing back. Hard. Here are three striking examples of that resistance just this week:

Maine’s governor refuses to flinch

Gov. Janet Mills has never been one to back down from a fight — especially not with Trump. When he called her a “dictator” during a 2020 visit to Maine, she replied: “I have spent the better part of my career listening to loud men talk tough to disguise their weakness. That’s what I heard today.”

Flash forward to 2025, and Trump is once again targeting her state, this time over transgender student-athletes. Proposed administration cuts threaten state school lunch programsand the Social Security Administration even briefly suspended a contract that helps new parents sign up their babies for Social Security numbers.

Mills’ response? Total moral clarity:

“This isn’t just about who can compete on the athletic field,” she said in a statement. “It’s about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law. I believe he cannot.”

That kind of clear-eyed courage, especially when kids’ basic needs are on the line, matters more than ever.

California takes Trump to court

If California were its own country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world. That also means it has a lot to lose if Trump’s tariffs tank the economy. And California Attorney General ROB Bonta isn’t taking any chances.

Bonta has filed suitarguing that Trump is abusing the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to bypass Congress and impose tariffs unilaterally. Tariff authority belongs to Congress, not the Oval Office. But with Republican lawmakers largely staying silent, Bonta is stepping up.

As he put it, you can’t invent “bogus national emergencies” to grab power.

Washington state schools double down on diversity

Trump’s threat to cut off federal education funding to states that won’t eliminate diversity programs isn’t going over well in Washington state.

In a letter to the administrationstate Superintendent Chris Reykdal emphasized diversity and inclusion are “core values” in Washington schools, and said he would not capitulate.

Even though his schools rely on Title I funding for low-income students, Reykdal made it clear: The rights of kids come first.

Around a dozen states have so far refused to go along with Trump’s directive to gut DEI programs in public schools.

These are just three stories, but they signal something bigger.

And while Trump may be trying to centralize power in Washington, he’s running headfirst into a patchwork of governors, attorneys general and state officials who are just as determined to defend their communities as he is to punish them.

A story you should be following: Sen. Murkowski gets honest about retaliation

This week, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said something out loud that many of her Republican colleagues are likely too afraid to admit:

I was genuinely surprised to hear the senator acknowledge this dynamic on camera. Murkowski has broken with Trump before: She opposed his deep cuts to the federal workforceand she criticized him for distancing America from the war in Ukraine. She knows what it means to be targeted by Trump and survive, having beaten a Trump-backed challenger in 2022.

She’s not up for re-election until 2028, which does give her a bit of political breathing room. But that doesn’t make her words any less significant. She declared publicly what so many Republicans are whispering behind closed doors: Retaliation is real. And the fear of speaking out is paralyzing.

Her comments reminded me of something I read in Garry Kasparov’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “How America Can Avoid Becoming Russia.” For those in Washington, it’s not an option to pick your battles, he notes, because “when fighting for democracy, you never know if there will be another day.”

Kasparov also argues that all Americans should back the small number of Republicans willing to stand up to Trump and “promise to support them against Musk’s threats to fund primary challenges if they defy him — and to raise millions against them if they don’t.”

I don’t know if that’s something many Democrats will end up doing. But we all need to remember that democracy can’t be taken for granted. And right now, the fight for it has to be loud, unapologetic — and yes, even a little uncomfortable.

Someone you should know: Iowa U.S. Senate candidate Nathan Sage

Meet Nathan Sagethe first Democrat to jump into Iowa’s 2026 U.S. Senate race against Republican incumbent Joni Ernst. A Marine and Army veteran, mechanic and small-town sports announcer, Sage isn’t your typical political hopeful — and that’s exactly the point. In his launch videoSage talks about growing up poor, watching places across Iowa get “abandoned,” and fighting for a Democratic Party that “people like me will actually want to be a part of.”

Now the executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, Sage is channeling frustration with a “rigged” economy and talking directly to to working-class voters who feel left behind — by both parties.

Iowa is a long shot for Democrats. But we are in unprecedented times. Veterans are worried about losing their jobs and their benefits. Tariffs could hurt Iowa soybean farmers. Republicans with power aren’t speaking out against Trump. And Sage is the right person to tell that story.

Only Psaki

Jen Psaki is the host of “Inside with Jen Psaki”airing Sundays at 12 p.m. ET and Mondays at 8 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden.