Month: October 2025

President Donald Trump often channels former President Ronald Reagan, down to his signature slogan, “make America great again.” But Judge William Young, who was appointed by Reagan himself, cited Reagan’s legacy as a total rebuke to Trump’s ruling philosophy. “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Young wrote in a ruling filed on Tuesday, quoting a speech by Reagan.

“I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message—yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message,” Young warned. “I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.”

Young’s ruling came in response to one of the Trump administration’s signature policies, its attempts to shut down Palestinian solidarity protests by deporting Palestinian students and their supporters. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued a few days after the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, arguing that the policy violates freedom of speech, both by intimidating foreign academics in America and preventing American academics “from hearing from, and associating with, their noncitizen students and colleagues.”

Ruling that administration officials indeed “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech,” Young promised to hold a hearing on the specific measures he will order. He wrote that “it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future,” given the current political environment.

What seems to have set off Young was a postcard from a hater: “Trump has pardons and tanks…What do you have?” Young attached a photocopy of the postcard to the top of his ruling, and dedicated the ruling to disproving the writer. “Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case,” he wrote, inviting the letter writer to visit his courthouse at the end of the ruling.

The ruling itself meticulously outlined how several different activists—Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri—were targeted for deportation and how the administration justified it, both internally and publicly. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in the media that the deportations were meant to target “riots” on campus, Young shows that the students were often targeted based on their opinions alone, with vague chains of association linking them to violent protests.

For example, the Department of Homeland Security noted in an intelligence analysis that “Hamas flyers” were handed out during a March 2025 protest that Khalil and Chung attended. But as Young pointed out, there was “neither an allegation nor evidence” that either Khalil or Chung themselves were involved in distributing the flyers.

In another case, Öztürk was a member of Graduate Students for Palestine. Because that group cosigned a call for boycotting Israel with Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that was banned from Tufts University for allegedly using violent imagery, the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence analysts tried to tie Öztürk to Students for Justice in Palestine, which she was not a member of. Young, exasperated, called the logic “hard to follow.”

He wrote that “there is no evidence that Öztürk did anything but co-author an op-ed that criticized the University’s position on investments with Israel, that she criticized Israel, and that the organization of which she was member joined in that criticism with an organization that was banned on Tufts campus, with which she was not affiliated.”

Particularly striking was the way that the administration used anonymous online blacklists as a basis for investigation. In March 2025, the Department of Homeland Security ordered its intelligence office to review all 5,000 names on Canary Mission, a controversial website that lists allegedly antisemitic students, Assistant Director Peter Hatch testified. The office also relied on names provided by Betar, an Israeli nationalist organization that has bragged about getting its opponents deported, Hatch testified.

“Those names that were passed up the chain of command by the investigating subordinates were almost universally approved for adverse action, and, again, the reasons for being passed up the chain of command included any form of online suggestion that one was ‘pro-Hamas,’ including Canary Mission’s own anonymous articles,” Young wrote.

The judge directly addressed Rubio’s claim that, because a visa or green card is a privilege, the government has unlimited power to remove non-citizens.

“This Court in part must agree: non-citizens are, indeed, in a sense our guests. How we treat our guests is a question of constitutional scope, because who we are as a people and as a nation is an important part of how we must interpret the fundamental laws that constrain us. We are not, and we must not become, a nation that imprisons and deports people because we are afraid of what they have to tell us,” he wrote.

And, Young argued, the decision to go after students for activism they did before Trump took office made the policy especially “arbitrary” and “capricious.” Students across America “have all been made to understand that there are certain things that it may be gravely dangerous for them to say or do, but have not been told precisely what those things are,” he wrote, noting that many of the arrests were designed to be as intimidating as possible.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents snatched Öztürk off the street while wearing masks. “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” Young wrote, calling ICE officials “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable” for trying to argue otherwise. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it,” he added, citing Abraham Lincoln.

Young moved from a discussion of the case into a broadside against the way immigration enforcement is used in America.

“ICE has nothing whatever to do with criminal law enforcement and seeks to avoid the actual criminal courts at all costs. It is carrying a civil law mandate passed by our Congress and pressed to its furthest reach by the President. Even so, it drapes itself in the public’s understanding of the criminal law though its ‘warrants’ are but unreviewed orders from an ICE superior and its ‘immigration courts’ are not true courts at all but hearings before officers who cannot challenge the legal interpretations they are given,” he wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security responded publicly to Young’s ruling—ironically, by accusing him of dangerous speech. “It’s disheartening that even after the terrorist attack and recent arrests of rioters with guns outside of ICE facilities, this judge decides to stoke the embers of hatred,” department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, accusing Young of “smearing and demonizing federal law enforcement.”

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President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he will place a 100 percent tariff on movies made outside of the United States. “Our movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America by other countries,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social. “In order to solve this long time, never-ending problem, I will be imposing a 100% Tariff on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States.” 

Monday’s announcement did not provide much detail about how Trump’s plan would work. However, a plan presented to Trump earlier this year by actor and Special Ambassador to Hollywood Jon Voight to “Make Hollywood Great Again” could offer insight into the president’s line of thinking. As Deadline reports, the plan suggested placing a tariff “on that production equal to 120% of the value of the foreign incentive received.” For instance, if a production shot overseas received $50 million in government assistance, it would face a $60 million tariff from the United States. 

Whatever direction the president takes, it is sure to face legal challenges. The plan would essentially amount to placing a tariff on a service, rather than a good, reports ABC7 News. And as the Office of the United States Trade Representative points out, “services are not subject to tariffs.” 

But even if these films were deemed as “goods,” past court rulings would indicate that the president would have trouble imposing tariffs on these products. In 2020, the president invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to prohibit the use of TikTok in the United States. The order was ultimately blocked by courts, which determined that IEEPA does not allow the president to restrict personal communications that don’t involve a transfer of value, or regulate the export or import of informational materials, which include films, literature, and other forms of media. 

Imposing these tariffs under other laws that Trump has invoked to levy tariffs, including Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act—which allows the president to impose duties on goods that undermine national security—is unlikely to pass legal muster. It’s hard to argue that allowing Americans to watch Paddington in Peru, which was filmed in the U.K. and Peru, is a danger to the United States. As the global strategy firm Capstone writes, invoking Section 232 over movie imports “would make any tariff action ripe for legal challenges,” as it stretches national security authority beyond its intended domain.

The idea also faces some practical challenges and real-world contradictions. International film markets make up more than 70 percent of the U.S. film industry’s box office revenue. As Heeyon Kim, an assistant professor at Cornell University, points out: “Tariffs and likely retaliatory measures from other countries could result in billions in lost earnings, impacting not only major studios but also thousands of jobs in production, marketing, and distribution.”

Moreover, modern film production is deeply globalized. An American-made movie might be financed in the U.S., shot in multiple countries, use post-production in India, and employ an international cast and crew. That makes any clear line between “foreign” and “domestic” nearly impossible to define or enforce.

It’s unclear how much of Trump’s film plan can be enforced, what studios it would target, or whether it could actually achieve anything meaningful beyond a simple political headline. As with many of Trump’s trade ideas, the symbolism appears to matter more than the substance. 

The post Here's Why Trump's Plan To Tax International Films Won't Work appeared first on Reason.com.

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Congressional Republicans and Democrats failed to pass a continuing resolution to maintain government funding at current levels on Tuesday. As a result, the federal government “shut down” on Wednesday morning. Some federal services and agencies might be put on hold, but the vast majority of the federal government, including all of its mandatory wealth transfers and obligatory payments, will remain unaffected.

During the shutdown, agencies that don’t fund themselves or haven’t received additional funding via a standalone bill must furlough non-excepted employees and stop their non-essential operations. Employees who render “essential services related to national security and public safety, like inpatient and emergency medical care, air traffic control, law enforcement, border security, disaster aid, and power grid maintenance” are excepted employees who will continue working (though these services may face disruptions), according to Rep. Ami Bera (D–Calif.). Also excepted are the 2.07 million “active-duty military personnel, as well as reserve component personnel on federal active duty, [who] must continue to report and carry out assigned duties,” explains the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). However, nearly 407,000 of the roughly 741,000 civilians employed by the Defense Department are expected not to be furloughed, as they are either excepted or not funded through annual appropriations.*

In addition to nearly 3 million Americans, uniformed and civilian, working for the Pentagon, there were 2.91 million non-military federal employees in August, per the latest data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which, like the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is not one of the agencies spared the shutdown’s effects). Of these, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 750,000 could be furloughed each day of the shutdown, at a daily cost of $400 million.

During a government shutdown, the largest expenditures are nondiscretionary and, as such, remain untouched: These include entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as interest payments on the debt. Altogether, mandatory spending and net interest payments made up 74 percent of the federal budget in FY 2024. Meanwhile, thanks to the funding provided by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Aviation Administration are also unaffected, according to The Washington Post.

If a government shutdown were what it sounds like, libertarians and supporters of small government would have reason to celebrate. But it’s not: The biggest contributors to the deficit are largely unaffected. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of federal employees are on vacation, not rendering services to the taxpayer. While this vacation is technically unpaid, it’s only so for the time being: After the 2018 government shutdown, Congress passed the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, which requires all federal employees who are furloughed or required to work without pay during a shutdown to receive back pay once federal funding resumes.

The lion’s share of government spending is utterly unaffected by the legislature failing to pass a spending bill, and that’s the real problem: The federal government is on autopilot, and its profligacy has the country slouching toward a fiscal crisis that Congress appears entirely unwilling to steer us away from.

* CORRECTION: The original version of this article misstated the conditions under which civilian employees of the Defense Department continue working during a government shutdown.

The post A Government Shutdown Isn't Really a Shutdown. Most Federal Employees Are Still Working and Will Get Paid. appeared first on Reason.com.

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