Trump Administration Updates: U.S. and Britain Hail Benefits of Trade Agreement (2025)

The drought in American military aid for Ukraine enters uncharted territory.

The exception to that rule was a 119-day period that began in December 2023, when Speaker Mike Johnson prevented a vote on more aid for Ukraine in the House of Representatives. That move nearly led to catastrophe for Ukraine as its troops began to run out of ammunition, prompting outrage from the White House, some members of Congress and the public.

Friday marks another grim milestone for Ukraine — the 120th day since the last new aid package was announced on Jan. 8, outstripping the length of Mr. Johnson’s devastating hold.

At the Pentagon there is silence. In contrast, during the Biden administration there were press briefings just days or weeks apart announcing arms shipments worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars each.

After Pete Hegseth became defense secretary in late January, his office promised to be “the most transparent Department of Defense in history,” but there has been only one Pentagon briefing for reporters during the Trump administration’s first 100 days.

There was no mention of additional assistance for Ukraine at the briefing, and only vague support for a cease-fire in Ukraine.

Mr. Hegseth’s office did not reply when asked whether he intended to spend the remaining $3.85 billion that Congress has authorized for additional withdrawals from the Defense Department’s stockpiles for Kyiv.

Ukraine’s bond with the United States, which once seemed unbreakable, appears to have been shelved.

During Mr. Johnson’s nearly fourth-month hold on aid, the Biden administration continued to apply pressure on Congress and kept lines of communication open with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. In November 2023, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III traveled to Ukraine to reassure Mr. Zelensky that the Biden administration had not abandoned his country.

Three months later, the Pentagon pieced together a single $300 million package that it said provided “a short-term stop gap” though “nowhere near enough to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs.”

“Without supplemental funding,” the Pentagon said in a statement, it “will remain hard-pressed to meet Ukraine’s capability requirements at a time when Russia is pressing its attacks against Ukrainian forces and cities.”

Mr. Johnson allowed the House to vote on a new aid package in April 2024, and the Pentagon resumed the flow of arms to Kyiv. Ukrainian soldiers began to make up ground they had lost during the speaker’s hold. All told President Biden sent 74 packages of weapons during his time in office.

But there is a different holdup this year.

In February, soon after taking office the second time, Mr. Trump outlined a transactional offer that Mr. Zelensky would have to agree to in order to receive more arms shipments: share your critical minerals with the United States, or else.

On Feb. 28, when the Ukrainian president arrived at the White House — a place he had been warmly welcomed by the previous administration — in the hopes of securing a lifeline of arms shipments, he was met with a stream of verbal abuse by Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance. All on live television.

It is unclear whether the two leaders spoke again before meeting face-to-face in Rome for the funeral of Pope Francis in late April. Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky were seen talking privately for about 15 minutes in St. Peter’s Basilica, leading some Ukrainians to hope things might change in their favor.

But so far there is no indication additional aid packages for Kyiv are forthcoming from the United States. As a result, Ukraine has had to rely more on European allies as well as building up its own defense industry.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

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The Trump administration has fired the librarian of Congress.

She was fired in a two-sentence email from Trent Morse, the deputy director of White House personnel, according to a screenshot released by Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch.

“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately,” the email said, without citing a cause. “Thank you for your service.”

A spokesman for the Library of Congress, Roswell Encina, confirmed the firing. Reached by phone, Dr. Hayden, 72, declined to comment.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic minority leader, issued a statement describing Dr. Hayden as an “accomplished, principled and distinguished” leader of the library.

“Donald Trump’s unjust decision to fire Dr. Hayden in an email sent by a random political hack is a disgrace and the latest in his ongoing effort to ban books, whitewash American history and turn back the clock,” Mr. Jeffries said.

Mr. Morse did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Since returning to office, President Trump has moved quickly to assert control over American cultural institutions, taking over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and declaring war on Ivy League universities.

A push to purge references to diversity and inclusion led to a page on Jackie Robinson’s life and military career temporarily vanishing from the Pentagon website. Arlington National Cemetery web pages highlighting the graves of Black and female service members disappeared. Books including “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the novel by Harper Lee about racism in the Depression-era South, were purged from schools run by the Defense Department, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Library of Congress, which describes itself as the world’s largest library, is home to millions of items, with collections of books on foreign languages and world history, as well as music, films and newspapers. It serves as the research arm of Congress and is open to the public.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said Dr. Hayden was widely admired by members of Congress.

“Her dismissal is not just an affront to her historic service but a direct attack on the independence of one of our most revered institutions,” Ms. DeLauro said in a statement.

Dr. Hayden became the librarian of Congress after a lengthy run as the chief librarian in Baltimore, her longtime home, where she had overhauled the city’s struggling public library system.

She had known Mr. Obama since her early days as a librarian working in the Chicago Public Library. She started as a librarian in Chicago in 1973 and ultimately became the city’s chief librarian.

But she harbored a special appreciation for the Library of Congress, which she called a “treasure chest.”

“It’s like heaven,” she said in a video published by the Obama White House when she was nominated to be librarian of Congress. In the video, she reflected on her status as the first female and first Black librarian of Congress, saying that her selection showed “what a national library can be.”

“It’s inclusive,” she said. “It can be part of everyone’s story. I believe in what libraries can be for a civilized society, and a country that is open to all.”

Catie Edmondson and Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.

Laura Loomer targets Trump’s pick for surgeon general.

Dr. Means, a close ally of Mr. Kennedy’s, trained as a surgeon in otolaryngology — ear, nose and throat medicine — but left her surgical residency after four years to practice “functional medicine,” which focuses on the root causes of disease. She has said she was disillusioned with the medical establishment, and had concluded it was failing patients.

Ms. Loomer ridiculed Dr. Means on social media Thursday, calling her a “total crack pot” who “USES SHROOMS AS ‘PLANT MEDICINE’ AND TALKS TO TREES!” and “DOESN’T EVEN HAVE AN ACTIVE MEDICAL LICENSE.” As evidence, Ms. Loomer posted excerpts of Dr. Means’s weekly newsletter, in which Dr. Means muses on recipes, product recommendations and other topics, including “mindset shifts and habits.”

Mr. Kennedy pushed back hard with a lengthy post on X, calling the criticism “absurd,” while Mr. Trump told reporters that he did not know Dr. Means, but picked her because “Bobby thought she was fantastic.”

Dr. Means’s brother, Calley Means, a White House adviser on health issues and former food industry lobbyist, defended his sister in an interview.

“Casey has inspired millions of Americans and is a threat to the status quo because she left the medical system, not in spite of it,” Mr. Means said.

He added that the family had been shocked when she left her residency, “but she had a clear moral insight that her patients were not getting better.”

Under federal law, the surgeon general oversees the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Health Service, the uniformed service that works on the front lines of public health.

There are just two requirements for the job: the nominee must be a member of the Corps (usually the president simply appoints a candidate before he or she takes the job) and must have “specialized training or significant experience in public health programs.”

Dr. David A. Kessler, a former head of the Food and Drug Administration who also served as dean of the medical schools at Yale and the University of California, San Francisco, said in an interview that while there may be legitimate reasons to criticize Dr. Means, not having a current medical license was not among them.

The main question, Dr. Kessler said, is whether a surgeon general is “well-trained” in medicine. If Dr. Means finished four years of residency, he said, “she is very well-trained.”

Major medical groups were largely silent on the appointment. Neither the American Medical Association nor the American Public Health Association issued statements. But Arthur L. Caplan, a prominent medical ethicist at New York University, called the appointment “irresponsible.”

“Appointing Casey Means, a non-practicing doctor who has spent years peddling unproven ‘health interventions,’ means a surgeon general that will put a fringe practitioner of unproven functional medicine in charge of educating the American people about their health and disease challenges,” Dr. Caplan wrote in an email.

Noting that Mr. Kennedy has called for placebo-controlled trials of vaccines, Dr. Caplan said the health secretary should apply the same scientific rigor to the type of functional and alternative remedies Dr. Means favors. “Without data it is akin to having her run Newark airport without radar or radio,” he wrote.

The Means siblings are both media-savvy wellness entrepreneurs. Calley Means is the founder of Truemed, a startup that enables tax-free spending on supplements, exercise and healthy food. Casey Means is the founder of Levels, a company that offers subscribers wearable glucose monitors to track their health.

Her embrace of holistic therapies has drawn some eye rolls in the press. Rolling Stone called her a “woo-woo wellness influencer.”

Dr. Means rose to prominence last year after she and her brother appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to promote their diet and self-help book, “Good Energy,” which argues that metabolic dysfunction is at the root of a chronic disease epidemic.

Mr. Kennedy said on X that Dr. Means’s ability to “inspire Americans to rethink our health care system” was “an existential threat to the status quo interests, which profit from sickness.” In an interview with Fox News, he said she had “galvanized” his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

Like Mr. Kennedy, Dr. Means has repeatedly said that America is in the midst of a chronic disease crisis. She has pointed to rising rates of infertility, obesity, diabetes, depression and other conditions as proof. Also like Mr. Kennedy, she has suggested that environmental toxins and the food system are to blame.

Mr. Trump’s appointment of Dr. Means came as a surprise. He announced it on Wednesday after withdrawing the nomination of his previous choice, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, who was to appear before the Senate health committee on Thursday.

Dr. Nesheiwat, an urgent care physician and former Fox News commentator, is the sister-in-law of Michael Waltz, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser until last week. She had faced criticism that she was less than forthcoming about her credentials; Ms. Loomer complained that Dr. Nesheiwat was not “ideologically aligned” with the president.

The surgeon general has no real authority to set policy; the power of the job is in the platform and in the surgeon general’s reports. The landmark 1964 report on tobacco led to warning labels on cigarette packages. Dr. C. Everett Koop, one of the nation’s best-known surgeon generals, used the office to advocate for patients with AIDS at a time when his fellow Republicans were ignoring the disease.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, who served as surgeon general in the Obama and Biden administrations, spoke out about loneliness and mental health.

Dr. David Perlmutter, an ally of Dr. Means’s whose work focuses on the intersection of nutrition and neurological disorders, said the most important quality for any surgeon general is the ability to communicate science to the public.

Dr. Means, he said, “excels at that.”

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Trump declares a Biden-era effort to expand high-speed internet access ‘racist’ and ‘unconstitutional.’

The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing “woke handouts based on race.”

In reality, the law barely mentions race at all, only stating that racial minorities could be covered by the program while including a nondiscrimination clause that says that individuals could not be excluded from the program “on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability” — language taken from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Digital Equity Act, drafted by Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, provides $60 million in grants to states and territories to help them come up with plans to make internet access more equal, as well as $2.5 billion in grants to help put those plans into effect. Some of that funding has already been disbursed to states with approved plans — including red, rural states like Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa and Kansas. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding were approved by the Biden administration in the weeks before Mr. Trump took office, but have not yet been distributed.

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump had carried out his threat to end the grants, which were appropriated through Congress. The agencies that oversee the internet initiative, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Department of Commerce, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The cancellation of grants to states would almost certainly be challenged in the courts, where the Trump administration has had some success in blocking, at least temporarily, challenges to its suspension of grants related to equity and diversity programs. However, in late March, the administration failed to ward off a block on its sweeping freeze of federal funds to states.

The Trump administration is demanding records from Penn on foreign ties.

Officials suggested in a letter sent on Thursday from the Education Department to J. Larry Jameson, the president of Penn, that the college has struggled with veracity in its disclosures of foreign funding.

By law, U.S. colleges and universities are required twice a year to report foreign gifts and contracts worth $250,000 or more to the government.

In Penn’s latest filing, more than half of the disclosures were reported late, according to the department. The government also said the university had misidentified many of the foreign sources without providing additional details.

Consequently, the department said it is demanding the college produce a lengthy and detailed list of documents within 30 days. Those documents include copies of admissions agreements with foreign governments for international students, as well as records related to faculty and research collaborations from the past eight years. The government is also seeking the names and contact information for university personnel involved in the “creation, administration or management” of those agreements.

In addition, the department asked for the names and contact information of college personnel involved in exchange student visitor programs and anyone involved in international research collaborations.

A spokesman for Penn did not immediately return a request for comment.

The investigation into Penn’s foreign funding is at least the third such inquiry started by the agency in the past three weeks. On April 18, the department said it was investigating Harvard University’s foreign donations, and April 25, the department said it was probing disclosures submitted by the University of California, Berkeley. Those investigations included similar requests for documents.

Representatives for U.C. Berkeley and Harvard said they were in full compliance with the law.

The investigations are part of a widening pressure campaign that the Trump administration has launched on the nation’s elite universities, a strategy to aimed at realigning what they view as the liberal tilt of elite universities.

Mr. Trump recently signed an executive order instructing his administration to make it more difficult for universities to obscure details of foreign funding.

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The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission moves to fire a judge who rejected a Trump directive.

In letters reviewed by The New York Times, Ms. Ortiz’s supervisor, Arlean Nieto, the New York District Office acting district director, said she was seeking to terminate Ms. Ortiz for “conduct unbecoming of a federal employee” and failing to follow the agency’s email policy.

Ms. Ortiz gained national attention in February when someone leaked her email to the commission’s acting chairwoman, Andrea Lucas, calling on her to resign. Ms. Ortiz accused Ms. Lucas of following the “illegal and unethical orders of our president” and violating the Constitution.

“I will not compromise my ethics and my duty to uphold the law,” Ms. Ortiz wrote in the email, which she copied to about 1,000 of her colleagues. She acknowledged that she was making herself a target for the administration.

The email went viral among those looking for signs of resistance to the Trump administration’s deep cuts to the federal government and its targeting of marginalized groups.

The agency turned off Ms. Ortiz’s email access and sent her a letter of reprimand warning that she had violated agency policy requiring all-employee emails sent to other offices be pre-approved by the office director.

In response, Ms. Ortiz sent more emails calling on Ms. Lucas to resign and accusing her of misconduct, including one that asked Ms. Lucas to ponder what she was allowing herself to be a part of and then linked to a video of the Tears for Fears song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” The content of the emails, Ms. Nieto wrote, was “profoundly unprofessional.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent Ms. Ortiz the letters a few weeks after President Trump mentioned her — though not by name — in an executive order on April 18 that aimed to make it easier to fire government workers who “oppose presidential policies.”

The commission declined by email to comment. Ms. Ortiz has 15 days to reply to the accusations. She said she intends to fight but has no regrets.

“These are quite literally trumped-up charges,” she said. “I stand behind my actions, which support the rule of law and the trans community.”

Trump revives a push for higher taxes on the rich, an idea many Republicans have opposed.

Such a change would roll back one of the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That measure reduced the rate on income earned in the top bracket to 37 percent from 39.6 percent. This year, the top income bracket starts at $626,350 for an individual. Mr. Trump is effectively seeking to restore the previous top rate, but at a much higher income level.

Mr. Trump has been flirting with some kind of tax hike on the rich for weeks, alarming Republicans who as a general matter like to cut taxes. Conservatives have aggressively lobbied against the idea, and last month, Mr. Trump proclaimed that a so-called millionaires tax would be “very disruptive.”

But Republicans are, at the same time, facing tricky political and budgetary calculations in the fiscal legislation they are struggling to complete. To offset the huge cost of the tax cuts they want to include — much of it from continuing the 2017 cuts — Republicans are preparing to slash spending on Medicaid, a health care program for the poor.

The optics of cutting benefits for the poor to cover the cost of tax cuts that provide their largest benefits to the rich has worried Republicans hoping to cultivate working class support. One person familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking said that the president believed a tax increase on the rich would help protect Medicaid.

Republicans are considering other tax hikes with a populist flavor, including raising a tax on stock buybacks and further limiting companies’ abilities to deduct compensation for highly paid employees. Mr. Trump also wants to end a tax break that allows private-equity and hedge fund managers to pay a lower rate on much of their earnings.

Mr. Trump’s revival of the possibility of raising income taxes on the rich comes just as Republicans in the House are hoping to release the first draft of their tax bill. They are already trying to figure out how to resolve other open issues, including Medicaid cuts, as well as the state and local tax deduction, which some Republicans have demanded be expanded.

Senator Michael Crapo, a Republican from Idaho who leads the Finance Committee, was wary of the idea of raising taxes on the rich.

“So right now, I’m not excited about the proposal,” he said in an interview with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt. “But I have to say, there are a number of people in both the House and the Senate who are, and if the president weighs in in favor of it, then that’s going to be a big factor that we have to take into consideration as well.”

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The transportation secretary unveils a planned air-traffic control overhaul, but says funding is up to Congress.

But the framework was missing key details, including how the government would pay for the equipment necessary to modernize a system that the Federal Aviation Agency has struggled to overhaul. The proposals will be dependent on support from Congress for funding.

In a 90-minute news conference at the agency’s headquarters in Washington that featured dozens of speakers including President Trump, who made remarks over a speakerphone, Mr. Duffy described the overhaul as an urgent mission.

“We actually have to build a brand-new, state of the art, air-traffic control system,” he said. “We have let this go for far too long.”

The announcement came just days after a technical outage at the air traffic control hub for Newark Liberty International Airport that terrified air traffic controllers and stranded passengers.

Mr. Duffy predicted the project would take three to four years — if lawmakers provided the budget money and the government can push aside some regulatory requirements. He declined to provide a cost estimate, except that it would be in the billions of dollars.

The secretary said he hoped the contractors who wanted to bid to provide the services or equipment that were laid out in the proposal would consider their costs immediately so that Congress could make an informed estimate of the total price tag. Setting a budget first and then waiting for cost calculations to roll in would be too time-consuming, he said.

Mr. Trump, speaking to the audience via a cellphone that Mr. Duffy held up to the microphone, solicited recommendations from the crowd about which company produced “the best system,” prompting some laughter.

Mr. Duffy was joined during the announcement by officials from the F.A.A. and the National Transportation Safety Board, chief executives of the country’s largest airlines, union leaders and aircraft manufacturers. Family members of some of the 64 people who died aboard American Airlines Flight 5342 when it crashed above the Potomac River after a collision with an Army Black Hawk helicopter in January sat in the audience. They repeatedly received condolences from the speakers on the dais.

The event appeared to have been carefully planned. Mr. Duffy spoke on a stage lined with antiquated electronic equipment and machinery, including clunky radar systems, cables and a navigational manual that was dated to 1975. He and another speaker at one point raised strips of paper and floppy disks as examples of outdated tools that are still in use in domestic air-traffic management.

The announcement came a week after Mr. Duffy announced new initiatives focused on recruiting and retaining badly-needed air traffic controllers. Among them: a $10,000 award for graduates of the F.A.A.’s controller training program who choose to work at one of 13 facilities that are considered difficult to staff.

Here are 5 takeaways from the U.S.-U.K. trade agreement.

As the dust settled, though, it became clearer that this was just a framework for a deal and there could be weeks, if not more, of additional negotiations before it became final. Here’s what we know.

It’s the first trade deal since Trump ramped up tariffs.

Mr. Trump’s rewriting of the global trade playbook shocked financial markets, and his administration has been under pressure to reach deals to reduce uncertainty. Mr. Trump said that this deal would be the first of many.

The Trump administration said it would open up export opportunities worth $5 billion for American businesses, while also bringing in $6 billion in tariff revenue.

But Mr. Trump said the final details were still being written up, and British officials said negotiators would continue to try to reduce tariffs not included in this deal.

It’s a narrowly focused deal.

The agreement will come as a huge relief for Britain’s auto industry, which will now face 10 percent tariffs on the first 100,000 cars exported annually to the United States. Britain sent 92,000 vehicles to the United States in 2024, according to data from Oxford Economics.

British officials warned that the higher tariffs, which were about 25 percent, had endangered jobs in the country’s car industry, which sent more than a quarter of its auto exports to the United States.

Britain will also be excluded from tariffs on steel and aluminum. In exchange, it increased the quota on beef imports from the United States and said it would remove a tariff on ethanol, which is used in manufacturing.

Britain said that it would receive “preferential treatment” if any further sectoral tariffs were introduced, such as on pharmaceuticals.

The two countries also have a “high-level” agreement on economic security and would work on building a deeper partnership on technology that would cover life sciences, quantum computing, biotech and other sectors.

There are still open questions.

This deal is not final, and neither side said when it could take effect. The British government said it was still negotiating to bring down the 10 percent tariff on most other goods.

Jonathan Reynolds, Britain’s business and trade secretary, said it was a “landmark breakthrough” but that it only reached the “general terms” that will set out the process for more tariff negotiations.

The British government can declare a victory.

The deal could be derailed before it takes effect. For now, however, it puts Britain in a better position than it was in a few weeks ago. The country’s auto and steel industries were already struggling, so any efforts to shore up their ability to export to the United States, an important market, are welcome.

Also, the agreement so far has not caused Britain to cross its red lines about lowering its auto or food safety standards, which would have impeded a deal with the European Union. Britain did not reduce its own tariffs on cars, as some reports had suggested. Nor did it make any changes to its digital services tax, which the Trump administration had said unfairly harmed American tech giants. That tax was introduced in 2020 as a 2 percent duty on revenues of search engines, social media services and online marketplaces, and most of the revenue has come from big American firms like Amazon and Google.

The Trump administration also scored a win, earning praise from American ranchers to increase exports of beef, though they would still have to be free of hormones. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association called it a “tremendous win.”

But it’s not an economic game changer.

Despite the agreement, British goods exports in general still face higher tariffs then they did two months ago, with the base line 10 percent tariff still in place.

And Britain’s trading relationship with the United States is heavily skewed toward services, which are not affected by tariffs. Many economists have cautioned that even with a deal, Britain’s economy is vulnerable to global economic uncertainty.

Reducing that uncertainty would require the Trump administration to secure more deals with other countries and make trade policy more predictable.

Ana Swanson contributed reporting from Washington.

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In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury, which underpins a range of borrowing costs, notably gained more than 0.1 of a percentage point today — a relatively sharp move higher in that market. Moves in the market for U.S. government bonds have emerged as a pain point for Trump, who wants interest rates to come down.

The Supreme Court is asked to allow the U.S. to end protections for migrants from troubled countries.

“This court’s immediate intervention is warranted,” Mr. Sauer wrote in the application, adding that a lower court had “nullified one of the administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions.”

The Biden administration introduced the program, known as humanitarian parole, in early 2023. Under the policy, migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela could fly into the United States if they had a financial sponsor and passed security checks. Approximately 532,000 people entered the country under the program, which allowed them to remain for up to two years.

The emergency application is the latest in a series of high-profile Trump administration policies to come before the Supreme Court since President Trump began his second term, including several that test the legality of Mr. Trump’s sweeping efforts to deport migrants. Earlier this week, the justices sided with the administration, determining that the federal government may start enforcing a ban on transgender troops serving in the military that had been blocked by lower courts.

On the day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration, he moved to end the humanitarian parole program. It was among a series of measures that the Biden administration had introduced, including ones offering refuge to people fleeing Ukraine, Haiti and Latin America. The goal was to discourage people from crossing the border illegally by allowing them to apply in a more orderly fashion from their home countries.

Still, Trump administration officials had been sharply critical of it, notably Stephen Miller, a senior aide to Mr. Trump.

In September, Mr. Miller, a primary architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, railed against the policy on social media.

“Here’s an idea: Don’t fly millions of illegals aliens from failed states thousands of miles away into small towns across the American Heartland,” Mr. Miller wrote.

In February, migrants and an immigration nonprofit sued the Trump administration, claiming that the termination of the humanitarian and other immigration parole programs was “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, and unconstitutional.”

On March 25, a federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily paused the administration’s revocation of the program. The court determined that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked authority to categorically revoke parole for all 532,000 people without providing individualized, case-by-case reviews.

The trial court, Mr. Sauer argued, had “engaged in the very review Congress prohibited — needlessly upending critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry, vitiating core executive branch prerogatives, and undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election.”

On May 5, a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the lower court’s temporary block, finding that Ms. Noem had not made a “strong showing” that her “categorical termination” of humanitarian parole for all migrants was likely to survive a court challenge.

The justices have requested a response from the challengers by 4 p.m. on May 15.