(NEW YORK) — The Trump administration has moved to dissolve the ban on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s removal so that it can proceed with his deportation to Liberia.
In a series of filings overnight, government attorneys said that the Salvadoran native’s claim of fear of torture or persecution in the African nation was denied after he was interviewed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services last week.
The attorneys for the Department of Justice argued that the preliminary injunction blocking Abrego Garcia’s removal to Liberia should be dissolved because the government received assurances from the government of the West African country that he will not be persecuted or tortured.
The government also said that Abrego Garcia’s lawsuit to stop his removal is improper because he is a member of a separate class action lawsuit in Massachusetts regarding third-country removals. In that case, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to proceed with third-country removals.
“Even if the merits were properly presented here, Petitioner’s claims fail,” the DOJ said. “The Constitution does not entitle Petitioner to process beyond what the political branches have chosen to afford.”
Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland with his wife and children, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison — despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution.
He was brought back to the U.S. in June to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
The DOJ called Abrego Garcia a member of MS-13 and said his removal is “in the public interest.”
On Friday, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis to block his removal to Liberia until an immigration judge reviews the denial of his reasonable fear claim by USCIS.
“The Government insists that the unreasoned determination of a single immigration officer—who concluded that Abrego Garcia failed to establish that it is “more likely than not” that he will be persecuted or tortured in Liberia— satisfies due process,” his attorneys said. “It does not.”
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys also said that the government has “cycled through” four third-country destinations—Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and now Liberia—without providing “the notice, opportunity to be heard and individualized assessment that due process requires.”
They argued that the government has disregarded their client’s “statutory designation” of Costa Rica, despite the country’s previous assurances that it would accept him and give him refugee or resident status.
Abrego Garcia is currently being held in a detention facility in Pennsylvania.
(NEW YORK) — More than 700 flights nationwide have been canceled Saturday as the Federal Aviation Administration continues limiting flight capacity at 40 major U.S. airports amid the government shutdown.
As of 6 a.m. ET on Saturday, 754 flights have already been canceled nationwide and the total could eclipse Friday’s toll of 1,024 cancellations.
However, despite more than 1,000 flights being canceled on Friday, major delays at airports across the country continue to persist due to staffing issues in air traffic controller towers and centers.
If the government shutdown continues, more air travel reductions could be on the way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in an interview on ABC News Live on Friday.
“My hope is that this government shutdown will end soon and we can get back in the business of letting Americans travel,” Duffy said in the interview.
It is possible the Department of Transportation may ask airlines to cancel more than 10% of their flights if controllers keep calling out in higher numbers, Duffy told ABC News.
Duffy said the FAA has asked private jets to avoid flying at the 40 airports impacted by the flight reductions, though they are currently not prohibited from flying there. He said private jet companies have been cooperative and are choosing alternate airports to help alleviate the pressure at those airports.
The cancellations are the latest — and perhaps biggest — disruption to air travel since the government shutdown began more than a month ago.
The FAA decided not to cut any international flights as it would be a violation of international agreements with the countries, according to Duffy.
“We have international agreements that we abide by, and because of those international agreements, I’m not going to impact those international flights. And because if I do, what will happen is we have other countries that are waiting to have a breach of those contracts from the US so they can cut down American flights, and then that would have a very long lasting impact on our ability to to to send travelers from the U.S. to those partners that have the agreements,” Duffy said.
(NEW YORK) — Mars is a cold, dry, desert-like planet. But billions of years ago, scientific evidence suggests that it had a thick atmosphere, which kept it warm enough to support flowing water on its surface. So, what happened to the Red Planet, and could it happen to Earth?
“From everything we know about the history of Mars through robotic exploration, it had very similar chemistry [to Earth]. It had very similar periods of time and development. It had that thicker atmosphere, had standing water, fresh water. All the things that Earth had,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society.
“So, what went wrong? Why don’t we see Mars as a rich planet now? That’s exactly the kind of thing that helps us put Earth in context and hopefully makes us appreciate Earth a little bit better as an outcome of that,” he added.
Dreier says one of the reasons Mars no longer has a dense and protective atmosphere is that the planet lacks the same kind of magnetic field that keeps Earth safe from the sun’s highly charged particles.
To better understand how solar wind energy interacts with Mars’ atmosphere and magnetic environment, and how that might have altered the planet’s surface, NASA and the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory are sending twin orbiters to the Red Planet.
The ESCAPADE mission, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, is the first dual-satellite mission to another planet. Two identical spacecraft will orbit in formation to provide a first-of-its-kind 3D view of Mars’ magnetosphere and upper atmosphere.
A unique route to the Red Planet
Scheduled to lift off on Sunday at 2:45 p.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, the two probes will take a unique path to Mars. Instead of the traditional route used by previous Mars missions, UC Berkley says the ESCAPADE will first travel to a Lagrange point, an area in space where the pull of Earth’s and the sun’s gravity is balanced. The two craft will loop around it for about a year and then slingshot back toward Earth on their way to Mars.
This flexible route could pave the way for future Mars missions by allowing for launch schedules spread over many months, which is essential if humans are to send fleets of spacecraft to Mars.
Sunday’s launch is only the second flight of the New Glenn rocket, a much more powerful rocket than the company’s New Shepard, which it uses for its regular space tourist missions to the edge of space. New Glenn is more than 320 feet tall, partially reusable and capable of delivering payloads to low, medium and geosynchronous orbits.
Unlocking the magnetic mysteries of Mars
NASA says the two identical Mars probes, which are nicknamed Gold and Blue after UC Berkeley’s school colors, “will reveal the planet’s real-time response to space weather and how the Martian magnetosphere changes over time.”
The two probes are about the size of a mini-fridge and weigh nearly 250 pounds.
Once they arrive at Mars in 2027, “The twin probes are designed to complement each other and unlock a more complete, real-time picture of how the Martian atmosphere blows off into space,” according to an analysis of the mission by the Planetary Society.
Dreier says that understanding what happened and is happening to Mars could help scientists better protect our own climate and atmosphere from current and future solar threats.
“The interaction between the sun’s particles and the atmosphere of Mars is thought to be one of the driving reasons that Mars no longer has a dense and protective atmosphere itself on the planet. So, understanding that relationship helps us understand the history and processes that have stripped away Mars’s atmosphere over time,” Dreier explained.
Safeguarding future astronauts from solar threats
The mission’s principal investigator, Robert Lillis of the Space Sciences Laboratory, emphasized that mapping Mars’ magnetic fields and how they respond to space weather is also critical for safeguarding future astronauts who may visit the planet. Solar storms and background cosmic radiation could pose significant risks to settlers, and lessons from this mission could help NASA protect human crews who may eventually spend time there.
“We will be making the space weather measurements we need to understand the system well enough to forecast solar storms whose radiation could harm astronauts on the surface of Mars or in orbit,” Lillis said in a press statement.
Dreier says the ESCAPADE mission is building on the science collected by MAVEN, another probe that has been studying the planet’s atmosphere since 2014. He notes that the mission is costing significantly less than previous scientific missions to space.
A mission on a budget
“This is a very, very, very low-cost mission for these types of science missions. This is roughly $70 to $80 million,” said Dreier. “It’s one of these smallest mission classes that NASA has, and as a consequence of that, it’s a very limited and focused set of scientific priorities, and it’s almost itself demonstrating the feasibility of doing missions like this.”
Dreier points out that NASA is facing the prospect of significant budget cuts and the decommissioning of a number of spacecraft, including MAVEN. He says wiping out the space agency’s science missions could have detrimental long-term consequences.
“It was actually looking at planets like Mars and also looking at planets like Venus that made scientists on Earth realize our climate and our planet is not this fixed, unchanging sphere. Things can go really, really, really wrong over the course of long periods of time,” said Dreier.
“Understanding that we weren’t owed an atmosphere, that we aren’t owed this protection from our magnetic field, puts this into context that the life and the habitat that we have here on Earth is actually very rare, but it’s also relies on and is protected by a number of these external factors that we are really just beginning to understand over the last generation or two,” he added.
Yurii Tynnyi/Suspilne Ukraine/JSC “UA:PBC”/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Russia carried out a massive aerial attack across central and eastern Ukraine overnight, killing at least four people and injuring 26 others, according to Ukrainian authorities.
The Ukrainian Air Force said in a Telegram post Saturday morning that Russia overnight had launched 503 projectiles — 458 drones and 45 missiles — of which 415 were shot down while the remaining 78 struck 25 different locations across Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post Saturday morning that the targets of the latest Russian strikes “remain the same: ordinary life, residential buildings, our energy system, and infrastructure.”
The city of Dnipro was hit hard, with three people killed and another 11 injured there, according to the regional military administration, which said children were among the casualties. A drone struck an apartment building in the city. Three more were injured in the nearby Samarskyi district of the wider Dnipropetrovsk region, authorities said.
In the Kharkiv region, at least one person was killed in the village of Rokytne; eight others were injured in the suburbs of Kharkiv city; one person was injured in nearby Chuhuiv; and another was injured in the village of Hrushivka, according to the regional military administration. The mayor of Kharkiv said in a Telegram post Saturday morning that the city is facing a significant electricity shortage.
Additionally, one person was injured in the Poltava region and another person was injured in the neighboring Kyiv region, according to the respective regional military administrations. The strikes on the Poltava region targeted energy infrastructure facilities, cutting off electricity, water and heating to some communities, authorities said.
The Russian strikes mark the ninth large-scale attack on Ukraine’s gas infrastructure since the start of October, according to Ukrainian state-run energy firm Naftogaz, which in a Telegram post Saturday morning accused Russian of deliberately “targeting enterprises that provide Ukrainians with gas and heat” during the winter months.
The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed in a Telegram post Saturday morning that it had targeted Ukrainian military and energy infrastructure in an overnight attack. The “massive strike” was carried out in response to “Ukraine’s terrorist attacks on civilian targets in Russia,” according to the Russian defense ministry.
(GRAND CANYON, Ariz) — A 65-year-old man died after slipping off the edge of the Grand Canyon and falling more than 100 feet, authorities in Arizona said.
The incident occurred at Guano Point on the canyon’s western rim on the Hualapai Reservation, according to the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office.
The sheriff’s office said it responded to assist the Hualapai Nation in a technical recovery Thursday afternoon.
A search and rescue crew located the man approximately 130 feet down into the canyon on a pile of rock fragments, according to the sheriff’s office.
Technical rope technicians used ropes to recover the body, which was then transported to the Mohave County Medical Examiner’s Office, authorities said.
The Hualapai Nation Police Department, Hualapai Nation Fire and Grand Canyon West security also assisted in the recovery, the sheriff’s office said.
The name of the man was not released.
Guano Point is known for its dramatic viewpoints of the Grand Canyon from the western rim.
ABC News has reached out to Grand Canyon Resort Corporation, which manages the Grand Canyon West area, for comment.
(PORTLAND, Ore.) — A federal judge ruled on Friday that Donald Trump “exceeded the President’s authority” when he sent federalized National Guard troops into Portland.
In a 106-decision, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut made permanent an order she issued last month blocking the deployment into the city.
“The evidence demonstrates that these deployments, which were objected to by Oregon’s governor and not requested by the federal officials in charge of protection of the ICE building, exceeded the president’s authority,” the judge wrote.
After a three-day trial, Immergut rejected the Trump administration’s argument that immigration-related protests amounted to rebellion or danger of a rebellion — the standard needed to justify a federal takeover of the National Guard.
“When considering these conditions that persisted for months before the President’s federalization of the National Guard, this Court concludes that even giving great deference to the President’s determination, the President did not have a lawful basis to federalize the National Guard” she wrote.
With Trump threatening to send the National Guard into Democratic-run cities across the country, Immergut acknowledged the magnitude of the issue in her order, writing the legal issue was bound for a higher court.
“The ‘precise standard’ to demarcate the line past which conditions would satisfy the statutory standard to deploy the military in the streets of American cities is ultimately a question for a higher court to decide,” she wrote.
In late September, Trump issued an order federalizing 200 members of the Oregon National Guard to protect federal property amid ongoing protests at a Portland ICE facility, despite objections from local officials.
The city of Portland and state of Oregon sued.
Around the same time, Trump sought to deploy Guard troops to Chicago — a move that was similarly opposed by local officials and blocked by the courts.
(WASHINGTON) President Donald Trump welcomed Hungary’s autocratic leader Viktor Orban to the White House on Friday, praising him repeatedly as a “great leader” as met sat to discuss trade and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“I like and respect him,” Trump said as he and Orban sat for lunch with their teams in the Cabinet Room, specifically applauding Orban’s views on immigration and crime.
Orban in turn celebrated what he said will be a “golden age between the United States and Hungary” with Trump’s return to office.
Orban is in Washington seeking an exemption to new U.S. sanctions targeting Russia’s largest oil companies and their subsidiaries that will go into effect later this month.
President Trump was asked if he would grant Hungary’s request.
“We’re looking at it because it’s very difficult for him to get the oil and gas from other areas,” Trump replied, expressing sympathy for Hungary’s geographic reliance on Russia for energy resources.
“It’s a big country. But they don’t have sea. They don’t have the ports. And so they have a difficult problem,” Trump said before turning to criticize European countries he said don’t have that issue but continue to buy Russian oil.
Orban called the issue “vital” for Hungarians.
Orban was recently going to play host to a summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, before Trump called the proposed meeting off amid frustration with the lack of progress in peace talks.
Trump said they had picked Budapest, Hungary, as the location because both he and Putin liked Orban.
On Friday, Trump reiterated that if he and Putin were to meet, he would like to do it in Budapest. Trump said he and Orban would be discussing a potential summit with Putin.
“We were talking about that with Viktor, he understands Putin and knows him very well,” Trump said, adding: “I think that Viktor feels we’re going to get that war ended in the not too distant future.”
As Orban gave his view on the war, Trump turned to him and asked, “So you would say that Ukraine cannot win that war?”
“You know, a miracle can happen,” Orban replied.
Trump previously welcomed Orban to the White House during his first term, in 2019, breaking from his predecessors who had shunned Hungary’s prime minister from Washington.
The two men met several times when Trump was out of office at his Florida estate, including during the summer of the 2024 campaign and after Trump became president-elect.
Orban has been embraced by many prominent American conservatives over his positions on immigration and LGBTQ issues, and has spoken several times at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Orban hosted a CPAC event in Hungary earlier this year.
Trump on Friday said it was an “honor to have a friend of mine here” at the White House.
“He’s done a fantastic job. He’s a very powerful man within his country … He’s run a really great country, and he’s got no crime, he’s got no problems, like some countries do,” Trump said.
(NEW YORK) — A federal judge has barred the Trump administration from removing Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano from the United States and transferring her to any federal jurisdiction outside of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, court documents show.
Santillana, 38, was detained at a day care center in Chicago earlier this week. Judge Jeremy C. Daniel has scheduled a hearing in her case on Nov. 13.
Santillana is currently detained at an ICE facility in Clark County, Indiana, her attorney, Charlie Wysong, said in a statement.
(NEW YORK) — Cornell University reached an agreement with the Trump administration to “immediately restore” its frozen federal funding after months-long negotiations over alleged civil rights violations, the school announced on Friday.
The multimillion-dollar agreement will be paid out over three years. Cornell agreed to invest $30 million into U.S. agriculture research and another $30 million will go directly to the federal government “as a condition for ending pending claims that have been brought against the university,” the school said.
This is the administration’s latest settlement with Ivy League institutions over alleged violations, following massive deals with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Brown in recent months.
Similar to the other university leaders, Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff maintained that it had not done any wrongdoing or broken federal civil rights laws.
The administration halted federal funding to Cornell in April along with Northwestern University and many other Ivy League schools in its quest to root out so-called unlawful DEI practices. Cornell said it has been subject to more than $250 million in federal funding interruptions, which have disrupted the research of faculty and students across all campuses.
President Kotlikoff explained that the agreement is taking place after “good faith” discussions with the administration, which enabled the school to return to its education and research practices in partnership with the federal government.
In a statement to the Cornell community, Kotlikoff noted “the agreement explicitly recognizes Cornell’s right to independently establish our policies and procedures, choose whom to hire and admit, and determine what we teach, without intrusive government monitoring or approvals.”
“In short, it recognizes our rights, as a private university, to define the conditions on our campuses that advance learning and produce new knowledge,” the statement added.
Kotlikoff will also certify compliance with the agreement on a regular basis and provide anonymized admissions data while continuing to conduct campus climate surveys and carry out foreign gift and contract reporting, according to the statement.
In a post on X, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon applauded the latest deal as a “transformative commitment” to restore merit and end DEI policies on college campuses.
“These reforms are a huge win in the fight to restore excellence to American higher education and make our schools the greatest in the world,” McMahon wrote.
(WASHINGTON) — With almost a year as vice president — and one year until the midterm elections, JD Vance’s supporters say he is settling into his role in the Trump administration, being used as the president’s “fixer” and “enforcer,” a source familiar with their relationship told ABC News.
“Vance really has been an enforcer and fixer for the president and his administration, and he’s been able to do it on a wide variety of topics,” the source, someone familiar with the relationship between Vance and Trump, said. “Unlike past vice presidents who demanded a specific policy portfolio, Vance never did that, which allows the president to put JD in the game whenever he sees a need for him to be put in the game.”
This has allowed Trump to dispatch Vance to advance his agenda, the source said.
“I think that dynamic has benefited the president, the vice president and the entire administration,” the source added, saying trust between the two — and others in the administration with whom Vance has forged relationships for years — has led to Vance’s role.
Vance’s role in the Trump White House has sharpened as the 2026 midterm elections approach and his name has been floated as a possible 2028 presidential candidate — even by Trump himself.
Proponents of Vance say his role as the “enforcer” and “fixer” was on display last summer as the White House worked to push Trump’s massive tax and spending bill through Congress.
In the days leading up to the bill’s passage, Vance — who served as a senator from Ohio before becoming vice president — held a series of meetings with conservative and moderate holdouts and with Senate leadership to help move the bill forward.
“He was a big part of getting it across the finish line and then promoting it afterwards,” a former White House official told ABC News about Trump’s megabill.
When asked by ABC News how they view Vance’s role in the administration, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said in a statement that Vance is Trump’s “trusted partner” who has helped deliver on Trump’s agenda.
“Vice President Vance is a trusted partner to President Trump and has played a critical role in helping the President keep all of the promises he made to the American people including delivering the largest tax cut in history for middle and working class Americans, securing the border, and putting American workers first,” Huston said.
Vance also took the lead in facilitating the TikTok framework that would transfer majority ownership of the app to Americans, but the deal has not been fully solidified. Vance was heavily involved in developing a strategy to reach the TikTok framework leading up to the U.S.-China summit in Madrid, where officials discussed the matter and joined Trump in the Oval Office when he signed the executive order on the framework.
A critical moment for Vance during this past year was his angry exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office where he chastised the world leader for not being thankful for the support the U.S. has provided to Ukraine in its war against Russia.
“Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said to Zelenskyy in February. “Right now, you guys are going around enforcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”
The eyebrow-raising exchange underscored Vance’s willingness to publicly defend Trump and the lengths he would go to do so. But Trump appeared to shut down Vance in the meeting: “But you see, I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on. I think it’s very important,” Trump said.
Vance and Trump have not always been aligned. In March of this past year, Vance showed a rare instance of appearing to break with Trump in a Signal group chat with other top US officials and questioned whether the president recognized that a unilateral U.S. attack on the Houthis to keep international shipping lanes open was at odds with his tough talk about European nations paying their share of such efforts.
Still, Vance’s skills as a communicator have been useful for the administration — especially during the ongoing government shutdown, the former White House officials said.
“I would say one thing there that sort of ties to where he’s been in general as a help in the administration, is that he’s a very good communicator, and like you saw when he took the podium at the beginning of the shutdown to talk about, you know, the White House’s position on it,” the official said.
Joel Goldstein, a vice-presidential scholar and former professor at Saint Louis University Law School, told ABC News that Vance follows the footprint of vice presidents as an administration spokesperson — but takes it even further.
“Vice presidents are generally spokespersons for the administration they serve, but Vice President Vance seems unusually active in this regard, including on social media, and more confrontational than most recent vice presidents in some of his rhetoric against political opponents and the discourse he uses or doesn’t rebuke,” Goldstein said. “He has also performed in visible diplomatic roles as have his predecessors, but has often been more confrontational towards traditional allies as he was at the Munich Security Summit and in the Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy.”
Republican political operatives said Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference was a breakout moment as vice president.
In February, Vance delivered a stinging message to European allies, saying that the biggest threat to Europe did not come from Russia or China, but from within Europe itself, and that he was concerned Europe was moving toward censorship and away from democracy.
Vance added another title under his portfolio when he became the Republican National Committee finance chair, a key fundraising role in the organization and the first time a sitting vice president has held the position.
In a statement to ABC News, RNC press secretary Kiersten Pels said that Vance will be critical for the national party heading into next year’s midterms — calling Vance a “fundraising powerhouse for the RNC.”
Vance has also been involved in trying to maintain Republicans’ slim majority in the House ahead of next year’s midterm elections. In August, Vance traveled to Indiana, where he made the pitch to Republican lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map.
With a year until the midterm election, a source close to the vice president said Vance will be involved.
“I think you can probably expect, as we get closer to midterms, for the vice president to be a regular presence on the campaign trail for Trump-endorsed candidates across the country,” the source said.
Next year’s election will also be critical for Vance as he’s viewed as a possible 2028 candidate and someone who could take on the mantle of leading the MAGA movement once Trump leaves office.
In a recent interview with Pod Force One, Vance shared that during a private lunch at the White House six months ago, Trump floated the idea of him and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the Republican ticket in 2028.
“It feels so premature, because we’re still so early. And what I always say to people is, if we take care of business, the politics will take care of itself,” Vance said to podcast host Miranda Devine.
Trump himself recently said Vance and Rubio would be “great” options as 2028 presidential candidates.
“I’m not sure if anybody would run against those two,” Trump said on Oct. 27 of Vance and Rubio. “I think if they ever formed a group it would be unstoppable.”
