“A lot of these challengers are bringing these cases fast and furious to the court, and what Alito is saying is, ‘What are we basing this decision on? These things are coming to us with virtually no record.’”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Sunday that justices on the Supreme Court are showing signs of “frustration” with lower courts over deportation cases.
The Supreme Court temporarily halted the Trump administration’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) early Saturday morning, saying detainees needed to have a chance to challenge their deportations. Turley said the high court was being forced into an “increasingly improvisational” approach by the sheer number of emergency cases.
“What Justice Alito is objecting to is that this is becoming increasingly improvisational,” Turley told “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream. “You have covered the Supreme Court for years, as I have, and we rarely see this level of number of emergency cases going in front of the Supreme Court. And a lot of them are half-baked in the sense that they simply don’t have the normal details, the record that you have. And the justices are expressing their frustration.”
Turley observed that United States District Judge Boasberg of the District of Columbia had particularly irritated some of the justices.
“Previously, they expressed frustration for the district courts. You know, in the case of Judge Boasberg, they said, ‘What is this doing in your court? This is a habeas case that belongs down south.’ And I think that they are showing some of that frustration,” Turley told Bream. “And I think all parties should take heed of that. I think going to the Fourth Circuit decision, the Trump administration should not be alienating Chief Justice Roberts and others. They need to tone down this language a bit.”
President Donald Trump issued several executive orders to address illegal immigration and border security, including designating Mexican drug cartels, TdA and the El Salvadoran prison gang MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations upon taking office Jan. 20. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up the deportation of gang members on March 15.
Boasberg issued a March 15 injunction ordering the Trump administration to turn two planes carrying members of TdA to El Salvador around. Boasberg has since threatened to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court for not turning the planes around.
The Supreme Court overturned Boasberg’s orders in a 5-4 decision issued April 7, saying Boasberg lacked the authority to issue the injunction since he was in the District of Columbia while the illegal immigrants were being detained in Texas. One of the new legal challenges is in Texas.
“A lot of these challengers are bringing these cases fast and furious to the court, and what Alito is saying is, ‘What are we basing this decision on? These things are coming to us with virtually no record.’”
More at:
Exposing Beijing’s ‘Gray Trade’ Tariff Avoidance Scheme
Is a new boom in deceptive trading practices taking shape in many parts of the world? As the U.S.–China trade war intensifies, it certainly looks that way.
With U.S. tariffs reaching 145 percent on Chinese imports—at least at the time of this writing—Beijing’s new strategy seems to include the use of so-called gray trade to bypass American trade barriers. Gray trade involves rerouting goods through low-tariff countries, such as Vietnam, Mexico, or Malaysia, to conceal their Chinese origin and thereby reduce U.S. import duties.
This sneaky tactic has surged as a response to President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policies, making China’s goods less competitive in the U.S. market due to their added cost.
Gray Trade Loophole Strategy
The simple idea behind gray trade is to exploit loopholes in U.S. Rules of Origin, the trading guidance for determining a product’s country of origin for tariff purposes. Chinese goods, for example, will remain unassembled or may be about 90 percent manufactured before being shipped to an intermediary country. There, they undergo final production, assembly, processing, repackaging, or relabeling to qualify as originating from that country, rather than from China.
For example, Chinese electronic parts may be sent to Vietnam, assembled into a product, and then labeled, “Made in Vietnam.” This enables China to benefit from the 10 percent tariff on Vietnamese imports under Trump’s 2025 reciprocal tariff regime, instead of the 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods.
It’s a perfectly sensible response by Beijing, and there’s no doubt that Chinese firms are rerouting goods through Vietnam, Mexico, and Turkey to exploit lower tariffs on goods sourced from those countries. A related tactic occurring in Mexico involves dividing goods into packages that are below the $800 tariff-free threshold for non-Chinese origins, a tactic called the “Tijuana two-step.”
China Has to Resort to Gray Trade
But gray trade isn’t new or even unfamiliar to the second Trump administration. During Trump’s first term, Chinese solar manufacturers bypassed 30 percent tariffs by partnering with their neighbors in Southeast Asia. In 2025, tracing the movement and provenance of vast numbers of products is complex at best and nearly impossible at worst, making it a challenge to disrupt gray trade.
It’s no mystery why Beijing is engaging in gray trade. With its exports to the United States accounting for 10 percent of its trade and supporting between 10 million and 20 million jobs, some experts say the world’s largest manufacturer faces an estimated 80 percent decline in its exports over the next two years, if the gray trade were to cease.
As domestic economic conditions decline due to the anticipated extensive trade tensions, China’s 2025 GDP projections have fallen from 5 percent to as low as 4 percent, potentially resulting in a 20 percent drop in GDP growth in just one year. With joblessness among its young people (ages 16 to 24) already approaching 17 percent, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faces a growing resentment among its people. The Party would like to avoid an uprising by its younger generation.
The gray trade has provided a much-needed cushion against the blow of the Trump administration’s high tariffs. For instance, according to official data, China’s exports surged by 12.4 percent in March, with exports to ASEAN increasing by 11.6 percent and exports to Vietnam climbing by nearly 19 percent.
Impact on Low-Tariff Countries
But it’s not just China that gains from gray trade. Its low-tariff country partners also gain economically from gray trade but face risks, too. Gray trading partners, such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Mexico, profit from trade and processing fees, with some estimates on the social media platform X reaching as high as 10 percent. It’s worth noting that between 2017 and 2022, Vietnam replaced almost half of China’s lost market share in U.S. imports.
However, gray trading partner countries risk the consequences of U.S. pushback, resulting in a delicate balancing act for these countries caught between gray trade with China and managing important trading relationships with the United States.
Economic and Geopolitical Implications
Economically, gray trade preserves China’s U.S. market access for the moment, but it raises costs as intermediaries take their cut, with logistics costs also increasing. For U.S. consumers, it may delay steep price hikes, but won’t eliminate them.
Geopolitically, Beijing’s retaliatory 125 percent tariffs on U.S. goods, plus adding barriers to U.S. beef and LNG imports, raise tensions even higher. CCP leader Xi Jinping’s recent visits to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia could have secured their gray trade hubs going forward.
A Rough Road Ahead?
But the impact of gray trade is perhaps deeper and wider than many may expect. On the one hand, it’s a reasonable response on China’s part to U.S. tariffs. But on the other hand, there are greater risks. The United States could expand tariffs or use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to close loopholes.
That, too, may be a rational response by the United States, or it could make things worse.
“The global trade system for the past ninety years is collapsing, leaving it difficult for people to forecast the economic impact and tell where the bottom for a market is,” Vincent Chan, a China strategist at Aletheia Capital Ltd., told Bloomberg.
As new phases of U.S. trade policy and responses unfold, the biggest risk may be uncontrolled escalation in both tariff retaliation and other forms of retaliation. In short, the impact of the gray trade may be deeper and wider than many expect, and it could even lead to a global trade war, with its own far-reaching implications.
More at:
FAKE NEWS BUSTED: NBC’s Sob Story About ICE’s Detainment of a Russian-Born Harvard Scientist Backfires When the Brutal Truth About Her Actions Emerge
One of the most significant benefits of the second Trump Administration is how quickly they have been able to blow up fake news stories pushed by the corporate media. One great example is a sob story about a Russian-born Harvard scientist written today that would have gone unchecked in previous years.
NBC ‘News’ yesterday published an article attempting to show the ‘consequences’ of President Trump’s no-nonsense illegal immigration policy relating to researchers at our universities. ICE detained 30-year-old scientist Kseniia Petrova back in February, and she is now battling to avoid being deported back to Russia.
Petrova was supposedly on the cusp of potentially unlocking major breakthroughs in cancer research and detection, which could save millions of lives. Moreover, Petrova fears that she will be punished for protesting the Ukraine-Russia war and is trying to claim asylum.
Here is how the Peacock channel ‘reported’ on the situation:
A groundbreaking microscope at Harvard Medical School could lead to breakthroughs in cancer detection and research into longevity. But the scientist who developed computer scripts to read its images and unlock its full potential has been in an immigration detention center for two months — putting crucial scientific advancements at risk.
The scientist, the 30-year-old Russian-born Kseniia Petrova, worked at Harvard’s renowned Kirschner Lab until her arrest at a Boston airport in mid-February. She is now being held at ICE’s Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, and fighting possible deportation to Russia, where she said she fears persecution and jail time over her protests against the war in Ukraine.
“I would call it a grinding machine,” Petrova, who spoke with NBC News from the Louisiana facility, said about being detained. “We are in this machine, and it doesn’t care if you have a visa, a green card, or any particular story. … It just keeps going.”
Petrova’s case and the detention of academics across the country has damaged the ability of universities in the United States to recruit and retain leading talent, experts and Petrova’s colleagues said. In fields where expertise is often highly specialized, the loss of talent could have dire consequences globally for the future of medicine and scientific discovery.
This sounds quite chilling. But what did Petrova allegedly do to cause ICE to take such drastic action?
Today, the Department of Homeland Security revealed the brutal facts regarding Petrova’s situation. She broke multiple laws, including smuggling undeclared Petri dishes, containers of unknown substances, and loose vials of embryonic frog cells.
Moreover, Petrova blatantly lied to federal officers about carrying the substances into America, and messages on her phone revealed she fully intended to sneak these items in without declaring them.
What was she really up to?
The individual was lawfully detained after lying to federal officers about carrying substances into the country.
A subsequent K9 inspection uncovered undeclared petri dishes, containers of unknown substances, and loose vials of embryonic frog cells, all without proper permits.… https://t.co/T0bFUZUs01
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) April 22, 2025
If Petrova gets sent back to Russia, she will only have herself to blame. However, corporate media will never dare tell the truth because it does not fit the narrative.
NBC says Petrova’s first immigration court hearing in Louisiana was scheduled for this morning. Her lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, told the outlet that they think they will have more information regarding her asylum case following the hearing.
More at:
More Stories
The 28th Amendment: Will Trump v. Barbara Be the Final Word on Birthright Citizenship?
Supreme Court strikes down Trump birthright citizenship order in blow to President
SCOTUS Rules 5-4 to Permit Counting of Mail-In Ballots that Arrive After Election Day