LiveUpdated Sept. 3, 2025, 3:42 a.m. ETThe ruling was a setback for a key part of President Trump’s domestic agenda. The case is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court.ImageThe U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit blocked President Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans on Tuesday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times PinnedUpdated Sept. 3, 2025, 3:38 a.m. ETA federal appeals court late Tuesday blocked President Trump from using an 18th-century wartime law to quickly deport a group of Venezuelans, rejecting the administration’s argument that the migrants were part of an “invasion” of the United States.The Trump administration has said the migrants are members of Tren de Aragua, a violent gang with roots in Venezuela. But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said in a 2-1 ruling that the Alien Enemies Act did not apply in this case.“A country’s encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States,” the court said. “There is no finding that this mass immigration was an armed, organized force or forces.”The court said that its injunction only applied to the use of the Alien Enemies Act, and does not prevent the government from using other lawful means to remove foreign terrorists.The case now appears set to return to the Supreme Court in what is shaping up to be a decisive battle over Mr. Trump’s ability to use the Alien Enemies Act.“This is an enormous victory for the rule of law,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer who argued the case for the A.C.L.U., “making clear that the President cannot simply declare a military emergency and then invoke whatever powers he wants.”For months, courts across the country have struggled to answer the question of whether Mr. Trump is stretching the limits of the law in using the Alien Enemies Act.That law had been invoked just three times before, all in times of war. It was enacted in 1798 as the young United States came to the brink of war with France, giving the president expansive powers to detain and expel members of a hostile foreign nation.Sept. 3, 2025, 3:36 a.m. ETThe case appears set to return to the Supreme Court, shaping up to be a decisive battle over Trump’s ability to use wartime powers to combat illegal immigration, one of his key domestic policies. His administration has claimed that the Alien Enemies Act empowers it to arrest and remove migrants with little or no due process.Sept. 3, 2025, 3:35 a.m. ETCourts have grappled with President Trump’s use of wartime powers to address immigration since he invoked the Alien Enemies Act in March. The Supreme Court in April had temporarily blocked the administration from deporting the Venezuelan migrants while cases made their way through the lower courts.Sept. 3, 2025, 3:31 a.m. ETA federal appeals court blocked the Trump administration from using wartime powers to deport Venezuelan migrants. In a 2-1 ruling, the court said there was “no finding that mass immigration was an armed, organized force” intended to harm the United States. The case was brought by a group of Venezuelan migrants in Texas accused of being members of a violent gang.Sept. 2, 2025, 7:36 p.m. ETDemonstrators called for the release of the Epstein files outside the Capitol in Washington on Tuesday.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York TimesA top House committee released more than 33,000 pages of records on Tuesday that the Justice Department had turned over last month in connection with its investigation of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, as Republican leaders toiled to tamp down pressure in their ranks for more transparency.The release of the files by the House Oversight Committee, the chamber’s chief investigative panel, had been expected. Many of the documents were public court filings, and it was not immediately clear whether they included any material the Trump administration had not already made public.Mr. Epstein, whose rich and powerful friends included President Trump, died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. He was accused of trafficking dozens of girls, some as young as 14, and engaging in sex acts with them.After years of alluding to a potential cover-up in the case, Mr. Trump has faced a backlash from his right-wing base over the Justice Department’s decision to close the investigation without revealing all of what was discovered. The Oversight panel subpoenaed all the files, but the department has turned over only a portion of them.The publication of what it received came as Congress returned from a five-week recess that House Republican leaders had hoped might dissipate the fervor over the Epstein files, only to find that pressure had intensified.On Tuesday afternoon, Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky and a frequent Trump critic, pushed forward with a bipartisan measure that would force a vote on the House floor on whether to demand that the administration publicly release all of its investigative material on Mr. Epstein.Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in a statement that 97 percent of the documents published on Tuesday had been previously released, and he accused Republicans of trying to “give cover” to Mr. Trump by feigning transparency.Republican leaders are laboring to kill Mr. Massie’s effort by persuading members of their party not to sign on to it. If he can collect the signatures of 218 members of the House — a majority of the body — demanding to bring his measure to the floor, it will force a vote on the matter.To do so, he would need at least a small bloc of Republicans to join Democrats in backing the effort. Such a move would be a striking rebuke of Mr. Trump and his administration, which has been buffeted by criticism from some core supporters for failing to fulfill promises to release all files connected to Mr. Epstein’s case.As the committee prepared to release the files on Tuesday evening, Speaker Mike Johnson criticized Mr. Massie’s effort as unnecessary, saying it was “effectively a moot point now because all of this is happening, what the House Oversight Committee is doing.”The White House has also signaled its opposition to the measure. An official said in a statement Tuesday evening backing Mr. Massie would be viewed as “very hostile act to the administration,” a vague intimation that could deter lawmakers. The official, who divulged details of the administration’s thinking on the condition of anonymity, said that it would be considered, “helping Thomas Massie and Liberal Democrats with their attention-seeking, while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive file release effort from the Oversight Committee.”But G.O.P. leaders’ efforts to squelch the move appeared to be falling flat. By Tuesday night, only hours after Mr. Massie submitted his petition for signatures, three Republicans had signed on: Representatives Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.In an interview, Mr. Massie acknowledged the White House’s pressure campaign but said that he expected the release of the documents would only give “fleeting” cover to Republicans reluctant to sign the discharge petition.“These are the same files that everybody already had or were available from court records, and the ones that weren’t are so heavily redacted as to be inconsequential,” Mr. Massie said. “So I think it could actually backfire."In another bid to head off defections, Republican leaders moved on Tuesday to set up a vote for later in the week on a measure that would direct the Oversight Committee to continue the investigation it has already been conducting for weeks into Mr. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime associate currently serving 20 years in prison on federal sex-trafficking charges.That measure would be little more than a political gesture: No vote by the full House is needed for the committee to continue its work. The panel issued the subpoena for the full Epstein files last month after Democrats forced a vote on the issue. It has already scheduled depositions on the matter in the coming weeks. And its Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, has since expanded the scope of the investigation, signaling his intent to push forward.Mr. Comer has previously said that the Justice Department will continue to provide records to the committee in the coming months, though neither he nor the department has provided details on the timing of any new releases. Mr. Massie’s measure would require that the department release its files within 30 days after passage.On Tuesday, Mr. Comer, Mr. Johnson and members of the Oversight Committee from both parties met behind closed doors with six of Mr. Epstein’s victims for more than two hours. Some of the victims are also scheduled to participate in a news conference on Wednesday morning with Mr. Massie and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who is cosponsoring his bill.As they left the meeting, several lawmakers described emotional conversations with victims who said they were sexually abused. Ms. Mace, who has spoken publicly about being sexually assaulted, appeared visibly shaken as she exited, declining to speak to reporters.After the meeting, Mr. Johnson said that Republican leaders were committed to uncovering wrongdoing and investigating the Epstein case. But he dismissed Mr. Massie’s measure as “inartfully drafted” and contended that it did not sufficiently protect victims, even though it would provide for similar redactions as the Oversight Committee’s subpoenas.Democrats in the meeting said that the victims welcomed greater transparency around the Epstein investigation. Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas dismissed Mr. Johnson’s concerns.“This is nothing more than an excuse for him not to push forward and try to say that it’s on behalf of the victims,” she said. “But if the speaker knows his job, then he knows how to fix legislation that has problems.”Erica L. Green, Jess Bidgood and Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.Sept. 2, 2025, 7:25 p.m. ETPresident Trump signed a still-secret directive in July instructing the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels that his administration has labeled “terrorist” organizations.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesPresident Trump said on Tuesday that the United States had carried out a strike against a boat carrying drugs and killed 11 “terrorists,” the administration’s latest military escalation in Mr. Trump’s war against Venezuelan drug cartels that he has blamed for bringing fentanyl into the country.Mr. Trump offered few specifics about the strike during his news conference on Tuesday, but later in the afternoon he posted more details on Truth Social.“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists,” Mr. Trump wrote. He said the strike “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”No American troops were harmed in the operation, he said.Mr. Trump’s post was accompanied by a video of what appeared to be a speedboat cutting through the water, with a number of people on board. An explosion then appears to blow it up.A senior U.S. official said a Special Operations aircraft — either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone — carried out the attack on Tuesday morning against a four-engine speedboat loaded with drugs. U.S. surveillance aircraft and other sensors had been monitoring cartel maritime traffic for weeks before the strike, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.The strike is an astonishing departure from traditional drug interdiction efforts. In the past, U.S. authorities focused on seizing drugs and identifying suspects to build a criminal case. A second senior U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there would be more such attacks against cartel boats.The action comes amid a major buildup of U.S. naval forces outside Venezuela’s waters. The administration has also stepped up belligerent rhetoric about fighting drug cartels and labeled Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, a terrorist cartel leader.“The president is very clear that he’s going to use the full power of America, the full might of the United States, to take on and eradicate these drug cartels, no matter where they’re operating from, and no matter how long they’ve been able to act with impunity,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio before boarding a plane in Florida to head to Mexico.In a deviation from Mr. Trump’s account, however, Mr. Rubio said that the vessel’s destination was probably Trinidad or another country in the Caribbean.Mr. Trump signed a still-secret directive in July instructing the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels that his administration has labeled “terrorist” organizations. Around the same time, the administration declared that a Venezuelan criminal group was a terrorist organization and that Mr. Maduro was its leader, while calling his government illegitimate.The U.S. Navy warship Sampson docked at the Amador International Cruise Terminal in Panama City on Tuesday. The Navy has built up its forces outside Venezuela’s waters recently.Credit...Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSince then, the Pentagon has moved U.S. Navy assets, including warships, into the southern Caribbean Sea. In response, Mr. Maduro said that he was deploying 4.5 million militiamen around his country and vowed to “defend our seas, our skies and our lands” from any incursions.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan accused the Maduro government of having effectively turned Venezuela into a “narco-state” in an indictment that was unsealed in March 2020 in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The indictment charged Mr. Maduro and some of his top aides — including Hugo Carvajal, then his chief of military intelligence — of being leaders of a sprawling drug trafficking organization known as the Cartel de los Soles, or the Cartel of the Suns.Named for the sun insignia on the epaulets of Venezuelan generals, the cartel was first led by Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, according to prosecutors. Over the course of more than 20 years, prosecutors said, the cartel worked with guerrillas in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to ship tons of cocaine from clandestine airstrips, airports and seaports in Venezuela to U.S. soil. In doing so, the cartel not only made millions of dollars, but also weaponized cocaine “by flooding it into the United States to inflict its harmful and addictive effects on communities throughout this country,” prosecutors said.Mr. Carvajal pleaded guilty to narco-terrorism conspiracy charges in June. But charges are still pending against Mr. Maduro and Diosdado Cabello Rondón, a leader of the Venezuelan legislature and a former vice president of the country.The Trump administration has labeled President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela a terrorist cartel leader, a designation he has said is false.Credit...Jesus Vargas/Getty ImagesMr. Maduro has accused the Trump administration of building a false portrayal of him to try to force him from office. On Monday, he told reporters he “would constitutionally declare a republic in arms” if his country were attacked by U.S. forces deployed to the Caribbean, according to The Associated Press.U.S. officials previously indicated that American guided-missile destroyers that had recently deployed to the region could target boats operated by drug cartels transporting fentanyl to the United States.During remarks at the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters that “when you leave the room, you’ll see that we just, over the last few minutes, literally, shot a boat — a drug-carrying boat.” He added that there were “a lot of drugs” on the vessel.“And there’s more where that came from,” the president continued. He said that the drugs targeted on Tuesday “came out of Venezuela” and added that “we have a lot of drugs pouring into our country.”In his social media post, he added: “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group — including the U.S.S. San Antonio, the U.S.S. Iwo Jima and the U.S.S. Fort Lauderdale, carrying 4,500 sailors — and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, with 2,200 Marines, recently arrived in the region, Defense Department officials said.Several P-8 surveillance planes and at least one submarine have also deployed to the region, officials said.