LiveUpdated 

Trump Administration Live Updates: Democratic-Leaning States Sue Federal Government Over Demands to Drop D.E.I.

Where Things Stand

• Education and D.E.I.: A coalition of 19 states sued the Trump administration on Friday over its threat to withhold federal funding from states and districts with certain diversity programs in their public schools. The lawsuit centers on an April 3 memo the Trump administration sent to states, requiring them to certify that they do not use certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs that the administration has said are illegal. Read more ›

• Trump and Zelensky: President Trump spoke with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday before Pope Francis’ funeral in Vatican City, their first in-person meeting since a heated argument in the Oval Office in February. A White House spokesman called it a “very productive discussion,” but gave no details. The United States has presented Ukraine with a plan for a cease-fire with Russia, on terms widely seen as favorable to Moscow. Read more ›

• Hatch Act: The Trump administration moved on Friday to weaken federal prohibitions on government employees showing support for President Trump while at work, embracing the notion that they should be allowed to wear campaign paraphernalia and removing an independent review board’s role in policing violations. Read more ›

Here’s what happened on Friday.

F.B.I. agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on Friday on charges of obstructing immigration agents, in a major escalation in the Trump administration’s battle with local officials over deportation policy.

Here are some of the other major developments from Friday:

• A coalition of 19 states sued the Trump administration over its threat to withhold federal funding from states and districts with certain diversity programs in their public schools.

• The Trump administration moved to weaken federal prohibitions on government employees showing support for President Trump while at work.

• Federal education officials they had opened a civil rights inquiry into whether New York State could withhold state money from a Long Island school district that had refused to follow a state requirement and drop its Native American mascot.

• A federal judge temporarily blocked Mr. Trump from ending collective bargaining with federal workers’ unions, obstructing a part of the president’s effort to assert more control over the federal bureaucracy.

• Attorney General Pam Bondi said federal authorities may seek reporters’ phone records and compel their testimony in leak investigations, reversing a Biden administration policy meant to protect journalism from intrusive efforts to identify and prosecute leakers.

• Staff members being fired from the U.S. Agency for International Development will be able to keep their government-issued electronic devices when the agency closes this summer, according to an internal email.

• China’s foreign ministry said an executive order that Mr. Trump signed to accelerate the permitting process for seabed mining in international waters “violates international law.”

• The Trump administration abruptly moved to restore the ability of thousands of international students to study in the United States legally, but immigration officials said they could still try to terminate the legal status of the students.

• The Trump administration was preparing to unveil a budget proposal with severe cuts that would eliminate some federal programs and fray the nation’s social safety net.

• Mr. Trump suggested he had been in talks with President Xi Jinping of China about a trade deal. Chinese officials said no negotiations were occurring.

• Mr. Trump, in an interview with Time magazine published Friday, said the United States could lead military action against Iran if nuclear talks collapse.

Advertisement

Trump meets with Zelensky at the pope’s funeral.

President Trump met privately with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday in Vatican City, the White House said, the first time the two leaders have met since their televised argument in late February in the Oval Office exacerbated the deep breach between the two countries.

The meeting took place in St. Peter’s Basilica, the two men perched on metal chairs, deep in conversation for several minutes as they waited for the funeral for Pope Francis to begin. A White House spokesman, Stephen Cheung, called it a “very productive discussion,” but gave no details.

It came at a critical moment. The United States has presented Ukraine with a plan for a cease-fire in its war with Russia, leading to a postwar plan that would give Russia de facto control over all of the lands it has illegally seized since the invasion began three years ago. The proposal also includes a major reversal of American policy: a formal recognition by the United States that Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014, is now Russian territory.

Mr. Zelensky said this past week that Ukraine would never make that concession, noting that it would violate Ukraine’s Constitution; most of the other nations in Europe would almost agree with Mr. Zelensky’s view. But the Ukrainian leader has a counterproposal of his own, Ukrainian officials said, one that would end the conflict on far less generous terms for Russia, and would include billions of dollars in reparations for Ukraine, paid by Russia.

The White House did not respond to queries about the specifics of the meeting in Vatican City. But it was a remarkable scene: an impromptu meeting between two men who have made no secret of their deep dislike and distrust for each other. In the minutes after they last saw each other, Mr. Zelensky was essentially evicted from the White House, a lunch for the two men left uneaten and an economic accord allowing the United States to help exploit much of Ukraine’s minerals left unsigned.

The meeting at the Vatican came just as Mr. Trump was trying to push Mr. Zelensky and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into direct talks. “They are very close to a deal,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social late Friday, after landing in Rome. “The two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off.’”

His enthusiasm may be premature. The proposal turned out by the Trump administration and Mr. Zelensky’s alternative showed a huge gap even on the question of what the Russians should be offered. And neither of the proposals meet several of Mr. Putin’s demands, including that the size of Ukraine’s military be sharply limited.

Mr. Zelensky posted a positive-sounding description of the meeting on X that made clear that he had learned one lesson from his Oval Office encounter: Always show gratitude, even if he and Mr. Trump differ significantly on the terms for ending the war.

“Good meeting,” he wrote, saying that among the points covered were “full and unconditional ceasefire,” and a “reliable and lasting peace that will prevent another war from breaking out.” The last was particularly important: Mr. Trump’s proposal has only vague security guarantees for Ukraine. The Ukrainian proposal is far more specific, calling for a European peacekeeping force with the U.S. providing backup.

“Very symbolic meeting that has potential to become historic, if we achieve joint results,” he wrote, careful to use the word “potential.” He ended with: “Thank you @POTUS.”

Since his inauguration, Mr. Trump has made clear that he wanted his first trip overseas in this term to be to the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia, the site of his initial visit during his first term in office. But on Saturday morning, he was in Europe, making his way to Vatican City to pay his respects at the pontiff’s funeral.

As the ceremonies began, Mr. Trump was surrounded by European leaders he has been denouncing as freeloaders unwilling to pay their share of the continent’s defense, and leaders of the European Union, which he said was “formed in order to screw the United States.”

On his way to Italy on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he was attending the funeral “out of respect” for Francis, noting, “I won the Catholic vote.”

The seating plan released by the Vatican had guests seated in their group in alphabetical order based on their country’s name in French. That put Mr. Trump in the front row between the leaders of Finland and Estonia, — two countries deeply worried about Russia’s “shadow war” against their countries — and just down from President Emmanuel Macron of France. Mr. Trump, Mr. Macron and Mr. Zelensky all chatted briefly before the services began.

Mr. Trump’s every handshake and conversation at the funeral was watched for meaning. He briefly greeted Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, who was sitting a few chairs down from Mr. Trump. White House reporters traveling with the president, but kept at a considerable distance, reported that the two appeared to chat, funereal protocols aside. In the past three months, Ms. von der Leyen was conspicuously absent from the leaders visiting the White House.

A 2-year-old U.S. citizen was deported ‘with no meaningful process,’ a judge suspects.

A federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern on Friday that the Trump administration had deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras “with no meaningful process” and against the wishes of her father.

In a brief order issued from Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, Judge Terry A. Doughty questioned why the administration had sent the child — known in court papers only as V.M.L. — to Honduras with her mother even though her father had sought in an emergency petition on Thursday to stop the girl from being sent abroad.

“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Judge Doughty, a conservative Trump appointee. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

Asserting that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, Judge Doughty set a hearing for May 16 to explore his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

The case of V.M.L., which was reported earlier by Politico, is the latest challenge to the legality of several aspects of President Trump’s aggressive deportation efforts.

The administration has already been blocked by seven federal judges in courts across the country from removing Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to El Salvador under a rarely invoked wartime statute. It has also created an uproar by wrongfully deporting a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador and so far refusing to work to bring him back.

According to court papers, the 2-year-old girl had accompanied her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and her older sister, Valeria, to an immigration appointment in New Orleans on Tuesday when they were taken into custody by officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ms. Lopez Villela was scheduled for an expedited removal from the country on Friday. And in a filing to Judge Doughty, lawyers for the Justice Department claimed that she “made known to ICE officials that she wanted to retain custody of V.M.L. and for V.M.L. to go” with her to Honduras.

But in a petition filed by the child’s custodian, Trish Mack, on Thursday, her father claimed that when he spoke briefly with Ms. Lopez Villela, he could hear her and the children crying. The father reminded her, the petition said, that “their daughter was a U.S. citizen and could not be deported.”

The father, who was not identified by name in the petition, tried to give Ms. Lopez Villela the phone number for a lawyer, but he claims that officials cut short the call.

The detention of V.M.L. “is without any basis in law and violates her fundamental due process rights,” the petition said. “She seeks this court’s urgent action and asks the court to order her immediate release to her custodian Trish Mack, who is ready and waiting to take her home.”

Judge Doughty said in his order that he tried to investigate what had happened himself by trying to get Ms. Lopez Villela on the phone on Friday shortly after noon to “survey her consent and custodial rights.”

The judge expressed concern that a plane carrying the mother and her daughters was by then already “above the Gulf of America.” His suspicions were confirmed, he wrote, when a lawyer for the Justice Department told him at 1:06 p.m. that day that Ms. Lopez Villela and presumably her children “had just been released in Honduras.”

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Advertisement

Nineteen states sue the Trump administration over its D.E.I. demands in schools.

A coalition of 19 states sued the Trump administration on Friday over its threat to withhold federal funding from states and districts with certain diversity programs in their public schools.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court by the attorneys general in California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota and other Democratic-leaning states, who argue that the Trump administration’s demand is illegal.

The lawsuit centers on an April 3 memo the Trump administration sent to states, requiring them to certify that they do not use certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs that the administration has said are illegal.

States that did not certify risked losing federal funding for low-income students.

Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, said at a news conference on Friday that the Trump administration had distorted federal civil rights law to force states to abandon legal diversity programs.

“California hasn’t and won’t capitulate. Our sister states won’t capitulate,” Mr. Bonta said, adding that the Trump administration’s D.E.I. order was vague and impractical to enforce, and that D.E.I. programs are “entirely legal” under civil rights law.

The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday evening.

The administration has argued that certain diversity programs in schools violate federal civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs that receive federal funding.

It has based its argument on the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling ending the use of race in college admissions, arguing that the decision applies to the use of race in education more broadly.

The administration has not offered a specific list of D.E.I. initiatives it deems illegal. But it has suggested that efforts to provide targeted academic support or counseling to specific groups of students amount to illegal segregation. And it has argued that lessons on concepts such as white privilege or structural racism, which posits that racism is embedded in social institutions, are discriminatory.

The lawsuit came a day after the Trump administration was ordered to pause any enforcement of its April 3 memo, in separate federal lawsuits brought by teachers’ unions and the N.A.A.C.P., among others.

Mr. Bonta said that the lawsuit by the 19 states brought forward separate claims and represented the “strong and unique interest” of states to ensure that billions of federal dollars appropriated by Congress reach students.

“We have different claims that we think are very strong claims,” he said.

Loss of federal funding would be catastrophic for students, said Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, an adversary of President Trump who previously won a civil fraud case against him.

She noted that school districts in Buffalo and Rochester rely on federal funds for nearly 20 percent of their revenue and said she was suing to “uphold our nation’s civil rights laws and protect our schools and the students who rely on them.”

Trump officials weaken rules insulating government workers from politics.

The Trump administration moved on Friday to weaken federal prohibitions on government employees showing support for President Trump while at work, embracing the notion that they should be allowed to wear campaign paraphernalia and removing an independent review board’s role in policing violations.

The Office of Special Counsel, an agency involved in enforcing the restrictions, announced the changes to the interpretation of the Hatch Act, a Depression-era law devised to ensure that the federal work force operates free of political influence or coercion. The revisions, a resurrection of rules that Mr. Trump rolled out at the end of his first term but that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. repealed, could allow for the startling sight of government officials sporting Trump-Vance buttons or “Make America Great Again” hats.

Critics have said the law was already largely toothless, and officials in the first Trump administration were routinely accused of violating it, with little punishment meted out. And the changes do not roll back Hatch Act restrictions entirely, but do so in a way that uniquely benefits Mr. Trump: Visible support for candidates and their campaigns in the future is still banned, but support for the current officeholder is not.

The move may not violate the law, because it will not influence the outcome of an election, experts say. But it threatens to further politicize the government’s professional work force, which Mr. Trump has been seeking to bend to his will as he tests the bounds of executive power.

“This is a really dark day,” Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and a government ethics lawyer, said in an interview on Friday. A president should work to ensure that the public knows the government is for everyone, she said.

“When you go into a Social Security office, if they’re still open, you will be treated the same whether you voted for the current president or not,” she said, referring to the government downsizing efforts since Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office.

“This is another example of Trump grabbing hold, seizing control of the federal government’s power, as though it was his own system, instead of acknowledging that he has a role to play as a public servant,” Ms. Clark said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Office of Special Counsel issued other opinions on Friday that will weaken enforcement of the law, by removing an independent review board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, from its role reviewing claims of violations. The office — which historically was independent but is now led by a Trump official after Mr. Trump fired its leader, starting a bitter court fight — will review accusations and send findings to the White House, which is unlikely to take action against its own backers.

The Hatch Act has been in effect for more than 80 years. It was intended to prevent presidents from handing out patronage jobs and filling the administration with political cronies.

Allowing the workplace display of support comes as Mr. Trump takes steps to drastically increase the number of political appointees in the federal government, which would allow presidents to install more loyalists in senior positions — the very thing the authors of the Hatch Act sought to prevent.

Federal employees have been under significant stress, many fearing they may be fired as the administration carries out mass layoffs.

Now, Trump-appointed managers could be walking around wearing Trump-Vance gear, said Richard W. Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House.

“I think it’s destructive to allow it,” he said.

Hampton Dellinger, the Senate-confirmed head of the Office of Special Counsel until Mr. Trump fired him, said, “Keeping partisan politics out of government services has benefited all Americans, particularly taxpayers, for generations.”

During the first Trump administration, several of his top advisers were accused of violating the law, including Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, who was cited as a “repeat offender.” Mr. Trump refused to fire her.

The Trump administration opens a civil rights inquiry into a Long Island mascot fight.

Federal education officials said on Friday that they had opened a civil rights inquiry into whether New York State could withhold state money from a Long Island school district that has refused to follow a state requirement and drop its Native American mascot.

The announcement came shortly after President Trump expressed his support for the district, in Massapequa, N.Y., in its fight against complying with a state Board of Regents requirement that all districts abandon mascots that appropriate Native American culture or risk losing state funding.

The Massapequa district, whose “Chiefs” logo depicts an illustrated side profile of a Native American man in a feathered headdress, is one of several that have resisted making a change.

The name of the town, a middle-class swath of the South Shore where most residents voted for Mr. Trump in the November election, was derived from the Native American word “Marspeag” or “Mashpeag,” which means “great water land.”

In announcing the investigation, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said that her department would “not stand by as the state of New York attempts to rewrite history and deny the town of Massapequa the right to celebrate its heritage in its schools.”

JP O’Hare, a spokesman for the state Education Department, said in a statement that state education officials had not been contacted by the federal government about the matter.

“However,” he added, “the U.S. Department of Education’s attempt to interfere with a state law concerning school district mascots is inconsistent with Secretary McMahon’s March 20, 2025, statement that she is ‘sending education back to the states, where it so rightly belongs.’”

The policy, introduced in 2022, was adopted amid a national push to change Native American mascot names or iconography through legislation and other moves.

When the ban was adopted, about five dozen New York school districts still used Native American-inspired mascots and logos. Districts were given until the end of June this year to eliminate banned mascots.

Since taking office for his second term, Mr. Trump and his administration have waged a relentless campaign against what they argue are illegal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and have threatened entities that do not fall in line and eliminate such efforts.

The president has said he would slash funding for low-income students in states that fail to do away with such programs. New York’s Education Department was the first to publicly refuse to comply with the order.

Massapequa school leaders filed a federal lawsuit seeking to keep the “Chiefs” name, but the judge in the case recently moved closer to dismissing it after finding they had failed to provide sufficient evidence for their claims, including that the mascot qualified as protected speech.

In a social media post this week, Mr. Trump criticized New York’s policy and called for Ms. McMahon to intervene.

“Forcing them to change the name, after all of these years, is ridiculous and, in actuality, an affront to our great Indian population,” the president wrote.

In a statement included in the federal Education Department’s announcement, Kerry Watcher, the Massapequa Board of Education president, welcomed the investigation.

“Attempts to erase Native American imagery do not advance learning,” Ms. Watcher said. “They distract from our core mission of providing a high-quality education grounded in respect, history and community values.”

Zach Montague and

U.S. restores legal status for many international students, but warns of removals to come.

The Trump administration on Friday abruptly moved to restore thousands of international students’ ability to study in the United States legally, but immigration officials insisted they could still try to terminate that legal status despite a wave of legal challenges.

The decision, revealed during a court hearing in Washington, was a dramatic shift by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as the administration characterized it as only a temporary reprieve.

The back and forth only contributed to the anxiety and confusion facing international students as the administration has moved to cancel more than 1,500 student visas in recent weeks.

On Friday morning, Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer, told a federal judge in Washington that immigration officials had begun work on a new system for reviewing and terminating the records of international students and academics studying in the United States. Until the process was complete, he said, student records that had been purged from a federal database in recent weeks would be restored, along with their legal status.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the students whose legal status was restored on Friday could still very well have it terminated in the future, along with their visas.

The changes on Friday came amid a wave of individual lawsuits filed by students who have said they were notified that their legal right to study in the United States was rescinded, often with minimal explanation. In some cases, students had minor traffic violations or other infractions. But in other cases, there appeared to be no obvious cause for the revocations.

Upon learning that their records had been deleted from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, scores of students have sued to preserve their status, producing a flurry of emergency orders by judges blocking the changes by ICE.

“We have not reversed course on a single visa revocation,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security Department spokeswoman. “What we did is restore SEVIS access for people who had not had their visa revoked.”

It was not clear how many student visa holders have left the country to date after their records were deleted; facing the prospect of arrest, at least a handful have left before risking deportation. But the Trump administration had stoked panic among students who found themselves under threat of detention and deportation. A handful of students, including a graduate student at Cornell, have voluntarily left the country after abandoning their legal fight.

“It is good to see ICE recognize the illegality of its actions canceling SEVIS registrations for these students,” said Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer who led a separate lawsuit over the revocations. “Sad that it took losing 50 times. What we don’t yet know is what ICE will do to repair the damage it has done, especially for those students who lost jobs and offers and had visas revoked.”

Judges reviewing the lawsuits so far have shown significant doubt that the abrupt changes to scores of students’ legal status are lawful, especially given the haphazard and often seemingly arbitrary way the administration has proceeded.

In March, the Trump administration moved to cancel visas and begin deportation proceedings against a number of students who had participated in demonstrations against Israel during the wave of campus protests last year over the war in Gaza. Federal judges had halted some of those revocations and slammed the brakes on efforts to remove those students from the country.

But in recent weeks, many students received word that their records had been deleted from the SEVIS database. That caused a wave of panic across the country among students and academics whose prospects of finishing a degree or completing graduate research were upended without warning.

By Friday evening, the government had already started moving to dismiss lawsuits over the SEVIS deletions, arguing that the administration’s policy change had made them unnecessary, since deleted records would be restored.

Other lawsuits, including a potential class action involving a number of states in New England, have moved forward, seeking to stop the administration from more broadly from carrying out further mass cancellations.

Another case out of Massachusetts, focused on instances where students were targeted over their speech in support of Palestine, a group has sued to prevent the administration from seeking to remove international students on First Amendment grounds.

A correction was made on 

April 25, 2025

An earlier version of this article and its headline misstated a Trump administration announcement related to international students. The administration said it would temporarily restore records in a federal database granting thousands of students legal status, not that it would restore canceled visas.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more