WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has further loosened tariffs on Brazil as part of his effort to lower consumer costs for Americans. The decision, released Thursday, affects coffee, fruit and beef, among other goods.

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The White House said last week that Trump was rolling back some worldwide tariffs that were originally announced in April.

However, Brazil said that didn’t affect levies that Trump had enacted in July to punish the country for prosecuting his political ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Thursday’s decision harmonizes Trump’s plans, ensuring that neither the April nor July tariffs apply to certain products.

Trump and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have been negotiating over trade, which could further reduce tariffs.

By BRIAN WITTE

GREENBELT, Md. (AP) — A federal judge in Maryland promised on Thursday to rule as soon as possible on whether to order the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from immigration custody.

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Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador in March, in violation of an earlier court settlement, has galvanized both sides of the debate over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Since his return to the United States in June, the government has been seeking to deport him to a series of African countries. His attorneys claim the government is illegally using the immigration system to punish Abrego Garcia for the embarrassment of having to admit that his earlier deportation was in error.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland earlier issued an injunction that prevents his immediate removal. The government has asked her to lift the injunction. In court on Thursday, John Cantu, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified in support of Homeland Security’s latest proposal to send Abrego Garcia to Liberia.

Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the U.S. illegally from El Salvador as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, finding he faced danger there. Since he cannot be deported to El Salvador, the government wants to deport him to a third country.

He has said he is willing to be deported to Costa Rica, which earlier had given the U.S. government a guarantee that he would be allowed to live freely there. However, the government has made no obvious effort to deport him to the Spanish-speaking Central American country, instead notifying of their intent to send him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and now Liberia.

In court on Thursday, Cantu told the judge that removal to Costa Rica is “not an option at the moment” but was short on details as to why.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys argued that the government cannot simply hold him in immigration detention indefinitely. They also pointed out that there is no final order of removal for Abrego Garcia in the immigration record.

Xinis seemed to agree that without a removal order, he probably should not be in custody.

“You can’t fake it ’till you make it,” she said of the order. “You’ve got to have it.”

Xinis said she would rule on whether he can be released as quickly as she could, but noted, “These are weighty issues.”

Even if Abrego Garcia is released from immigration custody, the government will likely continue seeking to deport him. He has petitioned to reopen his immigration case to seek asylum in the U.S., but there is no guarantee that he will be successful.

After the hearing, Abrego Garcia’s attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg told reporters that the government’s failure to state a reason why Costa Rica cannot accept him adds to the impression that the immigration system is being used for retaliation.

“I can’t think of any reason why we’re still fighting out this case, and why he’s still behind bars in a detention center in Pennsylvania, when the government could have sent him to Costa Rica months ago,” he said.

Travis Loller contributed to this report from Nashville, Tennessee.

By TIM SULLIVAN

A team of lawyers filed suit Thursday against federal authorities on behalf of immigrants facing what they called “ruinous civil fines” that reach up to $1.8 million.

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Daily fines of $998, designed to encourage immigrants in the U.S. illegally to leave the country, have been imposed on more than 21,500 people who the lawyers said were trying to comply with immigration laws.

The fines are “grossly disproportionate to the gravity,” of any immigration violations, said the suit, calling them unconstitutional.

The lawsuit was filed in a Massachusetts court on behalf of two immigrant women. It seeks class-action status to represent people facing fines that lawyers say have totaled more than $6 billion since President Donald Trump returned to office early this year and launched an immigration crackdown.

“The people we serve are doing exactly what the law requires — pursuing legal relief through immigration courts and immigration agencies,” Hasan Shafiqullah, a supervising attorney with The Legal Aid Society, one of the groups handling the suit, said in a news release. “In return, the government is threatening to seize their wages, cars, even their homes.”

One of the two plaintiffs, a Florida woman identified in the complaint only as Nancy M. to shield her from retribution, had been ordered to leave the U.S., but also had what’s known as an “order of supervision” and was meeting annually with immigration authorities as she tried to become a legal permanent resident.

Instead, earlier this year she received a bill for roughly $1.8 million, a number apparently reached by totalling daily $998 fines for the past five years.

Starting soon after Trump was sworn in, the administration announced a series of efforts to encourage immigrants to leave the U.S.

In February, the Department of Homeland Security announced that people in the country illegally could face “significant financial penalty” if they chose to stay.

Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “have a clear message for those in our country illegally: leave now,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a February statement. “The Trump administration will enforce all our immigration laws — we will not pick and choose which laws we will enforce.”

The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

Fears about the artificial intelligence boom turning into an overblown bubble have diminished for now, thanks to a stellar earnings report from Nvidia that illustrated why its indispensable chips transformed it into the world’s most valuable company.

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But that doesn’t mean the specter of an AI bubble won’t return in the months and years ahead as Big Tech gears up to spend trillions of dollars more on a technology the industry’s leaders believe will determine the winners and losers during the next wave of innovation.

For now, at least, Nvidia has eased worries that the AI craze propelling the stock market and much of the economy for the past year is on the verge of a massive collapse.

If anything, Nvidia’s quarterly report indicated that AI spending is picking up even more momentum. The highlights, released late Wednesday, included quarterly revenue of $57 billion, a 62% increase from the same time last year. That sales growth was an acceleration from the 56% increase in year-over-year revenue from the May-July quarter.

What’s more, Nvidia forecast revenue of $65 billion for the current quarter covering November-January, which would be a 65% year-over-year increase.

Given Nvidia’s forecasts, “it is very hard to see how this stock does not keep moving higher from here,” according to analysts at UBS led by Timothy Arcuri. The UBS analyst also said the “AI infrastructure tide is still rising so fast that all boats will be lifted.”

Nvidia’s numbers are viewed through a window that extends far beyond the Santa Clara, California, company’s headquarters because its products are needed by a wide range of companies — including Big Tech peers like Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta Platforms — to build data centers that are becoming known as AI factories.

“AI spending isn’t just holding up, it’s accelerating. That’s exactly what the market needed to see,” said Jake Behan, head of capital markets for investment firm Direxion.

The numbers initially lifted Nvidia’s stock price by as much as 5% in Thursday’s trading, while other tech stocks tied to the AI spending frenzy also got a boost. But Nvidia’s shares and other tech stocks reversed course later in the session as investors found other issues besides AI, such as the government’s latest jobs report and the future direction of interest rates.

Even with a 3% drop in its stock price amid the broader market decline, Nvidia remains valued at $4.4 trillion, more than 10 times its valuation three years ago when OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot, triggering the biggest technological shift since Apple released the iPhone in 2007.

Nvidia’s rapid rise has turned its CEO Jensen Huang into the chief evangelist for the AI revolution and he sought to use his bully pulpit during a late Wednesday conference call with industry analysts to make a case that the spending to make technology with humanlike intelligence is just beginning.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different,” Huang insisted while celebrating “depth and breadth” of Nvidia’s growth.

Huang is hardly a lone voice in the wilderness. A recent report from Gartner Inc. estimates that worldwide spending on AI will rise to more than $2 trillion next year, a 37% increase from the nearly $1.5 trillion that the research firm expects to be spent this year.

But it remains to be seen if all that money pouring into AI will actually produce all the profits and productivity that proponents have been promising. That leaves the question unanswered if all the real spending that’s happening will be worth it.

The most recent survey of global fund managers by Bank of America showed a record percentage of investors saying companies are “overinvesting.”

Big Tech is already so profitable that many of the most successful finance their spending sprees with their ongoing stream of revenue and cash hoards in their bank accounts. But some companies, such as Meta Platforms and Oracle, are relying more heavily on debt to fund their AI ambitions — a strategy that has raised enough alarms among investors that their stock prices have plunged more dramatically than their peers in recent weeks.

Both Meta and Oracle have suffered more than 20% declines in their stock prices since late October.

But other Big Tech powerhouses leading the way in AI remain just behind Nvidia and iPhone maker Apple in the rankings of the most valuable companies. Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon boast market values currently ranging from $2.3 trillion to $3.6 trillion.

“It is true that valuations are high and that there is some froth in the market, however, the spending on AI is real,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for money manager Northlight Asset Management. “Whether or not the spending turns out to be overdone won’t be known for many years.”

AP Business Writer Stan Choe in New York contributed to this story.