Chief Justice John Roberts offered a gentle rebuke of Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on the judiciary. 

During a fireside chat Wednesday night marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York in Buffalo, Roberts emphasized the importance of judicial independence. 

“In our Constitution, judges and the judiciary is a coequal branch of government separate from the others with the authority to interpret the constitution as law, and strike down, obviously, acts of Congress or acts of the president,” Roberts said. “And that innovation doesn’t work if the judiciary is not independent.

“Its job is to, obviously, decide cases, but in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive, and that does require a degree of independence,” he said.

The chief justice’s impartial recounting of the nation’s founding document flies in the face of the Trump administration’s efforts to sidestep the checks and balances provided by the judiciary. 

Roberts also doubled down on his rare public criticism of Trump, after the president called to impeach a federal judge who ruled against his illegal deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. 

“Well, I’ve already spoken to that, and impeachment is not how you register disagreement with decisions,” Roberts said. 

But Roberts’s mild criticism may not be enough, as the administration has escalated into making direct threats. When announcing his inane plan to reopen Alcatraz Sunday, Trump listed “judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals” alongside the “criminals” and “thugs” he hoped to imprison there. 

Josh Gerstein, a senior legal affairs reporter at Politico, suggested that there may be a method to Roberts’s missing madness. 

“Subdued Roberts seemed to be keeping his powder dry since many of the big fights, like law firms, deportations, contempt, are making their way to the court or already there,” Gerstein wrote on X Thursday.  “A reasonable strategy, but that’s not some rousing defense of the judiciary or separation of powers.”

Gerstein noted that Roberts’s “‘judicial independence’ stuff” was “thinner” than his 2024 Year End report on the federal judiciary, which had compared political bias to doxxing and disinformation as some of the “illegitimate activity” that threatens independent judges. At the time, his comments seemed to echo Trump’s complaints about critics who went after judges that ruled in his favor. Now the Trump administration has taken to attacking so-called “activist” judges who rule against him. 

Roberts’s refute is comparatively limp when held beside Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent indictment of the right-wing campaign of threats being used to intimidate judges.

“The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law,” Jackson said last week.

Trump had a press conference Thursday to explain to everyone that the beautiful, spectacular trade deal that he’s made with Britain is actually unfinished.

“The final details are being written up in the coming weeks; we’ll have it all very conclusive, but the actual deal is a conclusive one,” Trump said to reporters with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on the other line. “We think just about everything has been approved, so good for both countries.”

While details remain extremely unclear, this “deal” is said to include greater market access and mutually lowered tariffs.

Trump taking a victory lap for an unfinished, undefined deal immediately raised eyebrows.

“Why Britain? And why now? … You’ve described this deal as a full and comprehensive deal, and yet … clearly, there’s much more work left to do,” said James Matthews of Sky News. “With respect, are you overstating the reach and significance of this deal, because you’re a president who needs a result at a difficult time?”

Trump proceeded to ramble, almost completely avoiding Matthews’s question.

“I think that it’s a great deal for both parties.… It opens up a tremendous market for us. It works out very well, very well. A lot of assets, you see the chart. Those are tremendous assets. But we’ve been trying, and when you say, ‘Why us?’ meaning your country; we’ve been trying for years, and they’ve been trying for years to make a deal.… This is a maxed-out deal, not like you said it, really incorrectly. This is a maxed-out deal that we’re gonna make bigger. And we’ll make it bigger through growth.”

The framework of the deal that has been announced would reduce U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to 0 percent and reduce auto tariffs to 10 percent, while leaving in a baseline 10 percent tariffs on all other products. Trump also bragged about greater market access in the United Kingdom for American beef, before being reminded by a reporter that the U.K. doesn’t accept American beef because of its higher food standards.

The Trump administration apparently deported two U.S. citizen children—ages 5 and 4—after surreptitiously luring their mother to an immigration appointment. 

Denisse Parra Vargas and her husband, Omar, had just dropped off their three children at school in Austin, Texas, last Thursday when they were pulled over by Texas state troopers ostensibly for having an expired license plate. But then, the police officers turned the couple over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as suspected undocumented immigrants. 

Omar was sent to an ICE detention center and then deported to Mexico, but Parra Vargas was fitted with an electronic bracelet and told to report to a processing center near Austin on Tuesday. An Austin-based criminal justice and immigration advocacy organization, Grassroots Leadership, said to the Daily Beast that “she was told that if she showed up, then she would be eligible for asylum as well as a work permit.”

Parra Vargas complied, and showed up on Tuesday with her three children, two of whom are U.S. citizens, for what she thought was a routine appointment. But then she and all of her children seemed to disappear in ICE custody. Grassroots Leadership scrambled its legal team to try to find........

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