Sen. Bill Cassidy doesn’t think about Jan. 6, 2021, the day supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. The Louisiana Republican says he doesn’t “sit around constantly mulling over the past like Lady Macbeth.” Or rewatch the selfie video from inside the Capitol, where he called on the “hooligans” to “Stop, period” and allow the peaceful transfer of power.

And he certainly doesn’t sit around thinking about the impeachment vote he cast a little over a month later, in which he, along with six other Republicans and all Democrats, found President Trump guilty of “incitement of insurrection.” (The Senate ultimately did not convict Mr. Trump.)

“You make a decision based on facts, and you move on,” says Senator Cassidy, as he works a room full of blazer- and kitten-heel-wearing supporters at a seafood restaurant outside New Orleans. He shakes hands, cracks dad jokes, and talks about the things he says actually do keep him up at night, such as flood management and healthcare reform.

Why We Wrote This

GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy voted to convict Donald Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial and has pushed back on public health matters. His fate on Saturday will signal the clout of the Make America Healthy Again movement, as well as the president’s hold on his party.

Mr. Trump hasn’t moved on in the same way. The president, who demands total loyalty from Republicans in Congress, has made unseating the two-term senator in Saturday’s Louisiana primary a priority.

It’s not just the impeachment vote that has drawn Mr. Trump’s ire. There have been other dustups between the senator and the White House in the president’s second term – particularly over public health. During Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hearing to become secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Cassidy, a physician, challenged the vaccine skeptic on a number of fronts. And in the year since, he has continued to question many of Mr. Kennedy’s decisions and opinions.

As far as Trump pushback goes, Dr. Cassidy’s was hardly the most forceful: He eventually cast the tiebreaking committee vote that cleared the way for Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation. Still, he dragged his feet long enough to “make both sides mad,” says Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming, who is running to replace the senator. Mr. Trump has endorsed a third Republican in the race, Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow, who has the support of Mr. Kennedy’s MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement.

All of which could make Saturday’s primary even more telling. Even as Mr. Trump’s own poll numbers hit new lows amid rising prices and an unpopular war in Iran, his hold on his party has shown little sign of abating. His ability to punish errant Republicans was brought home just last week in Indiana, where state lawmakers who had resisted his redistricting demands lost seats to primary opponents. Dr. Cassidy is a much bigger, and potentially riskier, target – a two-term senator with a track record of delivering for his state. His fate will signal the clout of the still-young MAHA movement within the GOP as well as the president’s power as Mr. Trump heads into the lame-duck years of his final term.

“In such a frustrated and polarized society that we live in today, sometimes what we’re against is what stands out,” says Denham Springs City Council member Jim Gilbert before introducing Dr. Cassidy at a Baton Rouge campaign event. “And not what we’re for.”

A three-way split

Recent polls suggest Dr. Cassidy is in the race of his political life. A late April Emerson College poll has the senator trailing both Dr. Fleming, a physician like Dr. Cassidy, and Ms. Letlow, with 21% of the vote to their 28% and 27%, respectively. It’s possible the sitting senator won’t even make it to the all-but-guaranteed June runoff if no candidate passes the 50% threshold this Saturday.

Likely hurting Dr. Cassidy are changes to Louisiana’s elections. The state used to hold a “jungle” primary, where all candidates for an office appear on the ballot together, regardless of party. This year, Louisiana moved to a more typical party primary, which often favors candidates on the far ends of the ideological spectrum. Some speculate that GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, an ally of the president, pushed through this change deliberately to help Dr. Cassidy’s opponents.

Things took another turn last month when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map. In response, Governor Landry postponed the state’s House primary vote until this summer, but left the Senate primary on May 16. Both Dr. Cassidy and Dr. Fleming worry that the changes will cause confusion for voters.

Dr. Cassidy tells the Monitor he believes the race will ultimately be decided on “who delivered” for the state. For voters concerned about “how well I work with President Trump,” Dr. Cassidy points to bills he worked on that the president signed into law, like the HALT Fentanyl Act, or the “no tax on tips” part of Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. He also frequently references the $13.5 billion he brought to Louisiana as a lead negotiator for former President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is a frequent source of criticism from his opponents.

Mr. Gilbert, the Denham Springs council member, talks about how quickly the senator secured federal funds for his city when it flooded in 2016. Grant Parish Sheriff Steven McCain says after his parish flooded, the senator helped them get boats to navigate the water-covered, hilly terrain. Supporters across the state emphasize how Louisianans benefit from the senator’s position as chair of the powerful Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

To which Dr. Cassidy’s opponents have a ready response.

“None of that matters,” Ms. Letlow tells the Monitor bluntly, “if you don’t have access to the president.”

“I like Trump”

Mr. Trump called Ms. Letlow personally to ask her to get into the race against Dr. Cassidy. He followed that up with an endorsement on Truth Social (“RUN JULIA RUN!!!”) days before she made her campaign official in January. The president’s support for Ms. Letlow goes back to her first campaign in 2021, when she ran in a special election to fill the seat of her late husband, Luke Letlow, who died of COVID-19 shortly after being elected in 2020. She was reelected in Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District, the rural northeastern corner of the state, again in 2022 and 2024.

In an interview after speaking to two dozen members of a Rotary club in rural Crowley, nicknamed “the Rice Capital of the World,” Ms. Letlow attributes the president’s endorsement to loyalty. “He knows he can count on me,” she says.

Leaning on the hood of his car across the parking lot, GOP voter James Webb gives a similar reason for jumping ship from Dr. Cassidy to Ms. Letlow: “I like Trump,” he says, throwing up his hands both literally and figuratively.

“President Trump is very well liked in Grant Parish,” says Sheriff McCain, a Cassidy supporter, adding that the president’s endorsement “carries a lot of weight.” i

Mr. Trump won the state by roughly 20 points in each of his three presidential elections. But the Bayou State has also shown strong support over the years for Dr. Cassidy, a former state senator who defeated a Democratic incumbent to win Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District in 2008 and defeated a Democratic incumbent again in 2014 when he first ran for Senate. The first Republican to hold the seat since the 19th century, Dr. Cassidy won reelection in 2020 (with Mr. Trump’s endorsement) with more than 50% of the vote against 14 opponents.

A Cassidy campaign flyer shows the senator standing behind Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. And attendees at his events, many wearing “Geaux Bill” buttons, downplay any conflict between the senator and the president. The impeachment vote “was a little blip,” says Bernard Pentes in Metairie.

For a blip, though, it has had a big ripple effect. Of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Mr. Trump following the Capitol attack in 2021, only one, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, has been reelected despite facing a Trump-backed challenger. Three others retired, one resigned, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins will have her own existential race this year, although she did not face a serious primary challenge.

After the impeachment vote, “it really seemed obvious that [Cassidy] was going to have real trouble running for reelection,” Dr. Fleming tells the Monitor in a Baton Rouge coffee shop.

The four-term congressman and House Freedom Caucus co-founder had opted out of a Senate run in 2014 after Dr. Cassidy announced his own campaign, not wanting to “risk a contest” between two Republicans that could benefit the Democratic incumbent. This year, Dr. Fleming decided Dr. Cassidy was “beatable.”

“The Republicans in this state are some of the most conservative voters in the country,” says Woody Jenkins, a Republican who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives for almost 30 years and ran several of his own close campaigns for Senate. He calls the impeachment vote a “nail in the coffin” for Dr. Cassidy, saying: “He showed his true colors at that moment.”

Mr. Jenkins adds: “Then we had the pandemic.”

MAHA and vaccines

One big frustration for the Cassidy campaign is that many voters wrongly accuse the senator of having supported COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

“People should get vaccinated for COVID-19, but the government should not mandate it,” Dr. Cassidy said in 2021.

And despite the MAHA wedge in this primary race, his opponents shared a similar position. In 2021, Ms. Letlow said she “would have given everything” for the COVID-19 vaccine to have been available for her husband. When asked if her support for the vaccine puts her at odds with her MAHA supporters, the congresswoman responds that she “never said that vaccines should be mandated.”

Dr. Fleming says he is “not an anti-vaxxer at all,” and tells all his patients, children, and grandchildren to get vaccinated, but is opposed to vaccine mandates. He says he does not agree with “everything” that Mr. Kennedy says or believes, and that some of his “ideas about vaccines” are “really out of the mainstream.” But he also says he supports all of the president’s Cabinet choices and “can’t think of anything” that Mr. Trump has done that he would push back on.

When Dr. Cassidy announced his vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy, he said he had been given assurances of a “close collaborative working relationship,” with input on HHS hiring decisions. Other commitments, he said, included keeping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory committee on vaccines intact.

But the HHS secretary went on to handpick new members for the vaccine panel, which then voted to withdraw a recommendation for the Hepatitis B vaccine – a move Dr. Cassidy called a “mistake.” During his medical career, Dr. Cassidy, a liver specialist, had created a program to provide the Hepatitis B vaccine to 36,000 children in Baton Rouge.

On the CDC’s vaccine safety web page today, an asterisk on the headline “Vaccines do not cause autism” clarifies that it “has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.”

In recent months, Dr. Cassidy has continued to challenge Mr. Kennedy’s moves at HHS in Senate hearings. At the end of April, Mr. Trump blamed Dr. Cassidy directly (“a very disloyal person”) in a Truth Social post for the stalled nomination of the president’s original pick for U.S. surgeon general, MAHA influencer Casey Means.

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Taking the stage in Baton Rouge, Dr. Cassidy talks about the need for courage in politics. When he’s finished, reporters ask if he was referencing his impeachment vote. Or perhaps his pushback to Mr. Kennedy? Actually, Dr. Cassidy says, he was thinking about his vote for Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill. But, sure, he adds, the same point could apply to all those things.

“Do I get criticized? Yes,” he says. “If you don’t want to get criticized, don’t run for Senate.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy doesn’t think about Jan. 6, 2021, the day supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. The Louisiana Republican says he doesn’t “sit around constantly mulling over the past like Lady Macbeth.” Or rewatch the selfie video from inside the Capitol, where he called on the “hooligans” to “Stop, period” and allow the peaceful transfer of power.

And he certainly doesn’t sit around thinking about the impeachment vote he cast a little over a month later, in which he, along with six other Republicans and all Democrats, found President Trump guilty of “incitement of insurrection.” (The Senate ultimately did not convict Mr. Trump.)

“You make a decision based on facts, and you move on,” says Senator Cassidy, as he works a room full of blazer- and kitten-heel-wearing supporters at a seafood restaurant outside New Orleans. He shakes hands, cracks dad jokes, and talks about the things he says actually do keep him up at night, such as flood management and healthcare reform.

Why We Wrote This

GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy voted to convict Donald Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial and has pushed back on public health matters. His fate on Saturday will signal the clout of the Make America Healthy Again movement, as well as the president’s hold on his party.

Mr. Trump hasn’t moved on in the same way. The president, who demands total loyalty from Republicans in Congress, has made unseating the two-term senator in Saturday’s Louisiana primary a priority.

It’s not just the impeachment vote that has drawn Mr. Trump’s ire. There have been other dustups between the senator and the White House in the president’s second term – particularly over public health. During Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hearing to become secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Cassidy, a physician, challenged the vaccine skeptic on a number of fronts. And in the year since, he has continued to question many of Mr. Kennedy’s decisions and opinions.

As far as Trump pushback goes, Dr. Cassidy’s was hardly the most forceful: He eventually cast the tiebreaking committee vote that cleared the way for Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation. Still, he dragged his feet long enough to “make both sides mad,” says Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming, who is running to replace the senator. Mr. Trump has endorsed a third Republican in the race, Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow, who has the support of Mr. Kennedy’s MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement.

All of which could make Saturday’s primary even more telling. Even as Mr. Trump’s own poll numbers hit new lows amid rising prices and an unpopular war in Iran, his hold on his party has shown little sign of abating. His ability to punish errant Republicans was brought home just last week in Indiana, where state lawmakers who had resisted his redistricting demands lost seats to primary opponents. Dr. Cassidy is a much bigger, and potentially riskier, target – a two-term senator with a track record of delivering for his state. His fate will signal the clout of the still-young MAHA movement within the GOP as well as the president’s power as Mr. Trump heads into the lame-duck years of his final term.

“In such a frustrated and polarized society that we live in today, sometimes what we’re against is what stands out,” says Denham Springs City Council member Jim Gilbert before introducing Dr. Cassidy at a Baton Rouge campaign event. “And not what we’re for.”

A three-way split

Recent polls suggest Dr. Cassidy is in the race of his political life. A late April Emerson College poll has the senator trailing both Dr. Fleming, a physician like Dr. Cassidy, and Ms. Letlow, with 21% of the vote to their 28% and 27%, respectively. It’s possible the sitting senator won’t even make it to the all-but-guaranteed June runoff if no candidate passes the 50% threshold this Saturday.

Likely hurting Dr. Cassidy are changes to Louisiana’s elections. The state used to hold a “jungle” primary, where all candidates for an office appear on the ballot together, regardless of party. This year, Louisiana moved to a more typical party primary, which often favors candidates on the far ends of the ideological spectrum. Some speculate that GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, an ally of the president, pushed through this change deliberately to help Dr. Cassidy’s opponents.

Things took another turn last month when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map. In response, Governor Landry postponed the state’s House primary vote until this summer, but left the Senate primary on May 16. Both Dr. Cassidy and Dr. Fleming worry that the changes will cause confusion for voters.

Dr. Cassidy tells the Monitor he believes the race will ultimately be decided on “who delivered” for the state. For voters concerned about “how well I work with President Trump,” Dr. Cassidy points to bills he worked on that the president signed into law, like the HALT Fentanyl Act, or the “no tax on tips” part of Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. He also frequently references the $13.5 billion he brought to Louisiana as a lead negotiator for former President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is a frequent source of criticism from his opponents.

Mr. Gilbert, the Denham Springs council member, talks about how quickly the senator secured federal funds for his city when it flooded in 2016. Grant Parish Sheriff Steven McCain says after his parish flooded, the senator helped them get boats to navigate the water-covered, hilly terrain. Supporters across the state emphasize how Louisianans benefit from the senator’s position as chair of the powerful Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

To which Dr. Cassidy’s opponents have a ready response.

“None of that matters,” Ms. Letlow tells the Monitor bluntly, “if you don’t have access to the president.”

“I like Trump”

Mr. Trump called Ms. Letlow personally to ask her to get into the race against Dr. Cassidy. He followed that up with an endorsement on Truth Social (“RUN JULIA RUN!!!”) days before she made her campaign official in January. The president’s support for Ms. Letlow goes back to her first campaign in 2021, when she ran in a special election to fill the seat of her late husband, Luke Letlow, who died of COVID-19 shortly after being elected in 2020. She was reelected in Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District, the rural northeastern corner of the state, again in 2022 and 2024.

In an interview after speaking to two dozen members of a Rotary club in rural Crowley, nicknamed “the Rice Capital of the World,” Ms. Letlow attributes the president’s endorsement to loyalty. “He knows he can count on me,” she says.

Leaning on the hood of his car across the parking lot, GOP voter James Webb gives a similar reason for jumping ship from Dr. Cassidy to Ms. Letlow: “I like Trump,” he says, throwing up his hands both literally and figuratively.

“President Trump is very well liked in Grant Parish,” says Sheriff McCain, a Cassidy supporter, adding that the president’s endorsement “carries a lot of weight.” i

Mr. Trump won the state by roughly 20 points in each of his three presidential elections. But the Bayou State has also shown strong support over the years for Dr. Cassidy, a former state senator who defeated a Democratic incumbent to win Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District in 2008 and defeated a Democratic incumbent again in 2014 when he first ran for Senate. The first Republican to hold the seat since the 19th century, Dr. Cassidy won reelection in 2020 (with Mr. Trump’s endorsement) with more than 50% of the vote against 14 opponents.

A Cassidy campaign flyer shows the senator standing behind Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. And attendees at his events, many wearing “Geaux Bill” buttons, downplay any conflict between the senator and the president. The impeachment vote “was a little blip,” says Bernard Pentes in Metairie.

For a blip, though, it has had a big ripple effect. Of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Mr. Trump following the Capitol attack in 2021, only one, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, has been reelected despite facing a Trump-backed challenger. Three others retired, one resigned, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins will have her own existential race this year, although she did not face a serious primary challenge.

After the impeachment vote, “it really seemed obvious that [Cassidy] was going to have real trouble running for reelection,” Dr. Fleming tells the Monitor in a Baton Rouge coffee shop.

The four-term congressman and House Freedom Caucus co-founder had opted out of a Senate run in 2014 after Dr. Cassidy announced his own campaign, not wanting to “risk a contest” between two Republicans that could benefit the Democratic incumbent. This year, Dr. Fleming decided Dr. Cassidy was “beatable.”

“The Republicans in this state are some of the most conservative voters in the country,” says Woody Jenkins, a Republican who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives for almost 30 years and ran several of his own close campaigns for Senate. He calls the impeachment vote a “nail in the coffin” for Dr. Cassidy, saying: “He showed his true colors at that moment.”

Mr. Jenkins adds: “Then we had the pandemic.”

MAHA and vaccines

One big frustration for the Cassidy campaign is that many voters wrongly accuse the senator of having supported COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

“People should get vaccinated for COVID-19, but the government should not mandate it,” Dr. Cassidy said in 2021.

And despite the MAHA wedge in this primary race, his opponents shared a similar position. In 2021, Ms. Letlow said she “would have given everything” for the COVID-19 vaccine to have been available for her husband. When asked if her support for the vaccine puts her at odds with her MAHA supporters, the congresswoman responds that she “never said that vaccines should be mandated.”

Dr. Fleming says he is “not an anti-vaxxer at all,” and tells all his patients, children, and grandchildren to get vaccinated, but is opposed to vaccine mandates. He says he does not agree with “everything” that Mr. Kennedy says or believes, and that some of his “ideas about vaccines” are “really out of the mainstream.” But he also says he supports all of the president’s Cabinet choices and “can’t think of anything” that Mr. Trump has done that he would push back on.

When Dr. Cassidy announced his vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy, he said he had been given assurances of a “close collaborative working relationship,” with input on HHS hiring decisions. Other commitments, he said, included keeping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory committee on vaccines intact.

But the HHS secretary went on to handpick new members for the vaccine panel, which then voted to withdraw a recommendation for the Hepatitis B vaccine – a move Dr. Cassidy called a “mistake.” During his medical career, Dr. Cassidy, a liver specialist, had created a program to provide the Hepatitis B vaccine to 36,000 children in Baton Rouge.

On the CDC’s vaccine safety web page today, an asterisk on the headline “Vaccines do not cause autism” clarifies that it “has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.”

In recent months, Dr. Cassidy has continued to challenge Mr. Kennedy’s moves at HHS in Senate hearings. At the end of April, Mr. Trump blamed Dr. Cassidy directly (“a very disloyal person”) in a Truth Social post for the stalled nomination of the president’s original pick for U.S. surgeon general, MAHA influencer Casey Means.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

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Taking the stage in Baton Rouge, Dr. Cassidy talks about the need for courage in politics. When he’s finished, reporters ask if he was referencing his impeachment vote. Or perhaps his pushback to Mr. Kennedy? Actually, Dr. Cassidy says, he was thinking about his vote for Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill. But, sure, he adds, the same point could apply to all those things.

“Do I get criticized? Yes,” he says. “If you don’t want to get criticized, don’t run for Senate.”

U.S. states can’t bar immigrant children – no matter their status – from attending public school. The Supreme Court said so in 1982.

A growing chorus of Republicans wants to overturn that decision. Bills in state legislatures over the past year have unsuccessfully aimed to collect data on immigrant students without legal status or charge them tuition. Passing that sort of legislation could put the issue back in front of the Supreme Court someday.

“It’s time for it to go,” Rep. Chip Roy, who’s also running in the Republican primary for Texas attorney general, said of the court ruling during a congressional hearing in March. “Any amount of illegal immigration in our hospitals, jails, schools, or elsewhere should not be tolerated. ... States should have the ability to curb it.”

Why We Wrote This

The Supreme Court guaranteed immigrant children’s access to public education regardless of immigration status in Plyler v. Doe. A growing number of Republicans say it’s “time for it to go.”

Critics of the landmark decision – Plyler v. Doe – say that educating unauthorized immigrant children is expensive and that cash-strapped school districts should focus limited resources on American kids. Immigrant advocates say children who entered the United States illegally deserve the same access to schools as their American-born peers, arguing that free education helps shield against poverty.

The debate continues as the Trump administration expands its deportation effort, arresting and urging unauthorized residents to “self-deport” while moving to strip protections from immigrants lawfully here. The government has lifted limits on immigrant arrests at or near schools and in April argued in front of the Supreme Court that it was time to end the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. The Justice Department is also suing states that offer in-state tuition rates for college students without lawful status.

An estimated 14 million unauthorized immigrants live, work, and study in the United States. Yet the Plyler decision that for decades has protected unauthorized immigrant children who attend public school “doesn’t assert emphatically that education is a fundamental right – even if we do treat it that way,” says Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago.

What did the ruling establish?

Students, no matter their immigration status, can attend K-12 public schools for free.

The Plyler case involved a 1975 Texas law that withheld funding for students who weren’t lawfully admitted to the U.S. and also allowed districts to deny them enrollment. (Based on that law, a district charged such students tuition to enroll.) In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the Texas statute violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

“If the State is to deny a discrete group of innocent children the free public education that it offers to other children residing within its borders,” wrote the court, that denial must advance “some substantial state interest.”

The dissenting justices agreed that it seemed “senseless for an enlightened society to deprive any children” of an elementary education. But they also chided the court for “policymaking” to make up for congressional inaction on illegal migration.

Leading up to the 1975 Texas statute, Mexicans had lost legal paths to enter the United States, says Dr. Padilla-Rodríguez, who’s writing a book about migrant children and education. A decade prior, Congress had ended a program for temporary farmworkers and imposed a new cap on Mexican entries. Some American school officials at the time acknowledged calling the Border Patrol when they suspected a student lacking lawful status was trying to enroll, she says.

Some border communities saw the increase in unauthorized immigrant students as both a fiscal and existential threat, she says. “There’s a long history of seeing nonwhite kids entering schools as threatening the racial purity of school.”

Where do things stand now?

The full scope of immigrant-student enrollment in public schools is hard to pin down, because schools don’t typically collect that data directly.

That said, around 1 in 10 public school students were English language learners as of 2021, according to the government’s most recent data. But that count includes U.S. citizens, who make up the majority of public school students with limited English, an analysis of 2016 survey data found.

The Trump administration has chipped away at their access. Last year, the Department of Education rescinded guidance that asked schools to accommodate English learners, reports The Washington Post.

Under the Biden administration, surges in legal and illegal immigration brought foreign-born students to districts in interior states such as Colorado and Ohio, where budgets and classrooms weren’t prepared for so many new arrivals.

Amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown now, districts across the country, from Minnesota to Maine, have reported lower attendance during arrest campaigns.

Why keep these kids out of school?

Researchers estimate that unauthorized immigrants pay tens of billions of dollars in federal income and payroll taxes. Still, conservatives argue that free education for students who lack permission to be in the country siphons public resources away from citizens and others lawfully present.

At The Heritage Foundation, Lora Ries calls for charging unauthorized students the cost of their attendance. The former Homeland Security official urges all states to challenge what she considers flawed case law.

The Plyler decision was “policy-based, it was emotion-based, and we’ve also had changed circumstances since that decision came out,” says Ms. Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at Heritage. Since 1982, she counts an influx of unaccompanied minors and more restrictions on public benefits as critical developments that the court that decided Plyler didn’t foresee.

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with Monitor Highlights.

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Yet overturning the 44-year-old case has “no prospect,” says Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented students’ families in Plyler. Past attempts by California and Alabama to challenge the Supreme Court precedent failed, he notes.

If an anti-Plyler law were implemented now, says Mr. Saenz, “some of the people who are clamoring the loudest to do that would be first to complain.” That’s because excluding kids from school means more “end up on the streets and sidewalks in the middle of the day,” he says. “Their constituents won’t like that very much.”

U.S. states can’t bar immigrant children – no matter their status – from attending public school. The Supreme Court said so in 1982.

A growing chorus of Republicans wants to overturn that decision. Bills in state legislatures over the past year have unsuccessfully aimed to collect data on immigrant students without legal status or charge them tuition. Passing that sort of legislation could put the issue back in front of the Supreme Court someday.

“It’s time for it to go,” Rep. Chip Roy, who’s also running in the Republican primary for Texas attorney general, said of the court ruling during a congressional hearing in March. “Any amount of illegal immigration in our hospitals, jails, schools, or elsewhere should not be tolerated. ... States should have the ability to curb it.”

Why We Wrote This

The Supreme Court guaranteed immigrant children’s access to public education regardless of immigration status in Plyler v. Doe. A growing number of Republicans say it’s “time for it to go.”

Critics of the landmark decision – Plyler v. Doe – say that educating unauthorized immigrant children is expensive and that cash-strapped school districts should focus limited resources on American kids. Immigrant advocates say children who entered the United States illegally deserve the same access to schools as their American-born peers, arguing that free education helps shield against poverty.

The debate continues as the Trump administration expands its deportation effort, arresting and urging unauthorized residents to “self-deport” while moving to strip protections from immigrants lawfully here. The government has lifted limits on immigrant arrests at or near schools and in April argued in front of the Supreme Court that it was time to end the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. The Justice Department is also suing states that offer in-state tuition rates for college students without lawful status.

An estimated 14 million unauthorized immigrants live, work, and study in the United States. Yet the Plyler decision that for decades has protected unauthorized immigrant children who attend public school “doesn’t assert emphatically that education is a fundamental right – even if we do treat it that way,” says Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago.

What did the ruling establish?

Students, no matter their immigration status, can attend K-12 public schools for free.

The Plyler case involved a 1975 Texas law that withheld funding for students who weren’t lawfully admitted to the U.S. and also allowed districts to deny them enrollment. (Based on that law, a district charged such students tuition to enroll.) In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the Texas statute violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

“If the State is to deny a discrete group of innocent children the free public education that it offers to other children residing within its borders,” wrote the court, that denial must advance “some substantial state interest.”

The dissenting justices agreed that it seemed “senseless for an enlightened society to deprive any children” of an elementary education. But they also chided the court for “policymaking” to make up for congressional inaction on illegal migration.

Leading up to the 1975 Texas statute, Mexicans had lost legal paths to enter the United States, says Dr. Padilla-Rodríguez, who’s writing a book about migrant children and education. A decade prior, Congress had ended a program for temporary farmworkers and imposed a new cap on Mexican entries. Some American school officials at the time acknowledged calling the Border Patrol when they suspected a student lacking lawful status was trying to enroll, she says.

Some border communities saw the increase in unauthorized immigrant students as both a fiscal and existential threat, she says. “There’s a long history of seeing nonwhite kids entering schools as threatening the racial purity of school.”

Where do things stand now?

The full scope of immigrant-student enrollment in public schools is hard to pin down, because schools don’t typically collect that data directly.

That said, around 1 in 10 public school students were English language learners as of 2021, according to the government’s most recent data. But that count includes U.S. citizens, who make up the majority of public school students with limited English, an analysis of 2016 survey data found.

The Trump administration has chipped away at their access. Last year, the Department of Education rescinded guidance that asked schools to accommodate English learners, reports The Washington Post.

Under the Biden administration, surges in legal and illegal immigration brought foreign-born students to districts in interior states such as Colorado and Ohio, where budgets and classrooms weren’t prepared for so many new arrivals.

Amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown now, districts across the country, from Minnesota to Maine, have reported lower attendance during arrest campaigns.

Why keep these kids out of school?

Researchers estimate that unauthorized immigrants pay tens of billions of dollars in federal income and payroll taxes. Still, conservatives argue that free education for students who lack permission to be in the country siphons public resources away from citizens and others lawfully present.

At The Heritage Foundation, Lora Ries calls for charging unauthorized students the cost of their attendance. The former Homeland Security official urges all states to challenge what she considers flawed case law.

The Plyler decision was “policy-based, it was emotion-based, and we’ve also had changed circumstances since that decision came out,” says Ms. Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at Heritage. Since 1982, she counts an influx of unaccompanied minors and more restrictions on public benefits as critical developments that the court that decided Plyler didn’t foresee.

Deepen your worldview

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Yet overturning the 44-year-old case has “no prospect,” says Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented students’ families in Plyler. Past attempts by California and Alabama to challenge the Supreme Court precedent failed, he notes.

If an anti-Plyler law were implemented now, says Mr. Saenz, “some of the people who are clamoring the loudest to do that would be first to complain.” That’s because excluding kids from school means more “end up on the streets and sidewalks in the middle of the day,” he says. “Their constituents won’t like that very much.”

“We need the ballroom” for the White House, President Donald Trump asserted to reporters late on April 25, less than two hours after a gunman tried to storm a hotel ballroom where the president was about to speak.

“That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it,” he said from the White House briefing room, following an alleged assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton. “They’ve wanted the ballroom for 150 years.”

There’s no evidence that that’s the case, but the point is clear: President Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot, highly secure White House ballroom – at the moment still a hole in the ground where the East Wing once stood – is an animating focus of his second term.

Why We Wrote This

Congress may now put $1 billion toward the ballroom project, which has so far been funded through private donations. It reflects President Donald Trump’s effort to leave a physical legacy as well as meet a genuine need.

It’s both a symbol of his desire to create an enduring physical legacy at the heart of American power and an effort to fulfill a genuine need for a larger event space on the White House campus. The project also includes an underground national-security complex.

Ethics experts say the ballroom is a key example of pay-to-play behavior, with wealthy donors and corporations appearing to curry favor with the administration by donating to a favored presidential project.

Some of the donors are known – including major firms in finance, tech, defense, and cryptocurrency – while others remain undisclosed. Some, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia, have business before the administration, for example in helping to shape policy around artificial intelligence.

But the project also represents the stunning fashion in which Mr. Trump has shattered norms around presidential power, in tearing down the East Wing of the White House last October without advance authorization, ignoring seeming conflicts of interest with private donors, and then trying to secure permission for the new structure only after it was underway.

“President Trump’s approach to ethics seems to be to ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” says Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

How the new ballroom will be paid for appears to be in flux. Until last month’s shooting at the Hilton, where Mr. Trump was attending the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the $400 million White House ballroom was going to be fully covered by private donations.

Now, after the latest apparent assassination attempt on Mr. Trump, public funding is on the table. One bill introduced by a group of Republicans, led by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, would authorize $400 million to fund construction of the ballroom and the national-security-related facility below it. Senator Graham says national park user fees and customs fees would offset the costs.

Another GOP senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, filed a joint resolution last week to authorize construction of the ballroom and the below-ground security facility, but not to fund the project. “My bill just says it’s authorized, and if he has the private money to do it, he can move forward,” Senator Paul told a Louisville TV station.

A third proposal, released Tuesday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa, would allocate $1 billion for enhanced Secret Service security, including the “East Wing Modernization Project,” as part of the Republicans’ funding bill for immigration enforcement. The legislative text says the money may not be used for “non-security elements” of the project.

The flurry of legislation has fueled conspiracy theories that the latest alleged assassination attempt was staged to help Mr. Trump gain congressional approval and funding for his ballroom. But the funding aspect may not fly, political analysts say, given the optics around taxpayer money going to a presidential ballroom during a midterm campaign dominated by voter concerns about the cost of living.

Last week, for security reasons, the Department of Justice asked U.S. District Judge Richard Leon to lift his block on ballroom construction. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had already temporarily blocked Judge Leon’s ruling, allowing ballroom construction to proceed into June.

Mr. Trump’s goal is to complete the new ballroom – and the secure military complex directly beneath it – before he leaves office in January 2029.

Almost twice the size of the main White House edifice, the ballroom is meant to accommodate much larger events (up to 1,000 people) than the current mansion can (up to 250 people).

Over the decades, U.S. presidents have pitched tents on the White House’s South Lawn for larger events, hardly the elegant setting one might expect from the most powerful country in the world.

Changes to the White House are hardly unheard of. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman added a balcony to the south-facing side of the mansion. In the early 1960s, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy oversaw renovations to the White House funded with private donations.

But Mr. Trump, a real estate developer by profession, has plans much grander than a simple home renovation project. Beyond criticisms of Mr. Trump’s taste, ethical questions have swirled around donations to the ballroom – starting with the identity of donors and what they might be getting in return for their largesse.

Under the project’s fundraising contract, recently disclosed after the watchdog group Public Citizen sued for its release, many donors remain anonymous at their request. But a list of more than three dozen donors was released by the White House last fall, though the amounts of the donations were not revealed. Some donors, such as chipmaker Nvidia, revealed voluntarily that they donated to the White House ballroom.

In response to a query from the Monitor, a White House official said that contracts related to the White House executive residence have never been posted, for security reasons.

In the world of Trump fundraising, as overseen by the president’s chief campaign finance operative, Meredith O’Rourke, there are many other projects collecting donations.

“This is so much bigger than the ballroom,” says Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington. “There are so many other projects he’s raising money for in the same manner.”

Mr. Payne points to the Trump presidential library in Miami; The Trump Kennedy Center in Washington; the planned Garden of Heroes honoring noteworthy Americans, also in Washington; and Freedom 250, the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday.

In some cases, such as the presidential library, private donations are the standard route for funding. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, now dubbed The Trump Kennedy Center, also has a long history of private fundraising – appropriately so, say ethics experts who stress that transparency on who is donating is essential to maintaining trust.

And in a way, Mr. Trump can’t win. He gets criticized for soliciting private donations for public projects, but he also gets criticized when Congress tries to fund such projects.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor and expert on government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, sees the need for Congress to assert itself and exercise more oversight over the president.

“He is coercively extracting money from [donors] to fund his pet projects, and he’s done so without, at this point, any authorization or appropriation from Congress,” Professor Clark says.

“We need the ballroom” for the White House, President Donald Trump asserted to reporters late on April 25, less than two hours after a gunman tried to storm a hotel ballroom where the president was about to speak.

“That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it,” he said from the White House briefing room, following an alleged assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton. “They’ve wanted the ballroom for 150 years.”

There’s no evidence that that’s the case, but the point is clear: President Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot, highly secure White House ballroom – at the moment still a hole in the ground where the East Wing once stood – is an animating focus of his second term.

Why We Wrote This

Congress may now put $1 billion toward the ballroom project, which has so far been funded through private donations. It reflects President Donald Trump’s effort to leave a physical legacy as well as meet a genuine need.

It’s both a symbol of his desire to create an enduring physical legacy at the heart of American power and an effort to fulfill a genuine need for a larger event space on the White House campus. The project also includes an underground national-security complex.

Ethics experts say the ballroom is a key example of pay-to-play behavior, with wealthy donors and corporations appearing to curry favor with the administration by donating to a favored presidential project.

Some of the donors are known – including major firms in finance, tech, defense, and cryptocurrency – while others remain undisclosed. Some, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia, have business before the administration, for example in helping to shape policy around artificial intelligence.

But the project also represents the stunning fashion in which Mr. Trump has shattered norms around presidential power, in tearing down the East Wing of the White House last October without advance authorization, ignoring seeming conflicts of interest with private donors, and then trying to secure permission for the new structure only after it was underway.

“President Trump’s approach to ethics seems to be to ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” says Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

How the new ballroom will be paid for appears to be in flux. Until last month’s shooting at the Hilton, where Mr. Trump was attending the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the $400 million White House ballroom was going to be fully covered by private donations.

Now, after the latest apparent assassination attempt on Mr. Trump, public funding is on the table. One bill introduced by a group of Republicans, led by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, would authorize $400 million to fund construction of the ballroom and the national-security-related facility below it. Senator Graham says national park user fees and customs fees would offset the costs.

Another GOP senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, filed a joint resolution last week to authorize construction of the ballroom and the below-ground security facility, but not to fund the project. “My bill just says it’s authorized, and if he has the private money to do it, he can move forward,” Senator Paul told a Louisville TV station.

A third proposal, released Tuesday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa, would allocate $1 billion for enhanced Secret Service security, including the “East Wing Modernization Project,” as part of the Republicans’ funding bill for immigration enforcement. The legislative text says the money may not be used for “non-security elements” of the project.

The flurry of legislation has fueled conspiracy theories that the latest alleged assassination attempt was staged to help Mr. Trump gain congressional approval and funding for his ballroom. But the funding aspect may not fly, political analysts say, given the optics around taxpayer money going to a presidential ballroom during a midterm campaign dominated by voter concerns about the cost of living.

Last week, for security reasons, the Department of Justice asked U.S. District Judge Richard Leon to lift his block on ballroom construction. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had already temporarily blocked Judge Leon’s ruling, allowing ballroom construction to proceed into June.

Mr. Trump’s goal is to complete the new ballroom – and the secure military complex directly beneath it – before he leaves office in January 2029.

Almost twice the size of the main White House edifice, the ballroom is meant to accommodate much larger events (up to 1,000 people) than the current mansion can (up to 250 people).

Over the decades, U.S. presidents have pitched tents on the White House’s South Lawn for larger events, hardly the elegant setting one might expect from the most powerful country in the world.

Changes to the White House are hardly unheard of. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman added a balcony to the south-facing side of the mansion. In the early 1960s, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy oversaw renovations to the White House funded with private donations.

But Mr. Trump, a real estate developer by profession, has plans much grander than a simple home renovation project. Beyond criticisms of Mr. Trump’s taste, ethical questions have swirled around donations to the ballroom – starting with the identity of donors and what they might be getting in return for their largesse.

Under the project’s fundraising contract, recently disclosed after the watchdog group Public Citizen sued for its release, many donors remain anonymous at their request. But a list of more than three dozen donors was released by the White House last fall, though the amounts of the donations were not revealed. Some donors, such as chipmaker Nvidia, revealed voluntarily that they donated to the White House ballroom.

In response to a query from the Monitor, a White House official said that contracts related to the White House executive residence have never been posted, for security reasons.

In the world of Trump fundraising, as overseen by the president’s chief campaign finance operative, Meredith O’Rourke, there are many other projects collecting donations.

“This is so much bigger than the ballroom,” says Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington. “There are so many other projects he’s raising money for in the same manner.”

Mr. Payne points to the Trump presidential library in Miami; The Trump Kennedy Center in Washington; the planned Garden of Heroes honoring noteworthy Americans, also in Washington; and Freedom 250, the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday.

In some cases, such as the presidential library, private donations are the standard route for funding. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, now dubbed The Trump Kennedy Center, also has a long history of private fundraising – appropriately so, say ethics experts who stress that transparency on who is donating is essential to maintaining trust.

And in a way, Mr. Trump can’t win. He gets criticized for soliciting private donations for public projects, but he also gets criticized when Congress tries to fund such projects.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor and expert on government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, sees the need for Congress to assert itself and exercise more oversight over the president.

“He is coercively extracting money from [donors] to fund his pet projects, and he’s done so without, at this point, any authorization or appropriation from Congress,” Professor Clark says.

The U.S. military is attempting to guide commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

The vital shipping lane has been almost entirely closed to cargo ships since Iran imposed a blockade in early March, shortly after the United States and Israel began attacking Iran. The closure has left more than 1,500 commercial ships – and at least 20,000 sailors – stranded near the narrow waterway of the Persian Gulf.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump said the U.S. would “restore freedom of navigation for commercial shipping.” He posted on social media that the mission would take effect Monday and would help “guide” ships safely out of the strait.

Why We Wrote This

As the global economy feels the impact from a disruption of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, both the United States and Iran claim they control the waterway. America's efforts to open the lanes, coming amid the Iran war, are meeting steep challenges.

“The goal here is pretty simple: establish a zone of transit that is protected by a bubble of the United States, both naval and air assets,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Tuesday.

But by Tuesday afternoon, only a few vessels had managed to move through the strait.

U.S. officials say Iran has launched several attacks against American ships, but that all of them were unsuccessful. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a briefing on Tuesday that a ceasefire between the countries was still in place, though Iran has accused the U.S. of breaching the truce.

This is not the first U.S. military operation aimed at protecting international shipping. The current effort differs from previous interventions, however, because it originates from Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war.

“The U.S. is trying to get back to the situation that existed before we launched this escapade,” says Eugene Gholz, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. “We’re not trying to gain. We’re trying to undo a loss.”

What is the U.S. attempting to do with Project Freedom?

Mr. Trump has described U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf as “a Humanitarian gesture.” He has talked also about imposing a “blockade” against Iranian shipping, and said any interference would be dealt with “forcefully.”

The president did not provide details in his Sunday announcement about what it would look like practically for the U.S. to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command said in a statement that U.S. military forces involved would include more than 100 land- and sea-based aircraft, 15,000 service members, and U.S. missile-guided destroyers.

On Monday, Central Command said U.S. protection helped a total of two commercial ships to successfully pass through the strait.

It is unclear how long the ceasefire with Iran reached on April 8 can hold. U.S. officials say the military shot down several Iranian missiles and drones on Monday and sank seven Iranian speedboats that were “threatening commercial shipping.”

Mr. Hegseth added on Tuesday that the current U.S. operations in the strait would be temporary, and that other nations would soon need to take over the responsibility of maritime security. However, Mr. Rubio said later that “the primary responsibility for this Project Freedom is on the United States,” and that the U.S. would “systematically” continue efforts to clear the passageway.

What’s the Iranian response so far?

Iran says the Strait of Hormuz remains fully under its control.

“Project Freedom is Project Deadlock,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a social media post. “The U.S. should be wary of being dragged back into [a] quagmire by ill-wishers.”

On Monday, Iranian officials accused the U.S. military of jeopardizing shipping security in the strait. Throughout the war, Iran has maintained that all vessels need permission from Iran before crossing through those waters. And it reiterated that warning on Monday, as the U.S. Navy began carrying out new orders from the president.

“Iranians interpreted this as a threat, as a U.S. escalation, and they responded,” says Dr. Gholz.

How unprecedented is the latest U.S. intervention in the Strait of Hormuz?

The U.S. military has been operating in the Strait of Hormuz for many years, but its current operations are a departure from the recent past.

The Iran-Iraq War began in 1980 and went on for nearly a decade. Both countries carried out a series of attacks against merchant vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz and other parts of the Persian Gulf, in an effort to inflict economic harm on each other.

This aspect of the conflict came to be known as the Tanker War, and it led to a 25% drop in commercial shipping in the region, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

U.S. involvement grew in 1986, after the Kuwaiti government sought international protection for its oil tankers in Gulf waters. Kuwait approached both Washington and Moscow. After the Soviets showed interest in getting involved, U.S. President Ronald Reagan answered the call from Kuwait. And after negotiations, it was agreed that 11 Kuwaiti ships would sail under the American flag.

Over the next two years, the U.S. military expanded its operations in the Gulf, which included the destruction of two Iranian oil platforms, along with some of Iran’s crucial warships.

The U.S. also announced at the time that it would provide an escort upon request to all neutral vessels wanting to transit through the Strait of Hormuz. That is different from the current situation, with the U.S. offering protection to all commercial shipping, apart from Iran and its trading partners.

What’s at stake for the U.S.?

Before the start of the Iran war at the end of February, at least 130 cargo ships were safely passing through the strait each day, accounting for about 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas. That status quo was upended when U.S. and Israeli strikes began.

“If the U.S. succeeds, we will get what we already had,” says Dr. Gholz. “We could have had safe shipping in the Strait of Hormuz; we had it for a long time, and we decided we would put that at risk.”

The American public, and people worldwide, are already paying more at the pump for gas and diesel, meaning the Trump administration might feel the urgency to lower prices by opening the strait to oil and gas shipping. But the current U.S. military mission in the Strait of Hormuz also puts thousands of U.S. military personnel in harm’s way.

“The risk is not zero for U.S. military assets,” says Dr. Gholz.

Even if the current ceasefire holds, maintaining a military force of this size in the Middle East for any length of time does not come cheap. Operating costs such as fuel, maintenance, and combat pay for some 15,000 military personnel add up quickly.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

On Monday, a fire broke out on a South Korea-owned ship in the region. President Trump urged the government in Seoul to respond by joining the U.S. military’s security mission in the Gulf. But the incident might have been a reminder to other commercial ships about the level of uncertainty that remains.

“Why sail today? You can just wait till next week. As long as there’s hope that it’s going to end next week, no one is willing to take much risk,” says Dr. Gholz.

The U.S. military is attempting to guide commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

The vital shipping lane has been almost entirely closed to cargo ships since Iran imposed a blockade in early March, shortly after the United States and Israel began attacking Iran. The closure has left more than 1,500 commercial ships – and at least 20,000 sailors – stranded near the narrow waterway of the Persian Gulf.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump said the U.S. would “restore freedom of navigation for commercial shipping.” He posted on social media that the mission would take effect Monday and would help “guide” ships safely out of the strait.

Why We Wrote This

As the global economy feels the impact from a disruption of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, both the United States and Iran claim they control the waterway. America's efforts to open the lanes, coming amid the Iran war, are meeting steep challenges.

“The goal here is pretty simple: establish a zone of transit that is protected by a bubble of the United States, both naval and air assets,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Tuesday.

But by Tuesday afternoon, only a few vessels had managed to move through the strait.

U.S. officials say Iran has launched several attacks against American ships, but that all of them were unsuccessful. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a briefing on Tuesday that a ceasefire between the countries was still in place, though Iran has accused the U.S. of breaching the truce.

This is not the first U.S. military operation aimed at protecting international shipping. The current effort differs from previous interventions, however, because it originates from Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war.

“The U.S. is trying to get back to the situation that existed before we launched this escapade,” says Eugene Gholz, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. “We’re not trying to gain. We’re trying to undo a loss.”

What is the U.S. attempting to do with Project Freedom?

Mr. Trump has described U.S. military operations in the Persian Gulf as “a Humanitarian gesture.” He has talked also about imposing a “blockade” against Iranian shipping, and said any interference would be dealt with “forcefully.”

The president did not provide details in his Sunday announcement about what it would look like practically for the U.S. to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command said in a statement that U.S. military forces involved would include more than 100 land- and sea-based aircraft, 15,000 service members, and U.S. missile-guided destroyers.

On Monday, Central Command said U.S. protection helped a total of two commercial ships to successfully pass through the strait.

It is unclear how long the ceasefire with Iran reached on April 8 can hold. U.S. officials say the military shot down several Iranian missiles and drones on Monday and sank seven Iranian speedboats that were “threatening commercial shipping.”

Mr. Hegseth added on Tuesday that the current U.S. operations in the strait would be temporary, and that other nations would soon need to take over the responsibility of maritime security. However, Mr. Rubio said later that “the primary responsibility for this Project Freedom is on the United States,” and that the U.S. would “systematically” continue efforts to clear the passageway.

What’s the Iranian response so far?

Iran says the Strait of Hormuz remains fully under its control.

“Project Freedom is Project Deadlock,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a social media post. “The U.S. should be wary of being dragged back into [a] quagmire by ill-wishers.”

On Monday, Iranian officials accused the U.S. military of jeopardizing shipping security in the strait. Throughout the war, Iran has maintained that all vessels need permission from Iran before crossing through those waters. And it reiterated that warning on Monday, as the U.S. Navy began carrying out new orders from the president.

“Iranians interpreted this as a threat, as a U.S. escalation, and they responded,” says Dr. Gholz.

How unprecedented is the latest U.S. intervention in the Strait of Hormuz?

The U.S. military has been operating in the Strait of Hormuz for many years, but its current operations are a departure from the recent past.

The Iran-Iraq War began in 1980 and went on for nearly a decade. Both countries carried out a series of attacks against merchant vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz and other parts of the Persian Gulf, in an effort to inflict economic harm on each other.

This aspect of the conflict came to be known as the Tanker War, and it led to a 25% drop in commercial shipping in the region, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

U.S. involvement grew in 1986, after the Kuwaiti government sought international protection for its oil tankers in Gulf waters. Kuwait approached both Washington and Moscow. After the Soviets showed interest in getting involved, U.S. President Ronald Reagan answered the call from Kuwait. And after negotiations, it was agreed that 11 Kuwaiti ships would sail under the American flag.

Over the next two years, the U.S. military expanded its operations in the Gulf, which included the destruction of two Iranian oil platforms, along with some of Iran’s crucial warships.

The U.S. also announced at the time that it would provide an escort upon request to all neutral vessels wanting to transit through the Strait of Hormuz. That is different from the current situation, with the U.S. offering protection to all commercial shipping, apart from Iran and its trading partners.

What’s at stake for the U.S.?

Before the start of the Iran war at the end of February, at least 130 cargo ships were safely passing through the strait each day, accounting for about 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas. That status quo was upended when U.S. and Israeli strikes began.

“If the U.S. succeeds, we will get what we already had,” says Dr. Gholz. “We could have had safe shipping in the Strait of Hormuz; we had it for a long time, and we decided we would put that at risk.”

The American public, and people worldwide, are already paying more at the pump for gas and diesel, meaning the Trump administration might feel the urgency to lower prices by opening the strait to oil and gas shipping. But the current U.S. military mission in the Strait of Hormuz also puts thousands of U.S. military personnel in harm’s way.

“The risk is not zero for U.S. military assets,” says Dr. Gholz.

Even if the current ceasefire holds, maintaining a military force of this size in the Middle East for any length of time does not come cheap. Operating costs such as fuel, maintenance, and combat pay for some 15,000 military personnel add up quickly.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

On Monday, a fire broke out on a South Korea-owned ship in the region. President Trump urged the government in Seoul to respond by joining the U.S. military’s security mission in the Gulf. But the incident might have been a reminder to other commercial ships about the level of uncertainty that remains.

“Why sail today? You can just wait till next week. As long as there’s hope that it’s going to end next week, no one is willing to take much risk,” says Dr. Gholz.

President Donald Trump’s border czar said Tuesday that the administration is hiring 10,000 new deportation officers to remove unauthorized immigrants from the U.S. interior – part of an ongoing hiring spree at the Department of Homeland Security. The move signals that even without the high-profile arrest and detention operations previously seen in U.S. cities, the mass deportation goal – and efforts – remains in place.

The Trump administration is not giving “an inch,” Tom Homan told a crowd at a border security conference and trade show in Phoenix. “We’re going to enforce the laws of this country without apology.”

After the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by Department of Homeland Security law enforcement in Minneapolis in January, the administration reined in what had become large-scale, public immigration raids. But border officers have continued to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the nation’s interior, Rodney Scott, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), recently confirmed to the Washington Examiner. That collaboration has continued with a relatively low profile, sparing the Trump administration protests and other disruptions related to those arrests.

Why We Wrote This

Even though high-profile immigration operations in U.S. cities have eased, President Donald Trump’s border czar says the administration is hiring more deportation officers and will not back down.

Border officers and agents are sending interview data “within minutes” to ICE special agents, Mr. Scott said Tuesday at the Border Security Expo.

“In many cases now, we’re doing follow-up arrests at houses way away from the southwest border, ICE is, based on the information they got – 30 minutes, two hours ago – from Border Patrol agents and CBP officers,” he said. “We are putting that thing on steroids.”

Mr. Homan said that the Trump administration, between ICE and the Border Patrol, has made some 800,000 removals.

How exactly the government is calculating that removal count is unclear, as it has not been providing detailed, regular reports on how it counts deportations. As a result, the public, journalists, and researchers cannot verify the accuracy of certain immigration enforcement numbers.

The administration and some of its supporters have aimed for 1 million deportations a year.

Mass deportations are coming, and criminals, public safety threats, and national security threats must be prioritized, Mr. Homan said. At the same time, he reaffirmed the policy of detaining unauthorized immigrants encountered during operations, even if they weren’t the original targets.

“I don’t care how long you’ve been here,” Mr. Homan said.

Mr. Homan, who began his federal career as a Border Patrol agent in the 1980s, has long made a humanitarian case for tighter border security, which he reiterated Tuesday. Deterring illegal crossings means fewer migrant deaths and less abuse of women and children along the way, he has argued.

Immigrant advocates counter that hard-line and militarized border enforcement pushes border crossers into more remote and dangerous areas.

After record-high illegal border crossings during the Biden administration, the southern border has never been more secure than it is now, Mr. Homan said. 

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

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Individuals are now “returned” or detained rather than released into the country to await court dates.

The media want “to say our policy is inhumane; we’re cruel,” said Mr. Homan. “No. We’re saving thousands of lives.”

President Donald Trump’s border czar said Tuesday that the administration is hiring 10,000 new deportation officers to remove unauthorized immigrants from the U.S. interior – part of an ongoing hiring spree at the Department of Homeland Security. The move signals that even without the high-profile arrest and detention operations previously seen in U.S. cities, the mass deportation goal – and efforts – remains in place.

The Trump administration is not giving “an inch,” Tom Homan told a crowd at a border security conference and trade show in Phoenix. “We’re going to enforce the laws of this country without apology.”

After the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by Department of Homeland Security law enforcement in Minneapolis in January, the administration reined in what had become large-scale, public immigration raids. But border officers have continued to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the nation’s interior, Rodney Scott, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), recently confirmed to the Washington Examiner. That collaboration has continued with a relatively low profile, sparing the Trump administration protests and other disruptions related to those arrests.

Why We Wrote This

Even though high-profile immigration operations in U.S. cities have eased, President Donald Trump’s border czar says the administration is hiring more deportation officers and will not back down.

Border officers and agents are sending interview data “within minutes” to ICE special agents, Mr. Scott said Tuesday at the Border Security Expo.

“In many cases now, we’re doing follow-up arrests at houses way away from the southwest border, ICE is, based on the information they got – 30 minutes, two hours ago – from Border Patrol agents and CBP officers,” he said. “We are putting that thing on steroids.”

Mr. Homan said that the Trump administration, between ICE and the Border Patrol, has made some 800,000 removals.

How exactly the government is calculating that removal count is unclear, as it has not been providing detailed, regular reports on how it counts deportations. As a result, the public, journalists, and researchers cannot verify the accuracy of certain immigration enforcement numbers.

The administration and some of its supporters have aimed for 1 million deportations a year.

Mass deportations are coming, and criminals, public safety threats, and national security threats must be prioritized, Mr. Homan said. At the same time, he reaffirmed the policy of detaining unauthorized immigrants encountered during operations, even if they weren’t the original targets.

“I don’t care how long you’ve been here,” Mr. Homan said.

Mr. Homan, who began his federal career as a Border Patrol agent in the 1980s, has long made a humanitarian case for tighter border security, which he reiterated Tuesday. Deterring illegal crossings means fewer migrant deaths and less abuse of women and children along the way, he has argued.

Immigrant advocates counter that hard-line and militarized border enforcement pushes border crossers into more remote and dangerous areas.

After record-high illegal border crossings during the Biden administration, the southern border has never been more secure than it is now, Mr. Homan said. 

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Individuals are now “returned” or detained rather than released into the country to await court dates.

The media want “to say our policy is inhumane; we’re cruel,” said Mr. Homan. “No. We’re saving thousands of lives.”

America’s struggle over abortion rights has come roaring back – right as crucial midterm elections are ramping up.

Nearly four years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that guaranteed a nationwide right to the procedure, a federal appeals court has upended the abortion landscape once more by blocking access to a common approach to abortion: medication sent in the mail.

In a ruling Friday that applies nationally, a three-judge panel on the Louisiana-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a pause on the prescribing of abortion pills via telemedicine and their delivery by mail, curtailing the most-used method for ending an unwanted pregnancy. The 5th Circuit panel, all Republican appointees, was responding to a lawsuit by the state of Louisiana against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which had loosened regulation of the abortion pill mifepristone during the administration of President Joe Biden.

Why We Wrote This

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade four years ago, abortions in the United States have actually increased, with the rise of abortion medication sent through the mail. Now, a nationwide ruling puts the issue back before the Supreme Court – and on the campaign trail.

On Saturday, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, makers of mifepristone, each filed emergency requests asking the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the lower court’s temporary nationwide order blocking telehealth prescriptions. The case itself, Louisiana v. FDA, is expected to reach the Supreme Court. The two drugmakers are also defendants in the case.

For now, the high court has multiple options: It could uphold the 5th Circuit’s pause on the FDA regulation, overturn it, send the case back to the lower courts, or take up the case itself.

Louisiana is one of 13 states with a near-total ban on abortion, in a nation that has become a patchwork of varying state laws on access to the procedure since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022. A majority of states allow abortion until late in the second trimester of pregnancy or have no gestational limit, though the vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester.

Since Dobbs, in fact, the number and rate of abortions in the United States have increased, with the rise of telehealth. What are known as shield laws in states with legal abortion aim to protect providers from prosecution for prescribing and sending abortion medication to patients in states with a ban.

In its case against the FDA, Louisiana argued that the agency’s rules around mifepristone violated state sovereignty. In pausing the rules, the 5th Circuit panel agreed.

“The regulation creates an effective way for an out-of-state prescriber to place the drug in the hands of Louisianans in defiance of Louisiana law,” wrote the judges.

Now, policy experts say the future of abortion in the U.S. is once again in flux.

“We are in uncharted territory,” says Joanne Rosen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Having an in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone isn’t new, she says, noting that this was the case until 2021 – but at that time, Roe was still the law of the land.

“What’s new is the in-person dispensing requirement in combination with the lack of a constitutional right to abortion,” Professor Rosen says.

The FDA ended the in-person requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic and is studying the drug’s safety and effectiveness. The agency approved the abortion drug mifepristone, along with a companion drug, in 2000. Mifepristone has other uses, defenders say, including during miscarriages.

Given that nearly two-thirds of abortions nationwide take place via medication, and 1 in 4 are provided via telehealth, the 5th Circuit’s pause on prescription-by-telemedicine potentially represents the biggest reduction in access to abortion since Dobbs. Women in states where abortion is banned can still travel out of state to end a pregnancy, but for many, the costs and logistics are prohibitive. After Dobbs, an “underground” network emerged to assist women seeking abortions in those states.

For activists on both sides of the abortion divide, the 5th Circuit’s order has reignited the issue at a politically charged moment – six months before the November midterm elections, in which Republicans are scrambling to hold their slim majorities in the House and Senate. The party that controls the White House typically loses seats in the midterms, and President Donald Trump’s low job approval rating, now averaging under 40% amid voter concerns about affordability and the Iran war, suggests a Democratic advantage in the fall.

Notably, in the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump asserted that abortion was no longer a “big factor” in elections. During his first term, he had appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe in 2022, fulfilling a key campaign promise to his religious conservative base. But by 2024, as he sought to regain the presidency, he made clear that his work on the matter was done and that it was now up to the states.

Democrats support abortion rights in all or most cases to a far greater degree than Republicans – 84% to 36%, in the latest Pew Research Center poll – and the reemergence of the issue gives Democrats another cause to campaign on.

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For abortion opponents, the 5th Circuit pause on abortion telehealth was a welcome victory at a time of frustration with the Trump administration and its unwillingness to reverse the FDA’s shift in 2021 toward allowing abortion by telehealth. In fact, in January, the administration asked the 5th Circuit not to rule on the telehealth case while the FDA reviewed the safety of mifepristone. That study is due to be completed later this year.

“We are cautiously optimistic,” says Kristi Hamrick, spokesperson for Students for Life of America. “The FDA should be addressing this, but at this point, most of the strategic and effective efforts to address chemical abortion are in the courts.”

America’s struggle over abortion rights has come roaring back – right as crucial midterm elections are ramping up.

Nearly four years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that guaranteed a nationwide right to the procedure, a federal appeals court has upended the abortion landscape once more by blocking access to a common approach to abortion: medication sent in the mail.

In a ruling Friday that applies nationally, a three-judge panel on the Louisiana-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a pause on the prescribing of abortion pills via telemedicine and their delivery by mail, curtailing the most-used method for ending an unwanted pregnancy. The 5th Circuit panel, all Republican appointees, was responding to a lawsuit by the state of Louisiana against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which had loosened regulation of the abortion pill mifepristone during the administration of President Joe Biden.

Why We Wrote This

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade four years ago, abortions in the United States have actually increased, with the rise of abortion medication sent through the mail. Now, a nationwide ruling puts the issue back before the Supreme Court – and on the campaign trail.

On Saturday, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, makers of mifepristone, each filed emergency requests asking the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the lower court’s temporary nationwide order blocking telehealth prescriptions. The case itself, Louisiana v. FDA, is expected to reach the Supreme Court. The two drugmakers are also defendants in the case.

For now, the high court has multiple options: It could uphold the 5th Circuit’s pause on the FDA regulation, overturn it, send the case back to the lower courts, or take up the case itself.

Louisiana is one of 13 states with a near-total ban on abortion, in a nation that has become a patchwork of varying state laws on access to the procedure since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022. A majority of states allow abortion until late in the second trimester of pregnancy or have no gestational limit, though the vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester.

Since Dobbs, in fact, the number and rate of abortions in the United States have increased, with the rise of telehealth. What are known as shield laws in states with legal abortion aim to protect providers from prosecution for prescribing and sending abortion medication to patients in states with a ban.

In its case against the FDA, Louisiana argued that the agency’s rules around mifepristone violated state sovereignty. In pausing the rules, the 5th Circuit panel agreed.

“The regulation creates an effective way for an out-of-state prescriber to place the drug in the hands of Louisianans in defiance of Louisiana law,” wrote the judges.

Now, policy experts say the future of abortion in the U.S. is once again in flux.

“We are in uncharted territory,” says Joanne Rosen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Having an in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone isn’t new, she says, noting that this was the case until 2021 – but at that time, Roe was still the law of the land.

“What’s new is the in-person dispensing requirement in combination with the lack of a constitutional right to abortion,” Professor Rosen says.

The FDA ended the in-person requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic and is studying the drug’s safety and effectiveness. The agency approved the abortion drug mifepristone, along with a companion drug, in 2000. Mifepristone has other uses, defenders say, including during miscarriages.

Given that nearly two-thirds of abortions nationwide take place via medication, and 1 in 4 are provided via telehealth, the 5th Circuit’s pause on prescription-by-telemedicine potentially represents the biggest reduction in access to abortion since Dobbs. Women in states where abortion is banned can still travel out of state to end a pregnancy, but for many, the costs and logistics are prohibitive. After Dobbs, an “underground” network emerged to assist women seeking abortions in those states.

For activists on both sides of the abortion divide, the 5th Circuit’s order has reignited the issue at a politically charged moment – six months before the November midterm elections, in which Republicans are scrambling to hold their slim majorities in the House and Senate. The party that controls the White House typically loses seats in the midterms, and President Donald Trump’s low job approval rating, now averaging under 40% amid voter concerns about affordability and the Iran war, suggests a Democratic advantage in the fall.

Notably, in the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump asserted that abortion was no longer a “big factor” in elections. During his first term, he had appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe in 2022, fulfilling a key campaign promise to his religious conservative base. But by 2024, as he sought to regain the presidency, he made clear that his work on the matter was done and that it was now up to the states.

Democrats support abortion rights in all or most cases to a far greater degree than Republicans – 84% to 36%, in the latest Pew Research Center poll – and the reemergence of the issue gives Democrats another cause to campaign on.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

For abortion opponents, the 5th Circuit pause on abortion telehealth was a welcome victory at a time of frustration with the Trump administration and its unwillingness to reverse the FDA’s shift in 2021 toward allowing abortion by telehealth. In fact, in January, the administration asked the 5th Circuit not to rule on the telehealth case while the FDA reviewed the safety of mifepristone. That study is due to be completed later this year.

“We are cautiously optimistic,” says Kristi Hamrick, spokesperson for Students for Life of America. “The FDA should be addressing this, but at this point, most of the strategic and effective efforts to address chemical abortion are in the courts.”

After a week of late nights, last-minute votes, and party infighting, Congress passed a flurry of items – including a bill to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown – ahead of a one-week recess and multiple impending deadlines. 

The House of Representatives voted Thursday to fund all of DHS except Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law Thursday evening.

That ended a record 76-day partial government shutdown that included agencies like the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Coast Guard. The excluded agencies, ICE and CBP, already have funding through the Republicans’ tax and spending bill last year. 

Why We Wrote This

Congress resolved several persistent issues, including some that had been held up by inter-party disagreements among Republicans, and addressed homeland security funding less than a week after an alleged assassination attempt against President Donald Trump.

The House passed the measure in a voice vote Thursday afternoon, just before the last paychecks were set to go out to DHS employees. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had warned that the Trump administration’s temporary funding to cover their pay would run out during the first week of May.

Senators had struck a bipartisan deal in early April to fund everything in DHS apart from immigration enforcement. Republicans plan to deal with that in a separate budget bill that won’t need support from Democrats, who were using the funding impasse to press for reforms on immigration enforcement tactics. But House Speaker Mike Johnson had refused to take up the Senate-passed legislation for weeks under pressure from other House conservatives who didn’t want to exclude ICE and CBP. 

The chamber ultimately passed the bill after President Trump sent a memo to members on Tuesday urging them to take it up. The vote also came after an armed man tried to get into the April 25 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which Mr. Trump was present. The incident raised concerns about funding for the Secret Service, which is housed under DHS. 

Both chambers Thursday also authorized a 45-day extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, just hours before the midnight expiration deadline. That short-term reauthorization was headed to the president’s desk later Thursday. 

This section allows the government to monitor the communications of noncitizens outside the U.S. without a warrant. It’s controversial for several reasons, mainly because U.S. citizens who are communicating with foreign targets can get caught in that surveillance net. 

The extension means Congress will still need to grapple with Section 702 and the thorny issues involved when it returns from its recess the week of May 11. A bipartisan coalition of representatives and senators want to add a warrant requirement before the government can look at communications from Americans swept up in the government’s surveillance. 

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“I think that the fourth amendment should protect Americans from unreasonable searches,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky told reporters Tuesday, before the final vote on FISA.

Other actions in Congress on Thursday: 

• Farm bill compromise: The House passed a farm bill, a sweeping five-year law that would create national policy on issues ranging from agriculture to food programs to forestry. The bill faces a steep path in the Senate. House Republicans had to overcome internal divisions, including a debate between pro-business members and those who support the “Make America Healthy Again” movement championed by Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. The latter group ultimately succeeded in stripping language that would have protected pesticide makers from lawsuits. 

• Prediction market ban: Senators voted unanimously to prohibit themselves or their staff from trading in prediction markets. The ban went into effect immediately. This practice has come under scrutiny in recent months as reports emerge of people getting big payouts from market trades that seemed to foresee major news events – suggesting political insiders used their privileged knowledge of current events to make money betting on the outcome of those events.

• War powers flip: Republican Sen. Susan Collins flipped for the first time on a vote on the Iran war. The Maine senator voted yes on a Democrat-led procedural vote to move forward on a bill that, if passed, would have required the president to end military operations in Iran absent approval from Congress. The vote ultimately failed by a vote of 50-47, as multiple similar votes have in recent weeks. Senator Collins and Senator Paul were the only Republicans to vote yes.  “I think this is one of those votes where you really don’t know until the vote is called” if members will vote across party lines, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, who sponsored the resolution, told the Monitor a few hours earlier on Thursday.