Trump Administration Live Updates: White House to Host Executives for First ‘Crypto Summit’

“There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal,” Mr. Trump told Maria Bartiromo in an interview aired Friday on Fox Business. “I would prefer to make a deal, because I’m not looking to hurt Iran. They’re great people.”

The move is a sharp pivot for Mr. Trump, who in 2018 withdrew the United States from a nuclear deal with Iran, unraveling the signature foreign policy achievement of his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Iran did not immediately provide a response.

In the interview, Mr. Trump described the letter as saying, “I hope you’re going to negotiate because it’s going to be a lot better for Iran.”

“If we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing for them,” he said, adding: “The other alternative is we have to do something because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump talked more broadly about his desire to see the world’s countries eliminate their nuclear weapons. He said he hoped to negotiate denuclearization efforts with China and Russia as well.

“It would great if everybody would get rid of their nuclear weapons,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.

With his latest social media post, President Trump is reopening the attacks on South Africa that he started last month over what he says is the government’s mistreatment of white farmers. His post reiterates what he already put in an executive order, that South African farmers can seek refuge in the United States.

But the slight twist is that in this post, he did not specify that they needed to be Afrikaner — a white ethnic minority — as he did in the order. So the question is whether the many Black farmers in South Africa can also move to the United States as refugees.

President Trump said he sent a letter this week to Iranian leaders in an attempt to negotiate a new nuclear deal. “I’ve written them a letter saying I hope you’re going to negotiate, because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing for them,” he said in an interview that aired Friday morning on the Fox Business channel.

During his first term as president, Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear accord that Iran had struck with the Obama administration. Mr. Trump still claims that was a major victory, but most outside analysts say it backfired.

Cryptocurrency prices are down the day after President Trump signed an executive order to create a national stockpile of Bitcoin and other digital currencies. The order disappointed some investors who expected a more forceful commitment by the government to becoming a big buyer of crypto.

The order called for federal agencies to study how to buy more Bitcoin in a “budget neutral” way, potentially adding to a stockpile made up of billions of dollars in crypto that the government has seized in legal cases over the years. Trump plans to hold a summit with crypto executives at the White House today.

The judges, who are part of the administrative court system under the Justice Department rather than part of the judicial branch, make decisions about asylum claims and have the power to order someone removed from the country. Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise to hire more of them to address a growing backlog that can make cases stretch for years.

A loss of immigration judges is likely to undercut Mr. Trump’s efforts to deport millions of immigrants, since delays in adjudicating immigration claims contribute to the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States while waiting for their cases to be resolved.

“Donald Trump ran for office promising to boost deportations, but as president, his administration’s policies are actually decreasing the number of immigration judges and judge teams who hold deportation hearings,” Matthew Biggs, the president of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, said in a statement on Thursday.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On average, each judge handles 500 to 700 cases a year. The court has a backlog of more than 3.7 million cases, according to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The backlog is a byproduct of an immigration system under strain for decades. Since it can be years before an asylum seeker, for example, appears in court, many immigrants start putting down roots and growing their families in communities across the country.

“Immigration judges are hard to replace given their specialized knowledge and legal experience,” Mr. Biggs said. “It takes at least a year to recruit, hire, train and conduct a background check on a new judge.”

Both Democrats and Republicans have supported adding more judges to the system. The administration has also fired judges on the Board of Immigration Appeals.

“This makes no sense,” Mr. Biggs said.

The Justice Department last month issued a memo stating that immigration judges could be fired at will, suggesting more cuts could be coming.

Judge Beryl A. Howell, appointed to the Federal District Court in Washington by President Barack Obama, excoriated Mr. Trump’s vision of unchecked authority in her 36-page ruling, referring to a declaration he had made during the 2024 campaign that he would be a dictator on “Day 1” and to an image that the White House shared of Mr. Trump wearing the crown of a king.

“A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution” Judge Howell wrote.

She later continued that “an American president is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here.”

Ms. Wilcox did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Her ouster, in January, had the effect of paralyzing the N.L.R.B., which hears labor disputes, because it left the board with just two members — a Republican and a Democrat — and, by federal law, the board cannot act without a minimum of three members.

She swiftly filed a lawsuit, one of several cases that could wind up before the Supreme Court as a test of the reaches of executive authority.

In a lengthy hearing in the case on Wednesday, before the ruling, Judge Howell made a joke about the case’s possible trajectory, saying that she understood that “this court is merely a speed bump for you all to get to the Supreme Court.”

The order also calls for federal agencies to develop strategies to buy more Bitcoin, the most popular digital currency, as long as those purchases do not generate extra costs for taxpayers.

“This Executive Order underscores President Trump’s commitment to making the U.S. the ‘crypto capital of the world,’” said David Sacks, the White House’s crypto and A.I. policy czar, in a post on social media. He said the United States would not sell any Bitcoin in the reserve, which he likened to “a digital Fort Knox.”

Since Mr. Trump took office in January, his administration has moved rapidly to elevate the crypto industry, a volatile sector that had battled with federal regulators for years. The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped lawsuits against two of the biggest U.S. crypto companies and halted investigations into several others. And on Friday, Mr. Trump is scheduled to host crypto executives at the White House for a first-of-its-kind “crypto summit.”

Mr. Trump has a personal stake in the success of the crypto industry, creating conflicts of interests that have raised alarms with government ethics experts. Last year he started a business, World Liberty Financial, that offers a cryptocurrency called WLFI. Just days before his inauguration, he also began selling a so-called memecoin — a type of cryptocurrency tied to an online joke or a celebrity figure.

The notion of a U.S. crypto reserve gained traction last year as Mr. Trump embraced the industry on the campaign trail. Proponents argued that an investment in Bitcoin would help the government chip away at the $36 trillion national debt, and ensure that the United States remained dominant in a hypothetical future where the global economy runs on cryptocurrencies.

But skeptics said the plan seemed calculated to enrich crypto executives who already owned large amounts of Bitcoin by lifting its price. They argued that it was dangerous to link the nation’s economic future to a highly volatile asset.

At a conference in Nashville in July, Mr. Trump gave a speech to a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts and vowed to establish a national stockpile. He doubled down on that promise last weekend, posting on social media that he intended to create a reserve consisting of Bitcoin and other lesser-known cryptocurrencies, such as Solana, Cardano, Ether and XRP.

That plan drew criticism from some crypto executives, who argued that the only asset in a national reserve should be Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.

Under the order, the government will create a separate stockpile of digital assets other than Bitcoin. But it will include only coins that were acquired in criminal or civil seizures, and the government will not move to buy any cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin.

Crypto investors celebrated the announcement on social media, calling it a “historic day” and a “massive win” for the country.

“By holding Bitcoin and other digital assets for the long term, the White House is taking a future-forward approach,” Nathan McCauley, the chief executive of the crypto firm Anchorage Digital, said in a statement. “Expect this move to catalyze crypto adoption among more governments and institutions.”

Speaking at a tech conference on Wednesday, Elon Musk added Amtrak to the list of government-funded services on his chopping board, calling the federally owned railroad “embarrassing” and saying that privatization was the only way to fix it.

“If you go to China, you get epic bullet train rides,” said Mr. Musk, the billionaire who is working to dismantle the federal bureaucracy under the Trump administration. “They’re amazing.”

China’s trains, which are subsidized by the communist government and have produced large public debts, link every large Chinese city and run at speeds of at least 186 miles per hour. Amtrak’s northeastern Acela, the fastest American passenger train, tops out at about 150 m.p.h.

“And you come back to America, and you’re like, ‘Amtrak is a sad situation,’” Mr. Musk said at the conference, which was organized by the bank Morgan Stanley. “If you’re coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail. It’s going to leave you with a very bad impression of America.”

Mr. Musk, who has criticized an ambitious effort to build a high-speed rail system in California, has also called for the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service, a concept that President Trump has floated. The president has not called for privatizing Amtrak, and the White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday.

Amtrak has always lost money, uses antiquated technology — some of it a century old or more — and frustrates its riders with chronic delays on its brittle tracks. In one evening last spring, delays on Amtrak’s lines into New York City produced a domino effect that sent ride-hail service prices soaring. On another day, Amtrak delays snarled New Jersey Transit commuter trains and halted train travel as far away as Boston.

But Amtrak is also a vital cog in the U.S. travel system that keeps people off roads and out of airports, and that connects rural towns and small cities across the nation at affordable prices. Congress would have to approve any move to privatize Amtrak, which operates like a for-profit company.

Amtrak responded to Mr. Musk by saying that its “business performance is strong” and that it looked forward to working with Mr. Trump to create a “world-class passenger rail system.” Amtrak said it expected to make a profit for the first time under Mr. Trump.

Demand for Amtrak is up. In the last fiscal year, it served a record 32.8 million customers and invested more than $4 billion in improvements to its creaky infrastructure and aging fleet, according to the rail service.

On Wednesday, the railroad published a white paper arguing against privatization, saying, “It is not clear what problem Amtrak privatization proposals are intended to solve.”

Ridership in the Northeast Corridor has soared since the coronavirus pandemic, it said, and the Acela is expected to introduce new trains that will travel 160 m.p.h. this year. In the 2024 fiscal year, Amtrak reported record revenue.

The white paper dismissed arguments that privatization would improve service, noting that the British government is taking control of its passenger rail system after three “disastrous decades of privatization.”

Amtrak has long been under scrutiny from Republican presidents. President George W. Bush’s administration contemplated privatizing it. President Ronald Reagan went so far as to directly ask Congress to sell it. And in his first term, Mr. Trump proposed deep cuts.

Congress has stood by Amtrak. During the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a champion of the railroad after years of commuting from Delaware to the nation’s capital, lawmakers authorized more than $20 billion in spending for modernization.

Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the conservative Cato Institute and a sharp critic of Amtrak’s spending, said he had long expected Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to target the railroad.

Still, Mr. DeHaven said Mr. Musk would need to overcome the “political whims” of lawmakers — including Republicans from rural areas — who support money-losing, long-distance routes even as the popular northeastern lines net profits.

“It simply makes more economic sense to use roads, flying or even the emergence of intercity bus travel,” Mr. DeHaven said, adding, “Now the question is: How serious is the administration about it? And if they are serious, how serious are they with working with Congress to do something about it?”

Spokeswomen for Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican majority leader, and Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Louis Thompson, a member of the Transportation Department team that developed Amtrak and who later supervised its budget, said Mr. Musk’s proposal was “not possible.”

He said Americans did not expect subways or buses to make money, and they should not expect anything more from Amtrak. Achieving a profit has not been one of the rail system’s stated goals.

Amtrak provides a service that is “inherently not profitable,” Mr. Thompson said, adding that “this is the uniform model for most rail passenger service worldwide.”

If it isn’t profitable, Mr. Thompson said, “you can’t privatize it.”

The planned meeting was announced just under a week after an Oval Office blowup between the two men in which Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Zelensky as ungrateful for U.S. support and threatened to abandon Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Mr. Trump later paused all military aid to Ukraine.

Since then, Mr. Zelensky has expressed regret in general terms over how that meeting went, and both sides have showed willingness to sign a deal in which the United States would share in revenue from Ukraine’s mineral resources.

“Ukrainian and American teams have resumed work, and we hope that next week we will have a meaningful meeting,” Mr. Zelensky said in a statement on Thursday.

Mr. Zelensky said that Ukraine would send a delegation to meet with “military representatives of countries that are ready to make greater efforts to reliably guarantee security within the framework of ending this war.” He said the meeting was scheduled for Tuesday, but did not specify who would attend.

Russian officials met last month with top Trump officials in Saudi Arabia as Russia has signaled an openness to talks, though it has not said if it would accept a cease-fire or an agreement to end the war.

There remains significant doubt among European leaders as to whether they can serve as the ultimate security backstop for Ukraine if America abandons the war-torn country. The Trump administration suspended military assistance and intelligence sharing with Ukraine this week in a bid to pressure Kyiv to negotiate on its terms, although it has not outlined any specific peace plan.

Outside the White House on Thursday, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, told reporters that the negotiations would take place in Saudi Arabia.

“We are now in discussions to coordinate a meeting with the Ukrainians in Riyadh or even potentially Jeddah; the city is moving around a little bit,” Mr. Witkoff said. He added, “The idea is to get down a framework for a peace agreement and an initial cease-fire as well.”

Mr. Witkoff said Mr. Zelensky’s comments after the Oval Office showdown, praising the strength of Mr. Trump’s leadership, had helped Ukraine’s standing with America. Last Friday, Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance lectured the Ukrainian president for not showing enough gratitude for the United States’ more than $100 billion in military support.

“He felt that Zelensky’s letter is a very positive first step,” Mr. Witkoff said, adding: “President Zelensky has demonstrated that he’s intent on that good-faith path back. He’s apologized. He’s said he’s grateful. He said he wants to work toward peace.” Mr. Witkoff added that he believed Mr. Zelensky was willing to sign a minerals deal to create a U.S.-controlled fund that would receive revenue from Ukraine’s natural resources.

At next week’s meeting, Mr. Zelensky said the Ukrainians would insist on a number of commitments from Russia to test whether a lasting peace could ultimately be reached. Those demands include Russian pledges not to attack Ukraine’s energy or other civilian infrastructure; a truce for missiles, bombs and long-range drones; and no military operations in the Black Sea.

“Ukrainians truly want peace, but not at the cost of giving up Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said. “The real question for any negotiations is whether Russia is capable of giving up the war.”

Moscow has given no public indication it would accept any truce, cease-fire or end to the war it launched three years ago. But Mr. Witkoff said Russia had shown openness to continuing discussions.

Of the talks with Ukraine, Mr. Witkoff said: “Hopefully that will be a good signal to the Russians because they have been proactive too in wanting to get something done here.”

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump noted that France was willing to put soldiers in Ukraine “for safety reasons”; the country has suggested assembling a European peacekeeping force after the war’s end. He also said that U.S. negotiators had “made a lot of progress with Ukraine and a lot of progress with Russia over the last couple of days.”

He also expressed optimism about an eventual peace agreement.

“I think what’s going to happen is Ukraine wants to make a deal because I don’t think they have a choice,” Mr. Trump said. “I also think that Russia wants to make a deal because in a certain different way — a different way that only I know, only I know — they have no choice.”

One of the officials said the proposed red list currently consists mainly of countries whose nationals were restricted under versions of Mr. Trump’s previous travel ban. Last time, those countries included Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

The draft tentatively proposes adding Afghanistan to the group whose citizens would be categorically barred from entering the United States, according to one of the officials.

Shawn VanDiver, the head of a nonprofit group that helps resettle Afghans who worked with U.S. forces during the war, said he learned from officials that Afghan citizens would be subject to a complete travel ban.

On Wednesday morning, the group put out an emergency statement titled “Afghan Travel Ban coming” that urged Afghans with valid visas who are currently outside the United States to come back immediately. Later on Wednesday, Reuters also reported that Afghanistan would be recommended for a complete travel ban.

The recommendations also have an “orange” group of countries whose access would be curtailed but not completely barred. For example, only certain types of visas might be issued — like for relatively affluent people traveling for business, but not immigrants or tourists — and the length of visas could be shortened. Applicants would be required to have in-person interviews.

Countries in a third or “yellow” category would be given 60 days to change some perceived deficiencies or they would be added to one of the two other lists, the officials said.

Those issues could include failing to share with the United States information about incoming travelers, purportedly inadequate security practices for issuing passports, or the selling of citizenship to people from banned countries, as a loophole around the restrictions.

It is not clear whether people with existing visas would be exempted from the ban, or if those visas would be canceled. Many Afghans have been approved for resettlement in the United States as refugees or under special visas granted to people who assisted the United States during the war. It is also not clear whether green card holders, who are approved for permanent residency, would be affected.

About 200,000 Afghans in their native country and 51,000 outside, half in Pakistan, are in the official pipeline to come to the United States, with tens of thousands ready to travel and with housing in the works or already arranged, said Mr. VanDiver, a Navy veteran who is president of AfghanEvac, the nonprofit group.

“This is the most vetted population that there has ever been,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “It is crazy how much these people go through.”

He added that many veterans of the war in Afghanistan who had voted for Mr. Trump now felt fury as word of a possible travel ban has spread. “They’re saying, ‘This isn’t what I voted for,’” he said. “The deal was you need to bring our wartime allies home. And they’re just betraying these folks.”

In one of the many executive orders he issued on Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump ordered the State Department to start identifying countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries.”

Mr. Trump gave the State Department 60 days to finish a report for the White House with such a list — meaning it is due in about two weeks. He directed the Justice and Homeland Security Departments and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to work with the State Department on the project.

The State Department press office said in a statement that it was following Mr. Trump’s executive order and was “committed to protecting our nation and its citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process,” but it also declined to specifically comment on internal deliberations.

The State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs was assigned to take the lead in coming up with a first draft, according to the people familiar with the matter, but the lists for each of the three categories are still in flux.

In addition to security specialists at the other departments and intelligence agencies, regional bureaus at the State Department and U.S. embassies around the world are reviewing the draft. They are providing comment about whether deficiencies identified in particular countries are accurate or whether there is a policy argument — like not risking disruption to cooperation on some other priority — to reconsider including some.

Mr. Trump’s policy of categorically barring entry to citizens of certain countries traces back to his campaign call, in December 2015, for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

After he took office in January 2017, Mr. Trump issued what became the first of an iterative series of bans. They initially focused on a set of Muslim-majority countries but later also encompassed other low-income and nonwhite countries, including in Africa.

The first travel ban caused chaos, in part because Mr. Trump issued it without warning. Some people learned that they had been barred from entry only after they arrived in the United States. Major protests were held at airports against the new administration.

Courts blocked the government from enforcing the first two versions, but the Supreme Court eventually permitted a rewritten ban to take effect.

When Joseph R. Biden Jr. became president in January 2021, he rescinded Mr. Trump’s travel bans as one of his first acts and returned to a system of individualized vetting for people from those countries.

Mr. Biden’s proclamation labeled the travel bans “just plain wrong,” calling them “a stain on our national conscience” and “inconsistent with our long history of welcoming people of all faiths and no faith at all.” The actions, Mr. Biden said, also “undermined our national security” by jeopardizing “our global network of alliances and partnerships.”

In his executive order in January setting in motion the restoration and expansion of travel bans, Mr. Trump said he was acting to protect American citizens “from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.”

Thursday’s takeover of the small foundation, which has about 55 employees and an annual budget of about $45 million, came after a weekslong standoff between administration officials and the foundation’s leaders. The leaders refused to succumb to the efforts of Mr. Marocco and the Department of Government of Efficiency team, overseen by Elon Musk, to assume control of their functions, dismiss staff members and install Mr. Marocco as the acting leader.

Barely an hour after the officials arrived on Thursday with federal marshals, the foundation’s president, Ward Brehm, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to prevent Mr. Marocco from ousting him and usurping control.

“Without this court’s immediate intervention, defendants will continue their tactics and strong-arm their way into” the foundation, Mr. Brehm’s complaint said, predicting that “within days, the damage that they do will be irreparable.”

He asked the judge to issue injunctions preventing the Trump administration from removing him from his post and from installing Mr. Marocco or any other person in his place, and a court order stating that Mr. Brehm is the rightful president of the foundation.

The White House disputed the accusation that it had done anything unlawful, insisting that President Trump had ordered the staff to be reduced to a statutory minimum and appointed Mr. Marocco to be the acting chairman of the board.

“Entitled, rogue bureaucrats have no authority to defy executive orders by the president of the United States or physically bar his representatives from entering the agencies they run,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman.

Representatives for Mr. Musk’s team and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Before it became a target of the Trump administration, the U.S. African Development Foundation distributed federal grants of up to $250,000 directly to grass-roots enterprises and social entrepreneurs in Africa. But on Feb. 19, President Trump issued an executive order specifically naming the foundation as one of a handful of entities he had decided were “unnecessary” — prompting Mr. Musk’s team to begin trying to cull the bulk of its programs, over the objections of the staff and the board.

Mr. Brehm’s suit accuses officials working with Mr. Musk of initially trying to enter the foundation under false pretenses and flout statutory requirements preventing them from liquidating the board and slashing the foundation’s funding. Mr. Brehm and other members of the board refused to defer to their authority, according to the complaint, even reinstalling Mr. Brehm as the foundation’s president after Mr. Marocco appointed himself to the role in an acting capacity.

On Wednesday, the test of wills came to a head when Mr. Marocco and at least two of Mr. Musk’s deputies — Jacob Altik, a lawyer, and Ethan Shaotran, a software engineer — were denied entry to the offices, according to Mr. Brehm and video captured at the foundation. Mr. Marocco threatened to return with U.S. Marshals and the Secret Service if they were not allowed access.

Mr. Altik and Mr. Shaotran did not respond to requests for comment. But both were seen entering the building that houses the foundation on Thursday, alongside other members of Mr. Musk’s team, including Nate Cavanaugh. Mr. Brehm’s lawsuit said Mr. Cavanaugh was another engineer who had been closely involved in the effort to assume control of the foundation in the weeks since Mr. Trump issued his executive order. Mr. Cavanaugh did not respond to a request for comment.

The standoff on Wednesday lasted about an hour, according to media reports. On Thursday, it appeared that DOGE representatives were still in the foundation’s offices several hours after they arrived.

Eric Lee, Nicholas Nehamas and Aishvarya Kavi contributed reporting.