Donald Trump has always liked to use the stock market as a barometer of his success. The signals the market has emitted since his return to the White House have been discouraging the U.S. president’s administration, especially in terms of the trade war. It’s not just the stock market: the bond market and the dollar’s price have reflected the growing distrust in U.S. assets that Trump has generated. Along with the courts, the economy is taking charge of reining in some of the president’s decisions. Pressure from businesses and investors has led Trump to soften tariffs and appear more conciliatory toward China. Furthermore, a new market scare has led him to say he has no intention of firing Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, just days after calling for his dismissal.

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” This quote is from James Carville, Bill Clinton’s advisor, who saw how market pressure forced him to change his economic policy. The concept of “bond vigilantes” actually predates it. It was coined by economist Ed Yardeni, referring to investors who sell Treasury bonds, driving up the required yield, when they lose confidence in a country’s economic and fiscal policy. The bond vigilantes forced Clinton to back down, forced Liz Truss to resign as UK prime minister, and, via risk premiums, in Spain forced José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to implement harsh cuts, and Mariano Rajoy to request a financial bailout from the European institutions.

Trump isn’t easily intimidated, but the rise in U.S. bond yields, along with the stock market crash and the depreciation of the dollar, were the triggers for his declaration of a 90-day partial truce in the trade war on April 9. The Republican admitted that investors were “getting a little yippy.” “I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They’re getting a little bit… afraid,” he said, celebrating how “beautiful” the market looked after the truce.

The situation has been repeated in the last week. Just days after suggesting he was considering removing the Federal Reserve chair, he asserted Tuesday that he has no intention of doing so. “The press is jumping the gun on things. No, I have no intention of firing him,” Trump said. Meanwhile, threats to the central bank’s independence have heightened distrust in U.S. assets and driven the dollar to a three-year low, with further declines on Wall Street and in the bond markets.

Moderate the trade war

The market punishment and the rapidly deteriorating economic outlook have also forced Trump and his team to soften the tone in the trade war with China. The current tariffs, at 145% on Chinese imports (and 125% on Chinese purchases of U.S. goods), “are not sustainable,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday at a closed-door event with bankers. Trump himself later endorsed the idea in the Oval Office. He said the steep tariffs “will come down substantially, but they won’t be zero. It won’t be anywhere near that high,” he insisted.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the White House is considering a substantial reduction in tariffs on China, to levels of approximately 50% to 65%, in a combination that could include tariffs of 35% on goods the U.S. doesn’t consider strategic and 100% on those for which there is interest in special protection. This would be a way to begin the de-escalation process, but the president hasn’t made a decision.

On Wednesday, without abandoning his protectionist rhetoric, Trump once again extended his hand: “We’re going to have a fair deal with China,” he affirmed. Bessent, speaking to the press after a speech at a Washington hotel, offered a mixed bag. Asked if there was a unilateral offer from the president to de-escalate the trade war, he said “absolutely not.” At the same time, he left the door open to a reduction by both sides: “I don’t think either side believes the current tariff levels are sustainable, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lowered mutually,” he stated, asserting that there is “an opportunity for a great deal.”

In his first term, Trump was the first president in nearly a century to destroy jobs. He could have blamed the pandemic, but the crisis he now threatens to unleash is entirely self-inflicted. Fears of a financial crisis leading to a deep recession have spread within the White House in recent weeks, a scenario they internally call “1929,” according to The New York Times, in reference to the stock market crash that year that sparked the Great Depression.

It’s not just the markets. Automakers succeeded in getting Trump to ease tariffs on cars and components from Mexico and Canada after warning of the risk of exorbitant prices. The idea of iPhones costing over $2,000 and pressure from Apple preceded the tariff exemptions on cell phones, tablets, and computers. This week, executives from large retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, major importers of Chinese products, visited the White House, warning of the risk of price hikes and empty shelves. Trade policy thus becomes an influence peddling from which small and medium-sized businesses are excluded. It’s the large ones, those that helped Trump raise $239 million for his inauguration festivities, that have access to the president.

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It all began in 2007. Jacqueline Stevens (1962) read about Pedro Guzmán, a mentally ill 31-year-old man who was jailed for a misdemeanor in Los Angeles, California, where he was born, when he was removed from the country as an illegal immigrant. Guzmán was deported to Mexico and spent three months adrift, sleeping on the streets and eating out of the garbage, while his family desperately searched for him. Learning of his story made the researcher and professor of political science at Northwestern University (Illinois) set out to study something that until then no one had analyzed in depth: how many U.S. citizens are deported by their own country’s immigration authorities, a phenomenon the federal government does not track on its own.

“It occurred to me that if this was happening to one person, it was probably happening to many others as well. That whatever the protocols were that led to Mr. Guzmán being deported were leading to other people who were citizens being deported as well,” Stevens tells EL PAÍS by telephone from Chicago.

She examined years of immigration court records, reviewed thousands of cases and government documents, and interviewed immigration judges, attorneys and deported citizens. And she found that at any given time, about 1% of those detained by immigration authorities and 0.5% of those deported are actually U.S. citizens. Although this is a small share of the total number of deportations that take place, the consequences can be traumatic, as they were for Guzmán.

Stevens’ work has become even more important now that Donald Trump’s administration is entertaining the idea of deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes. The president has said he is considering sending them to prisons in El Salvador, where he already transferred more than 200 immigrants without due process after accusing them of belonging to Latin American gangs. “The home-growns are next,” the Republican told Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during his official visit to the White House last week.

His statement set off alarm bells of all kinds, but for Stevens, who founded the Deportation Research Clinic at Northwestern, it was nothing new.

Question. How alarming are the president’s latest comments about holding U.S. citizens in prisons in El Salvador?

Answer. I don’t see how this is even plausible. Leaving aside the constitutional issues, if you’re going to put somebody in federal custody as punishment, the facility has to conform with all sorts of regulations from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. To the extent that they’re able to implement any of those regulations outside the United States, it would be extremely expensive and really undermine the whole theater Trump has in mind, because those facilities would actually have to conform with the standards already in place in the U.S. And once that happens, it kind of takes the fun out of it for the president.

Q. And his argument is that it will actually be cheaper to do it in El Salvador.

A. Exactly, and it won’t be. There’s no loophole that says that you can have people in custody for federal crimes and not have the Bureau of Prison Regulations apply if you incarcerate them in El Salvador.

Q. But his administration is continuing to insist on it.

A. This is actually not new to Trump, but he’s trying to associate criminality with otherness and alienness, and therefore, taint the people who are in these kinds of proceedings and make the public think that it doesn’t matter if we put them in a different country. But to the extent that we are considering punishing people for stealing a car by sending them to El Salvador if they are citizens, we should also take a second look at our impulse to do that if they’re non-citizens as well.

Q. How do deportations of U.S. citizens take place? Since there should be legal protections to stop them from happening.

A. The problem is that there aren’t protections to stop this from happening. The premise of deportation proceedings is that the person that you have in custody is a non-citizen and therefore, the Constitution is able to provide very few protections to them. The issue with that is that when you make that assumption, you’re going to end up deporting the wrong people, including U.S. citizens. I want to be really clear about this: the reason I do this research is not because I care more about U.S. citizens than anybody else, but in fact to highlight exactly this problem. Because if you go into an immigration court as a U.S. citizen and still get deported, that tells us an awful lot about the low level of legal protections there for everybody else.

Q. This is going to sound really obvious, but can you explain why it’s illegal to deport U.S. citizens?

A. Immigration and deportation laws are only for non-citizens, they legally cannot apply to someone who is a U.S. citizen. It’s like asking, can you please explain why it’s illegal to find somebody who is innocent guilty? By definition, it’s impossible, and yet it happens.

Q. You started researching this because there wasn’t anyone else tracking this issue, least of all the government. Why do you think there’s so much secrecy around it?

A. There’s still no solid data on this in terms of the magnitude of how this is happening across the country. At some point, I thought I had a workaround to that. I thought that I would do a FOIA request for all the data indicating country of origin in cases in immigration court. Because I knew that some of these people were born in the United States, and in an immigration court proceeding, it should indicate that they were claiming that their country of origin was the United States. However, what I learned is that the Department of Justice Executive Office of Immigration Review, which is the agency that oversees the immigration courts, relies exclusively on the data of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] for that field. And ICE is never going to go into court and say, “Hey, here’s someone from the United States, judge, please deport them.” So their data indicated, in some cases, inaccurately, that the person was born outside the United States. That is pretty clear evidence that the federal government for decades has recognized that people in their custody were U.S. citizens.

Q. But they’re not going to publicly acknowledge it because then they would have to admit that they are doing something that is illegal.

A. And they don’t want to acknowledge that because they cannot run this system consistent with the U.S. Constitution and also admit that they’re deporting U.S. citizens. That’s actually been a huge problem in recent years. The more the research that I’ve done has gained traction in the media, the harder ICE is trying to push back in these cases of people claiming U.S. citizenship. In the past, they would pretty quickly acknowledge they made an error and release the person and terminate the deportation proceeding. But now they go to ridiculous extents to try to make those assertions.

Q. And that’s only going to get worse now under the Trump administration.

A. Exactly.

Q. In your research, have you noted any differences between people who were born in the U.S. and naturalized citizens when it comes to them being deported?

A. Ironically, it’s actually easier for people who are naturalized citizens to prove their citizenship than it is for people born in the United States or who have automatically acquired citizenship at birth. The reason for that is that if you’re naturalized, you have all the paperwork from Homeland Security that shows the process of your naturalization. If you’re born in the United States, it’s not that easy. Recently there was a case about a guy who was born in California. When he tried to return to the country with his birth certificate and so forth, the border patrol said, “oh, you must have gotten that fraudulently.”

Q. So even a U.S. birth certificate isn’t considered sufficient documentation anymore?

A. Even when you have the fingerprints and can prove that you’re the person who’s associated with the birth certificate, they still may not recognize that.

Q. Has anything struck you particularly in your research?

A. In a lot of these cases of U.S. citizens who are deported, ICE will spend a huge amount of time emphasizing their criminal record. And you can see that in the Guzmán case, where they talk about how this person was a gang member and so forth. As though to point that out is to justify deporting a U.S. citizen.

Q. It’s similar to what they’re now doing to Kilmar Abrego García in trying to justify his deportation even after admitting it was carried out in an administrative error. It’s all part of the same modus operandi.

A. And in that sense what Trump is saying is not new and in fact resonates with how ICE has been operating for quite some time.

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Charlotte Sweeney, a federal judge in Colorado, has joined the legal battle against the Donald Trump administration. From now on, the president must provide Venezuelan migrants with at least 21 days’ notice before any deportation — such as the controversial mid-March removals to El Salvador — during which time they can appeal in court.

This is the first time since the Republican took office that a court has imposed limits on how the new Trump administration must use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, under which 238 migrants classified as “criminals” were deported to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) in El Salvador.

Until now, the dozens of migrants expelled from the United States only learned they were being deported 24 hours beforehand. Over the past two months, family members have accused U.S. authorities of deception, saying many deportees believed they were headed to Caracas, only to be imprisoned in the dreaded Salvadoran mega-prison. Under this arrangement, President Nayib Bukele’s government receives around $20,000 per incarcerated migrant annually.

The decision by the Denver-based federal district judge follows a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — which currently represents deported immigrants and has sued the Trump administration over the expulsions to El Salvador. The lawsuit essentially demands that the migrants be afforded “due process.” That is, that individuals and their attorneys be notified of the potential deportation within 30 days, and for the government to be transparent when migrants are to be sent to a third country.

The ACLU told the Supreme Court that, “whatever due process may require in this context, it does not allow removing a person to a possible life sentence without trial, in a prison known for torture and other abuse, a mere 24 hours after providing an English-only notice form (not provided to any attorney) that gives no information about the person’s right to seek judicial review, much less the process or timeline for doing so.”

Judge Sweeney’s ruling, issued Tuesday, not only granted a temporary restraining order on the deportations but also required that future notices be provided in a “language the individual understands.”

Speaking to CBS News, Tim Macdonald, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado, thanked the court for putting “a stop to the Trump administration’s unlawful attempt to disappear Colorado residents to a Salvadoran mega-prison.”

He continued: “Due process is fundamental to the rule of law in this country, and the government has shown a rampant disregard for this essential civil right.”

Macdonald also argued that the Trump administration’s desire “to evade due process is a threat to all of us.”

The risk of violating due process

The erosion of due process has become a central concern since the Trump administration ramped up efforts to deport not only alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang, but also in carrying out the largest mass deportation operations in U.S. history.

Juan Pappier, deputy director of the Americas Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told EL PAÍS that that his organization has documented several legal violations stemming from the March deportations.

Not only did the administration continue sending flights to the Central American country despite a judge’s order to stop them, individuals were deported in “error” — such as 29-year-old Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego García, whose lawyers are demanding his return.

“When we shift the line of due process for migrants, we risk shifting it for everyone,” Pappier warns. “What affects Venezuelans and Salvadorans today could affect American citizens tomorrow as well.”

According to HRW, the administration is also violating rights by preventing detainees in El Salvador from contacting their families or lawyers, and because it is impossible for them to appeal to a judge. “What we are seeing is that the Trump administration wants to move forward with these deportations without giving them the opportunity to challenge them in court,” says Pappier.

But Trump himself hasn’t hidden his intention to prevent deportations from being decided by a judge. Earlier this week, he wrote on his Truth Social platform that it is impossible to prosecute all the people currently facing deportation.

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” he posted. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country.”

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