Category: Fact Check

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On the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to no longer consider a person’s gender and to recognize people as either male or female, as defined by the size of their reproductive cells.

The directive served as a basis for a series of subsequent orders that called for defunding medical or educational institutions that have protections for transgender students, provide gender-affirming medical care to transgender youth or allow transgender girls or women to participate in women’s sports. Another order attempted to ban transgender people from the military. 

But some of those orders — and Trump’s later comments — lack context or include incorrect or misleading statements.

“For four long years, we had an administration that tried to abolish the very concept of womanhood and replace it with radical gender ideology,” Trump said on March 26 at a Woman’s History Month event at the White House.

“No matter how many surgeries you have or chemicals you inject, if you’re born with male DNA in every cell of your body,” he continued, presumably referring to the presence of a Y chromosome, “you can never become a woman — you’re not going to be a woman. And that’s why last month, I proudly signed a historic executive order to ban men from competing in women’s sports. … I also banned puberty blockers — can you believe I’m even saying this — and the sexual mutilation of minor youth.”

Trump’s first transgender-related order declared that people are either male or female at “conception.” But scientists say that excludes certain people and sex is not fully determined at conception.

His executive order targeting gender-affirming medical treatments for trans youth — which is not a ban — claimed that health care providers are “maiming and sterilizing” children and referred to gender-affirming care as “chemical and surgical mutilation.” That language is misleading and wrong. Gender-affirming care is supported by professional medical associations under specific guidance, and surgeries typically take place after age 18. Gender-affirming care is associated with improved mental health, and some medical interventions are reversible. 

Trump’s policies were followed by a series of lawsuits across the country. Federal judges have already blocked some orders from taking effect while the cases move through the courts, or questioned the administration’s plans. Two separate restraining orders and a preliminary temporary injunction have been issued to prevent the government from withholding or conditioning funding for medical institutions providing gender-affirming care.

A transgender person identifies with a gender that does not match their sex assigned at birth. Nearly 1.6 million people over the age of 13, or about 0.5% of the U.S. population, identify as transgender, according to a 2022 report by the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law’s Williams Institute. 

We reached out to the White House to ask for support for some of the statements in the executive orders, but we didn’t get a response.

‘Two Sexes, Male and Female’

In an order titled “defending women from gender ideology extremism,” signed by Trump on his first day in office, the administration declared that the U.S. will now officially only “recognize two sexes, male and female,” on all federal documents, statements, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. The order also called for banning transgender women, who are referred to as “men,” from “intimate single-sex spaces,” such as bathrooms, single-sex shelters, women’s prisons and sports.

Sex, the order dictated, should be understood as a person’s “immutable biological classification as either male or female,” and not as “a synonym for” gender. The order specifically directs agencies and federal employees acting in an official capacity to “use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’” — yet Trump himself regularly conflates the terms, including in his inaugural address and his March 4 address to Congress.

Although one of the order’s stated purposes is to restore “biological truth,” it used a limited definition of how sex is understood by scientists, declaring that female means a person who “at conception” belongs “to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and male is someone who “at conception” belongs “to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” 

Scientists told us that although biological sex can be defined by the size of a person’s reproductive cells, or gametes, that definition doesn’t always work given there are multiple factors that define sex in humans.

“Sex is a catch-all phrase that actually refers to a constellation of features, not just one as they’ve defined it here,” Margaret M. McCarthy, a neuroscientist and pharmacology professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told us. 

Sex definitions typically refer to a construct based on genetic, physiological and anatomic traits. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referencing the American Psychological Association, has defined sex as a person’s “biological status as male, female, or something else,” which is “assigned at birth and associated with physical attributes, such as anatomy and chromosomes.” A 2022 consensus study report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine defined it as “a multidimensional construct based on a cluster of anatomical and physiological traits that include external genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, gonads, chromosomes, and hormones.”

In most cases, all facets of sexual development are congruent, McCarthy, who has studied sex differentiation for decades, told us. Typically, she said, an X and Y chromosome will lead to the development of testes, the production of testosterone, the development of a penis and the production of sperm. And typically, two X chromosomes will lead to ovaries, the production of estrogen and progesterone, the development of a uterus and a vagina, and the production of eggs.

But this is not always the case. According to the Pediatric Endocrine Society, about 4,500 people a year are born in the U.S. with a collection of medical conditions known as Differences of Sex Development that interfere with the typical male or female sex development described above. The definition in the executive order “should not and cannot apply” to people with a DSD, according to a statement from the organization. That’s because some people with a DSD, which is also called intersex, don’t produce sperm or eggs, produce both of them, or produce a reproductive cell that doesn’t match their biological sex development.

“Some people may have genitals that look typical for a male – with a penis – but have XX (‘female’) chromosomes and female body parts – a uterus and ovaries – due to medical conditions that affect the hormones. On the other hand, some people may have genitals that look typical for a female – with a vagina and no penis – but have XY (‘male’) chromosomes and testes on the inside of their bodies,” the statement reads.

Other professional and advocacy organizations, such as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and interACT, which advocates for intersex people, have also said the definitions in Trump’s executive order are not accurate and exclude intersex people. 

In addition, the inclusion of “at conception” in the executive order’s definition of female and male is “technically incorrect,” McCarthy said. (The Department of Health and Human Services’ definitions, created in response to the order, do not include that language.)

Sexual differentiation is not complete when the sperm fertilizes the egg, or at conception, as the order may suggest — it occurs progressively during gestation and beyond. “The only thing that’s happened at conception is a transfer of an X or a Y chromosome to the ova. The gonads haven’t differentiated yet,” McCarthy explained, referring to the glands that could eventually produce reproductive cells.

Experts also objected to the administration’s description and erasure of gender and gender identity. Gender identity, the order declared, can’t be used as “a meaningful basis for identification” and reflects a “fully internal and subjective sense of self” that’s “disconnected from biological reality and sex.”

“A person’s gender is associated with but cannot be reduced to either sex assigned at birth or specific sex traits,” the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report says.

The CDC has defined gender as “cultural roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes expected of people based on their sex” and gender identity as a “person’s inner sense of being a boy/man/male, girl/woman/female, another gender, or no gender,” which comes about “as a result of a combination of inherent and extrinsic or environmental factors.”

“Nobody thinks that [gender] identity is ‘disconnected from biological reality,’” Anne Fausto Sterling, a professor emerita of biology at Brown University who is an expert in gender development, told us, adding that most scholars think it is “inborn and thus must have a biological origin.”

Finally, McCarthy said, the definitions in the executive order are not practical either. In our daily lives, when interacting with people, doing research or filling out a form, people are usually asked to self-identify. “You ask a person, are you male or female? You don’t say, show me your gametes or what size are your gametes,” she said. Sex assigned at birth, which ends up on birth certificates and passports, isn’t based on gamete size or “the biological function of their reproductive system,” as HHS guidelines recommend either, she said — it is typically assigned by doctors based on external genitalia.   

Medical Gender Transition Treatments

In a separate executive order issued on Feb. 28, Trump directed the federal government to take a series of actions to no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support” gender-affirming care for people under 19. The order used misleading language to refer to treatments that are supported by professional medical associations under specific guidance, and were previously considered beneficial by the federal government.

“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” the order said. It later defined children as “individuals under 19 years of age.”

But experts have told us that gender-affirming surgeries typically take place after age 18, the legal age of adulthood in most states, and after a case-by-case assessment by a medical team. 

The majority of transgender children do not receive any medical treatments to transition. Instead, they may change their name, pronouns, or hair and dress as part of a social transition. When medical treatments do occur, they’re rarely surgical and begin during adolescence or after, as we’ve explained. Families with a child who identifies with a gender that doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth are offered counseling.

Guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recommends care at different ages. Puberty blockers, or medications that delay the beginning of puberty, are the first medical intervention and are typically offered between ages 8 to 13 for girls and 9 to 14 for boys. Gender-affirming hormone therapy is typically offered around age 16, when adolescents are capable of making an informed decision that weighs the potential risks and benefits.

Trump’s executive order referred to gender-affirming care as “chemical and surgical mutilation” and said it does “blatant harm” to children. “Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated,” it continued. The order directed the attorney general to enforce laws against female genital mutilation, or cutting, which is illegal in the U.S. and other countries and refers to a cultural practice of removing or injuring female genitalia for no medical reason. The order also called for “ending reliance on junk science,” directing agencies to stop using guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, female genital mutilation has no health benefits and can lead to serious complications. It is considered a human rights violation. Practiced primarily in Africa and the Middle East, FGM is mostly performed on girls under 15 by people who are not health care providers. Gender-affirming surgery is always carried out in a medical setting, is consensual and is rarely performed on minors.

“[T]he Executive Order promotes misinformation, including that large shares of youth are seeking gender affirming medical care, which is not the case, that regret rates among those who do seek care are high, when regret rates are very low, and erroneously conflating ‘female genital mutilation’ and gender-affirming care,” Lindsey Dawson, associate director of HIV Policy and director of LGBTQ Health Policy at KFF, a health policy research organization, said in a report about the order.

In a cross-sectional study among insured people in the U.S., Harvard researchers and colleagues found that in 2019 there were no gender-affirming surgical procedures in transgender and gender diverse, or TGD, minors under 12 years of age — and that those in minors older than 12 “were rare and almost entirely chest-related.” Based on those findings, the researchers wrote, “concerns around high rates of gender-affirming surgery use, specifically among TGD minors, may be unwarranted.”

A separate study by some of the same Harvard researchers, published in JAMA Pediatrics in January, used insurance claims data and found that less than 0.1% of minors ages 8 to 17 with private insurance are transgender or gender diverse and received puberty blockers or hormones between 2018 and 2022. No child under 12 years of age received a hormone prescription.

“There’s not some massive wave of folks accessing care,” Landon D. Hughes, co-author of both Harvard studies and a fellow at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told NBC News earlier this year.

Studies suggest that gender-affirming care can improve the well-being and mental health of transgender youth, who have an increased risk of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. While some of these findings have been criticized, there isn’t good evidence that gender-affirming care is harmful, as Trump’s executive order claimed.

“Although President Trump’s executive order describes gender-affirming care as ‘junk science,’ access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth is supported by a consensus of major medical associations in the U.S.,” Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law, said in a brief following the order. “The order does not acknowledge any benefits of gender-affirming care, instead making unsubstantiated statements of widespread harm and disregarding decades of science that form the foundation of the services that are currently available to transgender youth.”

Not All ‘Irreversible’

It’s important to note that not all medical gender-affirming interventions are “irreversible” nor do they make it impossible for someone to “conceive children of their own,” as the executive order said. 

As guidance from the AAP explains, only gender-affirming surgeries are fully irreversible and not all of them affect fertility. The effects of medications that suppress puberty are reversible, but the AAP notes that their impact on fertility is unknown and that fertility could be impacted if followed by the use of sex hormones.

The changes brought by gender-affirming hormone therapy can be reversed if hormones are stopped before these changes are fully developed, but they become irreversible after that happens, potentially impacting fertility, according to the guidance. 

The guidance sets a number of steps and criteria to make sure that individuals offered gender-affirming care are not what the executive order refers to as “impressionable children.” A multidisciplinary team of medical and mental health providers should screen, assess and monitor patients and make sure they are capable of fully understanding the risks and benefits of each intervention and discuss, when applicable, options to preserve fertility. 

There is very little reliable data on how often transgender people regret going through gender-affirming interventions or opt to “detransition.” Many studies have a short follow-up period and rely on patients reporting back to providers.

But the scientific literature doesn’t support the notion that “[c]ountless children soon regret that they have been mutilated,” as the order said.

As PolitiFact has reported, recent studies of medical gender-affirming interventions in adolescents show that rates of young people stopping or regretting treatment or detransitioning range from 1% to 9%, with most on the lower end.

A study by Princeton University researchers published in 2024 in JAMA Pediatrics that looked at the experiences of 220 young people using puberty blockers or hormones found that nine of them regretted the interventions, with four of them stopping treatment.

Another study looking at the outcomes of 1,089 young people who were assessed by the National Health Service Gender Identity Development Service in England from 2008 to 2021 found that 5.3% stopped treatment with puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones and reverted to identifying with their birth gender.

As scientists have explained, people detransition for multiple reasons and not all people who stop treatment regret that care. Some stop due to undesired side effects of hormones or of transitioning, such as discrimination, and some stop when they’ve reached the results they wanted. Similarly, a person who regrets transitioning may still consider themselves transgender, and someone who stops identifying as transgender may not regret gender-affirming care.

Regret rates are typically even lower in adults, and studies show adults regret other plastic surgeries more often than gender-affirming surgery.

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In his Rose Garden announcement of sweeping new “reciprocal tariffs,” President Donald Trump held aloft a misleading chart that claimed to give a breakdown of the tariffs other countries charge the U.S. and the corresponding tariff that the U.S. will now impose against those countries.

“Reciprocal. That means they do it to us and we do it to them,” Trump said in his April 2 speech. “Very simple. Can’t get any simpler than that.”

Trump said the U.S. would begin charging a “minimum baseline tariff of 10%” on all imported goods. But he said the U.S. would also tariff countries at a rate equal to half of tariff rates that countries charged for U.S. goods “including currency manipulation and trade barriers.” That, according to Trump’s chart, would mean tariffs of 50% on imports from some countries.

The first column next to the list of countries purported to represent “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A.” as a percentage. A cursory look revealed, however, that the percentages are far higher than the average tariff rates published by the World Trade Organization. Smaller print under the “Tariffs Charged” heading notes — as Trump did — that the figures include “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.” Those last two factors are harder to quantify, but it turns out that’s not how the White House arrived at its figures anyway.

“You see the numbers, the numbers are so disproportionate, they’re so unfair,” Trump said.

According to a fact sheet provided by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the reciprocal tariffs were “calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners. This calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing. Tariffs work through direct reductions of imports.”

USTR said that while computing trade deficit effects for every country “is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

To approximate that, USTR said it divided the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation.

Take the European Union, for example. The chart lists its tariffs charged for U.S. imports (again, including currency manipulation or trade barriers) as 39%. Trump said the U.S. would charge countries half of what they are charging the U.S., because charging the full reciprocal amount “would have been tough for a lot of countries.” So in the case of the EU, the “USA Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs” is 20%, the chart states.

According to the World Trade Organization, the EU’s trade-weighted average tariff rate is 2.7%. Trump also noted that European countries charge a value-added tax of about 20% — it varies by country but that’s roughly accurate. But those taxes are levied on imports as well as domestic production, so the VAT does not provide any trade advantage. In any case, neither of those numbers factor into the White House’s math.

How does the White House arrive at 39%? In 2024, the U.S. goods trade deficit with the EU was $235.6 billion. That year, the U.S. imported $605.8 billion worth of goods from the EU. So, $235.6 divided by $605.8 is 38.9%, or, rounded up, 39%.

Economists told us that’s not a legitimate way to calculate reciprocal tariffs for countries.

“Those listed numbers are simply not tariffs, but some other made-up measure based on a formulaic trade deficit calculation,” Kimberly Clausing, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us via email. “In almost every instance, countries’ true trade barriers are far, far lower.”

“This is not a legitimate way to calculate trade barriers, and the vast majority of subject matter experts (I would wager >99% of international economists) would reject this methodology as profoundly flawed,” Clausing said.

“For example,” she said, “imagine you have completely free trade with an island that produces mangos but lacks sufficient income to buy US goods. The US buys $100 in mangos and sends only $20 in exports. This would imply a tariff rate of 40% by the Trump method, (80/100 divided by 2), but the imbalance of trade represents only the fact of distinct comparative advantage in trade, not any trade barriers.”

Or, as the New York Times put it, “The difference between exports and imports doesn’t necessarily reflect trade barriers; Americans may simply want to buy more stuff from, say, Japan than the Japanese want to buy from the United States.”

“The Trump administration’s calculations are a fundamentally nonsensical way to calculate ‘reciprocal’ tariffs,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told us. “Absolutely none of the factors the White House purports to be looking at, like tariffs, non-tariff barriers, or other unfair practices, factor in to the tariff rate they calculate in any way. They are invented numbers that have zero relationship to real policies.”

William Reinsch, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former president of the National Foreign Trade Council, concurred.

“We do not believe it is an appropriate or accurate measure of trade barriers,” Reinsch told us via email. “We believe their methodology basically has nothing to do with reciprocal tariffs as the administration had previously discussed. The most charitable interpretation of what they are saying is ‘this is the tariff rate that would be necessary to balance bilateral trade with each partner.’”

Countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus – such as the U.K. and Singapore – are still listed on the chart as charging 10% tariffs.

According to York, if the aim is to balance trade with every country, these proposed tariffs won’t work.

“Tariffs will not reduce the US trade deficit because tariffs, either through their effects on the US dollar or through retaliation, will also reduce US exports,” York said. “That’s a result borne out in economic literature, and in recent US experience with the 2018-2019 tariffs.”

Economists also noted that the White House equation focuses only on goods, and ignores trade in services, where the U.S. enjoys a trade surplus.

“That skews the results. A lot,” Clausing, of the Peterson Institute, told us. “The US has a comparative advantage in services, and this ignores our substantial trade surpluses in that sector.”

“Excluding services is simply wrong and doesn’t give the full picture,” Stuart Malawer, a professor emeritus of policy and government at George Mason University, told us via email.

U.S. Trade Representative Fact Sheet

The USTR fact sheet on the reciprocal tariff calculations cited a handful of academic studies, but when we reached out to the authors of several of them, they balked at the Trump administration’s conclusions.

“The tariffs charged to the USA column certainly does not represent legislated tariffs faced by the US,” Anson Soderbery, an economics professor at Purdue University and author of the research paper “Trade elasticities, heterogeneity, and optimal tariffs,” told us via email. “Those are much smaller than reported and take into account bilateral agreements (e.g., USMCA, WTO preferential duties, etc).  

“If they are using the USTR formula proposed this morning to adjust those numbers, I am even less sure how to go about evaluating what they mean,” Soderbery said. “That is, suggesting trade imbalances are only due to trade barriers is not founded in any economic theory or methodology. And, further suggesting the reductionist formula exports-imports/imports can be used to back out all trade barriers and equivalent tariff rates is misguided.”

Ina Simonovska of the University of California, Davis, and co-author of “The elasticity of trade: Estimates and evidence,” told us via email, “The formula that the administration uses is correct under the assumption that the objective is to arrive at a zero bilateral trade balance with a given trade partner, holding fixed any other effects.” But there will be other effects, she said, including “the changes in exports that would occur due to the domestic price increases caused by the tariff as well as changes in trade flows with other trade partners than the one that the tariff targets. … These effects are harmful so they would result in a lower optimal tariff compared to the reported one” in the White House chart.

The USTR fact sheet also cites as a reference for its estimates a paper published in American Economic Review, “The Long and Short (Run) of Trade Elasticities.” One of the authors of that paper, Andrei Levchenko, a professor of international economics at the University of Michigan, told us via email that the “elasticity estimate” in the paper and used by the USTR “should not be directly applied in this tariff calculation.”

“The key reason is that the concept of the trade elasticity holds everything else constant,” he explained. “In practice, everything else will not be constant. In particular, US exports could change. That can come from a variety of channels, but one important one is tariff retaliation by trading partners. If a trading partner puts tariffs on US exports to it, they will fall, (at least partially) un-doing the impact of lower imports on the trade deficit.

“Beyond this, there are many other ways in which the change in US imports and exports will differ from the formula that directly applies a partial equilibrium trade elasticity,” he said. “For example, trade elasticity estimates do not account for any impact of the change in tariffs on wages, prices, exchange rates, and the stock market. Those can go in different directions depending on the country, the product, the production technology used, etc. For small tariff changes on individual products from individual countries, these changes might be small and could reasonably be ignored. However, the change in imports and in the bilateral trade balance implied by the partial equilibrium trade elasticity is likely to be
unreliable when the tariff change is large and comprehensive (covering all goods), as is the case today.”

Repeated Claims

Trump got other things wrong in his tariff announcement. He continued to wrongly frame his tariffs as a way to raise “trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes.” Tariffs are a tax. And because U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and often pass at least some of their increased costs onto consumers through higher prices, tariffs are considered to be regressive taxes, affecting lower-income households more than others as a percentage of income.

A Tax Foundation analysis projected that the tariffs announced on April 2, combined with earlier tariffs announced by Trump, would raise nearly $3.2 trillion in revenue over 10 years. But the tariffs would also reduce Americans’ after-tax income, amounting to “an average tax increase of more than $2,100 per US household in 2025,” the Tax Foundation said.

Trump also repeated false or misleading trade claims that we’ve already covered. 

He said Canada “imposes a 250 to 300% tariff on many of our dairy products,” referring to rates that would only be charged if U.S. exports to Canada ever exceeded predetermined quotas. He said tariffs made the U.S. “proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” between 1789 and 1913, even though  real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product per capita is many times higher today than it was more than a century ago. And he claimed that during his first term he “took in hundreds of billions of dollars” from tariffs on China, which he said “never paid 10 cents to any other president.” But the U.S. has long collected billions from customs duties on Chinese imports — and the tariffs are paid by U.S. importers, not China. 

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Quick Take

President Donald Trump said in a March 30 interview that “there are methods” for him to serve a third term in the White House, and a Daily Mail article referred to a “loophole” in the 22nd Amendment that would make it possible. But legal experts told us the “loophole” legal argument is “implausible” and “defeats the clear intent” of the amendment.

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Full Story

In a March 30 interview with NBC News, President Donald Trump said he could possibly serve a third term — as he has suggested before — even though a third presidential term is prohibited by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.

Asked by a reporter whether plans for an additional term have been presented to him, Trump said, “There are methods which you could do it.” NBC News asked Trump whether he was referring to “a possible scenario in which Vice President JD Vance would run for office and then pass the role to Trump,” and the president responded that “that’s one” method. “But there are others, too,” Trump said.

As we’ve written, the 22nd Amendment addresses presidential term limits, stating, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” The amendment was ratified in 1951 in response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt being elected four times and a consensus that there should be term limits on future presidents.

But a story published in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, on March 29 revives a legal argument from 1999 in the Minnesota Law Review to suggest a “loophole” in the 22nd Amendment would allow Trump to serve more than two terms. A March 30 Instagram post shared the Daily Mail headline, “Revealed: How Trump could be president until 2037 due to a simple loophole in the Constitution.”

The 1999 law review article, co-authored by Bruce Peabody, who was a graduate student at the time and is now a professor of politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, argued that the 22nd Amendment has been misunderstood and a president who had already served two terms is not prohibited from serving a third.

The “loophole” is the use of the word “elected” in the 22nd Amendment, the Daily Mail said, citing the law review article’s contention “that the Twenty-Second Amendment proscribes only the reelection of an already twice-elected President.”

“It is argued that means a twice-elected president would not be barred from later reassuming the office due to the resignation, or death, of another president,” the Daily Mail article continued. “Trump could therefore run for Vice President, with Vance as an openly recognized nominal figure at the top of the ticket. Once he is sworn in Vance could then resign, allowing his Vice President — Trump — to step into the office.”

The Daily Mail noted that the Minnesota Law Review article said an earlier constitutional amendment, the 12th Amendment, also would not stop Trump from returning to the White House for a third term. That amendment, ratified in 1804, states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”

Because the 12th Amendment was written before the 22nd Amendment, it “could not have originally meant to preclude someone from being Vice President who had been elected President twice,” the Minnesota Law Review paper argued.

Amendments’ Meaning and Intent

Legal scholars told us the “loophole” argument is “implausible.”

David A. Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown University Law Center, said the legal argument in the Daily Mail article “is implausible, primarily because of its clear misinterpretation” of the 12th Amendment.

In an email to us, Super said that before the 12th Amendment, “the Constitution provided for the vice president to be whomever received the second-most votes for president. Although in practice everyone knew that George Washington was running for president and John Adams was running for vice president, as a legal matter both were running for president. …The Twelfth Amendment changed that by establishing separate elections for president and vice president but retained (in its last sentence) the rule that no one could run for either office without being eligible to run for president,” Super said.

“It is, of course, true that we had no Twenty-Second Amendment when the Twelfth Amendment was ratified, but its effect is to make the qualifications for the two offices identical,” he said.

Paul Gowder, a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, also told us in an email that the “loophole” argument is “pretty implausible.”

First, the argument “defeats the clear intent of the 22^nd Amendment,” Gowder said. “The guy who wrote the text that got adopted as the amendment stated, on the record, his understanding of what Congress was trying to do in drafting it: to ‘prevent a man’s deliberately using the office of President in order to perpetuate himself in office; that is, for more than two terms.’ And if you believe in the loophole, not only does it mean that Trump could have more than two terms, it means that Trump could be president for life, just so long as he could keep finding people to occupy the top of the ticket.”

Second, Gowder said, “we often use the practice of prior officials as a guide to interpreting the Constitution, particularly when it comes to interpreting the powers of the presidency. … I think we should count it as strong evidence for a constitutionally meaningful consensus that no president after the 22^nd Amendment was enacted has to my knowledge ever even seriously floated the idea of running for a third term.”

And third, Gowder said, “it’s just too tricky — this is a real constitutional point. One of the things that makes the Constitution different from other kinds of law is that it’s meant to be enacted by and understood by (and ultimately enforced by) the people. … It’s a kind of category mistake to read the Constitution the way you might read the tax code, looking for loopholes that the drafters snuck in to trick ordinary people into dictatorship. Instead, we read it in the context of the collective goals that its terms are intended to pursue,” Gowder said.

He added that “the Constitution wasn’t written to be an airtight formal logic proof. But that doesn’t mean that it’s proper to take a provision that obviously means ‘no more than two terms’ and cook up a Bond-villain-esque scheme to interpret it to mean ‘yes more than two terms.’”

Circumventing the 22nd Amendment

Any attempt to repeal the 22nd Amendment would be extremely difficult, Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told us in an interview in November.

“I don’t think there’s any realistic possibility that the 22nd Amendment could be repealed,” Roosevelt said. “That would take another amendment (like the 21st, repealing the 18th) and I don’t think it would get 2/3 of both houses of congress, much less 3/4 of the states.”

To add a constitutional amendment, the House and the Senate both must approve a joint resolution with a two-thirds majority, and 75% of the states must then ratify the amendment. 

An attempt to circumvent the 22nd Amendment — such as Trump ascending from vice president to president — would face challenges in court. “I think the odds of that [being successful] are extremely low,” Roosevelt told us.

“Obviously the concern the 22nd Amendment is addressing is that someone who serves more than two terms as president might accumulate too much power,” Roosevelt said. “That concern has nothing to do with how the person takes office the third (or fourth, or fifth) time.” 

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Sources

Allen, Nick. “Revealed: How Trump could be president until 2037 due to a simple loophole in the Constitution.” Daily Mail. 29 Mar 2025.

Cillizza, Chris. “Believe it or not, Donald Trump says he should get a third term.” CNN. 18 Aug 2020.

Constitution Annotated. “Twelfth Amendment.” Congress.gov. Accessed 1 Apr 2025.

Constitution Annotated. “Twenty-Second Amendment.” Congress.gov. Accessed 31 Mar 2025.

Gowder, Paul. Professor of law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Email to FactCheck.org. 2 Apr 2025.

Kiely, Eugene. “Can Trump Serve a Third Term?” FactCheck.org. 15 Nov 2024.

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum. “Constitutional Amendments — Amendment 22 — ‘Term Limits for the Presidency.’” Accessed 31 Mar 2025.

Super, David A. Professor of law and economics, Georgetown University Law Center. Email to FactCheck.org. 31 Mar 2025.

Ward, Myah. “Trump at NRA convention floats 3-term presidency.” Politico. 19 May 2024.

Welker, Kristen and Megan Lebowitz. “Trump won’t rule out seeking a third term in the White House, tells NBC News ‘there are methods’ for doing so.” NBC News. 30 Mar 2025.

Source: FactCheck

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Misinformation is nothing new. It has, however, become ubiquitous and, in some cases, more difficult and time-consuming than ever to debunk. 

When we first started publishing in 2003 — which predated Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006) — viral misinformation took the form of chain emails. Although they were a problem at the time, chain emails were to misinformation what the Pony Express is to ChatGPT.

As the popularity of social media platforms has grown, so too has the scope of viral misinformation and the speed with which it travels. And this falsehood-fraught environment is increasingly where people get their news.

In a survey of U.S. adults last year, the Pew Research Center found that “just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media.”

The incredible growth of podcasts also has helped spread misinformation on social media. According to the Pew Research Center, 42% of Americans 12 and older said they had listened to a podcast in the past month in 2023 — up from only 9% in 2008. In February, YouTube — the largest video platform — announced that it had more than 1 billion monthly podcast users. 

The emergence of artificial intelligence, or AI, makes it even more difficult for social media users to separate fact from fiction. 

“AI technologies, with their capability to generate convincing fake texts, images, audio and videos (often referred to as ‘deepfakes’), present significant difficulties in distinguishing authentic content from synthetic creations,” Cathy Li and Agustina Callegari of the World Economic Forum wrote last year in an article on how to combat AI misinformation. 

Our work aims to inform the public and debunk political falsehoods. But we can’t fact-check everything. Here’s our advice on how to identify bogus posts and factual distortions.

Think before sharing. We have long advised our readers, “Be skeptical, not cynical.” When it comes to online content, that means: Think twice before you share that social media post.  

“Don’t hit reshare until you stop and think to yourself, ‘Am I reasonably sure that this is accurate … does this seem plausible?’” David Rand, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, told PBS Newshour last year. 

We know that this can be hard to do, particularly if the content evokes a powerful response in you and aligns with your beliefs — which is often the case. There’s two reasons for that: 

• Seeking clicks, content providers give us text, images and videos that often provoke a reaction from us. 

• Using algorithms, social media platforms feed us what they think we want to see and hear.

As a result, social media posts often play to our emotions, and, as humans, we are susceptible to confirmation bias — which is the tendency to give too much weight to information that confirms our beliefs. The combination of the two makes misinformation go viral. 

But resist the urge to immediately reshare. 

Consider the source. Who shared the claim? What do you know about this person or organization? Do they have any partisan or financial conflicts? What qualifies them to write or speak about the subject?

We’ve seen a lot of misinformation from people who draw conclusions and share opinions, despite a lack of expertise in the subject or a clear conflict of interest, or both.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we debunked bogus claims about the virus from several chiropractors. A multiple offender, chiropractor Eric Nepute, was sued by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission for violating the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act. In a settlement, Nepute agreed to pay a fine and stop making false claims about supplements that he advertised and sold as preventatives and treatments for COVID-19. The civil complaint said Nepute and his companies “have earned a substantial amount of money from selling these and other Wellness Warrior Products.”

If someone is making claims in an effort to sell you something, that’s a red flag to be skeptical.

Of course, we also see a lot of misinformation from partisans — so be wary of liberal and conservative social media accounts making claims about the other side. 

For example, we recently debunked the misleading claim spread by President Donald Trump and conservative commentators that Politico, an online news outlet, was being “completely” or “massively funded” by the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Biden administration. In fact, the media payments were for subscriptions that were common at many federal agencies under the Trump and Biden administrations. 

Evaluate the evidence. Does the person making the claim provide any evidence, such as links to articles, published research or other sources? Are some sources mentioned, but no links provided? How credible is the evidence provided?

It’s a red flag if no sources are provided. If sources are cited, find the source material and see if the evidence supports the claim. You would be surprised how often the “evidence” doesn’t support the claim. (Be careful in clicking on links. Make sure they lead to a legitimate website.)  

Last month, we did a story on social media posts that falsely claimed Trump ordered former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s release from the International Criminal Court. The posts cited “Executive Order 2025-03” — which doesn’t exist. That’s not even the numbering system for executive orders. 

You should also check the credibility of the source material provided in the social media post. 

We recently debunked misleading claims about measles in a video posted to X by Mary Holland, the CEO of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense that was founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Holland based her claims on an article written by Sayer Ji, the founder of an alternative medicine website who was named in the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “Disinformation Dozen,” a list of top spreaders of vaccine misinformation on social media. Ji has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Rutgers University.

Ji’s history of spreading misinformation and his lack of expertise in the area of infectious diseases are red flags. 

In another case, we wrote about an article in a peer-reviewed journal that made numerous false claims about COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The article — which was later retracted — was written by known vaccination opponents who have spread misinformation about the mRNA vaccines, and it was published in a journal that did not have the same standards as more reputable journals.

If the social media post includes an image that you suspect might be a fake, then you can use reverse image search engines, such as Google and TinEye, that may help you find the original image and where and when it appeared online. We have used such tools numerous times over the years.

Evidence or opinion? Cable TV commentators, podcasters and columnists have blurred the line between news and opinion. 

If the evidence cited in the social media post comes from a news source — or purports to come from a news source, sometimes falsely labeled “breaking news” — you should consider if the social media post is sharing fact-based reporting or someone’s opinion of the news. 

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but we’ve found that many partisan websites, podcasters and commentators – whether they are pushing a liberal or conservative agenda — aren’t telling the full story. Their version of the facts is often slanted to benefit their side. 

Consult the experts. If you are still uncertain about the veracity of a social media claim, then you should consult the experts. That includes FactCheck.org — we’re on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, BlueSky, WhatsApp and TikTok.

A good place to start is Google or the search engines of FactCheck.org and other fact-checking websites.

The search should include keywords or a short excerpt of the social media post, podcast or video. For example, social media posts claimed the Department of Government Efficiency stopped “royalties” to former President Barack Obama for “Obamacare,” formally known as the Affordable Care Act. The top two results of a recent Google search of “royalties + Obama + Affordable Care Act” turned up articles by FactCheck.org and AFP Fact Check, a France-based fact-checking organization.  

Google has also created a tool called “Fact Check Explorer” — a searchable database of fact-checking articles from around the world. The same search for “royalties + Obama + Affordable Care Act” on Google’s Fact Check Explorer turned up six fact-checking articles – all debunking the claim about Obama. 

Fact-checking articles take time to produce, so in some cases you may not immediately find a fact-checking article on the topic. You may, however, find some news articles on the subject — but make sure you are using trusted sources, such as the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Associated Press, New York Times and other established news outlets. 

We know that trust in the media is low, but the fact is that legitimate news organizations, such as the Washington Post and New York Times, have written policies and procedures for such things as newsgathering, editing and corrections, as well as standards for ethical conduct and conflicts of interest. 

Even when using such trusted sources, you might want to check more than one source to see what others are reporting. Multiple news outlets will report on breaking news and major news developments, so be wary if only one news organization is reporting on the “news” that you are seeing on social media.

AI-Generated Images  

As we mentioned earlier, online content may be created by generative AI, which “can create original content — such as text, images, video, audio or software code — in response to a user’s prompt or request,” as IBM explains on its website. 

We’ve already covered text in the section above. The same rules apply to text created by humans or AI services. Here we focus on AI-generated images, videos and audio.

We have been writing about fake photos for years. In the early years, the fakes were real images that were altered using Photoshop or other editing programs. 

In 2008, for example, we wrote about an image that purportedly showed then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wearing a red, white and blue bikini and holding a rifle. But it wasn’t her. Her head had been Photoshopped onto the body of another woman. 

Using AI, people looking to entertain or cause mischief can create entirely new images, video and audio. Experts say you may be able to spot a fake by looking closely for red flags.

“It is possible to create realistic appearing images, audio, and video with today’s generative AI tools,” Matthew Groh, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told us in an email. “One of the best ways to spot a lie (and likewise AI-generated media) is to search for contradictions.”

Groh and his colleagues published a research paper in February that measured the accuracy of more than 50,000 participants who were asked to identify whether images were real or AI-generated. The participants were given “unlimited time, 20 seconds, 10 seconds, 5 seconds, and 1 second.” The paper found that “longer viewing times” improved the participants’ accuracy.

Unnatural body parts. Groh and his Northwestern colleagues identified telltale signs of AI-generated photos for an article last year in Kellogg Insight, a school publication. They advised social media users to look closely at various body parts for “anatomical implausibilities.” 

“Are there missing or extra limbs or digits? Bodies that merge into their surroundings or into other nearby bodies? A giraffe-like neck on a human? In AI-generated images, teeth can overlap or appear asymmetrical. Eyes may be overly shiny, blurry, or hollow-looking,” the article said.

If the person is a public figure, you can compare facial features with existing news photos to spot discrepancies, the article also noted. 

Odd objects. There may also be oddities in the way that body parts interact with objects, or even problems with the objects themselves.

For example, the Kellogg Insight article included an AI-generated image that showed a person’s hand inside a hamburger. The hamburger itself is improbably large.

“When there’s interactions between people and objects, there are often things that don’t look quite right,” Groh told Kellogg Insight, referring to these oddities as “functional implausibilities.”

Irregular shadows and reflections. AI also has difficulty with shadows and reflections. Shadows may be cast in different directions, and reflections may not match the object they pretend to reflect, Groh and his colleagues said.

For example, an AI-generated image in the Kellogg Insight article shows a person wearing a short-sleeved shirt, while his mirror image is wearing a long-sleeved shirt. The Northwestern research paper describes these irregularities as “violations of physics.”

The researchers also identified two other telltale signs of AI-generated images: “stylistic artifacts,” which refer to “overly glossy, waxy, or picturesque qualities of specific elements of an image,” and “sociocultural implausibilities,” which are “scenarios that violate social norms, cultural context, or historical accuracy.”

Nonsensical words. Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, explained in an article on the university’s website last year that AI-generated images have trouble with words. In his article, Jarry asked an AI service to create a photo of Montreal circa 1931. One problem, however, was that the lettering displayed on background signage was “gibberish.”

(Think you can tell real photos from bogus AI-generated images? Take the “Detect Fakes” test on Kellogg School’s website.)

AI-Generated Video and Audio

Unlike fake images, bogus video and audio are fairly new phenomena.   

We recently wrote about an audio clip circulating on social media that purported to show Donald Trump Jr. saying “the U.S. should have been sending weapons to Russia,” instead of Ukraine. But we found no evidence that Trump ever made such a comment, and a digital forensic expert told us it was likely fake.  

Look for contextual clues. Determine if the text of the post or the audio or video clip itself offers some contextual clues — such as where and when the words were allegedly spoken.

In the case of the fake Trump audio, one red flag was the claim that the president’s son made his remark about Russia on a Feb. 25 episode of his podcast, “Triggered with Donald Trump Jr.” However, Trump did not make any such comment about Russia during that episode.

Listen for audio anomalies. The European Digital Media Observatory, a project of the European Commission, offers tips for detecting AI-generated audio and video. When listening to audio, it says to “[p]ay attention to choices of words, intonation, breaths, unnatural pauses and other elements that can manifest anomalies.”

Watch for quality of video. The EDMO suggests checking “the quality of the video” to spot “out of focus contours, unrealistic features” and poor “synchronization of audio and video,” i.e., when the lips don’t match the audio.

Look for disclaimers. Some social media platforms — including Meta, YouTube and TikTok — require users to add a label on AI-generated content. Check to see if the platform you are using has such a policy and, if so, look for the disclaimers.

For example, Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads and Instagram, uses an “AI info” label “for content we detect was generated by an AI tool and share whether the content is labeled because of industry-shared signals or because someone self-disclosed.”

Groh, the Northwestern assistant professor, said that Community Notes on X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — can be useful at flagging AI-generated content.

“Community notes can be very useful for adding context and directing people’s attention to possible tells,” such as this note in response to an image posted following Hurricane Milton, Groh said. “Likewise, context and insights from trusted sources like fact checkers or digital forensics experts can be useful for helping people on social media make up their minds about whether what they’ve seen online is AI-generated or real.”

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To support his plan to increase tariffs, President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that the Canadian government charges U.S. farmers a 250% or 270% tariff on dairy products exported to Canada. That’s misleading. There are rates that high on the books, but they would only be charged if U.S. exports exceed predetermined tariff rate quotas, which the dairy exports don’t come close to meeting. 

Below these quotas, American dairy sales to Canada face zero tariffs. The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or USMCA, a trade agreement negotiated by the first Trump administration, had raised the thresholds for the protectionist tariffs. Some American industry stakeholders argue that Canadian regulations impede the United States’ ability to reach these quotas, but U.S. dairy has never faced triple-digit tariffs.

During an interview with Sharyl Attkisson of Sinclair that aired on March 16, Trump claimed, “Nobody says that with Canada, that they charge, our farmers – think of this. They have for dairy products, some dairy products, 270% tariff. Nobody knows that.” He continued, “So we want to sell milk into Canada, and they throw a 270% price increase on the milk.”

Trump has repeatedly made similar claims regarding Canadian tariffs on U.S. dairy exports.

On at least two occasions, he has wrongly claimed that the Biden administration had allowed the tariffs to increase. “In Canada, we find that they’re charging us over 200% for dairy products. You know about that. And when I left, we had that well taken care of, but under Biden they just kept raising it — very difficult to deal with the Canadian representatives, 250 percent for dairy products, tariff,” Trump said during a discussion with reporters in the Oval Office on March 7. The over-quota rates on dairy exports to Canada as of January 2025 are virtually identical to the last year of Trump’s first term in office in 2020. 

In 2024, the U.S. exported more than $1.1 billion in dairy products to Canada, a nearly 55% increase in exports since 2020. None of it was subject to triple-digit Canadian tariffs. Canada is the second-largest international recipient of U.S. dairy behind Mexico. 

We reached out to the White House about the president’s claims but did not receive a response.

Trump has implemented or threatened numerous tariffs targeting Canadian goods, and the administration’s monthlong delay of its announced 25% tariff on many Canadian and Mexican imports is set to expire on April 2 — the same day that the administration plans to apply reciprocal tariffs to match the duties charged by other nations for U.S. exports.

High Tariffs Only Enforced over Quota Thresholds

The maximum tariff rates for multiple U.S. dairy products exported to Canada do approach or exceed the 250%-270% range. For example, as of Jan. 1, the maximum Canadian import tariff was 245.5% for cheese and curd, 298.5% for butter, and 241% for liquid milk. 

However, Trump failed to mention that these large tariffs are levied only if U.S. dairy exports exceed a predetermined quota.

Chuck Nicholson, associate professor in the department of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained to us in an email that “both the US and Canada use a system of tariffs for dairy products that includes two elements, ‘Tariff Rate Quotas’ (TRQs) and ‘Over-Quota Tariffs.’” He continued, “TRQs indicate an amount of product that can enter the country at low tariff rates (or, in the case of US dairy products to Canada, generally zero tariffs).”

The tariff schedule published by the Canada Border Services Agency shows that for nearly all dairy products, American producers are fully exempted from paying tariffs so long as the quantity of exports remains below the quota (this is denoted by the label “UST” under the “Applicable Preferential Tariffs” column in the document). 

Nicholson told us that the Canadian government implemented import quotas to increase the competitiveness of the nation’s domestic dairy industry through a supply management system. By limiting dairy imports through quotas, the Canadian government aids domestic producers by increasing minimum dairy prices. Kirsten Hillman, the Canadian ambassador to the U.S., told CBS News on March 9 that the quotas seek to “protect our farmers and families.”  

As we’ve explained before, tariffs are customs duties paid by domestic importers — in this case, Canadian processors, distributors and retailers purchasing American dairy products. Therefore, Nicholson told us that over-quota tariff rates in the triple digits ensure that American imports stay below the quotas.

Nicholson also noted that “the US has a similar system of trade protection for dairy products, albeit with generally lower Over-Quota Tariff rates.” For example, he told us that while butter imported from Canada to the U.S. faces no tariffs under a predetermined quota threshold, it is subject to over-quota tariffs of about 24%, or up to 39%.

The current tariffs and quotas for the dairy industry were put in place by the USMCA — a trade agreement that Trump negotiated and signed into law in 2020. The USMCA replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

We previously fact-checked Trump in 2020 when he falsely claimed in October of that year that the USMCA “got rid of the tariffs” on American dairy products exported to Canada. As we explained then, while the USMCA raised quota thresholds for many dairy exports, it did not remove such quotas. 

It is worth noting that the TRQs on American dairy products are an exception rather than the norm. The USDA website states that under both the USMCA and NAFTA, “almost all agricultural products traded between the United States and Canada” face no tariffs or quotas. 

U.S. Dairy Exports Do Not Meet Tariff Quotas

Currently, American producers do not export enough dairy to meet Canadian tariff rate quota thresholds. Therefore, Al Mussell, research lead and founder of the Canadian research organization Agri-Food Economic Systems, told CNN that “in practice, these tariffs are not actually paid by anyone.”

The International Dairy Foods Association, a lobbying group that advocates on behalf of the U.S. dairy industry, said in a March 7 statement that “the U.S. has never gotten close to exceeding our USMCA quotas.”

The IDFA sent us calculations based on Canadian utilization data that identified the proportion of each dairy product’s annual tariff quota met thus far by U.S. exporters, also known as the “fill rate.” In an email response, IDFA explained that Canadian tariff quotas measure imports on either a calendar year basis or a “quota year” basis that ends on July 31. According to the IDFA’s calculations, at the end of 2024, the average fill rate for dairy products subject to a calendar year tariff quota was only 26.72%. For dairy products subject to a quota year tariff, the average fill rate as of March 2025 was only 21.24%.

Trump also claimed during the March 16 interview that Canada enacts “a lot of non-monetary tariffs” that restrict U.S. dairy exports. It’s true that the U.S. dairy lobby has expressed numerous grievances regarding Canadian trade policy.

The U.S. lobby says that Canadian dairy processors use up much of the quotas by buying products from their own dairy operations based in the U.S. “Canadian companies on both sides of the border” claim shares of the American import quota, Matt Herrick, the IDFA’s executive vice president, told us in an email. “Canada is preserving most shares of their TRQs for Canadian processors, causing fill rates to remain low across several dairy product categories.” 

The IDFA also opposes other regulations enacted by the Canadian government, such as pricing policies for dairy proteins and compositional standards for cheese.

Becky Rasdall Vargas, senior vice president of trade and workforce policy at the IDFA, told Farm Progress that these regulations prevent American producers from exporting as much dairy to Canada as they would like. She explained, “Our complaint is we’re not able to get anywhere near [the quota] cap, even though we have buyers who tell us they would like to bring in our product.”

Elaborating on this argument, economists based in Canada and the U.S. explained in a 2023 article for a University of California publication, “The United States believes that Canada violated the USMCA by giving most of the TRQ allocation to Canadian processors and thereby reducing U.S. access to Canadian retail markets.” They explained, “Canada currently allocates 85%–100% of the TRQs to domestic processors on a market-share basis, depending on the type of dairy product. As a result, the processors mostly import dairy products that must undergo additional processing before they are ready for retail sale.”

In December 2021, a USMCA dispute settlement panel ruled in favor of the U.S. dairy industry on this matter. After Canada subsequently implemented changes, another ruling by a USMCA panel in November 2023 found that the nation’s updated policies were permissible under the trade agreement and could continue. The IDFA and some lawmakers maintain that Canada continues to violate the USMCA through its dairy policies. 

Ultimately, the economists writing for the University of California publication concluded that the U.S. dairy industry’s concerns regarding violations of the USMCA have little real-world effect on the American dairy industry. “If Canada were to change their TRQ allocation system to fully align with the petition from the United States, not much would change regarding the makeup of Canadian dairy imports,” they wrote.

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The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift a District Court judge’s order blocking the use of an obscure 18th century law to summarily expel Venezuelan immigrants. Earlier this month, the administration sent hundreds of immigrants to an El Salvador prison because, officials alleged, they were members of a dangerous gang.

In response to a lawsuit, the lower court temporarily blocked any further deportations while the court considers the merits of the case, and it ordered planes carrying migrants deported under the law to be returned, which the administration did not do.

The lack of due process and the apparent disregard for the court order has led some legal experts to forecast a deterioration of the rule of law in the U.S., while the Trump administration maintains that it is within its rights to deport dangerous criminals.

We’ll lay out the facts as we know them regarding the key issues.

On Saturday, March 15, the Trump administration sent three planes carrying more than 250 immigrants to El Salvador, bound for the country’s largest prison.

The administration claimed that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which is active primarily in South America, but has had an increasing presence in the U.S., were on board. The Treasury Department designated it as a transnational criminal organization in July 2024, and the State Department designated it as a terrorist organization on Feb. 20.

The same day as the deportations, the White House posted a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act — a rarely used law that dates back to 1798 — to expel members of Tren de Aragua. It said that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA” and aren’t U.S. citizens or permanent residents “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” According to the Federal Register, the proclamation was signed the day before the administration posted it.

The secrecy and pace of the deportations could suggest that the administration was trying to avoid preemptive legal challenges, the judge handling the case disputing the deportations said. “Why is this proclamation essentially signed in the dark on Friday night, early Saturday morning, when people [were] rushed on the plane?” U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg asked at a March 21 hearing. “To me, the only reason to do that is if you know the problem and you want to get them out of the country before a suit is filed.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward had filed a lawsuit on the same day of the deportations on behalf of five Venezuelan men who were being held in Texas and “threatened with imminent removal under the President’s expected Proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act.” The suit sought class action status for all affected immigrants and asked the judge to block the administration’s use of the act.

Boasberg granted both of those requests on March 15. He issued a ruling from the bench ordering any planes carrying immigrants being deported under the Alien Enemies Act to be returned to the U.S.

The planes did not return and, when Boasberg requested details from the Trump administration about when the planes took off and landed, lawyers for the administration withheld that information and invoked the state secrets privilege.

What is the Alien Enemies Act?

The Alien Enemies Act was one of four laws passed in 1798 as the newly formed U.S. prepared for a potential war with France. That conflict, which entangled the U.S. in a dispute between France and Britain, took place at sea and never became a declared war. It is often called the Quasi War.

The four laws that came from it are referred to collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. They include:

• The Naturalization Act, which extended the amount of time it would take immigrants to become citizens. It was repealed in 1802.
• The Alien Act, which allowed the government to deport noncitizens who were deemed to be dangerous. It expired in 1801.
• The Sedition Act, which censored speech that was critical of the government. It expired in 1801.
• The Alien Enemies Act, which allowed the government — in times of war — to detain, relocate or remove those who were from the enemy nation.

The Alien Enemies Act is the only surviving law of the group.

It says that in times of war or during an “invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government,” the president can apprehend, restrain, secure and remove any immigrants who came from the enemy country.

It has been used three times throughout U.S. history — first, during the War of 1812 when British immigrants were required to move away from the coast to areas designated by federal marshals; second, during World War I, when German immigrants were required to register with the government and comply with restrictions on where they could work and live; third, during World War II, when the government rounded up Japanese, German and Italian immigrants, leading to the use of internment camps.

Can Trump use the act this way?

This is a question for the courts, which haven’t yet conclusively ruled.

As we said, there’s a class action lawsuit on behalf of the deported immigrants challenging the administration’s use of the act. The federal judge handling the case — Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia — issued an opinion on March 24, saying, “The President’s unprecedented use of the Act outside of the typical wartime context … implicates a host of complicated legal issues, including fundamental and sensitive questions about the often-circumscribed extent of judicial power in matters of foreign policy and national security.”

Boasberg went on to say that the court probably wouldn’t have to decide that question since the immigrants who brought the case are likely to prevail on a different issue. “Before they may be deported, they are entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all,” he said. “As the Government itself concedes, the awesome power granted by the Act may be brought to bear only on those who are, in fact, ‘alien enemies.’”

However Boasberg ends up ruling, though, the case will almost certainly be appealed. The government, in fact, already appealed Boasberg’s initial order blocking further use of the Alien Enemies Act. A split panel of the appeals court upheld Boasberg’s order, and the administration on March 28 filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

Legal experts have described the administration’s use of the wartime act as an overreach, noting that the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela.

“The legal problems with the deportations are obvious: The US is not at war with Venezuela; the gang isn’t a government; and in any case it’s not threatening the US with invasion or incursion in any ordinary English language sense of those words,” wrote Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman in a March 17 column.

The Trump administration, however, had endeavored to link Tren de Aragua to Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president. Tren de Aragua “is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus,” the proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act says, going on to call Venezuela a “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.”

Gangs have flourished in Venezuela as Maduro’s government has struggled, but it’s worth noting that his administration conducted a raid on Tren de Aragua’s home base — the Tocorón prison — in 2023.

“If our government has evidence of a coordinated invasion into this country that was engineered by a foreign nation, it must have proof. Otherwise, it is fiction,” Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill constitutional law professor, told PolitiFact.

For years, President Donald Trump has been claiming without evidence that other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending people to the United States. In particular, he has targeted Venezuela. Experts in the country told us last year that there’s no support to back up Trump’s claim.

And other legal experts have weighed in on the implications of the proclamation. “The president is invoking the Alien Enemies Act to try to dispense with due process. He wants to bypass any need to provide evidence or to convince a judge that someone is actually a gang member before deporting them,” Katherine Yon Ebright, a lawyer in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said in a statement.

“Trump is trying to use the post 9/11 terrorism playbook for immigration,” Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent and current associate dean at Yale Law School, wrote on Substack. By using the Alien Enemies Act, “Trump may try to ignore or sidestep the courts altogether, giving him immense ‘wartime’ authority (in peacetime) without any judicial check,” she said.

Tren de Aragua in the U.S.

Tren de Aragua began around 2014 in Venezuela’s Tocorón prison in the state of Aragua and, by 2023, had grown to be one of the county’s most powerful criminal organizations, according to the investigative reporting think tank InSight Crime.

“Tren de Aragua’s expansion turned transnational around 2018, when the gang attempted to establish itself on the Venezuela-Colombia border between the Venezuelan state of Táchira and the Colombian department of Norte de Santander,” according to InSight Crime. “Between 2018 and 2023, Tren de Aragua built a transnational criminal network, setting up cells in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, with further reports of a sporadic presence in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil.”

As of 2021, the gang had about 4,000 members in Latin America, according to the anti-corruption advocacy organization Transparencia Venezuela.

Estimating the size of Tren de Aragua in the U.S. is difficult, in part because members don’t adhere to traditional gang behavior, like wearing specific tattoos, Mitchel P. Roth, a professor at Sam Houston State University who researches organized crime, told us in an interview.

In October, the Department of Homeland Security had reportedly identified about 600 members across the U.S., although that number may be too low.

We reached out to DHS asking for updated figures, but we didn’t receive a response.

Of the 194 migrants with gang affiliations who have been apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection between October and February, 16 have been members of Tren de Aragua, according to CBP statistics. For context, that’s about half the number of MS-13 members who have been apprehended in the same time frame, and, assuming all 16 were from Venezuela, that’s .02% of the roughly 64,000 Venezuelans who were apprehended.

Who was deported?

There’s been little official information made available about those who were deported on March 15. But CBS News published 238 names from an “internal government list,” and an unnamed official told the network that 137 of them were deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a March 17 press briefing that the administration wasn’t releasing names due to “privacy concerns.”

News outlets have reported on a handful of deportees, revealing that their families, lawyers and even judges presiding over their asylum cases have almost no information on their detention by the U.S. government.

As USA Today reported on March 21, a judge presiding over an asylum hearing was unaware that the claimant, Jefferson José Laya Freites, wouldn’t be present. A lawyer with an immigrant rights organization told the judge that Laya Freites’ wife believed he’d been sent to El Salvador after he was detained following a traffic stop because she saw him in a video the president of El Salvador posted of deportees being taken to the prison there. She said he’s never been in a gang.

Similar stories were reported by the Washington Post, which described how Henrry Albornoz Quintero was arrested and detained after a routine check-in with immigration officials in January, then didn’t show up to a bond hearing. Neither the judge nor the government’s attorney knew where he was. His wife, pregnant with their first child, identified him in one of the photographs released by the El Salvadoran government.

Another case that has been widely reported in the media is that of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and coach who was seeking asylum in the U.S. after he was allegedly tortured in Venezuela for demonstrating against Maduro, according to his lawyer, Linette Tobin. In a declaration filed in the case before Boasberg, Tobin said that a tattoo Barrios has depicting the logo of his favorite soccer team — Real Madrid — and a social media post in which he was showing the sign language hand gesture that means “I love you” were misinterpreted by Department of Homeland Security officers as indicating he was a member of Tren de Aragua. He has no criminal record, Tobin said.

The Trump administration, however, has maintained that those who were deported were gang members and criminals, whom Leavitt described as “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country.”

Trump has repeatedly referred to the deportees as simply “criminals.” A declaration filed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in the case challenging the deportations said that many of those who were deported did not have criminal records, adding that this was “because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time.”

The ICE declaration maintained that all of them were members of the Venezuelan gang. “Agency personnel carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact members of TdA,” it said. “ICE did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In recent news appearances, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suggested allowing bird flu to spread in poultry flocks unchecked. Scientists say that’s risky because it gives the virus more opportunities to replicate, increasing the chance it could change to spread easily among humans.

Avian influenza, or bird flu, has been spreading in U.S. dairy cows for more than a year now and has infected several dozen dairy workers. The virus also has infected flocks of chickens and other poultry in the U.S. since 2022, leading to the deaths of more than 168 million birds, infections in poultry workers and high egg prices.

“We’ve in fact said to [the U.S. Department of Agriculture] that they should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” Kennedy said of bird flu in an interview with medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel. The conversation aired March 4 on Fox Nation.

“Most of our scientists are against the culling operation,” Kennedy said in an interview with Sean Hannity, which aired on Fox News March 11. Kennedy advocated testing therapeutics in flocks and again suggested looking for birds with “a genetic inclination for immunity.”

Researchers have acknowledged that culling on its own has not stopped bird flu from infecting poultry. But they said Kennedy’s strategy is risky and unlikely to yield a breakthrough in the search for bird flu therapeutics or genetic resistance.

“If someone is going to say well, we should let the virus just go unchecked and follow RFK Jr.’s suggestion, we’re going to exacerbate the problem,” Dr. Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor at University of California, Davis, Veterinary Medicine Cooperative Extension, told us. “There’s no scenario where that is a good idea.”

“Why do we want to give the virus a leg up? Why do we want to give it an advantage and let it do its worst without being checked?” Ian Brown, group leader of avian virology at the Pirbright Institute in the U.K., asked us. “That doesn’t feel terribly logical.”

Letting bird flu run through poultry flocks is “not advisable and this will cause serious harm to poultry and put other animals at risk, but also humans who will have to manage the culling/clean-up, which poses a huge biosecurity risk,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told us in an email.

Meanwhile, Kennedy left out important context about the risk of bird flu. And he misleadingly claimed that vaccinating poultry would turn birds into “mutation factories,” when researchers say that vaccinating birds could be one possible way of mitigating agricultural harm and reducing risks to people.

Kennedy is in charge of HHS, not the USDA, so it is unclear how much his views will influence the policy on culling or vaccinating birds. On the human health side, lawmakers and scientists recently have raised concerns that HHS is threatening pandemic preparedness by pulling back funding to states being used to control infectious disease, embarking on a massive reduction in HHS staff and reportedly reevaluating a contract for research into bird flu mRNA vaccines.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in a Feb. 26 Fox News interview indicated USDA might try out a pilot program to build a “safe perimeter” around some flocks to “see if there is a way forward where the immunity and the genetics and the DNA become part of this.”

However, the USDA affirmed to us via email that its policy is still to require culling. “The United States will continue to follow our established stamping out policy,” in keeping with international guidelines, an agency spokesperson said, and also will work to “develop innovative strategies (including alternative response activities) and ensure we use every tool at our disposal” to fight bird flu.

In late February, the USDA announced a $1 billion strategy to combat bird flu, which includes funds dedicated to developing vaccines for poultry and for improving biosecurity on farms. Good biosecurity can help prevent bird flu from being introduced to farms in the first place.

Letting Bird Flu Spread in Poultry Is Risky

H5N1 bird flu — the type causing the current outbreak in the U.S. — spreads rapidly in chickens and is highly lethal. USDA policy is to kill all the birds in a flock once H5N1 is detected. This culling process, also referred to as depopulation, reduces bird flu’s ability replicate, mutate and spread.

In his interview with Hannity, Kennedy blamed high egg prices on culling. “We’ve killed 166 million chickens,” Kennedy said. “That’s why we have an egg crisis.” 

But bird flu is the root cause of the bird deaths. These birds “would die anyway if they were not depopulated,” Brown said, explaining that the “lethality is pretty close to 100%.” The hens would stop laying eggs early in their infection, he added. 

When infection is allowed to take its course, poultry “die quite a horrible death,” Brown said, so there is also an animal welfare issue with not culling.

The most likely outcome of stopping culling, Pitesky said, would be more bird deaths as the virus spread unchecked, ultimately reducing the country’s food security.

“The quicker you depopulate, the quicker you can prevent disease transmission from that facility to other facilities or to wild birds that are in that area that are then going to transmit the disease to other facilities,” Pitesky said.

Stopping culling could increase the risk of bird flu changing in dangerous ways. “The more opportunities the virus has to replicate, the more opportunities it has to mutate and reassort with all kinds of different strains,” Pitesky said.

Kennedy was also wrong to almost entirely blame bird flu cases in humans on culling. “Almost all of the people who have gotten sick were workers who were involved in the culling operations,” he told Siegel. 

“That’s inaccurate,” Popescu said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 24 out of 70 U.S. human bird flu cases cave been in people exposed via poultry farms and culling operations.

There have been cases “related to culling, but this is also in relation to poultry exposure overall – culling is a necessary practice to avoid additional exposure (humans and animals), and frankly it’s a horrific illness for birds,” Popescu said.

Strategy Unlikely to Identify Flu-Resistant Chickens

Researchers said that stopping culling in order to find resistant birds or new therapeutics was unlikely to be effective. “People have been trying to breed genetic lines that are resistant to flu for some years now and have generally failed to succeed,” Brown said.

There has been research into whether some birds might have genes that could provide flu resistance, Pitesky said, but this work is done in poultry being raised in villages in Africa and Asia that have more genetic variation.

Commercial chickens in the U.S. are bred to be as genetically identical as possible so that they will grow at the same rate, Pitesky added. These poultry are the “least ideal population” to test whether it’s possible to identify birds with genetic resistance to H5N1, he said.

Pitesky also said that before testing a therapeutic in the field, “you ultimately need some indication that it’s going to work.” 

“The biggest issue is we don’t have anything in the pipeline right now, as far as I know, that there’s any indication it could be curative of a viral infection like this in poultry,” he said.

Brown said that there have been concerns about whether therapeutics for chickens could be cost-effective, “even if they could do the job, which I doubt.”

“I do think we do need to think outside the box, but that is not a viable outside-the-box scenario,” Pitesky said, referring to Kennedy’s proposal for finding resistant chickens.

Vaccinating Poultry Could Curb Bird Flu

One possible way to protect chickens would be to vaccinate them, Brown said. 

But in his conversation with Hannity, Kennedy misleadingly dismissed vaccination as a strategy that could harm human health. “All of my agencies have advised against vaccination of birds because if you vaccinate with a leaky vaccine — in other words, a vaccine that does not provide sterilizing immunity, that does not absolutely protect against the disease — you turn those flocks into mutation factories,” Kennedy said.

Brown said that vaccination would reduce illness in birds and their ability to spread the virus. Bird flu vaccines do not completely prevent infection, and vaccination could favor versions of the virus that aren’t as well targeted by the vaccine. However, there isn’t evidence that vaccination would “generate some monster virus that can infect people,” he said.

Poultry vaccines are available, and countries including Mexico, France, Egypt and China use vaccines against bird flu in poultry. 

The “claim that poultry vaccination will ‘turn those birds into mutant factories’ is incorrect,” virologist Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan said in a social media thread. Vaccination in China against another type of bird flu virus, H7N9, did favor survival of flu genotypes that could evade the vaccine, she said. But researchers found that the “variants that emerged were less adapted to infect humans,” Rasmussen said, and vaccinating the birds “basically stopped human infections.”

“So yes, RNA viruses like flu can mutate & vaccination creates selection pressures driving their evolution,” Rasmussen said. “But that doesn’t turn chickens into mutant factories & reduces the risk to humans.”

There are policy and logistical barriers to vaccinating chickens in the U.S. Brown explained, for instance, that some countries do not allow imports from countries that vaccinate their poultry. The laying industry in the U.S. does not have a substantial export business and is for vaccinating poultry. The meat industry, also called the broiler industry, exports large quantities of chicken and is against vaccination due to the trade embargoes.

As we’ve written, USDA is funding vaccine research. In response to a March 26 question from Forbes about Kennedy’s poultry vaccine comments, asked during an impromptu interview outside the White House, Rollins did not comment specifically but emphasized that multiple agencies would work together to curb bird flu.

Risks of Bird Flu

The CDC and the World Health Organization currently consider the risk of H5N1 bird flu to the general public to be low. However, public health experts still recommend that people take precautions, such as avoiding raw milk and using caution around wild birds and other potentially infected animals. 

Scientists also have emphasized that the risk level of bird flu could change very quickly if the virus changes to more readily infect and spread among humans.

Kennedy — who has advocated deregulating raw milk in the past — left out this context in talking about the food supply. “It’s not transmitted through eggs or through dairy products,” he told Siegel.

“As far as we know, you cannot get it from an egg or milk or meat from an infected animal,” he said to Hannity.

There have been no documented human cases of bird flu in the U.S. resulting from eating eggs, milk or meat. Birds with flu stop laying eggs early in the course of their infection, and the virus isn’t found in high amounts in eggs, Pitesky said. For eggs, “I’d be more concerned about salmonella than I would about avian influenza,” he added.

“Dairy is different,” Pitesky said, saying that raw milk is “dangerous,” both due to the potential presence of bird flu and due to other microbes. In cows, bird flu is found at the highest levels in the udder and milk. Pasteurization kills the bird flu virus, but it has been shown to persist in raw milk and raw milk products.

Cats have died from H5N1 bird flu after drinking raw milk. “If someone is going to tell me, let’s wait until a human dies … I’m not willing to take that chance,” Pitesky said.

Raw meat pet foods have also killed cats.

Kennedy also said that B3.13, the version of bird flu that spread to cows in late 2023, is “not very dangerous to humans,” adding that it “is not something that we’re deeply concerned about.” He said to Siegel that the D1.1 version of the virus, which has been found in wild birds and poultry and also recently spread to cow herds, is “more dangerous.”

To date, the B3.13 genotype has caused mild disease in humans. D1.1 and a related version of the virus, called D1.3, have led to three severe bird flu cases in humans in the U.S., including one death. The severe cases occurred in two people with backyard poultry and one worker who was culling diseased poultry.

However, scientists cautioned against complacency in the response to any version of the virus. “It only needs to acquire a couple of mutations” to become more dangerous to humans, Brown said. “That risk profile might change.” 

“Epidemiologists like me are wary of drawing premature conclusions about severity,” Caitlin Rivers of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece. She cautioned against drawing firm conclusions from small numbers of cases occurring largely in dairy workers, when people with high-risk health conditions or the very old or young might be underrepresented.

“I fear that the apparent mildness of infections in the United States has confounded calls to act more decisively,” Rivers wrote.

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SciCheck Digest

The measles vaccine uses a weakened virus that’s never been shown to spread to others. Samples from the outbreak in Texas also show that a wild-type virus is responsible. Yet, social media posts have falsely claimed that the outbreak is due to a vaccine strain. Without evidence, other posts have blamed immigrants crossing the southern border illegally.

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Full Story

In 2000, following widespread vaccination, the U.S. eliminated measles, a highly contagious disease that can cause serious health complications. With elimination, measles no longer circulates regularly in the country, but outbreaks still occur when travelers are infected abroad and then encounter pockets of susceptible people. Most often, the travelers are unvaccinated and returning to the U.S.

The measles vaccine, which is administered in two doses as part of the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine, is safe and highly effective. To generate robust protection, the vaccine uses a live but weakened version of the measles virus. There’s no evidence that a vaccinated person has ever spread the weakened measles virus to another person.

Despite this, social media posts have incorrectly claimed or suggested that the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas is due to a vaccine strain and that vaccine clinics are the reason why the outbreak has grown.

“‘Texas Measles Outbreak Began in the Vaccinated,’” reads a Feb. 20 X post from the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which was shared on Instagram. “Isn’t it odd that in the same area where there was a mass measles vaccination campaign there is now an outbreak?”

“Measles cases in Gaines County, TX, exploded immediately after health officials handed out free measles vaccines — vaccines that contain live measles virus,” a Facebook post stated. “CDC studies show vaccinated children shed measles virus, which can spread to the unvaccinated. Did the vaccine fuel the outbreak?”

Misinterpreting a scientific finding from the 2015 Disneyland measles outbreak, another Facebook post claimed that “vaccine strain measles … can spread from person to person.” It added, “This is what happens with live virus vaccines.”

The Disneyland claim is similar to one Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the founder and former chairman of Children’s Health Defense who is now the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, has made before, including in a 2019 letter to the prime minister of Samoa. That year, the island nation experienced a large measles outbreak after vaccination rates fell perilously low, in part due to misinformation propagated by Children’s Health Defense. In the letter, Kennedy referenced the California outbreak to incorrectly posit that Samoan children who died of measles may have succumbed to a vaccine strain of the virus.

Even though the source of the measles importation is not yet known, posts have also made unsubstantiated claims that the Texas outbreak was sparked by immigrants illegally crossing the southern border.

No Evidence the Measles Vaccine Ever Transmits Virus

Because the measles vaccine is a live vaccine, it’s theoretically possible that it could in rare cases cause infections that then spread the vaccine virus. This would be most likely in an immunocompromised person whose immune system is not robust enough to respond to even the weakened virus and gets sick. Research does show that for some vaccinated individuals, the virus or parts of it can be found in small amounts in urine or respiratory secretions, as we’ve noted before.

But the vaccine is not recommended for immunocompromised people. And evidence of this so-called vaccine shedding is not the same as evidence of transmission. After many decades and billions of vaccinations, there is no indication that the vaccine virus is transmitted.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us when we addressed this concern last year, not only is there “no history” of a measles outbreak ever occurring as a result of the vaccine, but even a single transmission of the vaccine virus to another person has “never been proven.”

A 2016 systematic review that included more than 770 scientific articles determined that there have been “no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission of the measles vaccine virus.”

Multiple experts also reiterated to PolitiFact last month that the vaccine does not pose a transmission risk. 

The claim that the current outbreak began with or expanded due to vaccination is contradicted by several other lines of evidence as well.

Lara Anton, a press officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told us in late February, when these claims first circulated, that all 30 samples the department genotyped and had results for showed the measles virus was the wild-type D8 strain, which circulates in many parts of the world. This included the first cases. 

The first case in the Texas outbreak was unvaccinated, Anton said, along with many others. As of March 25, there have been 327 cases, of which only two have been in vaccinated people. The remainder are in people who are unvaccinated or have an unknown vaccination status.

In neighboring New Mexico, there have been 43 cases as of March 25. Of those, 31 were in unvaccinated people, eight were in people with unknown vaccination status and four were in people who had received one or more vaccine doses.

“The New Mexico Department of Health has no evidence of a measles outbreak beginning with a person that has been vaccinated,” David Morgan, a public information officer for the department, told us in an email. He added that CDC genotype testing shows that the measles strain found in New Mexico cases is the same one as in Texas and “that the New Mexico outbreak is not caused by the vaccine.” (Although the New Mexico health department told us it considers the cases in the two states to be a single regional outbreak, there isn’t yet a direct epidemiological link between any of the New Mexico cases and a Texas case.)

Oklahoma has also now reported nine measles cases (seven confirmed and two probable) in the northeastern part of the state, all in unvaccinated people. The initial cases “reported exposure to the measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico,” according to the state’s Department of Health.

Kansas, too, has identified 23 measles cases in the southwest part of the state as of March 26, with a suspected link to the cases in Texas and New Mexico. Only one of the cases is in a person who has been fully vaccinated for their age.

All of this is consistent with how measles outbreaks occur in the U.S. The outbreak was first identified in January in undervaccinated Mennonite communities in Gaines County, Texas, where many children are home schooled or attend smaller private schools and are not vaccinated.

Even in the public schools there, two of the three districts in the county had kindergarten MMR vaccination rates well below the 95% needed to prevent outbreaks in 2023-2024 — including one with fewer than half of students vaccinated. (Overall, the vast majority of parents vaccinate their children against measles, but when unvaccinated people are clustered together in the same area, a measles introduction can lead to large outbreaks.)

Notably, the measles outbreak has also led to the first measles death in the U.S. in a decade, in an otherwise healthy child — something there’s no evidence the vaccine strain could do. Another person in New Mexico also tested positive for measles after death.

“There’s no data and the biological plausibility of it being a vaccine strain … it’s just not even in the cards,” Dr. Michael Mina, a former Harvard School of Public Health professor who studied measles, told us.

Given all this, vaccination clinics are not a plausible source of measles. It’s also completely expected to see clinics pop up precisely when cases are continuing to rise because vaccination is an important tool for stopping the spread of measles. Vaccination, however, does not provide immediate protection, nor do enough people necessarily go to the clinics to get vaccinated to stop the spread of an outbreak, so it’s common to continue to see clinics as an outbreak develops. (Local health officials in West Texas have said that there hasn’t been much demand for vaccines.)

Uncommonly, vaccination can temporarily contribute to the case numbers if someone has a reaction to the vaccine that looks similar enough to measles to be counted as a case. This is not the same, however, as the vaccine causing a real case of measles. 

The one Facebook post, for example, pointed to the 2015 Disneyland outbreak, incorrectly claiming that “73 of the 194 cases were determined to be vaccine strain measles.” But as Science Feedback has explained, the post was likely misinterpreting a 2017 paper that discussed methods for distinguishing between “measles cases and vaccine reactions to avoid unnecessary outbreak response measures such as case isolation and contact investigations.”

The paper did not say that 73 of 194 measles cases in that outbreak were caused by the vaccine. Rather, the paper referred to sequences and suspected cases. In other words, precisely because vaccine reactions are not infectious and do not require the same public health response, it is useful to quickly differentiate between those instances and a bona fide measles case.

Indeed, by early March, there initially had been five measles cases among vaccinated people in the Texas outbreak count. That tally is now down to two. One case was removed, Anton said, because it was “reclassified as a vaccine reaction and not a case.” She said the state does additional testing when someone develops symptoms within six to 21 days of being vaccinated to check whether it’s a measles case or a vaccine reaction.

Two other cases were changed to being unvaccinated since the vaccinations had occurred after being exposed to measles. The individuals had received a first MMR dose a day or two before becoming symptomatic, Anton said. It’s recommended that unvaccinated people who have measles exposure get the vaccine within 72 hours to either prevent infection or reduce illness severity, but the prophylaxis does not always work.

Original Measles Source Unknown

Although it’s no surprise that measles is spreading in an undervaccinated community, it’s not known how measles first infected people in Gaines County. The first measles case of the outbreak had not traveled internationally, according to the Texas health department.

People online have taken advantage of this information vacuum, blaming “Biden’s open borders” and illegal immigration.

“If the vaccines worked and it was eradicated, where did it come from?” asked one Threads post from last month, misunderstanding the difference between elimination and eradication, the latter of which means a disease is no longer present anywhere in the world. “Hmm. In Texas, mind you. Right near the border. Right where people are coming over, unvaccinated, but yet it’s the Americans you’re worried about??” 

As we said, it’s not known how measles made its way to Texas. However, it’s worth noting that the cases are in the northwestern part of the state and not particularly close to the border. There’s no evidence at this time that people in the country illegally are responsible, PolitiFact has written.

Measles importations usually occur when U.S. residents return from visiting places where measles is common. To a lesser extent, foreign travelers introduce the disease.

Mina told us that it’s possible measles could have originated in Mexico, but Europe is a more typical source. The countries with the highest number of reported measles cases are generally in Europe, Africa and Asia — not the Americas, according to World Health Organization data.

Last November, the Pan American Health Organization reverified that Brazil was measles-free, restoring measles elimination status — first given in 2016 — to the entire Americas region.

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Source: FactCheck

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As fallout from a Trump administration group chat about a military attack in Yemen continues to unfold, some Democrats are saying the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist in the chat goes beyond incompetence — they say it was criminal.

Legal experts on national security issues say Democrats may have a point, that a case could be made that the chat violated a provision of the Espionage Act. But they say it is highly unlikely such a prosecution would be initiated by the Trump administration against one of its own.

Speculation about culpability for the chat that included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and whether any of the Trump administration officials involved in the chat should face any consequences continues to percolate on Capitol Hill. The chat between top administration national security officials took place on Signal, a private encrypted messaging app. Goldberg reported on March 24 that he had received a connection request through the app from National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who then added him to the chat.

On March 26, after several administration officials insisted the information shared in the chat was not classified, the Atlantic published more of the messages. In one of them, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to provide a timeline for impending U.S. military strikes in Yemen on March 15.

Department of Defense regulations specifically prohibit use of the app to share “non-public DoD information.”

“Unmanaged ‘messaging apps,’ including any app with a chat feature, regardless of the primary function, are NOT authorized to access, transmit, process non-public DoD information. This includes but is not limited to messaging, gaming, and social media apps. (i.e., iMessage, WhatsApps, Signal),” according to a 2023 DoD memo. NPR reported that just days after the Signal chat on March 15, the Pentagon issued a warning that a “vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application” and that “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the use of Signal for the chat was “a mistake,” and President Donald Trump said that Waltz — who took “full responsibility” for the inadvertent inclusion of Goldberg in the chat — “has learned a lesson.” But Democrats say that’s not enough. Some have called for a formal investigation. On March 25, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent Trump a letter calling on him to fire Hegseth “immediately.”

Some leading Democrats have gone even further, saying the chat was illegal or that its participants ought to be prosecuted.

• “This is blatantly illegal and dangerous beyond belief,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted on X on March 24. “Our national security is in the hands of complete amateurs.”

• “I am horrified by reports that our most senior national security officials, including the heads of multiple agencies, shared sensitive and almost certainly classified information via a commercial messaging application, including imminent war plans,” Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement on March 24. “If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way.”

• “At this moment, the White House and Secretary Hegseth are trying desperately to underplay a extraordinary blunder,” Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a press conference on March 25. “We cannot overstate how serious of a disaster it is. If an American service member texted classified information about an active military operation to an unknown number on an unclassified app, they would be dismissed, investigated and prosecuted.”

• “Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally – that would normally involve a jail sentence,” Sen. Chris Coons said in an X post that appears to have since been deleted.

Warren’s press office pointed us to stories that suggest participants in the Signal exchange may have violated a part of the Espionage Act that makes it illegal to inadvertently share “through gross negligence” sensitive national security information.

The section of the law related to the handling of defense information states: “Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense” and “through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed … Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

Kevin Carroll, a lawyer who specializes in national security litigation and previously worked as a CIA officer, told us in a phone interview that the Signal chat was “100%” a violation of that law.

“In a society of laws, the FBI director would read this in the Atlantic Monthly, and … tell the FBI Washington field office to start an investigation of people, and the investigation would be managed by the counterespionage section of the national security division” in the Department of Justice, Carroll said. “And there’s just no question, zero question, that in any administration other than this, that is what would happen.”

“It’s absolutely the kind of thing where if Hegseth and others were junior military personnel, they would absolutely be court-martialed,” Carroll said. “If they were civilians, they’d absolutely be prosecuted by the counter espionage section of the Justice Department. … Hegseth and these other guys would absolutely be sent to prison if we were living in a society of laws, which we’re no longer living in.”

In a press conference on March 26, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who participated in the chat — said that while “obviously someone made a mistake” by adding a journalist to the chat group, he was assured by the Pentagon that “none of the information on there at any point threatened the operation or the lives of our servicemen. And, in fact, it was a very successful operation.”

The same day, Hegseth posted on X, “So, let’s me get this straight. The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information. Those are some really shitty war plans.”

According to the Atlantic, two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing in Yemen, Hegseth shared this with the chat group:

• TIME NOW (1144ET): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w Centcom we are a GO for mission launch.
• 1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
• “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”
• “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
• “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
• “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

For Hegseth to claim that “the impending target and time and method of a manned aircraft attacking something is not classified is preposterous,” Carroll said. And in any case, he said, the information need not to have been marked as classified to run afoul of the Espionage Act.

“It’s obviously national defense information,” Carroll said. “So that’s the controlling criteria: Is it or is it not national defense information that could be helpful to an adversary.”

“Yes, it’s possible that the Espionage Act was violated here,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor who teaches criminal law at Stanford University, concurred in an email. “That depends on two things: first, whether the information carelessly disclosed to Jeffrey Goldberg was ‘information relating to the national defense’ within the meaning of the statute, and second, whether the information was provided to Jeffrey Goldberg through gross negligence.

“The first requirement is probably satisfied,” Sklansky said. “Courts generally treat information as falling within the protection of this statute if it relates to military facilities or activities, and if it is ‘closely held’ by the government, as opposed to being made generally available to the public. The information posted on the Signal chats appears to qualify.

“So the question comes down to whether one or more of the officials participating in the chat exhibited gross negligence in the handling of this information–in other words, whether they departed egregiously from the standard of care that would be expected,” Sklansky said. “That’s hard to assess definitively without knowing more about how all this happened, but there certainly are grounds for suspecting that gross negligence was involved. If the case were prosecuted, this would be a question for the jury.”

But neither Sklansky nor Carroll thinks any charges will be filed against anyone involved in the Signal chat.

“It is highly unlikely that this case will be criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted, because that would be the job of federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents, and the Trump Administration has, to put it mildly, shown little interest in holding itself to account for violations of the law,” Sklansky said.

Carroll put it more bluntly: “It would be more likely that a Jim Crow South sheriff would prosecute a murder by the Klan than that [FBI Director] Kash Patel and [U.S. Attorney General] Pam Bondi are going to investigate this.”

Trump was asked in a White House meeting on March 25 if he planned to investigate the matter.

“It’s not really an FBI thing,” Trump said. “It’s really something having to do with security — security like will somebody be able to break in? Are people able to break into conversations? And if that’s true, we’re going to have to find some other form of device. … But we’ll look into it.” Trump said he asked Waltz “to immediately study that and find out.”

In a press briefing on March 26, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the National Security Council, the White House counsel’s office and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team” were looking into the issue. “Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat, again, to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt said.

There’s another legal issue being debated about the use of Signal, which allows messages to be deleted after a set amount of time. Messages in the chat in question were set to be automatically deleted in four weeks.

Federal open-records laws, including the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act, require records to be kept of all communication involving official government business, Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, told NextGov in February.

According to the National Archives and Records Administration: “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” Guidance from NARA in 2015 stated, “Employees create Federal records when they conduct agency business using personal electronic messaging accounts or devices. This is the case whether or not agencies allow employees to use personal accounts or devices to conduct agency business. This is true for all Federal employees regardless of status.”

An update of the federal records laws in 2014 allows federal employees “using a non-official electronic messaging account” to provide records of those communications to federal archivists within 20 days. So as Josh Gerstein wrote for Politico on March 25, “That means the officials involved in these discussions on Signal still have time to comply since these messages came about 10 days ago.”

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President Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on lowering egg prices, which increased significantly toward the end of the term of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.

Where do prices stand now? What caused them to spike last year?

Here, we answer those and other questions about the cost of the popular food item.

Are egg prices going up or down?

That depends on which prices you’re talking about.

In remarks on March 16, Trump said that when he began his second term in January, the price of “eggs were through the roof,” but now “are down 35% over a short period of time.” Vice President JD Vance also talked about declining prices on March 14, saying, “Egg prices are lower than they were when we took office.”

What neither the president nor vice president made clear is that they were referring to wholesale prices, which is how much retailers pay to farmers and other egg producers to procure eggs to sell in their stores.

In its March 14 Egg Markets Review, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that average national wholesale prices for graded, loose, white large shell eggs declined to $4.15 per dozen – down roughly 39% from $6.85 per dozen on March 7. By March 21, average prices for those eggs, which had been as high as $8.17 on March 3, had dropped further to $3.27, the USDA said.

Before Trump took office, average wholesale prices rose from $1.07 as of Jan. 5, 2024, to $5.87 as of Jan. 17, 2025.

But during the campaign, Trump seemed to be focused on lowering prices for consumers — not retailers. So far, it’s not clear whether prices have gone down much for grocery shoppers. We won’t have March data on retail prices until April.

In February, retail prices paid by consumers were still increasing, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last month, the nationwide average price for a dozen grade A white eggs was about $5.90 – up more than 19% from $4.95 in January, the previous average price record in the U.S.

The USDA’s March 21 report on egg markets said that, just in time for the Easter holiday, “consumers are slowly beginning to see downward price adjustments.” Although, “it remains to be seen if the recent price drops will be sufficiently reflected in store shelves to encourage price-weary consumers to not limit their holiday celebrations,” the report said.

Some economists have said that retailers may not lower egg prices for consumers until current store inventories run out, or until retailers can recoup some of their lost profits.

Generally, consumer prices for eggs have been trending up since the fall of 2023. Current wholesale prices are also still higher than they have been on average in past years.

What caused egg prices to increase?

Many economists say the primary reason is the highly pathogenic avian influenza – caused by the H5N1 virus – that has been spreading among poultry, dairy cows and wild animals in the U.S. since January 2022. What is now the largest bird flu outbreak since 2015 has caused an egg shortage, as tens of millions of egg-producing hens have had to be killed to prevent further spread of the virus.

As of March 20, more than 168 million birds had been affected in total, according to USDA data. Over 30 million birds from commercial egg layer flocks have been lost in 2025 alone.

The diminished egg supply, coupled with consistently high consumer demand, led to price increases. There was a similar spike in prices in 2022 and early 2023, during the first months of the outbreak, when average retail egg prices reached a then-high of $4.82 per dozen.

Inflation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic played a role as well.

“Inflation is another, if less dramatic, factor driving up egg prices,” Bernt Nelson, an economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation lobby, wrote in a March 11 analysis. “While inflation has slowed over the last couple of years, it’s important to remember inflation is a measure of growth. Slowing inflation doesn’t mean prices are going down, it means they are getting expensive more slowly.”

On top of making eggs more expensive in grocery stores, inflation “also raises the cost of everything it takes to produce eggs on the farm and get them on grocery store shelves,” Nelson said. That includes the cost of replacing chickens that are bred to produce eggs, he said.

Is price gouging happening?

Farm Action and Food & Water Watch are two advocacy organizations that have alleged that corporations are making huge profits by intentionally keeping supply low and prices high.

In a March 7 post, Farm Action said: “While avian flu has been cited as the primary driver of skyrocketing egg prices, its actual impact on production has been minimal. Instead, dominant egg producers—particularly Cal-Maine Foods—have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power. The slow recovery in flock size, despite historically high prices, further suggests coordinated efforts to restrict supply and sustain inflated prices.”

The Wall Street Journal and others reported in early March that the Department of Justice opened an investigation to determine if egg prices were being manipulated by large producers.

But Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, said that there is a much simpler explanation for why prices have remained high: supply and demand.

“[Y]ou don’t need shadowy conspiracies of egg producers to understand the dynamics of egg-flation in the United States,” he wrote in a March 14 commentary piece for the Cato Institute. “Those same theories were trotted out in 2022–23 during the last big increase in egg prices, with many on the political left blaming a conspiracy of egg producers and corporate greed for high egg prices. That argument was wrong then, as we know, because egg prices quickly fell from almost $5 per dozen in January 2023 down to $2 per dozen in summer 2023. This change wasn’t because egg producers suddenly got less greedy: It’s because the supply shock of the major avian flu outbreaks ended.”

Horpedahl continued, “All you need to explain the price fluctuations of eggs is good old supply and demand. Avian flu is the biggest challenge recently, with around 68 million egg-laying chickens being affected in the past year, with 44 million of those in just the prior three months (December 2024 to February 2025). The USDA also tells us that there are 378.5 million egg-laying chickens in the US, so over 11 percent of the total supply has been reduced in a very short time.”

And, he said, “because so many consumers are willing to keep buying eggs as the price rises, the price has to rise a lot in response to an 11 percent reduction in supply and still have the market clear—which happens when enough buyers have decided they don’t need the good anymore.”

What is the Trump administration doing to address high prices?

On Feb. 26, the USDA announced a $1 billion, “five-pronged strategy” focusing on biosecurity to minimize outbreaks, relief for farmers, vaccine research and regulation reductions.

The department said that up to $500 million would be used to expand wildlife security measures, including free biosecurity audits to egg-producing facilities to protect flocks from virus transmission from wild birds. The plan also calls for up to $400 million to be used to help farmers speed up the chicken repopulation process, and as much as $100 million could go to exploring potential vaccines and therapeutics that may protect chickens from future outbreaks.

In addition, the USDA said that it would explore temporarily importing egg products to increase the domestic supply. The department already has reached import agreements with Turkey and South Korea.

Is the Trump administration responsible for lower wholesale prices?

A White House post on March 21 mentioned several “resounding wins” that were attributed to Trump’s “economic agenda.” The first item highlighted on the list: “Wholesale egg prices dropped for the third straight week — down more than 50% since President Trump took office.”

Before that, on March 12, the president said from the Oval Office, “We have a great secretary of agriculture, and we did a lot of things that got the cost of eggs down very substantially.”

But it’s not clear that the decrease can be credited to the administration’s policies.

The USDA said in its March 14 report that wholesale prices had gone down because “no significant outbreaks” of the bird flu were reported in March, “rapidly improving” the supply situation. The report also said that high retail prices had weakened consumer demand for eggs, which also helped with store inventories.

And when the USDA’s plan was announced last month, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that the administration’s strategy was not an immediate fix.

“This five-point strategy won’t erase the problem overnight, but we’re confident that it will restore stability to the egg market over the next three to six months,” she wrote in a Feb. 26 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

Furthermore, the Des Moines Register reported that, in a March 20 call with reporters, Rollins acknowledged that prices for consumers could remain high for some time.

“While calling lower wholesale prices a move ‘in the right direction,’ Rollins said grocery store prices could, in fact, continue climbing, given increased demand ahead of the upcoming Easter holiday,” the newspaper said about her remarks. “In addition, she noted that the spring migration of wild birds is imminent, bringing the threat of increased bird flu outbreaks, the main reason for the egg-price runup.”

“While [wholesale] prices are exponentially down, and we’re really, really encouraged by that, there’s always a possibility that prices could tick back up,” Rollins said, according to the Register.

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