By STEPHEN GROVES and ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON

WASHINGTON (AP) — For Democrats, the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is about fundamental American ideals — due process, following court orders, preventing government overreach. For the Trump administration and Republicans, it’s about foreigners and gang threats and danger in American towns and cities.

And that argument is precisely the one that Donald Trump wants to have.

This dichotomy is playing out as Democrats double down on their defense of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man mistakenly deported and imprisoned without communication. They’re framing his case as a threat to individual rights to challenge President Trump’s immigration policies.

The effort comes as the Trump administration pushes back harder, turning this deportation into a test case for his crusade against illegal immigration despite a Supreme Court order saying Abrego Garcia must be returned to the United States.

In trying to shape public discourse against Democrats, White House officials are accusing them of defending a foreigner who they’ve claimed is a gang member based on testimony of an informant — and whose wife admitted she once filed a protective order against him despite now advocating for his return.

“Due process and separation of powers are matters of principle,” Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said Thursday. “Without due process for all, we are all in danger.”

Democrats began the year without unity on immigration

The opposition started the year splintered on its immigration strategy, especially after an election season where Trump led Republicans to victories by harping on illegal border crossings and vowing to conduct mass deportations.

But now many Democrats are latching onto the Abrego Garcia case, with a senator trekking down to El Salvador and a number of House representatives working to organize official visits to the Salvadoran prison. On Thursday evening, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen posted photos of himself meeting in El Salvador with Abrego Garcia. The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Abrego Garcia, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the U.S.

Trump responded Friday with a social media post saying Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention.”

Still, other high-profile Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are making a public appeal by painting the case as an example of government overreach.

But even Newsom, who has presidential aspirations, recognized Trump’s ability to curry favor with the public.

“These are not normal times, so we have to call it out with clarity and conviction,” Newsom said in an interview with YouTube commentator Brian Tyler Cohen. “But we’ve got to stay focused on it so the American people can stay focused on it. Because his success is his ability to win every damn news cycle and get us distracted and moving in 25 different directions.”

Immigration was a relative strength for Trump in a March AP-NORC poll, which found that about half of U.S. adults approved of his approach to immigration. And he came into office with strong support for one component of his immigration agenda — deporting people with certain kinds of criminal histories. The vast majority of U.S. adults favored deporting immigrants convicted of violent crimes, according to a January AP-NORC poll.

There was far less consensus about how to handle deportations more broadly, though.

The January poll found that removing immigrants who are in the country illegally and have not committed a violent crime was divisive, with only about 4 in 10 U.S. adults in support and slightly more than 4 in 10 opposed. Along those lines, a Pew Research Center poll from late February found that while about half of Americans said at least “some” immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported, very few people in that group supported deporting immigrants who have a job or are married to a U.S. citizen.

Trump staunchly defends his administration’s position

The Trump administration has acknowledged Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a result of “an administrative error,” saying immigration officials were aware of his protection from deportation. But Trump officials have described Abrego Garcia, who was living in Maryland, as a “terrorist” and claimed he is a member of the MS-13 gang, even though he was never criminally charged in the U.S. with gang involvement. “He is not coming back to our country,” Attorney General Pam Bondi has said.

In defending his administration’s position, Trump says he is doing what he was elected to do and justifying the need to deport millions, saying a “big percentage” of migrants who arrived during the Biden administration are criminals — an assertion for which there is no evidence. Studies show immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

And while it is not clear when Abrego Garcia arrived in the U.S., he began fighting against deportation proceedings in 2019 — before Democratic President Joe Biden took office.

“I was elected to get rid of those criminals — get them out of our country or to put them away, but to get them out of our country. And I don’t see how judges can take that authority away from the president,” Trump, a Republican, said Thursday.

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A three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Trump’s government is “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”

While immigration is a relative strength, defiance of court rulings could put his administration in a trickier situation. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted in February found that about 8 in 10 Americans think the Trump administration should follow a federal court’s ruling if it determines that the administration has done something illegal.

Rep. Glenn Ivey, a Democrat who represents the Maryland district where Abrego Garcia lived, told The Associated Press that no allegations brought up by Trump officials would change how he approaches the case. Ivey, who is more aligned with the party’s moderates, described the issue as about more than just immigration.

“On the one hand, it’s an immigration issue. On the other hand, it’s also a constitutional issue,” he said. “Yes, there’s an immigration component, but it’s rapidly growing into a separation of powers conflict that could actually end up taking on historic proportions.”

Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Associated Press writers Seung Min Kim in Washington and Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.

By BERNARD CONDON, Associated Press Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Among the threats tariffs pose to the U.S. economy, none may be as strange as the sell-off in the dollar.

Currencies rise and fall all the time because of inflation fears, central bank moves and other factors. But economists worry that the recent drop in the dollar is so dramatic that it reflects something more ominous as President Donald Trump tries to reshape global trade: a loss of confidence in the U.S.

The dollar’s dominance in cross-border trade and as a safe haven has been nurtured by administrations of both parties for decades because it helps keep U.S. borrowing costs down and allows Washington to project power abroad — enormous advantages that could possibly disappear if faith in the U.S. was damaged.

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“Global trust and reliance on the dollar was built up over a half century or more,” says University of California, Berkeley, economist Barry Eichengreen. “But it can be lost in the blink of an eye.”

Since mid-January, the dollar has fallen 9% against a basket of currencies, a rare and steep decline, to its lowest level in three years.

Many investors spooked by Trump don’t think the dollar will be pushed quickly from its position as the world’s reserve currency, instead expecting more of a slow decline. But even that is scary enough, given the benefits that would be lost.

With much of world’s goods exchanged in dollars, demand for the currency has stayed strong even as the U.S. has doubled federal debt in a dozen years and does other things that would normally send investors fleeing. That has allowed the U.S. government, consumers and businesses to borrow at unnaturally low rates, which has helped speed economic growth and lift standards of living.

Dollar dominance also allows the U.S. to push around other countries like Venezuela, Iran and Russia by locking them out of a currency they need to buy and sell with others.

Now that “exorbitant privilege,” as economists call it, is suddenly at risk.

“The safe haven properties of the dollar are being eroded,” said Deutsche Bank in a note to clients earlier this month warning of a “confidence crisis.” Added a more circumspect report by Capital Economics, “It is no longer hyperbole to say that the dollar’s reserve status and broader dominant role is at least somewhat in question.”

Traditionally, the dollar would strengthen as tariffs sink demand for foreign products.

But the dollar not only failed to strengthen this time, it fell, puzzling economists and hurting consumers. The dollar lost more than 5% against the euro and pound, and 6% against the yen since early April.

As any American traveler abroad knows, you can buy more with a stronger dollar and less with a weaker one. Now the price of French wine and South Korean electronics and a host of other imports could cost more not only due to tariffs but a weaker currency, too.

And any loss of safe-haven status could hit U.S. consumers in another way: Higher rates for mortgages and car financing deals as lenders demand more interest for the added risk.

More worrisome is possible higher interest rates on the ballooning U.S. federal debt, which is already at a risky 120% of U.S. annual economic output.

“Most countries with that debt to GDP would cause a major crisis and the only reason we get away with it is that the world needs dollars to trade with,” says Benn Steil, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations. ”At some point people are going to look seriously at alternatives to the dollar. ”

They already have, with a little help from a U.S. economic rival.

China has been striking yuan-only trading deals with Brazil for agricultural products, Russia for oil and South Korea for other goods for years. It has also been making loans in yuan to central banks desperate for cash in Argentina, Pakistan and other countries, replacing the dollar as the emergency funder of last resort.

Another possible U.S. alternative in future years if their market grows: cryptocurrencies.

Said BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink in his annual shareholder letter about dollar dominance, ”If deficits keep ballooning, America risks losing that position to digital assets like Bitcoin.”

Not everyone is convinced that a big reason the dollar is falling is because of lost faith in the U.S.

Steve Ricchiuto, an economist at Mizuho Financial, says dollar weakness reflects anticipation of higher inflation due to tariffs. But even if investors aren’t as comfortable holding dollars, he says, they really don’t have much of a choice. No other currency or other asset, like yuan or bitcoin or gold, is vast enough to handle all the demand.

“The U.S. will lose the reserve currency when there is someone out there to take it away,” Ricchiuto says. “Right now there isn’t an alternative.”

Maybe so, but Trump is testing the limits.

It’s not just the tariffs, but the erratic way he’s rolled them out. The unpredictability makes the U.S. seem less stable, less reliable, and a less safe place for their money.

There are also questions about his logic justifying the policy. Trump says the U.S. needs tariffs to drive down its trade deficits with other countries. But most economists believe those deficits, which measure trade in goods, not services, are a bad measure of whether a country is “ripping off” America, as Trump puts it.

Trump has also repeatedly threatened to chip away at the independence of the Federal Reserve, raising fears that he will force interest rates lower to boost the economy even if doing so risks stoking runaway inflation. That is a sure fire way to get people to flee the dollar. After Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that he would wait to make any rate moves, Trump blasted him, saying “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”

Economists critical of Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement recall another event, the Suez Crisis of 1956, that broke the back of the British pound. The military attack on Egypt was poorly planned and badly executed and exposed British political incompetence that sank trust in the country. The pound fell sharply, and its centuries-long position as the dominant trading and reserve currency crumbled.

Berkeley’s Eichengreen says Liberation Day, as Trump called April 2, could be remembered as a similar turning point if the president isn’t careful.

“This is the first step down a slippery slope where international confidence in the U.S. dollar is lost.”

By JON GAMBRELL

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — U.S. airstrikes targeting an oil port held by Yemen’s Houthi rebels killed 74 people and wounded 171 others, the group said Friday, in the deadliest known attack under President Donald Trump’s new military campaign against the Iranian-backed faction.

The strike on the Ras Isa port, which sent massive fireballs shooting into the night sky, represented a major escalation in the American effort by hitting oil facilities for the first time.

Assessing the toll of Trump’s campaign, which began March 15, has been difficult, as the U.S. military’s Central Command hasn’t released any information, including its attacks’ targets and how many people have been killed. The Houthis, meanwhile, strictly control access to attacked areas and don’t publish complete information on the strikes, many of which likely have targeted military and security sites.

In a statement, Central Command said “U.S. forces took action to eliminate this source of fuel for the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists and deprive them of illegal revenue that has funded Houthi efforts to terrorize the entire region for over 10 years.”

“This strike was not intended to harm the people of Yemen, who rightly want to throw off the yoke of Houthi subjugation and live peacefully,” it added. It did not acknowledge any casualties from the attack or offer any damage assessment.

Hours after the strike, the Houthis launched a missile toward Israel that was intercepted, the Israeli military said. Sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

Yemen’s civil war, meanwhile, further internationalized, as the U.S. alleged a Chinese satellite company was “directly supporting” Houthi attacks — a claim Beijing declined to directly comment on. And a second round of negotiations between Iran and the U.S. over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, which America has linked to the Yemen campaign, is due to happen Saturday in Rome.

In this photo taken from video released by Al Masirah TV channel shows a burning oil tanker after U.S. airstrikes targeted the Ras Isa oil port held by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in Hodeida, Yemen, Friday, April 18, 2025.( Al Masirah TV via AP)

US strikes spark massive fireball

The Ras Isa port, a collection of oil tanks and refining equipment, sits in Yemen’s Hodeida governorate along the Red Sea. It is just off Kamaran Island, which has been targeted by intense U.S. airstrikes over the past few days.

The Houthis’ al-Masirah satellite news channel aired graphic footage of the aftermath, showing corpses strewn across the site and smashed tanker trucks ablaze.

Satellite images of the port from Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by The Associated Press showed destroyed oil tanks and vehicles. Oil also appeared to be leaking into the Red Sea. Wim Zwijnenburg, an analyst with Dutch peace organization PAX, said it appeared at least three fuel storage tanks had been destroyed and that oil had leaked from mooring pipelines.

The port also is the terminus of an oil pipeline stretching to Yemen’s energy-rich Marib governorate, which is held by allies of Yemen’s exiled government. The Houthis expelled that government from Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in 2014. However, oil exports have been halted by the decadelong war and the Houthis have used Ras Isa to bring in oil.

Ras Isa takes in gasoline, diesel and liquefied petroleum gas for the Houthis. The damage from the airstrikes could seriously affect life in Houthi-held areas of Yemen.

The Houthis denounced the U.S. attack as a “completely unjustified aggression.”

“It targets a vital civilian facility that has served the Yemeni people for decades,” the Houthis said in a statement.

On April 9, the U.S. State Department issued a warning about oil shipments to Yemen, saying it would “not tolerate any country or commercial entity providing support to foreign terrorist organizations, such as the Houthis.”

The attack follows Israeli airstrikes on the Houthis that hit port and oil infrastructure used by the rebels after their attacks on Israel, including Ras Isa.

The deadliest known attack in Trump’s Yemen campaign

The airstrike on the port is the deadliest known attack yet in Trump’s campaign against the Houthis. The actual cost in lives is hard to assess, said Luca Nevola, the senior analyst for Yemen and the Gulf at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a think tank.

“Since they are targeting civilian areas, there’s a lot more victims. But it’s also difficult to assess how many because the Houthis are releasing these umbrella statements that cover all the victims … or tend to stress only the civilian victims,” Nevola said.

Further complicating the situation is the U.S. strikes hitting military targets, said Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemen expert at the Basha Report risk advisory firm. He pointed to an American attack that Trump highlighted online with black-and-white strike footage, which might have killed about 70 fighters.

“Although the Houthis claimed it was a tribal gathering, they neither released any footage nor named a single casualty, strongly suggesting the victims were not civilians but affiliated fighters,” al-Basha said. “However, the overnight strike on the Ras Isa Fuel Port marks the first mass-casualty incident the Houthis have openly acknowledged and publicized.”

This is a locator map for Yemen with its capital, Sanaa. (AP Photo)

The US accuses a Chinese satellite company of aiding Houthi attacks

Meanwhile, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce in a briefing with journalists accused Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co. Ltd., a commercial satellite image provider, of “directly supporting Iran-backed Houthi terrorist attacks on U.S. interests.”

Bruce did not elaborate in detail, but acknowledged a report by The Financial Times that quoted anonymous American officials saying the firm linked to the People’s Liberation Army has provided images allowing the rebels to target U.S. warships and commercial vessels traveling through the Red Sea corridor.

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Bruce said “Beijing’s support … of the satellite company” “contradicts their claims of being peace supporters.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian, responding to a question about the allegation, said Friday: “I am not familiar with the situation you mentioned.” However, he insisted China is seen as urging countries “to make more efforts conducive to regional peace and stability.”

“Since the escalations in the Red Sea situation, China has been playing a positive role in de-escalating the situation,” Lin said. “Who is promoting talks for peace and de-escalating the tensions, and who is imposing sanctions and pressure?”

Chang Guang did not respond to request for comment. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the company in 2023 for allegedly providing satellite images to the Russian mercenary force the Wagner Group as it fought in Ukraine.

It remains unclear whether Chang Guang is linked to the Chinese government. The U.S. government in the past has used images taken by American commercial satellite companies to share with allies, like Ukraine, to avoid releasing its own top-secret pictures.

US strikes are part of monthlong intense campaign

An AP review has found the new U.S. operation against the Houthis under President Donald Trump appears more extensive than that under former President Joe Biden. The new campaign of airstrikes started after the rebels threatened to begin targeting “Israeli” ships again over Israel blocking aid entering the Gaza Strip.

The Houthis targeted more than 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two of them and killing four sailors from November 2023 until January of this year. That has greatly reduced the flow of trade through the Red Sea corridor, which typically sees $1 trillion of goods move through it. The Houthis also launched attacks targeting American warships without success.

Associated Press writer Sam Mednick in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Approximately 10,000 pages of records related to the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were released Friday, continuing the disclosure of national secrets ordered by President Donald Trump.

Kennedy was fatally shot on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after giving his victory speech for winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving life in prison.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration posted roughly 229 files containing the pages to its public website. Many files related to the senator’s assassination had been previously released, but others had not been digitized and sat for decades in storage facilities maintained by the federal government.

“Nearly 60 years after the tragic assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the American people will, for the first time, have the opportunity to review the federal government’s investigation thanks to the leadership of President Trump,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement.

Gabbard also said the files release “shine a long-overdue light on the truth.”

The release of the RFK files comes a month after unredacted files related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were disclosed. Those documents gave curious readers more details about Cold War-era covert U.S. operations in other nations but didn’t initially lend credence to long-circulating conspiracy theories about who killed JFK.

Trump, a Republican, has championed in the name of transparency the release of documents related to high-profile assassinations and investigations. But he’s also been deeply suspicious for years of the government’s intelligence agencies, and his administration’s release of once-hidden files opens the door for additional public scrutiny and questioning about the conclusions and operations of institutions such as the CIA and the FBI.

Trump signed an executive order in January calling for the release of governmental documents related to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., who were killed within two months of each other.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a son of the Democratic New York senator who now serves as the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, commended Trump and Gabbard for their “courage” and “dogged efforts” to release the files.

“Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government,” the health secretary said in a statement.

AP writer Eric Tucker contributed.