| This week, the U.S. DOGE Service gained access to extraordinarily detailed data about undocumented immigrants, President Donald Trump’s defense secretary came under fire, the Supreme Court heard a major religious-rights case, and new polls suggested that Trump is as unpopular as ever. Here’s what happened — and we’ll bring you more Friday, because the amount of news from the Trump administration could not be contained by just a single newsletter. Trump officials may know where millions of immigrants live As the Trump administration continues to face challenges to its deportation plans, DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, got approval to access a highly sensitive dataset that contains the addresses of millions of immigrants, The Washington Post reported this week. It’s a huge win for Trump officials. The Post has reported they’ve been mining everything from the Social Security Administration to Medicare to tax information to job and housing data to find out where undocumented immigrants are living and working — often leading to contentious fights with agency officials. This latest dataset, from the Justice Department, also contains any case histories immigrants may have, which could provide Trump officials with reasons to cite when deporting migrants. “It’s every record of every interaction immigrants have had with the U.S. government in any way,” a government official told The Post. Legal experts raised concerns that all of the access DOGE has could violate the privacy of Americans, even the data purportedly just on immigrants. Denise Gilman, who leads the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, told me that even if administration officials frame this as a way to target undocumented immigrants, it’s a slippery slope. “This is an easy pathway for depriving citizens of rights, because when the government is tracking or collecting huge amounts of data, the government is not going to be distinguishing between a U.S. citizen and noncitizens. They are necessarily going to be looking at U.S. citizens’ data, as well.” Supreme Court seems open to a major expansion of parental rights in schools The Supreme Court seems likely to let families opt out of lessons with LGBTQ+ books in public schools, The Post’s Ann E. Marimow reports. She says it could be “a significant expansion of the long-standing practice of allowing opt-outs for reproductive health classes,” and one that public educators have warned could have nationwide implications that could disrupt the classroom. Parents in a liberal suburb outside D.C. said they should be allowed to pull their children out of lessons with LGBTQ+ characters — just like they can for sex education. Several justices questioned what was unreasonable about allowing parents to have a choice; that included Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who has been highly critical of the court legalizing same-sex marriage. “What is the big deal about allowing them to opt out of this?” Alito asked. Public education leaders and experts warned this could effectively turn public schools into a choose-your-own-curriculum situation that disrupts classes. “No one is obligated to send their kids to public school, but if the court rules that religious parents can micromanage the education of their children in public school even where the effect is to undermine the school’s ability to do the job it needs to do for all of its students,” Georgetown Law Professor David Cole told Ann, “that will seriously undermine the ability of public schools to do the work they need to do.” “It will be like, you know, opt-outs for everyone,” liberal justice Elena Kagan said in arguments. The court heard the case this week and is expected to issue its decision on it before the term ends this summer. Hegseth is on the defensive about Signal and his leadership Trump’s defense secretary has never led a major organization, let alone one as large as the U.S. military, something that gave even some Republican senators pause before they confirmed him. And this week, reporting from the New York Times, The Post, NBC News and others underscored the potential problems with that: Pete Hegseth used an app available to anyone to discuss more sensitive military attack plans, including information that had been shared with him on a classified channel. “Hegseth’s usage of Signal has become a growing crisis for the Pentagon,” The Post’s Dan Lamothe reported, revealing Hegseth installed Signal on a computer in his Pentagon office. Trump has stood by Hegseth just like he did for his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who recently set up a Signal chat to discuss bombings and accidentally invited a journalist to join it. But Signal isn’t the only drama Hegseth is facing. Top aides have either left or been fired by Hegseth recently. One loyal aide who left of his own accord said that the secretary is struggling to lead the Defense Department. “The last month has been a full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon — and it’s becoming a real problem for the administration,” he wrote in a Politico op-ed at the start of the week. Suzanne Spaulding, a former CIA official who is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview this month that officials using Signal in this way makes Americans less safe, in part because it makes it less likely that informants in dangerous countries will want to share secrets with the U.S. “I do think they need to impose some significant consequences,” Spaulding said. “A more junior member would be fired.” Polls show Trump’s approval falling, including on immigration Multiple new polls, including a new one from Pew Research, found that a majority of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the job as president, of his tariffs, how he’s handling the economy more broadly, his cuts to federal agencies, how Elon Musk is handling DOGE, how much the president is governing by executive order and even how he’s handling immigration — which has been Trump’s strongest issue for nearly a decade. The polls show Trump’s approval ratings are dropping as he institutes tariffs and challenges the courts over his controversial deportations, such as the mistaken one of Kilmar Abrego García. A month ago, more Americans approved of Trump’s job performance than disapproved, an Economist/YouGov poll found. Now, it’s the opposite: Fifty-four percent disapprove, and just 41 percent approve. That same poll finds that over the past two weeks, a majority of Americans have gone from approving to disapproving of how Trump handles immigration. “If I were advising this White House,” Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee official told me last week, “I would tell them to get this guy back from El Salvador yesterday, because the longer that’s out there, the more the public is reminded the Trump administration admitted a mistake.” Trump’s opponents see reason to hope in these numbers. William Kristol, a conservative and prominent Trump critic, wrote this week in his newsletter for the Bulwark: “Could we be entering a period when the public sees that Trump is both wrong and weak?” | 
