“Trump administration officials late Sunday began placing dozens of posters of arrested unauthorized immigrants along the White House driveway,” Axios reports.

“It’s a provocative, sure-to-be-controversial move aimed at highlighting President Trump’s immigration crackdown as his 100th day in office approaches.”

“Driving the news: The posters — which read ‘ARRESTED’ — specify various crimes linked to the pictured immigrants and have the White House’s official logo at the bottom.”

“A federal judge in Louisiana said he suspected the Trump administration had deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras earlier Friday despite a lawsuit intended to block the child’s removal,” the New York Times reports.

“President Donald Trump’s approval ratings on immigration, relatively strong in the early weeks of his second term, have dipped into negative territory, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, a sign that his administration’s hard-line and, in some cases, legally dubious enforcement tactics are losing public support.”

“A majority of Americans, 53 percent, disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, with 46 percent approving, a reversal from February when half of the public voiced approval of his approach.”

Ryan Goodman points out the Trump administration circumvented a federal court order barring the removal of migrants to third countries without due process by playing a shell game with government agencies.

In this case, the Department of Homeland Security “transferred” custody of a detainee to the Department of Defense—then allowed the Pentagon to carry out the deportation to El Salvador.

Then, the Trump administration argued the court’s order didn’t apply to the Defense Department, since DOD wasn’t technically a party to the original lawsuit.

“A federal judge in Maryland has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a 20-year-old Venezuelan man deported to El Salvador, whose removal violated a previous court settlement,” ABC News reports.

Jonathan Chait: “Right now, the public supports Trump’s immigration stance because it’s reacting to the extraordinary surge in migration, led by huge numbers of unprocessed asylum seekers, under the Biden administration. But when Joe Biden took office, after four years of draconian Trump policies and rhetoric—above all the cruel spectacle of family separation—the public was in a far more forgiving mood toward immigrants. This reflects a dynamic called ‘thermostatic public opinion,’ in which people tend to move in the opposite direction of where the president is pushing policy.”

“If immigration is still the best issue for the Republican candidate in, say, summer 2028, then Democrats would be wise to let the issue drop. At the moment, however, time remains for thermostatic opinion to swing against Trump, and Democrats can help push it in that direction by highlighting the unpopular aspects of his agenda.”

“This is not a secret court, an inquisition in medieval times. This is the United States of America.”

— U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, quoted by Reuters, on President Trump’s deportation of migrants without due process.

“A trio of federal judges excoriated the Trump administration Tuesday over its immigration crackdown and threw up new legal roadblocks to the White House’s no-holds-barred approach,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Democrats have a plan for fighting President Donald Trump over the most high-profile deportation case in recent history: Don’t make it about immigration,” Politico reports.

“As the party lines up to defend Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident mistakenly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration, Democrats are emphasizing due process and the rule of law — side-stepping the thornier intricacies of immigration policy that have served as a drag on their party for years.”

“President Trump on Monday complained of being ‘stymied at every turn’ by the courts, arguing the administration can’t hold trials for migrants it plans to deport amid accusations they are gang members,” The Hill reports.

“The remark was Trump’s first on the topic since the Supreme Court agreed to intervene early Saturday morning, halting flights as the administration prepared to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants, presumably to a prison in El Salvador.”

“Representatives for the U.S. DOGE Service have received permission to access a highly sensitive Justice Department system that contains information including the addresses and case history for millions of legal and undocumented immigrants,” the Washington Post reports.

Washington Post: “The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United Statesby the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements.”

Arizona Public Media: “Immigration officials in Tucson arrested the 19-year-old man from Albuquerque on April 8, saying he had entered the country illegally, before a judge dismissed his case on April 17.”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told NBC News he disagreed with President Trump’s idea to deport U.S. citizens to foreign prisons, saying it should not be “considered appropriate or moral.”

Dan Balz: “From the day he came down the escalator to announce his candidacy for the White House, President Donald Trump has had one go-to issue in his political playbook: immigration. He rode it to the White House in 2016 and again in 2024. He has now ridden it into a major confrontation with the courts.”

“The battle has been building for weeks, a clash over the rule of law and due process vs. the Trump administration’s assertions of presidential power and its resistance to challenges by federal district court judges.”

Peter Baker: “In the unlikely yet profound showdown between the president and the migrant that has captured international attention, the courts have uniformly determined that one of them recently violated the law. And it wasn’t the migrant.”

“According to liberal and conservative judges all the way up to the Supreme Court, President Trump’s administration broke the rules by deporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and must try to fix the mistake. But Mr. Trump and his team are trying to rewrite the narrative so that it is a dispute about illegal immigration rather than the rule of law.”

“It is a fight that Mr. Trump seems to welcome. His administration could easily have avoided it by simply bringing Mr. Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador and following a process that might have resulted in him being deported anyway. Instead, Mr. Trump opted to double down, defying the courts and reverse-engineering a justification for a deportation that his administration initially acknowledged was wrong.”