Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on April 15 blocked the Trump administration from freezing the disbursement of funds for climate and infrastructure grants, finding that the pause in disbursing funds was illegal.

Nonprofits suing the administration over the freeze presented evidence that the indefinite freeze of already-awarded money was arbitrary and capricious, in contravention of federal law, U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy said in a 63-page ruling that entered a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and five other agencies.

Officials with the agencies earlier this year froze funds awarded under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, two laws passed by Congress and signed by former President Joe Biden. They cited President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 order that directed all agencies to pause the disbursement of money through the laws in order to review whether the funds were consistent with the law and with Trump’s agenda.

The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council and other groups that have awards sued, alleging in part that the freeze violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which prohibits arbitrary and capricious actions and lets courts set such actions aside.

The freeze “blatantly arbitrary and capricious, including because it fails to account for the significant reliance interests of grantees and other recipients who reasonably expect—and need—to be able to draw on open awards of funding in order to provide services,” the groups said in a motion for an injunction.

Government lawyers told the court that Congress gave agencies the discretion to select among eligible recipients of the funding allocated by the laws, “and therefore Defendants are likewise entitled to temporarily pause funding for current recipients to determine whether they wish to redirect that funding elsewhere.”

“Plaintiffs’ contrary theory—that this Court should compel agencies to continue funding existing grants, even when those grants conflict with the President’s priorities—would raise significant separation of powers concerns,” they said.

McElroy said that courts cannot decide whether a president’s policies are sound, but must weigh in on the lawfulness of the policies when constitutionally required.

“Agencies do not have unlimited authority to further a President’s agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity two statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration,” she wrote.

The judge also said that agencies are likely able to pause funding on a case-by-case basis, but those “narrower powers cannot justify the broad exercise of authority” that they asserted.

The White House did not respond to an early morning request for comment.

Reuters has cited a UK-based open-source analysis firm to claim that Russia’s military is now relying almost on entirely on artillery shells produced and supplied by North Korea along the Ukrainian front.

“Between September 2023 and March 2025, four Russian-flagged vessels made 64 trips transporting nearly 16,000 containers from North Korea to Russian ports, according to satellite data analyzed by the U.K.-based Open Source Center (OSC),” the Tuesday report said. “The organization estimates the shipments included between 4 million and 6 million artillery shells.”

In 2023, when US intelligence and Western allies began calling out alleged North Korean ammo transfers to Russia, the Kremlin rejected the allegations at the time, saying there was “no proof” of such activity.

But since then it’s become clear that North Korea has actively contributed to Russia’s military needs, including sending some 10,000 DPRK troops to assist Russian troops in retaking Kursk territory, on Russian soil.

War analysts have long acknowledged that Russian forces are able to fire at a rate of some ten times more than the Ukrainians along front line positions. This despite Europe and the US over years donating billions worth of weaponry and ammo to Kiev.

This also ties into Ukraine’s recent assertions saying that there is an ‘axis’ of enemies it is fighting back:

“Without help from the DPRK, the Russian army shelling of Ukrainian defensive positions would have been cut in half,” Ukraine’s military intelligence agency GUR told Reuters.

“Without Chairman Kim Jong Un’s support, President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t really be able to prosecute his war in Ukraine,” added Hugh Griffiths, the former coordinator of the UN panel monitoring North Korea sanctions.

Starting last summer, Western media began highlighting that North Korea was sending containers to Russia that could hold as many as 4.8 million artillery shells. And specifically South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik made the first such accusation in an June interview with Bloomberg.

Seoul’s intelligence services spotted at least 10,000 containers being shipped from North Korea to Russia, according to Won-sik. Pyongyang has also sent dozens of ballistic missiles, reportedly for use against Ukraine.

In exchange for the ordnance Russia is allegedly giving North Korea oil, satellite technology as well as tech to improve their tanks and aircraft.  North Korea’s cheap labor, while ethically abhorrent in nature, is proving useful in the fast manufacture of weapons.

Critics argue that artillery coming from North Korea is “substandard” and far less advanced than western produced artillery, leading to a decrease in effect on target. However, 5 million rounds is an incredible arsenal regardless of technology – and more than enough boom to support a large-scale ground offensive. 

The Trump administration has directed the Internal Revenue Service’s top legal official to consider revoking Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, according to the Washington Post, citing three people familiar with the matter. The move represents a significant escalation in the administration’s conflict with the Ivy League institution over its handling of antisemitism and diversity practices.

The request was made to Andrew De Mello, the IRS’s acting chief counsel, on Wednesday by officials at the Treasury Department. De Mello has not yet decided whether to act on it, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations.

Of note, Harvard – which has a $53.2 billion endowment – dodged “at least $465 million” in 2023 due to the tax exemption, according to a Bloomberg analysis cited by the Free Beacon‘s Peter J. Hasson

A Bloomberg analysis last year found that Harvard’s 501c3 status lets it avoid just under **$500 million** in taxes every year https://t.co/FznTtNU2Rh

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) April 16, 2025

The directive follows the administration’s broader efforts to pressure higher education institutions it views as “woke,” the sources said. Earlier this month, the Trump administration demanded sweeping authority over Harvard’s admissions, hiring, and curricular decisions, as well as its response to student activism related to the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Harvard rejected those demands on Monday. Hours later, the administration announced it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding to the university.

Harvard is a tax-free hedge fund with $53 billion in semi-liquid assets, and that doesn’t include its tax-free real estate, which is also worth billions. And it still has the gall to demand even more taxpayer money. If schools are going to act like hedge funds, they should be… pic.twitter.com/DCmRWDAxUY

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 15, 2025

The next day, President Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status,” and falsely claimed the institution has supported terrorism.

The request to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status was first reported by CNN. While nonprofit status is granted to educational institutions under federal tax law, it comes with restrictions – particularly a prohibition on certain political activity. Legal experts say there is no public evidence that Harvard has violated those rules.

According to federal law, the authority to investigate or alter a nonprofit’s tax status rests solely with the IRS, and the president is explicitly prohibited from ordering or influencing such actions against individual taxpayers or entities.

Former House GOP leader Newt Gingrich thinks it’s just the beginning… “I think they’re going to go after a whole bunch of them,” said Gingrich. “I’m not sure why we need to be funding people who aggressively refuse to give up a variety of values and structures that most Americans don’t agree with.”

The Trump administration has taken steps in recent months to increase political control over the IRS. De Mello was appointed acting chief counsel in March after the administration demoted a career IRS lawyer who had reportedly resisted efforts to access confidential tax records in pursuit of undocumented immigrants.

In a separate development, Gary Shapley, appointed by Trump as acting commissioner of the IRS, reportedly told staff that revoking the tax-free status of certain nonprofit groups flagged by Republican lawmakers was one of his top priorities. That includes organizations that oppose Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and a Georgia-based political group aligned with Democratic candidates, according to people briefed on the conversations.

Rep. Jason T. Smith (R-MO), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has called on the IRS to strip nonprofit status from groups opposing Israel’s war effort.

The IRS has previously faced controversy over its treatment of politically active nonprofit groups. In 2013, the agency acknowledged using politically loaded keywords to scrutinize organizations seeking tax-exempt status. Although that process initially drew criticism for targeting conservative groups, an inspector general’s investigation later revealed that liberal organizations were also subjected to increased scrutiny.

In a decisive move to address the nation’s overwhelmed immigration system, the Trump administration has rolled out a new policy directing immigration judges to swiftly dismiss asylum claims deemed legally deficient, a long-overdue measure to alleviate frivolous claims and legal loopholes that has paralyzed the US immigration court system, which has a backlog of nearly four million cases.

The policy, which took effect April 11, empowers judges to deny asylum applications early in the process if they clearly lack a legal basis, bypassing the lengthy and often unnecessary “merits hearing” phase that can drag out cases for years.

“Adjudicators have the duty to efficiently manage their dockets,” wrote Sirce Owen, acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), in the policy memo. “It is clear from the almost four million pending cases on E.O.I.R.’s docket that has not been happening.”

For years, critics of the current system have argued that America’s generosity has been exploited by migrants who file dubious asylum claims solely to remain in the U.S. for years while awaiting hearings. Critics of America’s broken immigration system have long argued that it rewards economic migrants who game the asylum process by applying without any real chance of qualifying, then using the backlog to remain in the country for years – often receiving work permits and taxpayer-funded benefits in the meantime.

Judges are now encouraged to take “all appropriate action to immediately resolve cases” that lack a viable legal path – a move that could clear out tens of thousands of meritless claims clogging the courts.

According to the Justice Department memo cited by the NY Times, “No existing regulation requires a hearing when there are no factual issues in dispute, including when the facts underlying the legal claim for asylum are undisputed, but the claim itself is legally deficient.”

The move comes as immigration courts face record-breaking backlogs. Despite efforts to increase the number of immigration judges, staffing has not kept pace with the rising number of illegal border crossings and asylum applications.

With only about 700 judges managing nearly four million cases, each judge now faces a crushing caseload. The Trump administration has proposed adding more judges, but in the meantime, streamlining the process is seen as critical.

The policy could be especially effective in deterring fraudulent claims. Many migrants who arrive at the southern border file asylum claims not because they fear persecution, but because they know the system allows them to stay in the country for years regardless of merit. By allowing judges to quickly reject obviously invalid claims, the policy could reduce the incentive to abuse the system.

And of course, a Democrat judge will block this in 3, 2, 1…

Speaking of which – the move to block migrants at the front door comes as a Democrat judge, Indira Talwani, has ordered the Trump administration to require individual hearings for roughly 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) before deporting them.

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Georgia man has been sentenced to 6.5 years in prison for his role in a scheme to launder millions of dollars in illicit drug proceeds for Mexican cartels.

Judge Claude M. Hilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia handed down the sentence to Li Pei Tan, 47, of Buford, Georgia, on April 11, according to a court statement. Tan pleaded guilty in October 2024 after he was arrested several months earlier.

Tan’s coconspirator, Chaojie Chen, a 41-year-old Chinese national living in Chicago, was sentenced to more than 7.5 years in December 2024.

Tan and Chen worked on behalf of foreign drug trafficking organizations, including the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación. The two, along with other coconspirators, traveled throughout the United States to collect money gained from trafficking fentanyl, cocaine, and other illicit drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration said in its 2024 threat assessment report that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels “are at the heart” of the fentanyl crisis. The agency said the two cartels “rely on chemical companies and pill press companies in China” for precursor chemicals and equipment and “utilize Chinese Money Laundering Organizations to move their profits from the United States back to Mexico.”

According to a court document submitted days before the sentence was imposed, prosecutors said Tan and his coconspirators often received bulk cash amounts from drug trafficking organizations, and they transported the money across state lines so that the “funds could be transacted with and laundered several states removed from where the proceeds were generated.”

Tan and his coconspirators used encrypted messaging platforms for communication, such as the Chinese app WeChat, according to the court document.

They relied on bank accounts in both China and the United States for their scheme, the court document stated.

To further their money laundering conspiracy, Tan and his coconspirators also purchased bulk electronics in the United States and shipped them to coconspirators in China, according to the court document. In return, Tan received commissions for these shipments.

On March 3, 2024, nearly 12 weeks before being arrested, Tan was stopped by law enforcement officials during a traffic stop near Charlotte, North Carolina. He was found to have in his possession $197,700 in illicit drug proceeds.

Tan’s money laundering totaled more than $3.5 million, according to the court document.

Prosecutors explained in the court document that they had sought a sentence of more than 11 years for Chen, who admitted to laundering more than $14 million in illicit drug proceeds.

Considering Chen’s involvement in the scheme and that he received a 90-month sentence, prosecutors argued that the judge should sentence Tan to 108 months, or nine years, of imprisonment.

Prosecutors said that sentence “adequately reflects the seriousness of the defendant’s conduct,” and “will serve to deter the defendant and others from engaging in similar, potentially deadly criminal activity.”

“The defendant was a crucial member of an international money laundering conspiracy who enriched himself on the back of international drug trafficking, a ruinous and destructive trade that has brought untold suffering to communities throughout the United States and fueled instability and violence abroad,” the court document states.

Tan’s lawyer, Robert L. Jenkins Jr., said his client regretted his involvement in the scheme.

“Mr. Tan is a hard-working family man. He truly regrets becoming involved in this matter. He sincerely wishes to put it behind him and refocus his attention on his family,” Jenkins stated in an email to The Epoch Times on April 14.

In December 2024, a federal judge in Illinois sentenced Pan Haiping to 10 years behind bars for laundering $62 million in illegal narcotics proceeds on behalf of Mexican drug traffickers.

Pan, a Chinese national, collaborated with accomplices to launder as much as $3 million monthly in drug proceeds using “secretive money pickups” in several U.S. cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, followed by currency swaps between the U.S. dollar and Chinese yuan, and the Chinese yuan and the Mexican peso, according to prosecutors.

A 61 year old man known as “Sushi John” and owner of Ya Ya Noodles in Montgomery Township, NJ, was arrested by ICE in Newark on March 24, according to the NY Post.

Ming Xi Zhang, 61, was convicted in April 2024 of “acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government” and sentenced to three years’ probation. He had pleaded guilty in 2021 to serving as a Chinese agent in 2016 without notifying the U.S. Attorney General.

According to ICE, Zhang legally entered the U.S. in 2000 but later “violated the terms of his lawful admission.” He is being held at the Elizabeth Detention Center awaiting immigration proceedings, following his recent arrest by ICE amid a broader deportation push under President Trump.

The NY Post writes that in 2016, Zhang met with Chinese security officials in the Bahamas and delivered $35,000 to an unnamed individual in New Jersey. He also admitted to hosting a Chinese government agent twice at his Princeton home that fall, according to NJ.com.

“He’s doing good, I mean, given the circumstances,” a worker at his restaurant told the Post. “But yeah, he’s just kind of waiting… to get let out.”

Since his arrest, local support in the blue state has accelerated. Apparently citizens of New Jersey are just fine with Zhang acting on behalf of the Chinese government.

“The whole town has been really supportive,” the worker added. “Everyone’s been coming in, offering phone numbers, talking to his family . . . everyone’s really supportive.”

No word yet on whether or not it was Eric Swalwell’s favorite place to eat when visiting New Jersey…

Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations,

While limiting strings-attached grants and curbing federal regulation, President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education also take aim at a key tool bureaucrats use to oversee schools in all 50 states: civil rights investigations.

Probes handled by the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against public schools, colleges and universities roughly doubled during the Biden administration, topping 20,000 last year. Investigations by hundreds of OCR lawyers and staff members – and responses to them by untold numbers of school officials and administrators – touched on everything from allegations of sexual violence and disability accommodations to website compatibility. 

Defenders of the office say it has been an invaluable protector of civil rights for America’s nearly 70 million students. They say eliminating or even downsizing the office, which has already begun, would kneecap thousands of ongoing investigations while abolishing a prime instrument of justice. 

“This reckless action strips students of vital resources and tears down statutorily mandated functions that are essential to addressing racial and economic inequality in education,” the ACLU declared last month. Trump, it said, has put “millions of students’ education and civil rights at risk.”

Advocates for handicapped students, who until recent years accounted for half of all complaints, are concerned they might get short shrift in the Trump administration and have gone to court to block cuts. “We have many members who file complaints, and it has left many of them in limbo, or distraught, thinking there will be no accountability,” said Selene A. Almazan, legal director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, plaintiffs in a suit filed March 14. 

But backers of Trump’s effort to eliminate the Department of Education counter that the Office for Civil Rights is a symbol of how the federal government has expanded its reach into what they describe as chiefly local matters. They say its investigative arm has been designed to make it as easy as possible for the department to maximize its influence and oversight through investigations. 

A complainant does not need a personal connection to a school. Indeed, petitioners don’t even have to live in the same state, and legal standing is not a factor. They do not even need to identify themselves. They are not required to try to resolve their problems at the local level before notifying the feds – though many do. Consequently, the office’s operations sometimes function as a nationwide anonymous sounding board rather than a source of last resort, a place where anyone can make a federal case out of any slight, real or perceived.

Although OCR probes include many serious allegations, the system’s structure means the number of cases can be inflated through duplication, serial filers and ambitious bureaucrats.

“The numbers aren’t really what they first appear,” said Teresa R. Manning, policy director at the National Association of Scholars, a conservative counterweight in higher education to the liberal American Association of University Professors. “A lot of this was by design. If they didn’t have complaints, they wouldn’t have jobs, so a lot of federal bureaucrats and campus officers want any grievance to become a federal case.”

The numbers themselves are unclear. Neither the Department of Education nor its Office for Civil Rights responded to multiple requests for comment, and a listed phone number is no longer manned daily; voice messages left there were not returned. But it appears the administration has laid off some 240 people in the OCR, shuttering at least six of its 12 regional offices. Currently, eight of 22 “key staff” positions there are vacant, according to its website.

When Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon first announced layoffs in February, reports mentioned 12,000 active investigations listed on the OCR database, which was last updated on Jan. 14. Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced his own report on the office, claiming 6,800 cases would be shortchanged by the layoffs. 

But no matter which total is used, the claim that U.S. schools are teeming with incidents of overt racism or sexism, or bias against handicapped students, is misleading, according to experts familiar with the OCR and its work. 

In theory, every complaint is reviewed to determine if it constitutes discrimination on the basis of race (“Title VI”), sex (“Title IX”), or disability. If so, the Office for Civil Rights can open an investigation, or its attorneys can allege that there are “systemic” violations and trigger much broader investigations.

Such initiatives were highlighted in a glossy report the office released on Jan. 16, four days before Trump’s inauguration. The office appears to have published six such “special reports” since 2016, with half of those during Biden’s term. Two of them – the first and another in 2021 – dealt with alleged “racial disparities” or “equity” in school discipline.

This looks like a more proactive OCR following the age-old practice of boosting the cases on its books and then insisting it needs more funding, said Jim Blew, a co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute and a former assistant secretary of education in Trump’s first term.

“Skepticism is legitimate, because by declaring something is ‘systemic,’ then rather than resolve that one issue they can turn it into a federal case,” Blew said. “And if you’re going to interpret the discrimination on much different and broader levels than ever before, that’s going to increase the number of complaints, too.” 

RealClearInvestigations found that, despite claims that cuts to OCR will impede “prompt” action or justice for filers, the office did not always handle complaints promptly. Among the 12,000 ongoing investigations listed in the OCR database – half of which involved disability complaints – RCI found active investigations into alleged incidents that occurred in 2016 or 2017, long after any students at the schools in question would have departed. Many alleged incidents also triggered more than one investigation, meaning the “thousands” are fewer than they first appear.

The investigations can take years. Alabama A&M University, for example, is under investigation for “sexual violence” that allegedly occurred on Aug. 24, 2016. The university did not respond to requests for comments on this alleged incident or general compliance with OCR.

Similarly, on Aug. 2, 2017, an alleged incident in Mississippi’s Greene County School District sparked two investigations, one for racial harassment and another for “retaliation” that remain active, according to OCR’s website.

Also, totals were swollen by one unnamed individual. For example, in 2022 when OCR received 9,948 complaints of Title IX violations, nearly three out of four – 7,339 – came from this person. That same individual slipped a bit the following year, accounting for only 69% of the 5,590 complaints. RCI asked several people familiar with Office of Civil Rights work who this person might be, but none said they knew.

The number of complaints skyrocketed during the Biden administration, doubling the average that had held for more than a decade, records show. Last April, Biden regulators sought a radical expansion of Title IX sex discrimination protection to cover things like “gender identity.” That attempt was later blocked by the courts.  

Through President Obama’s two terms and Trump’s first term, the office received just under 10,000 complaints annually. In 2022, however, that figure shot up to a record 18,804 and did not stop climbing. It jumped 18% in 2023 before topping 20,000 complaints for the first time in 2024, according to OCR.

It’s not exactly clear what accounted for the big increases, according to experts. But the usual breakdown of classification of complaints changed. Instead of disability complaints comprising more than half of the total OCR received, 42% of those filed in 2023 concerned sexual discrimination, while disability complaints fell to a bit more than a third, according to the office’s figures.

Office for Civil Rights attorneys can launch investigations, or encourage schools to do so, via the well-known “Dear Colleague” letter that alerts administrators to how regulators plan to interpret federal laws. It was just such a “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 from Catherine Lhamon, who headed the Office for Civil Rights under Obama and Biden, that urged schools to use the lowest possible level of evidence in sexual harassment or assault cases, to make it easier for people to request a remedy to perceived injustice.

“If you’re going to interpret the discrimination in much different and broader terms than ever before then you’re going to increase complaints,” Blew said. “It should be obvious there are certain interests that care about padding their Office of Civil Rights numbers.”

‘Administrative Bloat’

In the face of rising Office for Civil Rights investigations, letters and complaints, schools have been forced to add more layers of administrators and attorneys. Those offices also grew during Biden’s term, when an emphasis on “diversity, equity and inclusion” departments and offices swelled higher education payrolls.

“It has led to administrative bloat, too, as tuition goes to deanlets and bureaucrats,” Manning said. “They often partner together with other entities on campus, and you have many bureaucrats who feed complaints.” 

In its January report, OCR reported that it had received 71,385 complaints during Biden’s term and had resolved 56,383 of them. But the backlog of complaints has grown, and in the 13 years covered by the report it was only during Trump’s first term that the office reported resolving more complaints than it received. At least one person who has filed numerous complaints with the OCR suspects that some of the backlog results from an unwillingness to tackle cases that do not fit progressive orthodoxy.

Mark Perry, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, who specializes in complaints challenging race- and gender-based scholarships, fellowships and other programs, said OCR has opened 423 investigations into his complaints since he started filing them in 2019. 

“I currently have nearly 300 complaints backlogged at OCR, some going back to 2019 and 2020 that have either never made it through the evaluation stage to being opened for investigation and others opened for investigation back in 2019, 2020, and 2021, etc. that have never been resolved,” he said. “Now it’s possible I’m being targeted and slow-walked for being a repeat filer for complaints alleging discrimination against men and whites.”

Perry based that belief, in part, on a handwritten letter he received from an OCR employee in its Chicago branch in September 2023 in response to a Chronicle of Higher Education article about Perry’s filings. “OCR has no impetus, sadly, to advance your cases, total failure in HQ,” the letter said. “Your cases just sit with no activity.”

The delays are especially odd, in Perry’s opinion, given that he is a professional who accompanies his complaints with printed evidence of the specific grant or program he thinks should be curtailed or made available to all students. “My complaints are simple; they should only take a couple of months,” he told RCI.

Another more recent, consistent filer is the Equal Protection Project, launched by conservative Cornell Law School Professor William Jacobson, who runs the Legal Insurrection website. In 2025, the project has averaged an OCR complaint a week, and has filed 70 complaints since it began in February 2023.

Like Perry’s, the project’s focus is on clear violations of the plain language of statues, Jacobson said. On April 1, the project filed a complaint against the Pennsylvania College of Technology, an affiliate of Pennsylvania State University, for 12 scholarships that allegedly “discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, and/or sex in violation of Title VI and Title IX, respectively.”

For now, it’s unclear what will happen to the thousands of investigations on the office’s books, or to future complaints like disability grievances filed by Almazan’s group. The laws require a direct interference with a student’s education to validate a complaint, a distinction drawn more by the courts than administrators and bureaucrats who give themselves wide latitude to pursue their own enforcement goals, experts said.

“Biden and the Democrats tend to tinker with the language, creating ‘subjective’ offenses that are a moving target and raise due-process concerns,” Manning said. “The courts have tried to rein it in.”

Even as it appears intent on limiting the Education Department’s reach, the Trump administration has also signaled that it will not completely surrender the use of federal power to influence local schools. It has vowed  to root out antisemitism on college campuses, biological men competing against women in sports, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs the administration says violate the clear letter of discrimination laws.

On April 7, McMahon announced a special investigative office, staffed by the Education and Justice departments, to enforce “Title IX to protect female students and athletes.”

One of the primary platforms of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was the strict control of foreign elements entering into the United States.  American voters overwhelmingly supported closed borders as well as the deportation of illegal migrants and disruptive migrant elements including those that received visas and green cards under the Biden Administration.  The political left, not surprisingly, has refused to accept that this is the majority view of the population as they continue to interfere with the migrant clean-up using whatever methods are at their disposal. 

The question of constitutional legality has come up often.  The very same people who, only a few years ago, were trying to silence any and all dissent on the Covid mandates and vaccines are suddenly concerned with the free speech rights of people who are not American citizens or those that obtained green card status through convenient circumstances (marriage as a fast track for citizenship).

In a recent blow to their position, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that the Trump administration can deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal permanent resident who was detained last month for his role in violent campus protests against the war in Gaza.  Judge Jamee Comans said the government had “established clear and convincing evidence that he is removable”, supporting the determination that Khalil poses a national security risk for the United States.  Khalil was not charged with a specific crime. 

The leftist media maintains that the evidence against Khalil is “shaky at best” and that his green card, obtained in 2024 after his marriage to a woman out of Flint, Michigan in 2023 means he should have the same protest rights as any natural American citizen. 

Khalil is a Syrian born Palestinian, and it should be noted that according to Amnesty International protesters in Gaza are routinely arrested, tortured and executed by Hamas officials for crimes as minor as demanding that Hamas repair infrastructure or stop interfering with food deliveries.  In other words, the very government that Mahmoud Khalil is defending would murder him without a second thought if he tried the same thing in Gaza.  The hypocrisy of such immigrants fomenting unrest in the US is clear, but it’s not necessarily a violation of the law.

Technically it is true that green card holders and migrants in general have the same free speech rights as native born Americans.  This is why Khalil’s deportation is subject to due process.  However, just because an immigrant has free speech rights, it doesn’t mean they can’t be deported anyway.

According to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the US government has the right to “preserve the sociological and cultural balance of the United States” and deny foreign entry to the US based on a migrant’s political ideology.  This means that the Trump Administration does in fact have the power to remove foreigners, even those with green cards, if they are seen as an ideological threat to the west. 

That is to say, migrants have free speech rights but the federal government also has the right to kick them out.  Is this contradictory?  Maybe, but it’s also a fact of life for anyone wanting access to US soil.

Democrats claim the law no longer has standing because it is “73 years old” (the Bill of Rights is hundreds of years old and the age of a law is irrelevant).  They also say that later civil rights policies make the law obsolete.  But is this really true?  Maybe strict immigration laws are more important than ever in light of efforts by leftist politicians and NGOs working hand in hand to flood the US with disruptive foreign elements.

The political left has been engaged in a guerrilla war in which civil liberties are used as a shield to protect astroturf activism paid for by NGOs, along with deliberately destructive third world immigration.  The strategy is classically Marxist; use the rules of the opponent against him, while you have no rules of your own.

The Gaza protests are in large part simply a convenient vehicle for wider leftist disruption.  The hilarious mixture of LGBT, feminist and race activists into the Palestinian plight showcases how the woke movement often rides the coattails of whatever issue is convenient in order to steal the spotlight for their own agenda.  Is Mahmoud Khalil being made into an example as a warning to the political left?  Probably.   

There is certainly the ongoing risk of a slippery slope of governmental overreach.  Do the deportations stop with people like Mahmoud Khalil, reportedly participating in high profile civil disturbances?  Or, will this power be used against people who merely engage in peaceful criticism?  The idea that constitutional rights don’t necessarily apply to everyone equally doesn’t sit well with many Americans, but at this time in US history a line in the sand when it comes to migrants is necessary.  

The bottom line is, not every foreigner is entitled to US access.  Not every foreigner is entitled to the same rights as native born American citizens.  American society is not a lump of clay to be molded by any and all foreign activists that happen to come along.  There are civilizational boundaries and rules of decorum.  Immigrants should probably keep their heads down and remain thankful that they were allowed into the country at all. 

A report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on April 15 showed that 1 in 31 children in America has autism.

The figures, which mark another jump in a long line of increases, stem from the CDC’s latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The report prompted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to say that “the autism epidemic is running rampant.”

“That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992,” Kennedy said in an April 15 statement.

“Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California, it’s 1 in 12.5.”

“We need to move away from this ideology that the prevalence of autism increases are simply from better diagnosis, better recognition, or changing diagnostic criteria,” RFK Jr began his address this morning.

“This epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream media, and it’s based on an industry canard.” 

“There are people who don’t want us to look at environmental exposures.” 

“Doctors and therapists in the past were not stupid.” 

“They weren’t missing all these cases.”

The most important video on X today!

RFK Jr: “We need to move away from this ideology that the prevalence of autism increases are simply from better diagnosis, better recognition, or changing diagnostic criteria.”

“This epidemic denial has become a feature in the mainstream… pic.twitter.com/nHEHjikZCo

— End Tribalism in Politics (@EndTribalism) April 16, 2025

As Jeff Louderback reportsa for The Epoch Times, the previous ADDM report released in 2023 discovered that 1 in 36 8-year-old American children had autism in 2020. The April 15 survey reflects a 16.1 percent increase in two years.

The new ADDM report was conducted in 2022 across 16 sites in 14 states and surveyed 8-year-old children born in 2014.

The new autism prevalence is also 4.8 times higher than in the first ADDM survey 22 years ago, when 1 in 150 children had autism.

“The autism epidemic has now reached a scale unprecedented in human history because it affects the young,” Kennedy said in his April 15 statement.

“The risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than COVID-19. Autism is preventable and it is unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes. We should have had these answers 20 years ago,” Kennedy added.

Autism Society of America spokeswoman Kristyn Roth told the Associated Press that more research is needed to find what causes autism, but she is alarmed about Kennedy’s approach.

“There is a deep concern that we are going backward and evaluating debunked theories,” Roth said.

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech, and nonverbal communication, according to Autism Speaks.

“There are many different factors that have been identified that may make a child more likely to have ASD, including environmental, biologic, and genetic factors,” the HHS website reads.

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a no-fault system for compensating individuals injured by certain vaccines.

This eliminated the potential financial liability of vaccine manufacturers due to vaccine injury claims.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Oval Office in Washington on Feb. 13, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

In the early 1990s, just 1 in 10,000 children were diagnosed with autism. In the first decade of this century, the estimate rose to 1 in 150. In 2018, it was 1 in 44 before reaching 1 in 36 in 2020.

Last December, President Donald Trump said that he would also give Kennedy the freedom to investigate the potential link between vaccines and autism.

“When you look at some of the problems, when you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said in December.

“I think somebody has to find out. If you go back 25 years ago, you had very little autism.”

Kennedy has said for years that autism is likely tied to childhood vaccines.

The NIH supports and funds research into autism, as well as potential new vaccines.

Kennedy told The Epoch Times in September that he would revamp the NIH to focus on the causes of autism, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopmental diseases instead of developing drugs and serving as an incubator for pharmaceutical products.

In February, after the Senate confirmed Kennedy as health secretary, Trump established the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which the White House stated would investigate the “root causes of America’s escalating health crisis.”

At Trump’s April 10 cabinet meeting, Kennedy announced that HHS has “launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world” to determine what has caused autism rates to spike in recent years.

“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” he noted.

For parents and vaccine safety advocates such as Scott Shoemaker and MaryJo Perry, extensively studying potential links between childhood vaccines and autism is long overdue.

Shoemaker told The Epoch Times that his son was diagnosed with autism at the age of 15 months.

“The bottom line is we want the truth,” said Shoemaker, who is president of Health Freedom Ohio. 

“We want safe products for our kids. We don’t want big pharma to just say vaccines are safe and effective.”

According to Children’s Health Defense, there has not been a double-blind placebo-controlled safety study on infant vaccines.

“That needs to happen,” Perry told The Epoch Times. “There is no liability and no accountability for pharmaceutical companies. That needs to change.”

Perry, who is president of Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights, said that all vaccines should undergo extensive safety studies and results should be “accurate and transparent.”

“If it’s good and safe, parents will use it,” she said. “You won’t have to coerce parents if it’s good and safe.”

Hard not to get emotional. We’ve got somebody who isn’t going to silence or shame mothers that don’t understand how their healthy child all of a sudden wasn’t anymore. Science is about following the facts and not ignoring inconvenient evidence that might disadvantage big…

— P.T. Ward (@HTWardish) April 16, 2025