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President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda is playing out in numerous ways Friday, from hearings in key cases on the government’s power to deport people to the start of a registry required for all those who are in the country illegally.

And on Thursday, immigration developments came on multiple fronts as federal officials work on the president’s promise to carry out mass deportations and double down on his authority to do so. The Supreme Court ruled in the case of a mistakenly deported man, and the administration’s classification of thousands of living immigrants as dead came to light.

Here is a breakdown of some of what has happened so far and what is ahead.
Judge says Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia student arrested over Gaza protests, can be deported

An immigration judge in Louisiana decided Friday that Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil can be kicked out of the U.S. as a national security risk.

Immigration Judge Jamee E. Comans presided over a hearing over the legality of deporting the activist who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The government’s contention that Khalil’s presence in the United States posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” was enough to satisfy requirements for his deportation, Comans said.

Lawyers for Khalil said Khalil will appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and that lawyers can also pursue an asylum case on Khalil’s behalf. And a federal judge in New Jersey has temporarily barred Khalil’s deportation.

Khalil, a legal U.S. resident, was detained by federal immigration agents on March 8 in the lobby of his university-owned apartment, the first arrest under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined campus protests against the war in Gaza.
Judge orders daily updates on US plan to return man who was mistakenly deported

The Supreme Court on Thursday said the Trump administration must work to bring back a Maryland man mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen who had an immigration court order preventing his deportation to his native country over fears he would face persecution from local gangs. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him anyway to El Salvador, where he’s been held in a notorious prison.

At a Friday hearing, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said it is “extremely troubling” that a government lawyer couldn’t explain what, if anything, the Trump administration has done to arrange for Abrego Garcia’s return. The U.S. attorneys told Xinis they haven’t had enough time to review the Supreme Court ruling and struggled to provide information about Abrego Garcia’s exact whereabouts.

“I’m not asking for state secrets,” Xinis said. “The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: Where is he?”

Xinis ordered daily updates on plans to bring Abrego Garcia back.
Judge refuses to block immigration enforcement at places of worship

Also Friday, a federal judge sided with the Trump administration in refusing to block immigration agents from conducting enforcement operations at houses of worship.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich found that there have been only a handful of such enforcement actions and that the plaintiffs — more than two dozen Christian and Jewish groups representing millions of Americans — hadn’t shown the kind of legal harm for a preliminary injunction.

The groups argued that the policy violated the right to practice religion. They said attendance has declined significantly since Trump took office.

But Friedrich said they didn’t show the drops were linked to the church policy.
‘I screamed’: Turkish student detained by ICE speaks out

A Tufts University doctoral student from Turkey said she was talking to her mother on her phone at the time she was detained by immigration enforcement officials.

Rumeysa Ozturk said in a document filed Thursday by her lawyers in federal court that she had just left her Massachusetts home on March 25 when she was surrounded by several men, and “I screamed.”

Ozturk, 30, has since been moved to a detention center in Louisiana. Her lawyers say detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.

Ozturk is among several people with ties to American universities who attended demonstrations or publicly expressed support for Palestinians during the war in Gaza and who recently had visas revoked or have been stopped from entering the U.S.
Temporary reprieve for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans a
nd Venezuelans?

A federal judge said Thursday that she will prevent the Trump administration from ordering hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with temporary legal status to leave the country later this month.

More than 500,000 people came to the country under the Biden-era program. They were facing an April 24 deadline by which their work permits would be terminated, and they could be subject to deportation.

The program was launched as the Biden administration was generally trying to alleviate pressure on the southern border by creating new pathways for people to come to the U.S. and work, usually for two years on humanitarian parole.

The government is likely to appeal.
Temporary restraining orders to stop the removal of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act broadened

Federal judges in New York and Texas ruled Friday that temporary restraining orders to stop the removal of Venezuelans from the U.S. would expand to protect more people in those states.

The rulings come in class-action lawsuits filed to halt the government from removing Venezuelans accused of being gang members under the Alien Enemies Act. The judges granted temporary restraining orders earlier this week that prevented the U.S. government from removing Venezuelans held at a detention facility in Raymondville, Texas, and those held within the federal jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York.

On Friday, Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. in Texas broadened his ruling to protect all Venezuelans detained in his judicial district, which includes the cities of Houston and Galveston, among others. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in the Manhattan federal court changed his order to include protection for “individuals subject to the Presidential Proclamation who are in state or local custody.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled the administration can resume removals under the Alien Enemies Act, but detainees first must be afforded due process, including reasonable time to argue to a judge that they should not be removed.
The start of a registry for people in the country illegally

Friday marks the launch of a requirement for people who are in the country illegally to register with the federal government.

Homeland Security announced Feb. 25 that it was mandating all people in the U.S. illegally register with the federal government, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. People will be required to carry registration documents with them.

Opponents sued to stop the registry from taking effect, saying the government should have gone through the more lengthy public notification process, and that it’s enforcing this simply to facilitate Trump’s aim of mass deportations.

On Thursday, a federal judge sided with the administration. Officials had argued they were simply enforcing a requirement that already existed for everyone who is in the country but isn’t an American citizen and have emphasized that going forward, the registration requirement would be enforced to the fullest.

The Trump administration has said between 2.2 million and 3.2 million people could be affected.
Classifying immigrants as dead?

In an effort to make more migrants voluntarily go home, the Trump administration is classifying more than 6,000 immigrants — who are alive — as dead. Officials are canceling the immigrants’ Social Security numbers and effectively wiping out their ability to work or receive benefits in the U.S. That is according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans had not yet been publicly detailed.

The move will make it much harder for those affected to use banks or other basic services where Social Security numbers are required.

The officials said stripping Social Security numbers will cut the immigrants off from many financial services and encourage them to “self-deport.”

It wasn’t clear how the immigrants were chosen. But the Trump White House has targeted people in the country temporarily under Biden-era programs.

Earlier this week, the departments of Homeland Security and Treasury signed a deal allowing the IRS to share immigrants’ tax data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify and deport people illegally in the U.S.

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Associated Press reporters Rebecca Santana, Jake Offenhartz, Will Weissert, Fatima Hussein, Mark Sherman, Michael Kunzelman, Lindsay Whitehurst and Michael Casey contributed.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A firing squad on Friday executed a South Carolina man who killed an off-duty police officer, the second time the rare execution method has been used by the state in the past five weeks.

Mikal Mahdi gave no final statement and did not look to his right toward the nine witnesses in the room behind bulletproof glass and bars once the curtain opened.

He took a few deep breaths during the 45 seconds between when the hood was put over his head and when the shots rang out, fired by three volunteers who are prison employees at a distance of about 15 feet (4.6 meters).

Mahdi, 42, cried out as the bullets hit him, and his arms flexed. A white target with the red bull’s-eye over his heart was pushed into the wound in his chest.

Mahdi groaned two more times about 45 seconds after that. His breaths continued for about 80 seconds before he appeared to take one final gasp.

A doctor checked him for a little over a minute, and he was declared dead at 6:05 p.m., less than four minutes after the shots were fired.
Firing squad executions resume

Mahdi’s execution came a little over a month after Brad Sigmon was put to death March 7, in the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and the fourth since 1976. The others all occurred in Utah.

The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history around the world. It has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

But South Carolina lawmakers saw it as the quickest and most humane method, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs.

In a statement Mahdi’s attorney, assistant federal public defender David Weiss, called the execution a “horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilized society.”

Mahdi had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair.

“Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils,” Weiss said. “Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney.”

Mahdi is the fifth inmate executed by South Carolina in less than eight months as the state makes its way through prisoners who ran out of appeals during an unintended 13-year pause on executions in the state.

Mahdi’s is the 12th execution in the U.S. this year. Twenty-five prisoners in nine states were killed in all of 2024. Alabama and Louisiana have killed inmates by nitrogen gas. Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona and Texas have executed men by lethal injection, while South Carolina has used both the firing squad and lethal injection.

Mahdi’s last meal was ribeye steak cooked medium, mushroom risotto, broccoli, collard greens, cheesecake and sweet tea, prison officials said.
The crime

Mahdi admitted killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times before burning his body. Myers’ wife found him in the couple’s Calhoun County shed, which had been the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier.

Myers’ shed was a short distance through the woods from a gas station where Mahdi tried but failed to buy gas with a stolen credit card and left behind a vehicle he had carjacked in Columbia. Mahdi was arrested in Florida while driving Myers’ unmarked police pickup truck.

Mahdi also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Boggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi’s ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing.
Final appeal

Mahdi’s final appeal was rejected this week by both the U.S. and South Carolina Supreme Courts. His lawyers said Mahdi’s original attorneys put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that did not call on relatives, teachers or others who knew him and ignored the impact of months spent in solitary confinement in prison as a teen.

The defense’s case to spare Mahdi’s life before a judge lasted only about 30 minutes. It “didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial,” Mahdi’s lawyers wrote.

Mahdi’s earliest memory was his father slamming his mother through a glass table and later lying to his son and saying his mother was dead. Mahdi’s father pulled him out of school in fifth grade when officials suggested he needed behavioral help, defense lawyers said.

Prosecutors said Mahdi constantly used brutality to solve his problems. As a death row prisoner, he stabbed a guard and hit another worker with a concrete block. Mahdi was caught three times with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of sharpened metal that could be used as a knife, according to prison records.

“The nature of the man is violence,” prosecutors wrote.

Weiss, Mahdi’s attorney, said his client died in full view of a system “that failed him at every turn — from childhood to his final breath.”
Busy death chamber

Mahdi’s death is the end of a busy time in South Carolina’s death chamber. He is the fifth inmate killed since September after the state had not had any executions since 2011. No other inmates are out of appeals but several are close.

The state was able to restart executions after lawmakers allowed the firing squad and passed a bill allowing suppliers of the pentobarbital to remain secret, along with the exact procedures used to kill inmates and the names of prison employees on execution teams, including the firing squad shooters.

Along with Sigmon’s firing squad death last month, three other South Carolina prisoners have been executed via lethal injection since September.

The state now has 26 inmates on its death row. Just one man has been sentenced to death in the past decade.

McALLEN — A federal judge in South Texas on Friday extended a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Trump Administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans detained in the Southern District of Texas.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez came at the request of attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union representing three Venezuelans who were facing deportation and secured a temporary restraining order halting their removal on Wednesday.

During a hearing on Friday, the judge extended the restraining order until April 25 and expanded it to include other detained Venezuelans in the Southern District of Texas — whether detained in federal or state facilities — and other Venezuelans in the district who could be subject to deportation under the Alien Enemies Act.

The Southern District includes the Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, Corpus Christi, Houston and Galveston.

An attorney representing the Trump Administration said they were not aware if there were other Venezuelans in the area who could be subject to deportation. The judge ordered the administration to provide a number by the next hearing, scheduled for April 24.

The three Venezuelans in the case were set to be the first to be deported after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to resume deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. But the justices ruled that immigrants targeted under the act are entitled to the opportunity to challenge their deportation in court and must receive proper notice to do so.

The administration’s attorney said the administration was still reviewing the court’s order and was not prepared to state how much notice they would provide migrants of their pending removal.

The men, who were detained in Pennsylvania, California, and New York, were transferred to the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville.

Rodriguez temporarily halted their removals after attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Texas stepped in, filing an emergency lawsuit on Wednesday to stop the removals and asking the judge to rule on whether it was lawful for the Trump Administration to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport people.

The judge also granted the ACLU’s request to stop the government from removing other Venezuelans detained at El Valle who could be subject to removal under the act, which dates back to 1798 and gives the president the authority to imprison and deport noncitizens of the U.S. during times of war. It was last used during World War II.

While the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela, the Trump Administration issued a proclamation last month invoking the Alien Enemies Act, claiming the U.S. faced threat of invasion by members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the administration designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

The government claims the three detained Venezuelans are members of the gang but their attorneys deny that.

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.

AUSTIN – Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will run for a fourth term of his influential role as lieutenant governor, he announced Friday, touting his first endorsement from President Donald Trump.

Patrick said a more formal kickoff would follow the Legislative session, but that he wanted to make his intentions “known and official.”

“The campaign will begin soon enough, but with seven weeks still to go in the Legislative Session, my focus remains on the work to be done at the Capitol for the people of Texas,” he said in a statement.

The lieutenant governor, who presides over the state Senate, has used his bully pulpit to advance a conservative agenda that has included stricter border enforcement, increasing the role of religion in schools and property tax cuts.

The 75-year-old former radio host served two terms as a state senator from Harris County before he unseated three-term incumbent Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in 2014.

Patrick has been a close ally to Trump, who praised Patrick for his contributions as the Texas Chair of his presidential campaigns since 2016.

“In his next Term, Dan will fight tirelessly alongside of us to Secure the Border, Stop Migrant Crime, Grow the Economy, Cut Taxes and Regulations, Champion School Choice, Support our Great Military/Vets, Restore American Energy DOMINANCE, and Strongly Protect our always under siege Second Amendment,” Trump wrote on the Truth Social platform.

Among those who identify as conservative, 33% of 1,200 registered voters polled by the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Polling Project in February approved strongly of Patrick’s performance, while another 34% somewhat approved. Among voters of all ideologies — conservative, moderate and liberal, 37% approved of Patrick’s job performance.

Patrick is unlikely to face credible opposition, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Polling Project.

Tyler Norris, a Republican political consultant, agreed that given Patrick’s political prowess, no significant opposition was expected.

“The degree to which he can accomplish his agenda changed the shape of the senate and Texas politics,” he said. “By the end of next term he will definitely be the most powerful lieutenant governor in Texas history, if he’s not already. From 2015 to today, he’s built a Senate that works extremely efficiently.”

Patrick is already one of the longest serving lieutenant governors in state history — ranking alongside Ben Ramsey as the third-longest. At the end of another four-year term, he’ll be the second longest-serving lieutenant governor.

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports that Dallas-area international students are struggling to navigate why they were told to leave the country immediately after visas were suddenly revoked by federal officials, lawyers working with some of them said. In some instances, the students had faced criminal charges but those charges were dismissed, the lawyers said. The lawyers — criminal defense attorney Bruce Anton and immigration attorney Stefka Stoyanova — said they are working with several students who had their visas revoked. They declined to share the students’ names because of privacy concerns. At least 110 international students at Texas universities had visas terminated by U.S. government officials as of Thursday afternoon, according to university administrators.

Locally, students from University of North Texas (27), the University of Texas at Arlington (27), the University of Texas at Dallas (19) and Texas Woman’s University (6) had visas revoked, university administrators confirmed. Officials from Southern Methodist University said some students were affected but didn’t release numbers. Texas school officials did not release details of the students’ names, backgrounds or reasons why the federal database that tracks their statuses terminated the records, signaling that the students’ statuses changed. Federal privacy laws limit what information schools can share. “They’re panicked,” said Anton, who said he has five former clients he is assisting. “They’re in absolute panic.” They are among hundreds across the country who had their statuses suddenly changed in recent weeks, according to local and national media reports. The revocations come as President Donald Trump’s administration vows to crack down on immigration and on student protests over the war in Gaza, such as the ones in Texas last year.

WASHINGTON – The San Antonio Express-News reports that U.S. Rep. Chip Roy backed down on Thursday from his promise to vote against a Senate budget resolution, saying he had gotten assurances from President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders that the final budget would include trillions of dollars in spending cuts. The turnaround came a day after Roy, R-Austin, criticized the Senate budget bill as failing to reduce spending to match proposed tax cuts, likely resulting in a $3 trillion increase in the federal deficit.

In a post of X Thursday, Roy said Trump had assured him on $1 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending programs included in former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and to Medicaid. He also said House Speaker Mike Johnson guaranteed him that the tax cuts central to Trump’s budget plan would be tied to a reduction in spending and that Senate Majority Leader John Thune had committed to a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. “I would have preferred we amended the Senate bill to reflect these commitments. But, in the interest of comity, I will take them at their word,” Roy wrote. “But, to be clear, failure to achieve these baselines including deficit neutrality will make it impossible for me to support a final reconciliation product.” After delaying a vote Wednesday, House Republicans passed the Senate budget resolution 216-214, with just two Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Victoria Spartz, R-Ind. — voting against it. Now the Senate and House Republicans must do the hard work of deciding what’s in and what’s out of the federal budget, which they can pass without any Democrats’ support through the reconciliation process.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports the Texas job market was humming along. Even as first-quarter job cuts surpassed the tally from a year-earlier by more than 40%, the unemployment rate in Texas held steady over the past year at around 4.1%. Still, signs were emerging that policies imposed by the Trump administration were starting to take their toll. An analysis by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas released last week found American companies slashed more than 275,000 jobs in March, a staggering 60% increase over February’s cuts and more than 200% greater than the 90,309 jobs lost during the same period a year earlier. Challenger data for Texas shows first-quarter job cuts in 2025 were more than 41% greater than the year-earlier period. Yet job growth outpaced losses to start the year.

“The job market has remained robust year to date for Texas,” Pia Orrenius, a vice president and labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said. “Our growth number is like 1.9%, which is right under trend growth, so we’ve actually seen a little bit of improvement in the first two months of the year relative to last year. But this is backward-looking data.” Of the nearly 17,500 jobs lost in the state during the first quarter, Challenger found, the services sector took the biggest hit, losing 8,242 jobs, up from 1,053 a year earlier. “In March, Orrenius said, “the Texas service sector outlook survey slowed revenue growth to zero. So there was no growth in March according to our survey.” The impact on the jobs market of the sweeping tariffs announced last week by President Donald Trump has yet to be felt, and their effect will depend in large part on how long they stay in place. Meantime, the impact of cuts across the federal government are rippling across the Texas economy. “Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency plans to eliminate positions in the federal government. It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs,” Andrew Challenger, the firm’s senior vice president, said in the statement accompanying the report.