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A Republican state lawmaker in Minnesota who recently introduced a bill to create a mental illness category for liberals obsessed over Donald Trump was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Minnesota senator Justin Eichorn was arrested and booked on Tuesday. He believed he was talking to a 17-year-old female, but was communicating instead with detectives from the Bloomington, Minnesota, police department, police allege.

Eichorn, a 40-year-old whose biography on the Minnesota Senate website says he is married with four kids, faces felony charges for soliciting a minor to practice prostitution.

“As a 40-year-old man, if you come to the Orange Jumpsuit District looking to have sex with someone’s child, you can expect that we are going to lock you up,” Booker Hodges of the Bloomington police department said in a statement.

The Minnesota Senate GOP called for Eichorn to resign, saying the reports were shocking. “Justin has a difficult road ahead and he needs to focus on his family,” the caucus said in a statement. The Republican party of Minnesota also called for Eichorn to resign because of the “seriousness” of the charges.

Eichorn is one of five authors of a bill introduced this week that would classify “Trump derangement syndrome” as a mental illness. The derogatory term is often used by Trump supporters to claim liberals are obsessed with Trump to the point of being mentally ill.

The bill defines the syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J Trump. Symptoms may include Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior.” Expressions of the syndrome could include “intense hostility” toward Trump or “overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald J Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J Trump”.

The bill garnered national headlines and criticism from the left. State senate majority leader Erin Murphy called it “possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history” and said if it’s a joke, it wastes time and trivializes real mental health issues. If it’s serious, it’s “an affront to free speech and an expression of a dangerous level of loyalty to an authoritarian president”.

Former U.S. Agency for International Development employees terminated after the Trump administration effectively dismantled the agency collect their personal belongings at USAID headquarters on Feb. 27 in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Trump administration likely violated the Constitution when it effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal judge has ruled.

In a 68-page opinion Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Theodore Chuang, an Obama appointee, wrote that “the Court finds that Defendants’ actions taken to shut down USAID on an accelerated basis, including its apparent decision to permanently close USAID headquarters without the approval of a duly appointed USAID Officer, likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways, and that these actions harmed not only Plaintiffs, but also the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”

The plaintiffs are more than two dozen unnamed current or recently fired employees and contractors of USAID. The defendants are Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.

In his ruling, Chuang wrote that “the evidence presently favors the conclusion that contrary to Defendants’ sweeping claim that Musk has acted only as an advisor, Musk made the decisions to shutdown USAID’s headquarters and website even though he lacked the authority to make that decision.”

In an earlier court filing in the case, the Department of Justice claimed that “the undisputed evidence reflects that USAID leadership—not Defendants—are responsible for the actions Plaintiffs contest.”

President Trump responded to the ruling in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Tuesday, saying, “We have a judge from a very liberal state who ruled like that — so bad for our country.” He added that the agency needed to be closed because of waste, fraud and abuse.

“I guarantee you we will be appealing it,” Trump said, of the decision. “We have rogue judges that are destroying our country.”

Several times in recent days, Trump and the White House have criticized federal judges who’ve ruled against the executive branch’s authority.

USAID employees who were fired or put on administrative leave were told to show up at the now-shuttered USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C., late last month to collect their belongings. A week ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio canceled most foreign aid contracts.

“Today’s decision is an important victory against Elon Musk and his DOGE attack on USAID, the United States’ government, and the Constitution,” Norm Eisen — executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, the group that represented the plaintiffs — said in a statement. “They are performing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel, harming not just the people USAID serves but also the majority of Americans who count on the stability of our government. This case is a milestone in pushing back on Musk and DOGE’s illegality.”

Chuang, in his opinion, ordered DOGE team members “to reinstate access to email, payments, security notifications, and other electronic systems, including restoring deleted emails, for current USAID employees” and contractors. He also blocked defendants from taking any more steps to shut down USAID.

But with the majority of USAID’s programs already terminated, and its staff whittled down to a couple hundred people, it wasn’t immediately clear what kind of impact the judge’s order would have on an effectively shuttered agency.

In a statement, Abby Maxman, president of Oxfam America, said the ruling was “a welcome reprieve” for agency staffers “but more is needed to stop the administration’s illegal dismantling of an independent agency. We need all funding and all staff to be fully reinstated immediately so that the vital work that saves lives around the world can go on.”

Jeremy Konyndyk — president of Refugees International, who oversaw USAID’s response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak— told NPR he found the judge’s remedy “a little disappointing.”

“The narrow relief that it grants would not be related to USAID’s [contracting] partners and funding recipients, it’s really specific to the workforce,” Konyndyk said.

Still, Konyndyk said the judge’s ruling is “a really relevant, meaningful decision” in stating for the record that DOGE and Musk’s actions in shutting down USAID likely violated the Constitution.

“Musk is acting as a sort of para-governmental free agent in destroying a federal agency where he has the backing and the authorization of the president of the United States, and yet has not been endowed with any actual formal authority, according to the government,” Konyndyk said.

President Donald Trump supported President Vladimir Putin’s idea to organize hockey games between the U.S. and Russia during their phone call on Tuesday, according to a summary released by the Kremlin.

According to the Russian government, Trump and Putin discussed “hockey matches in the USA and Russia between Russian and American players playing in the NHL and KHL,” which is Russia’s professional hockey league.

“We have just become aware of the conversation between President Trump and President Putin,” the NHL said in a statement to ESPN. “Obviously, we were not a party to those discussions and it would be inappropriate for us to comment at this time.”

The NHL and KHL have played exhibition games in the past. In 2008, the New York Rangers faced Metallurg Magnitogorsk in Switzerland as part of the short-lived Victoria Cup in Europe. In 2010, the NHL had two games against KHL teams as part of its “Premiere Challenge” series, as the Carolina Hurricanes faced SKA Saint Petersburg in Russia and the Phoenix Coyotes took on Dinamo Riga in Latvia.

The NHL’s relationship with Russia changed dramatically after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The league suspended its dealings with the KHL in March 2022, instructing teams to cease contact with KHL teams and with agents based in Russia. It also terminated its broadcast agreement with Russian television.

Russia has been frozen out of the hockey world since its invasion of Ukraine. It was banned, along with Belarus, from international hockey tournaments by the International Ice Hockey Federation since 2022. That ban was extended last month through the 2025-26 season, citing security concerns.

“As the current security conditions do not allow the necessary requirements for the organization of tournaments guaranteeing the safety of all, the IIHF must maintain the current status quo until further notice,” the IIHF said in a statement.

That ban would carry through the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, which is scheduled to have NHL players’ participation for the first time since 2014. Despite the IIHF’s ruling, the International Olympic Committee will have the final decision on Russia and Belarus participating in the Games and under what conditions.

Trump recently made hockey headlines by calling Team USA on the morning of their NHL 4 Nations Face-Off championship game in Boston to wish them luck. The U.S. lost in overtime to rival Canada 3-2.

That tournament became politically charged thanks in part to Trump’s tariff plans impacting the Canadian economy and his statements about making Canada “the 51st state,” leading to the countries’ respective national anthems being booed during games.

“Canada needed a win, and the players beared that on their shoulders. They took it seriously,” Team Canada coach Jon Cooper said. “This one was different. This wasn’t a win for themselves. This was a win for 40-plus million people. The guys knew it and they delivered.”

The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday temporarily blocking the deportations, but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a statement Sunday, responded to speculation about whether the administration was flouting court orders: “The administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order. The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.”

The acronym refers to the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump targeted in his unusual proclamation that was released Saturday

In a court filing Sunday, the Department of Justice, which has appealed Boasberg’s decision, said it would not use the Trump proclamation he blocked for further deportations if his decision is not overturned.

Trump sidestepped a question over whether his administration violated a court order while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening.

“I don’t know. You have to speak to the lawyers about that,” he said, although he defended the deportations. “I can tell you this. These were bad people.”

Asked about invoking presidential powers used in times of war, Trump said, “This is a time of war,” describing the influx of criminal migrants as “an invasion.”

Trump’s allies were gleeful over the results.

“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who agreed to house about 300 immigrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house immigrants, posted on the site: “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”

Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Boasberg’s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order but that the Trump administration clearly violated the “spirit” of it.

“This just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,” Vladeck said.

The immigrants were deported after Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has been used only three times in U.S. history.

The law, invoked during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II, requires a president to declare the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II.

Venezuela’s government in a statement Sunday rejected the use of Trump’s declaration of the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”

Tren de Aragua originated in an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied an exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their nation’s economy came undone during the past decade. Trump seized on the gang during his campaign to paint misleading pictures of communities that he contended were “taken over” by what were actually a handful of lawbreakers.

The Trump administration has not identified the immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States. It also sent two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States.

Video released by El Salvador’s government Sunday showed men exiting airplanes onto an airport tarmac lined by officers in riot gear. The men, who had their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down to have them bend down at the waist.

The video also showed the men being transported to prison in a large convoy of buses guarded by police and military vehicles and at least one helicopter. The men were shown kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform — knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs — and placed in cells.

The immigrants were taken to the notorious CECOT facility, the centerpiece of Bukele’s push to pacify his once violence-wracked country through tough police measures and limits on basic rights

The Trump administration said the president actually signed the proclamation contending Tren de Aragua was invading the United States on Friday night but didn’t announce it until Saturday afternoon. Immigration lawyers said that, late Friday, they noticed Venezuelans who otherwise couldn’t be deported under immigration law being moved to Texas for deportation flights. They began to file lawsuits to halt the transfers.

“Basically any Venezuelan citizen in the US may be removed on pretext of belonging to Tren de Aragua, with no chance at defense,” Adam Isacson of the Washington Office for Latin America, a human rights group, warned on X.

The litigation that led to the hold on deportations was filed on behalf of five Venezuelans held in Texas who lawyers said were concerned they’d be falsely accused of being members of the gang. Once the act is invoked, they warned, Trump could simply declare anyone a Tren de Aragua member and remove them from the country.

Boasberg barred those Venezuelans’ deportations Saturday morning when the suit was filed, but only broadened it to all people in federal custody who could be targeted by the act after his afternoon hearing. He noted that the law has never before been used outside of a congressionally declared war and that plaintiffs may successfully argue Trump exceeded his legal authority in invoking it.

The bar on deportations stands for up to 14 days and the immigrants will remain in federal custody during that time. Boasberg has scheduled a hearing Friday to hear additional arguments in the case.

He said he had to act because the immigrants whose deportations may actually violate the U.S. Constitution deserved a chance to have their pleas heard in court.

“Once they’re out of the country,” Boasberg said, “there’s little I could do.”

_____

Cano reported from Caracas, Venezuela.

US President Donald Trump said he plans to discuss ending the war in Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and that negotiators had already discussed “dividing up certain assets”.

“I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work’s been done over the weekend,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a late flight back to the Washington area from Florida.

“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance,” Trump said.

Trump is trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.

“We will be talking about land. We will be talking about power plants,” Trump said, when asked about concessions. “I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We are already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”

The comments came hours after his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said that the Russian president “accepts the philosophy” of Trump’s ceasefire and peace terms.

Witkoff told CNN that discussions with Putin over several hours last week had been “positive” and “solution-based”.

But he declined to confirm when asked whether Putin’s demands included the surrender of Ukrainian forces in Kursk, international recognition of Ukrainian territory seized by Russia as Russian, limits on Ukraine’s ability to mobilise, a halt to western military aid, and a ban on foreign peacekeepers.

Putin said on Thursday that he supported a truce but outlined numerous details that need to be negotiated before the deal can be completed.

Moscow has among other things firmly opposed the deployment of European troops to provide security guarantees for Ukraine after any eventual ceasefire.

On Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron said Russia’s permission was not needed, noting that Ukraine was a sovereign state. “If Ukraine requests allied forces to be on its territory, it is not up to Russia to accept or reject them,” he said in remarks quoted by several French newspapers.

Later on Sunday Russia’s deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko said that any long-lasting peace treaty on Ukraine must meet Moscow’s demands.

“We will demand that ironclad security guarantees become part of this agreement,” Izvestia cited Grushko as saying. “Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of Nato countries to accept it into the alliance.”

Regarding the possibility of European troops in Ukraine, he said “It does not matter under what label Nato contingents were to be deployed on Ukrainian territory: be it the European Union, Nato, or in a national capacity … If they appear there, it means that they are deployed in the conflict zone with all the consequences for these contingents as parties to the conflict.

Putin has said his military incursion into Ukraine was because Nato’s creeping expansion threatened Russia’s security. He has demanded that Ukraine drop its Nato ambitions, that Russia keeps control of all Ukrainian territory seized, and that the size of the Ukrainian army be limited.

He also wants western sanctions eased and a presidential election in Ukraine, which Kyiv says is premature while martial law is in force.

Also on Sunday, Moscow said that US secretary of state Marco Rubio had called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to discuss “concrete aspects of the implementation of understandings” agreed at a US-Russia summit in Saudi Arabia last month.

February’s Riyadh gathering was the first high-level meeting between the United States and Russia since Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022.

“Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio agreed to remain in contact,” the Russian foreign ministry said, with no mention of the US-suggested ceasefire.

State department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said on Saturday that the pair had “discussed the next steps” on Ukraine, and “agreed to continue working towards restoring communication between the United States and Russia”.

The Lavrov-Rubio call came hours after the UK hosted a virtual summit on Ukraine, at which prime minister Keir Starmer accused Putin of “dragging his feet” on the ceasefire.

“The ‘yes, but’ from Russia is not good enough,” Starmer said, calling for a stop to the “barbaric attacks on Ukraine once and for all”.

The diplomatic developments came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had replaced the chief of general staff of the armed forces.

According to a communique, Anatoliy Bargylevych has been replaced by Andriy Gnatov, who “has been tasked with increasing the efficiency of the management.”

“He is a combat guy,” Zelenskyy said of Gnatov. “His task is to bring more combat experience, the experience of our brigades in planning operations, defensive and offensive, as well as more active development of the corps system,” he added.

The Ukrainian military, which has grown since mobilising to repel Russia’s February 2022 invasion, is in the process of reorganising its army corps to improve coordination.

Defence minister Rustem Umerov said on his Facebook page: “We are systematically transforming the Armed Forces of Ukraine to enhance their combat effectiveness.

“This involves restructuring the command system and implementing clear standards.” Gnatov, he said, had “more than 27 years of military experience”.

Bargylevych has been appointed as the chief inspector of the defence ministry, he added.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report