CHICAGO (AP) — A shooting at a hospital in Chicago has led to its campus being placed on lockdown.

The Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital campus said Saturday that patients and staff at the health facility were safe and that by midafternoon there was no active threat.

The shooting occurred at around 11 a.m. Local news reports said two police officers were injured. The Chicago Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for further information.

NAHUNTA, Ga. (AP) — Two wildfires in southeastern Georgia continued to threaten homes and lives on Saturday as officials warned that strong winds could spread the flames.

Brantley County Manager Joey Cason, called it a “dynamic situation” in a Saturday morning video posted to social media and begged residents to “please evacuate” if they are ordered to do so.

“This fire is going to move rapidly, once these winds get here later today,” he said.

The Highway 82 Fire has been burning since Monday and has destroyed at least 87 homes. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Friday that is the most for a single wildfire in the state’s history.

The fire was started by a foil balloon hitting live power lines. That created an electrical arc that ignited combustible material on the ground. An infrared flight that detects heat was conducted overnight Friday, helping officials to better map the fire. A Saturday news release said the fire’s perimeter is more than 14.8 square miles, and it is only about 10% contained.

Meanwhile, a second fire about 70 miles (113 kilometers) to the southwest in Clinch and Echols counties, near the Florida state line, has burned more than 46.9 square miles and destroyed at least 35 homes. Started by sparks from a welding operation, that wildfire was also about 10% contained as of midday Saturday.

Firefighters have been battling more than 150 other wildfires in Georgia and Florida that have sent smoky haze into places far from the flames, triggering air quality warnings for some cities.

An unusually large number of wildfires are burning this spring across the Southeast. Scientists say the threat of fire has been amplified by a combination of extreme drought, gusty winds, climate change, and dead trees still littering some forests after being toppled by Hurricane Helene in 2024.

In northern Florida, the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office volunteer firefighter James “Kevin” Crews died on Thursday evening after he suffered an unspecified medical emergency while suppressing a brush fire. No fire deaths or injuries have been reported in Georgia.

By Laura Matthews

NEW YORK, April 25 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump bought at least $51 million in bonds in March, according to financial disclosures released on Saturday, with the purchases spanning several sectors.

• Trump carried out 175 financial transactions last month, according to forms released by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The forms don’t include exact values for each sale or purchase, only a range of values for each.

• Most of the assets disclosed were municipal bonds issued by states, counties, school districts and other entities with ties to government agencies or public-private partnerships.

• His 26 largest transactions, in the $1 million to $5 million range, were mainly municipal bonds or U.S. Treasuries, although two of the deals listed were purchases of corporate offerings from Weyerhaeuser and General Motors. He also invested in an exchange-traded fund tracking a high-yield bond index.

• The president bought corporate bonds across energy, technology, healthcare and financial services, with issuers including Constellation Energy, Occidental Petroleum, Broadcom, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Wall Street banks Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, along with Boeing.

• The combined maximum value of Trump’s bond purchases across all asset classes is about $161 million.

(Reporting by Laura Matthews in New YorkEditing by Rod Nickel)

Donald Trump’s expected attendance at Saturday’s annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington for his first time as president will put his administration’s often-contentious relationship with the press on full public display.

Trump will be watched closely at the event held by the organization of reporters who cover him and his administration. Past presidents who have attended have generally spoken about the importance of free speech and the First Amendment, adding in some light roasts about individual journalists.

The Republican president did not attend during his first term or the first year of his second. He came as a guest in 2011, sitting in the audience as President Barack Obama, a Democrat, made some jokes about the New York real estate developer. Trump also attended as a private citizen in 2015.

Past dinners have also featured comedians who poke at presidents. This year, the group opted to hire mentalist Oz Pearlman as the featured entertainment.

Trump’s planned appearance is rekindling a longer running debate about the dinner and events like it — in particular, whether it is poor form for journalists to be seen socializing with the people they cover. The New York Times, for example, stopped attending the dinner more than a decade ago for that reason.

“What was once (a fairly long time ago) a well-intended night of fundraising and camaraderie among professional adversaries is now simply a bad look,” wrote Kelly McBride, ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

Between berating individual reporters, fighting organizations like the Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press in court and restricting press access to the Pentagon, the administration’s animus toward journalists has been a fixture of Trump’s second term.

On the eve of the dinner, nearly 500 retired journalists signed a petition calling on the association “to forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump’s efforts to trample freedom of the press.”

“The White House Correspondents’ dinner reinforces the importance of the First Amendment in our democracy,” said the WHCA president, Weijia Jiang, a CBS News reporter. “As we mark America’s 250th birthday, our choice to gather as journalists, newsmakers and the president in the same room is a reminder of what a free press means to this country and why it must endure. Not for the media or the president, but for the people who depend on it.”

Many reporters who attend, however, consider it a valuable opportunity get story ideas and establish personal connections with those in government, one that may pay dividends with returned telephone calls in the future.

Journalists often invite sources as guests at the dinner. It will be noticed Saturday whether administration officials who have also expressed hostility to the press will attend, and with whom they will be sitting.

The AP has invited Taylor Budowich, a former White House deputy chief of staff who left last fall for the private sector. The invitation is notable because Budowich, in his role crafting White House communications policy, was a named defendant last year when the AP sued the administration after it reduced its access to the president because the news outlet did not follow Trump’s lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico.

“We maintain professional relationships with people across the political spectrum because we are nonpartisan by design — focused on reporting the facts in the public’s interest,” AP spokesman Patrick Maks said.

The White House correspondents will also hand out awards for exemplary reporting. That includes some stories that displeased Trump, such as one from the Journal about a birthday message Trump once sent to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The story led to a presidential lawsuit.

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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

At the peak of the crackdown, carloads of masked immigration officers were a common sight in the streets of Minneapolis, while thousands of people were being arrested every week in Texas, Florida and California.

“Turn and burn,” top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino called the strategy, with relentless displays of force and teams of agents descending on restaurant kitchens, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots.

In December, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents peaked at nearly 40,000 nationwide and were nearly as high the next month, according to data provided to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press.

In late January, the killings in Minneapolis of two American citizens by immigration officers and growing concerns over the government’s heavy-handed tactics led to a shake-up of top immigration officials. In the weeks that followed, ICE arrests across the country dropped on average by nearly 12%.

Polling has found the general public felt the immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota went too far, a factor that may have contributed to the abrupt firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in early March.

Bovino, who swaggered through raid scenes in tactical gear and was the public face of the Trump administration crackdown, was pushed aside following the killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Border czar Tom Homan was then sent to the Twin Cities to chart a new course for immigration enforcement, and he announced the drawdown of immigration agents in the state on Feb. 4.

An AP analysis of ICE arrest records show the department averaged 7,369 weekly arrests nationwide in the five weeks after Homan’s drawdown announcement, , the most recent period for which data is available, down from 8,347 per week in the previous five weeks. Those arrest numbers were still higher on average than during much of the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, and were dramatically higher than during the Biden administration.

The numbers were not, however, uniform across the country.

ICE arrests rose significantly in Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida during those five weeks, in some cases hitting their highest weekly count since the start of Trump’s second term.. In Kentucky alone, weekly arrests more than doubled, reaching 86 by early March.

Those increases were offset by steep drops in a handful of large states, including Minnesota and Texas.

The Trump administration insists it is targeting the most vicious criminals living illegally in the U.S., and the president has referred to them as “the worst of the worst.”

In some cases the description is accurate, but the reality is complicated.

Many of the toughest criminals taken into ICE custody were already in prison, but many others who were arrested have no criminal history.

Nationally, some 46% of the people ICE arrested in the five weeks before Feb. 4 had no criminal charges or convictions, dropping to 41% in the five weeks that followed.

Yet that’s still above the 35% weekly average for the time since Trump returned to office. And in a number of states, even after Feb. 4, the share of noncriminals being arrested went up, not down.

Across the country, thousands of federal court filings offer an imperfect window into how the Trump administration’s deportation tactics remain in high gear, even if activity has waned.

Like the 21-year-old Honduran man with no criminal record who has filed a petition for release after being arrested Feb. 22 in a suburban San Diego traffic stop. The father of three U.S. citizen children — ages 5, 3 and 10 months — had been under ICE surveillance, the petition says, before officers in tactical gear pulled him over.

Or the 33-year-old Venezuelan woman, a well-known South Texas doctor who worked in a region designated as medically underserved, who was arrested earlier this month with her five-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, on her way to her husband’s asylum hearing.

She was arrested, officials said, for overstaying her visa.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the research and advocacy group the American Immigration Council, says he sees signs of change in lower arrest and detention numbers but warns it’s too early to know if those shifts are permanent.

“The Trump administration says: ‘We’re not slowing down,’ ‘Nothing has changed,’” in immigration enforcement, he said. “But it’s very clear that they have pulled back from some of the tactics of Operation Metro Surge,” the crackdown that swept Minneapolis.

___

Kessler reported from Washington and Sullivan from Minneapolis. Associated Press reporters Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed.

A former University of South Florida student has been charged with killing his roommate and the roommate’s girlfriend — two doctoral students from Bangladesh who disappeared earlier this month, authorities said Saturday.

Hisham Abugharbieh, 26, is facing two counts of premeditated murder in the first degree with a weapon in the deaths of Zamil Limon and Nahida Bristy, students at USF, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. He made an initial court appearance Saturday in Tampa, where he was ordered held without bond. A hearing is set for April 28.

Limon’s remains were found on the Howard Frankland bridge Friday morning, but Bristy is still missing, Hillsborough County Chief Deputy Joseph Maurer said on Friday.

Abugharbieh, a native-born U.S. citizen, was initially taken into custody on Friday at his family’s home on preliminary charges that include unlawfully moving a dead body, failure to report a death, tampering with evidence, false imprisonment and battery. Online court records do not list an attorney for him. Messages were sent via email and phone to the public defender’s office in Hillsborough County.

Officers encountered Abugharbieh as they responded to a report of domestic violence at his family’s home, just north of the campus, and were able to move his relatives to safety. But then he barricaded himself inside and refused to come out. A SWAT team responded — along with a drone, a robot and crisis negotiators — before Abugharbieh came out with his hands up, apparently wearing nothing but a blue towel.

Limon and Bristy, both 27, were considering getting married, a relative said. They disappeared from campus on April 16. Limon was last seen at his home in an off-campus apartment complex where he lived with Abugharbieh. Bristy, who lived off campus, was last seen an hour later at a campus science building.

An autopsy is being done on the remains to determine the manner and cause of Limon’s death, and those results are expected Saturday morning, Maurer said Friday.

Abugharbieh had been a USF student but was not currently enrolled. University records showed he had attended the school from Spring 2021 through Spring 2023, and had pursued a BS in Management, a university spokesperson said.

Limon was studying geography, environmental science and policy, and Bristy was studying chemical engineering. She was a graduate of Noakhali Science and Technology University. The school, which spelled her last name as Brishti, said in a statement Saturday that she was a Ph.D. candidate and described her as a talented and promising student.

“Her sudden passing has deeply saddened all of us,” Vice Chancellor Mohammad Ismail said. “The university family pays deep respect to her memory. At the same time, we demand punishment for those involved in her death and compensation for the victim’s family.”

The search for Bristy continues. Anyone with information regarding her disappearance is asked to contact the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

Abugharbieh had several previous arrests, the sheriff’s office said. He was charged with battery and burglary of an unoccupied dwelling in September 2023, and with battery that May — both classified in court records as misdemeanors.

Court records show Abugharbieh entered into a diversion program for first-time offenders charged with misdemeanors. He completed the program in 2024 and the charges were discontinued. A phone call to his lawyer in that case was not immediately returned.

Hillsborough County Court records also showed two domestic violence petitions filed by a family member in 2023. A judge granted an injunction in one case and denied the other petition. He also was accused of traffic violations.

___

This story corrects that Bristy lived off campus.

___

Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says the U.S. Navy is clearing Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz, a vital sea route for oil shipments whose disruption is increasingly threatening the global economy.

Sweeping for underwater explosives could take months despite a tenuous ceasefire between the United States and Iran in the weekslong war, experts say. Any future claims that the U.S. cleared the waterway where 20% of the world’s oil typically passes might fail to convince commercial freighters and their insurers that it is finally safe.

“You don’t even have to have lain mines — you just have to make people believe that you’ve laid mines,” said Emma Salisbury, a scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program.

“And even if the U.S. sweeps the strait and says everything’s clear, all the Iranians have to do is say, ‘Well, actually, you haven’t found them all yet,’” said Salisbury, who is also a fellow at the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre. “There’s only so much the U.S. can do to give that confidence back to commercial shipping.”

Seeking out mines is one of the latest tactics announced by the Trump administration to get traffic moving again through the strait as rising energy prices and wider economic effects pose a political risk. The U.S. also has blockaded Iran’s ports and seized ships tied to Tehran, but the president said Saturday he had instructed his envoys not to travel to Pakistan for the latest ceasefire talks after Iran’s top diplomat left Islamabad.

Pentagon officials told lawmakers it would likely take six months to clear the mines that Iran has set in the strait, according a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive information. The information was delivered during a classified briefing at the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

When asked about the estimate, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Friday that the military would not speculate on a timeline, but he did not deny it.

“Allegedly that was something that was said,” Hegseth said at a Pentagon news conference. “But we feel confident in our ability, in the correct period of time, to clear any mines that we identify.”

Trump said he has ordered the Navy to attack any boat laying mines in the strait.

“Additionally, our mine ‘sweepers’ are clearing the Strait right now,” the president said on social media Thursday. “I am hereby ordering that activity to continue, but at a tripled up level!”

Adm. Brad Cooper, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, recently told reporters that the military would be working to clear mines from the strait. He did not offer details.

There is no indication that the U.S. military is using warships, its most visible mine-clearing assets, in the strait now.

But the Navy also has divers and small teams of explosive ordnance disposal technicians in the region that are capable of clearing mines. They are a less obvious target than a large warship.

Experts also say some mine-clearing equipment could be moved off ships and deployed from land.

It is unclear whether a single mine has been deployed. Iran has mentioned only the “likelihood” of mines in the strait’s prewar routes.

Estimates of Iran’s mine stockpiles are in the low thousands, said Salisbury, of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Most of its underwater explosives are believed to be older Soviet models. Some of its newer ones may be from China or made domestically.

“Minelaying is a lot easier than minesweeping, so you can literally push these things off the back of a speedboat,” Salisbury said, though she noted the U.S. could likely see that.

Iran also has small submarines that can lay mines and are much harder to detect, Salisbury added. She said she has not seen indications that they have been destroyed in the war.

If Iran has set mines in the strait, they are not the spiky balls floating on the surface seen in the movies, Salisbury said. The explosives are likely sitting on the seabed or moored to it by a cable and floating under the surface. They can be triggered by the water pressure changing when a ship passes or by the sound of its engine.

The U.S. Navy now has two littoral combat ships in the Middle East that are capable of sweeping for mines, said a defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military movements.

Two U.S. Avenger-class minesweepers based in Japan also have departed for the Middle East but were in the Pacific Ocean as of Friday, the official said.

Steven Wills, a retired lieutenant commander who served on an Avenger-class ship, said the Navy is likely looking for sea explosives in order to create a safe channel through the strait. Minesweeping is a slower process that usually occurs after a conflict.

“Minehunting is walking through your yard pulling individual weeds and dandelions so that you can walk safely from one side to the other. Minesweeping is more like mowing the grass,” said Wills, an expert at the Center for Maritime Strategy at the Navy League of the United States.

Scott Savitz, a researcher with the RAND Corp. who focuses on naval operations and mine clearing, said the Navy does not necessarily have to remove every last mine.

“There’s still areas that have not been cleared from World War II — and in some cases, World War I — just because it is so resource intensive and it takes a lot of time,” he said.

Teams on the Navy’s littoral combat ships can deploy remotely operated, uncrewed vehicles that use sonar and other technology to find mines, Wills said. They also carry charges to destroy the explosives.

U.S. Navy ships may also have explosive ordnance disposal teams, including divers, that can hunt for and destroy mines, Wills said. Helicopters can search for mines using lasers.

Eventually, shipping companies will be willing to take some risks to travel through the strait “particularly given how lucrative it is,” Savitz said.

Under Iran’s approval procedure for vessels wanting to transit the strait, ships must take a different route than before the war — to the north, near Iran’s coastline.

Insurers are adding a clause that requires ship owners to contact Iranian authorities to ensure safe passage, said Dylan Mortimer, U.K. marine war leader for insurance broker Marsh.

That certification does not mention mines specifically and is intended to protect against the entire spectrum of threats, including missile and drone attacks or seizures, Mortimer said.

But mines do, at the very least, play a psychological role, a phenomenon Mortimer called the “specter of threat.”

“That plays in the Iranians’ favor, because whether there are mines there or not, people think there’s mines there and they will operate accordingly,” Mortimer said.

Those fears could mean it takes longer to restore confidence that the strait is safe even after the war.

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McHugh reported from Frankfurt, Germany. AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

PORTSMOUTH, Va. (AP) — When President Donald Trump tried to cancel five massive offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast, it wasn’t just environmentalists who cried foul. Nine Republicans in the U.S. House sent a letter to administration officials demanding an explanation.

“America’s energy policy should be grounded in facts, fiscal responsibility, and the national interest — not ideology or politics,″ they wrote.

One of the lawmakers is Rep. Jen Kiggans, a former Navy helicopter pilot who represents a coastal district in Virginia where an $11.5 billion wind farm is expected to create 1,000 jobs. Her support for an initiative targeted by Trump shows the scrambled politics of clean energy in an election year where Republicans are at risk of losing the House.

Kiggans could be even more at risk after Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a new congressional map that makes her competitive district more Democratic than before.

Trump’s broader campaign against clean energy resulted in the cancellation of nearly $35 billion in U.S. projects last year, according to a report by E2, a clean energy business group. Republican-held congressional districts lost nearly twice as much in investments than did Democratic districts, the report said.

For now, the Virginia project is back on track, along with the other four, because of federal court rulings. But Elaine Luria, a former congresswoman who is seeking the Democratic nomination in the 2nd Congressional District represented by Kiggans, said the incumbent’s efforts have been futile in the face of Trump’s onslaught.

“Her advocacy did nothing,” Luria said. Kiggans did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump has treated energy issues as another front in the nation’s cultural clashes, referring to Democrats’ support for clean energy as the “Green New Scam.” He frequently talks about his hatred of “windmills,” which he described as “STUPID AND UGLY” on social media. He issued an executive order on the first day of his second term blocking wind projects and he has insisted that “smart countries” do not use wind power.

Solar farms are not much better in his mind.

“You go around and you see all these things that are 3 miles long by 3 miles wide and you say what the hell is that,” Trump said at the White House last summer.

The administration even agreed to pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases and instead invest in oil and natural gas projects.

Kiggans voted in favor of Republican legislation to gut clean energy tax credits as part of Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill even though she has long portrayed herself as a champion of renewable energy. Democrats have turned the issue into campaign advertisements, and Luria said it undermines Kiggans’ attempt to “sell herself as if she’s a moderate.”

Luria said Kiggans “voted for a bill to make energy more expensive.”

In a Facebook post after the bill was passed in July, Kiggans said her vote “wasn’t about politics — it was about overall results.”

“I had ONE vote, and I voted YES on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act not because it was perfect but because it delivers permanent tax relief for families & small businesses, rebuilds our Navy & invests in national defense,” she wrote.

Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, said front-line Republicans have been put in a difficult position.

“Kiggans is not the only Republican being squeezed” as Trump focuses on his own priorities and the country faces economic headwinds exacerbated by the war with Iran, he said. Although few want to risk upsetting the president, Farnsworth said, “in coastal Virginia politics, there’s not much upside to opposing wind.”

U.S. Rep. Tom Kean Jr., R-N.J., has been caught up in a controversy over the Gateway Tunnel, which will add new rail tracks under the Hudson River to alleviate congestion between his state and New York City. Trump tried to block federal funding, a potential setback for commuters in towns that Kean represents. A judge ordered the administration to restore money for the project after Democratic leaders in New Jersey and New York went to court.

Although Trump has dismissed offshore wind turbines as ugly, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is about 27 miles (43 kilometers) out into the ocean, making it difficult to see from land. On a recent visit to the Portsmouth Marine Terminal, where construction is staged, the turbines were impossible to discern along the horizon.

Dominion Energy, which operates the wind farm, says it delivered its first power to the grid last month. The project, first announced in 2013, is expected to create 1,000 jobs and generate about $2 billion in economic activity, the company said.

Once finished, the 176-turbine project could deliver 2.6 gigawatts of power to the grid — enough to supply more than 660,000 homes — at a time when Virginia faces growing energy demand from an expanding hub of artificial intelligence data centers.

“There’s an opportunity here for Hampton Roads to be a national leader in offshore wind,” said Andrew Nissman, a spokesman for the Hampton Roads Workforce Council, which has trained maritime workers for the project.

Nissman declined to comment on the congressional race, saying, ”as with any stop-and-start challenge, it’s important the project is moving forward.”

While the wind farm is now partially online, “Kiggans nearly cost her constituents this project by standing with an administration dead set on dismantling the offshore wind industry and voting to repeal critical clean energy tax credits last year,” said Dan Taylor, Southeast regional field manager for the BlueGreen Alliance, which coordinates labor unions and environmental groups.

“Kiggans claims to prioritize jobs, lower energy costs for Virginians and reducing emissions,” Taylor added. “Yet she voted to kill jobs, skyrocket energy costs to families and increase the emissions driving climate change.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has made it clear he expects his choice for Federal Reserve chair to quickly cut interest rates once he takes office. Yet Americans shouldn’t pencil in lower borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans, or business loans just yet.

The odds of Kevin Warsh becoming chair by the time Jerome Powell’s term ends May 15 shot higher Friday when U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, said she would drop her probe into Powell over his testimony last summer about the Fed’s costly building renovations.

But should he be confirmed, Warsh will still face several hurdles to reducing rates, including rising gas prices that are pushing up inflation, questions about his political independence, and 11 other Fed policymakers who have a vote on the decision, with most of them not ready to cut.

At a Senate hearing Tuesday, Warsh pledged to be independent from White House pressure, but said relatively little about the direction he would take rates. While economists say he was likely just being cautious, he missed a chance to lay out an argument for rate cuts.

“Warsh’s stated outlook is much more consistent with an extended hold than additional cuts,” Aditya Bhave, head of U.S. economics at BofA Securities, wrote in a client note.

Trump, meanwhile, has kept up the pressure. When asked last week on Fox Business whether he still expects interest rates to decline, Trump said, “when Kevin gets in, I do … interest rates should be much lower.”

Here’s what you need to know about Warsh and what he will face as next Fed chair:

Warsh, who was a member of the Fed’s governing board from 2006 to 2011, regularly argued for rate cuts last year as he sought Trump’s nomination to replace Powell. But since being named in late January, he has kept quiet, and hasn’t made any public comments since the Iran war started Feb. 28.

The war has pushed up oil and gas prices, which caused inflation to spike to a two-year high of 3.3% in March, above the Fed’s target of 2%. The Fed typically keeps its short-term rate — currently at about 3.6% — elevated to combat inflation, or even raises it.

The Fed reduces its rate to spur more spending and hiring, and earlier this year several Fed officials worried that a slowdown in job gains demonstrated that the rate was too high. But in recent weeks there are signs the job market may be stabilizing, possibly undercutting the need for a rate reduction.

Christopher Waller, a Fed governor who voted in favor of a rate cut in January, last week expressed concerns that rising inflation could mean the Fed would have to stand pat. He also suggested that with the unemployment rate a still-low 4.3%, rate cuts might not be necessary.

And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that if the Fed wanted “to wait for some clarity” before cutting rates, “I understand that,” a statement widely seen as providing some cover for Warsh to keep rates unchanged for at least a few months.

For now, Wall Street investors see little chance for a rate cut until October 2027, according to futures pricing.

Certainly, if inflation cools in the coming months and unemployment worsens, more Fed officials could end up supporting a rate cut. The economy has been volatile for the past year, at times looking healthy and other times anemic.

Another challenge for Warsh is that he will be just one of 12 voters on the Fed’s rate-setting committee, which meets eight times a year to decide on where to set its overnight interest rate. Most have indicated in recent speeches or votes that they are reluctant to lower borrowing costs with inflation as high as it is. The committee voted 11-1 to keep rates unchanged in March.

Next week, at a meeting likely to be Powell’s last, the committee is widely expected to keep rates where they are.

Stephen Miran, a governor Trump appointed last September, was the only official to vote for a rate cut in March and has voted to cut rates at every meeting he has attended. But Warsh will replace Miran. Another governor Trump named in his first term, Michelle Bowman, has also occasionally dissented in favor of a rate cut.

But there is a larger faction on the committee that wants the Fed to start considering the possibility of hiking rates, rather than cutting them, at upcoming meetings, according to minutes of their March gathering.

Members of the Fed’s board typically seek to support the chair, former Fed officials say. But rarely can a chair single-handedly and quickly swing an entire committee in his or her direction.

Jon Faust, an economist at Johns Hopkins and former adviser to Powell, said that the last time a chair was able to achieve something close to that was in the late 1990s, when then-chair Alan Greenspan famously persuaded the rest of the committee that rising productivity from the Internet would prevent inflation from taking off, and so the Fed didn’t need to raise rates.

Yet that was after Greenspan had been chair for several years and had built support on the committee, Faust said.

“Warsh comes in with essentially none of the gravitas that Greenspan had,” Faust said. “Instead, Warsh comes in with the baggage that Trump has really loaded on him. It’s not Warsh’s fault, but Trump has led to legitimate questions about whether he’ll act independently.”

One way to establish independence would be for Warsh to not cut rates right away, economists have said.

In his remarks at Tuesday’s hearing, Warsh acknowledged that “we have a short window to try to bring inflation back down to where it should be,” which some economists said sounded more like an argument for rate hikes, rather than cuts.

Warsh also said that the job market is essentially at what the Fed considers “maximum employment,” or the lowest the unemployment rate can go before it starts to push up inflation. That also suggests the Fed doesn’t need to cut to boost hiring.

Before being nominated, Warsh had often argued that artificial intelligence would accelerate growth and make the economy more efficient. Similar to the Internet, he often said, it would allow the Fed to reduce interest rates without worrying about inflation.

At his hearing, Warsh repeated his claim about AI, but added, “we don’t know that, we can’t bank on that,” which struck many economists as a step back from his previous stance.

Warsh’s views “didn’t have a lot of clarity going in,” Claudia Sahm, chief economist at New Century Advisers and a former Fed economist, said. “And then he muddied the waters. There were so few specifics.”

By Andrew Chung

April 25 (Reuters) – Among President Donald Trump’s main arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court defending his moves to rescind humanitarian protections that shield hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation, one stands out: Courts cannot review his administration’s decisions in this area. 

Federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., barred Trump’s administration from stripping from more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians a legal status provided by the U.S. government that protects them from deportation. Citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping, the administration currently warns against traveling to either of these countries for any reason. 

The justices are due to hear arguments on Wednesday in the administration’s appeals of those rulings as it defends former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s actions to terminate Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for people from Haiti and Syria. 

Revoking TPS and other humanitarian protections is part of Trump’s broader crackdown on legal and illegal immigration since he returned to office in January 2025. 

When it took up the matter, the Supreme Court did not act on the administration’s request to immediately end TPS protections for Haitians and Syrians while the case plays out. The court under similar circumstances last year let the administration end TPS for Venezuelans.

WARS AND DISASTERS

Under a U.S. law called the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS is a designation that allows migrants from countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes to live and work in the United States while it is unsafe for them to return to their home countries.

The legal dispute could have wide implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 TPS-designated countries, according to the plaintiffs. Trump’s administration has sought to rescind the protections for 13 of those countries so far.

Lower courts have ruled against the administration’s TPS terminations, finding that officials failed to follow protocols required under the Immigration Act to assess conditions in a country before revoking its designation.

Trump’s Justice Department disputes those points and makes a broader argument that could doom challenges going forward, asserting that courts cannot second-guess its TPS decisions in the first place.

“The TPS statute unambiguously bars judicial review of claims that attack the secretary’s TPS determinations, including the procedures and analysis underlying those determinations,” the department said in a Supreme Court filing.

In this and other matters, Trump has asserted an expansive view of presidential powers and a limited view of judicial purview.

Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer for the Syrian TPS recipients who challenged the administration’s actions, said “a huge amount is at stake” in the legal fight. “If the government is correct, then they can terminate TPS without conducting any country conditions review at all – they can do it for reasons that are completely arbitrary,” Arulanantham said.

The administration’s actions overall do not reflect a federal agency’s reasoned decision-making but rather a concerted effort to end TPS entirely, Arulanantham, co-director of the UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, told reporters during a conference call.

“This really is about a war on this congressional statute,” Arulanantham added.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has granted the Republican president’s requests to immediately implement various hardline immigration policies while legal challenges continue to play out in courts. For instance, it let Trump deport immigrants to countries where they have no ties and let federal agents target people for deportation based in part on their race or language. 

FALSE CLAIMS

Trump, who sought but failed to rescind TPS protections during his first term as president, made clear while running for reelection he would try again. For instance, Trump vowed to revoke TPS for Haitian immigrants after making false and derogatory claims that they were eating household pets in Ohio.

Noem, a Trump appointee, moved quickly to act on TPS designations for countries, including on February 1, 2025, to end the protection for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.

TPS recipients, some of whom have been in the United States for years and could face separation from jobs and families, have said it is cruel to consider sending them back to countries where they risk danger and even death. 

“Temporary Protected Status is, by definition, temporary. It was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency, no matter how badly left-wing organizations want it to be,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Reuters.

During Democrat Barack Obama’s presidency, Haitians ‌were first given ⁠TPS in 2010 after a devastating earthquake, and Syrians in 2012 after the country plunged into a civil war. The U.S. government repeatedly extended the statuses amid continuing crises in those countries. 

Noem moved to revoke TPS for Syria last September and for Haiti last November, stating the designations were contrary to U.S. national interest in part due to difficulties screening and vetting migrants from those countries. Noem’s TPS decisions were not at issue when Trump fired her in March. 

Groups of Syrian and Haitian TPS holders filed class action lawsuits alleging the termination notices were mere pretext for the administration’s plan to end existing designations. The lawsuit said Noem did not comply with the TPS law’s procedural mandate to consult other federal agencies concerning conditions inside a country before revoking its protective status. 

The plaintiffs said the consultation consisted of a State Department official replying to a Homeland Security Department official’s email to say there were “no foreign policy concerns” with ending the designations. 

JUDICIAL REVIEW 

Trump’s Justice Department has said rulings backing the plaintiffs in the cases are “an invitation for courts to referee interagency discussions, demand agency verbosity and gauge how much consultation is enough.”

But that defense would be unnecessary if the court accepts the Justice Department’s bolder argument that, in any event, the administration’s actions are shielded from scrutiny. 

Leaning on a section of the 1990 statute that states there is no judicial review “of any determination” with respect to giving, extending or ending TPS, it said that includes not only final outcomes but also the decisions behind them. In a written filing, it warned against “installing district courts as the ultimate foreign-policy superintendents of temporary status.”

The argument that courts have no role in reviewing the legality of certain actions by a presidential administration is a familiar one for Trump. His administration has made it in numerous challenges to his policies, part of a broader push against the power of judges, according to a Reuters analysis.

The plaintiffs said the administration’s position would insulate even unlawful actions. They contend the statute lets courts scrutinize the compliance of federal officials with statutory procedural requirements.

They also cite a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that blocked Trump from adding a citizenship question to the national census, a move opponents called a Republican effort to deter immigrants from taking part in the decadal population count. The court decided that the stated reasons by administration officials for adding the question were pretextual and contrived. 

‘HOSTILITY TO NON-WHITES’

In the Haiti case, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes decided the administration’s action likely was motivated in part by “racial animus,” violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law.

Reyes referenced statements by Trump and Noem, including the former homeland security secretary’s social media post labeling immigrants killers and leeches. 

“Plaintiffs ​charge that Secretary Noem preordained ⁠her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely,” Reyes wrote.

The Justice Department disputes any racial discrimination, saying no statement by Trump or Noem mentions race. It said the Supreme Court should apply its precedents offering deference to the administration on immigration, foreign policy and national security matters.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule by around the end of June.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)