By LINDSAY WHITEHURST and MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two board members fired by President Donald Trump can go back to their jobs for now, a split appeals court ruled Monday ahead of a likely Supreme Court showdown on the president’s power over independent agencies.

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An appeals court in the nation’s capital handed down the 7-4 decision in lawsuits brought by two women separately fired from agencies that both deal with labor issues, including one with a key role for a federal workforce Trump is aiming to drastically downsize.

The order relies largely on a 90-year-old Supreme Court decision known as Humphrey’s Executor, which found that presidents can’t fire independent board members without cause.

But that ruling has long rankled conservative legal theorists who argue it wrongly curtails the president’s power, and experts say the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court may be poised to overturn it.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly told the courts of appeals to follow extant Supreme Court precedent unless and until that Court itself changes it or overturns it,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion. All 7 members of the majority were appointed by Democratic presidents. The four dissenters are Republican appointees, including three named by Trump in his first term.

The vote was closer, 6-5, over whether to pause the decision for a week to let the Trump administration appeal to the Supreme Court right away.

The ruling isn’t a final decision on the legal merits of the case, but it does reverse a judgment from a three-judge panel from the same U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that had allowed the firings to go forward.

Former President Joe Biden nominated both of the fired board members. Cathy Harris is from the Merit Systems Protection Board, which reviews disputes from federal workers and could be a significant stumbling block as the Trump administration seeks to carry out a dramatic downsizing of the workforce.

Gwynne Wilcox, meanwhile, has served on the National Labor Relations Board, which resolves hundreds of unfair labor practice cases every year. The five-member board lacked a quorum after Wilcox’s removal.

Government lawyers have argued that Trump can remove both board members. In Wilcox’s case, they said reinstatement “works a grave harm to the separation of powers and undermines the President’s ability to exercise his authority under the Constitution.”

They also argued that MSPB members like Harris are removable “at will” by the president.

Wilcox’s attorneys said Trump couldn’t fire her without notice, a hearing or identifying any “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” on her part. They argued that the administration’s “only path to victory” is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to “adopt a more expansive view of presidential power.”

Wilcox was the first Black woman to serve on the five-member board in its 90-year history. The Senate confirmed Wilcox for a second five-year term in September 2023.

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman contributed to this story.

By ELLEN KNICKMEYER and SAMY MAGDY

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has notified the World Food Program and other partners that it has terminated some of the last remaining lifesaving humanitarian programs across the Middle East, a U.S. official and a U.N. official told The Associated Press on Monday.

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The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the U.S. Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whom the Trump administration appointed to oversee and finish dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to a letter sent to USAID partners and viewed by the AP.

About 60 letters canceling contracts were sent over the past week, including for major projects with the World Food Program, the world’s largest provider of food aid, a USAID official said. An official with the United Nations in the Middle East said WFP received termination letters for Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Some of the last remaining U.S. funding for key programs in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and the southern African nation of Zimbabwe also were affected, including those providing food, water, medical care and shelter for people displaced by war, the USAID official said.

The Trump administration had pledged to spare those most urgent, lifesaving programs in its cutting of aid and development programs through the State Department and USAID.

The Trump administration already has canceled thousands of USAID contracts as it dismantles USAID, which it accuses of wastefulness and of advancing liberal causes.

The newly terminated contracts were among about 900 surviving programs that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had notified Congress he intended to preserve, the USAID official said.

There was no immediate comment from the State Department.

Magdy reported from Cairo.

By GISELA SALOMON, Associated Press

DORAL, Fla. (AP) — Wilmer Escaray left Venezuela in 2007 and enrolled at Miami Dade College, opening his first restaurant six years later.

Today he has a dozen businesses that hire Venezuelan migrants like he once was, workers who are now terrified by what could be the end of their legal shield from deportation.

Since the start of February the Trump administration has ended two federal programs that together allowed more 700,000 Venezuelans to live and work legally in the U.S. along with hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.

In the largest Venezuelan community in the United States, people dread what could face them if lawsuits that aim to stop the government fail. It’s all anyone discusses in “Little Venezuela” or “Doralzuela,” a city of 80,000 people surrounded by Miami sprawl, freeways and the Florida Everglades.

Cars pass through the area known as Downtown Doral, Saturday, April 5, 2025, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Deportation fears in Doralzuela

People who lose their protections would have to remain illegally at the risk of being deported or return home, an unlikely route given the political and economic turmoil in Venezuela.

“It’s really quite unfortunate to lose that human capital because there are people who do work here that other people won’t do,” Escaray, 37, said at one of his “Sabor Venezolano” restaurants.

A 9-year-old girl with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, who was born in Venezuela, but who fluently speaks only English and is in the gifted program at her school, watches TV in her family’s apartment, Saturday, April 5, 2025, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Spanish is more common than English in shopping centers along Doral’s wide avenues, and Venezuelans feel like they’re back home but with more security and comfort.

A sweet scent wafts from round, flat cornmeal arepas sold at many establishments. Stores at gas stations sell flour and white cheese used to make arepas and T-shirts and hats with the yellow, blue and red stripes of the Venezuelan flag.

New lives at risk

John came from Venezuela nine years ago and bought a growing construction company with a partner. He and his wife are on Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which Congress created in 1990 for people in the United States whose homelands are considered unsafe to return due to natural disaster or civil strife. Beneficiaries can live and work while it lasts but TPS carries no path to citizenship.

Born in the U.S., their 5-year-old daughter is a citizen. John, 37, asked to be identified by first name only for fear of being deported.

People shop in the Sabores Market, specializing in Venezuelan food and goods, Tuesday, April 1, 2025, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

His wife helps with administration at their construction business while working as a real-estate broker. The couple told their daughter that they may have to leave the United States. Venezuela is not an option.

“It hurts us that the government is turning its back on us,” John said. “We aren’t people who came to commit crimes; we came to work, to build.”

A federal judge ordered on March 31 that temporary protected statuswould stand until a legal challenge’s next stage in court and at least 350,000 Venezuelans were temporarily spared becoming illegal. Escaray, the owner of the restaurants, said nearly all of his 150 employees are Venezuelan and more than 100 are on TPS.

The federal immigration program that allowed more than 500,000 Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans to work and live legally in the U.S. — humanitarian parole — expires April 24 absent court intervention.

Politics of migration

Venezuelans were one of the main beneficiaries when former President Joe Biden sharply expanded TPS and other temporary protections. Trump tried to end them in his first term and now his second.

The end of the temporary protections has generated little political reaction among Republicans except for three Cuban-American representatives from Florida who called for avoiding the deportations of affected Venezuelans. Mario Díaz Ballart, Carlos Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazar have urged the government to spare Venezuelans without criminal records from deportation and review TPS beneficiaries on a case-by-case basis.

The mayor of Doral, home to a Trump golf club since 2012, wrote a letter to the president asking him to find a legal pathway for Venezuelans who haven’t committed crimes.

“These families do not want handouts,” said Christi Fraga, a daughter of Cuban exiles. “They want an opportunity to continue working, building, and investing in the United States.”

A country’s elite, followed by the working class

About 8 million people have fled Venezuela since 2014, settling first in neighboring countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. After the COVID-19 pandemic, they increasingly set their sights on the United States, walking through the notorious jungle in Colombia and Panama or flying to the United States on humanitarian parole with a financial sponsor.

In Doral, upper-middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs came to invest in property and businesses when socialist Hugo Chávez won the presidency in the late 1990s. They were followed by political opponents and entrepreneurs who set up small businesses. In recent years, more lower-income Venezuelans have come for work in service industries.

They are doctors, lawyers, beauticians, construction workers and house cleaners. Some are naturalized U.S. citizens or live in the country illegally with U.S.-born children. Others overstay tourist visas, seek asylum or have some form of temporary status.

Thousands went to Doral as Miami International Airport facilitated decades of growth.

Frank Carreño, president of the Venezuelan American Chamber of Commerce and a Doral resident for 18 years, said there is an air of uncertainty.

“What is going to happen? People don’t want to return or can’t return to Venezuela,” he said.

By TIA GOLDENBERG, Associated Press

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday, becoming the first foreign leader to visit Trump since he unleashed tariffs on countries around the world.

Whether Netanyahu’s visit succeeds in bringing down or eliminating Israel’s tariffs remains to be seen, but how it plays out could set the stage for how other world leaders try to address the new tariffs.

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Netanyahu’s office has put the focus of his hastily organized Washington visit on the tariffs, while stressing that the two leaders will discuss major geopolitical issues including the war in Gaza, tensions with Iran, Israel-Turkey ties and the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant against the Israeli leader last year. Trump in February signed an executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC over its investigations of Israel.

They are also likely to discuss Israel’s hoped-for annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank, which the Palestinians want as the heart of their future independent state.

Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations, said he expected Trump to use the tariffs as leverage to force concessions from Netanyahu.

In Israel’s case, those concessions might not be economic. Trump may pressure Netanyahu to move toward ending the war in Gaza — at the very least through some interim truce with Hamas that would pause the fighting and free more hostages.

Gilboa said Trump is hoping to return from his first overseas trip — expected next month to Saudi Arabia — with some movement on a deal to normalize relations with Israel, which would likely require significant Israeli concessions on Gaza.

If he does manage to move toward bolstering ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, that would act as a regional diplomatic counterweight to pressure Iran, against which Trump has threatened new sanctions and suggested military action over its nuclear program.

In a preemptive move last week, Israel announced that it was removing all tariffs on goods from the U.S., mostly on imported food and agricultural products, according to a statement from Netanyahu’s office.

The statement did not mention Trump’s impending tariffs, which were announced the following day, but said Israel’s step would bolster ties with its largest trading partner, the United States. Israel is not a major trading partner of the U.S.

But the tactic failed, and with a 17% rate, Israel was just one of dozens of countries that were slapped with tariffs on Trump’s so-called Liberation Day last week.

Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.