Posts by Newspaper Staff

President Donald Trump said his tariffs on foreign imports are fueling the nation’s economic growth as he prays for a favorable U.S. Supreme Court decision.
“The TARIFFS are responsible for the GREAT USA Economic Numbers JUST ANNOUNCED…AND THEY WILL ONLY GET BETTER!” Trump wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. “Also, NO INFLATION & GREAT NATIONAL SECURITY. Pray for the U.S. Supreme Court!!!”
Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser, gave a more detailed explanation defending Trump’s use of tariffs in an op-ed published Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal.
“The tariff debate remains distorted by two opposing misconceptions: that tariffs would instantly resurrect American industry, that they would immediately crash the economy and ignite runaway inflation,” Navarro wrote. “The experience of 2025 has disproved both. The economy didn’t collapse, but neither did a manufacturing renaissance appear on demand. These outcomes should surprise no one who understands how industrial capacity is built.”
Navarro said the resurrection would take longer. He also said the import duties wouldn’t produce inflation.
“The related slogan – ‘Who pays the tariff?’ – is equally misleading. Importers remit duties at the border, but who actually pays is determined by bargaining power, not paperwork,” he wrote. “In real markets, the burden falls on whoever can’t afford to lose access to the U.S. consumer.”
The Congressional Budget Office changed some of its tariff projections after noting that foreign businesses were picking up about 5% of the cost of the tariffs through lower prices.
“We had previously projected that foreign exporters would not reduce their prices to offset increased tariff rates. We now project that foreign exporters will reduce their prices by an amount equivalent to 5% of the increase in tariff rate,” according to a CBO report from November.
A recent Goldman Sachs report found that U.S. consumers will pay 55% of the costs resulting from Trump’s tariffs, U.S. businesses will pay 22%, and foreign exporters will pay 18%. That report said that most tariffs will be passed on to American consumers as businesses adjust prices in the coming months.
In November, the Supreme Court sharply questioned Trump’s authority to impose tariffs under a 1977 law that he has used to justify the bulk of the tariffs announced on April 2, which he dubbed “Liberation Day” for U.S. trade. The cases challenging Trump’s tariff authority remain pending before the nation’s highest court.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called the tariffs “taxes on Americans,” which he said had long been a “core power of Congress,” not the president.
Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families and pay down the national debt.
Economists, businesses and some public companies have warned that tariffs will raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed Texas another win in a lawsuit brought by Chinese nationals challenging a state law banning foreign adversaries from purchasing land in Texas.
The law, which went into effect, Sept. 1, remains in effect.
Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 17, filed by state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham. It prohibits the purchase of certain private property in Texas by governmental entities, companies and individuals that are domiciled in a country named in three recent Annual Threat Assessment reports published by the Director of National Security. It applies to agricultural, commercial, industrial and residential properties as well as mines, quarries, minerals and standing timber; it includes civil and criminal penalties.
The bill took several years to pass after multiple hearings and a Chinese Communist Party campaign against it, in which reporting by The Center Square was highlighted.
This year, under House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, the bill not only passed but additional measures were included targeting countries of foreign concern and their operatives as well members of transnational criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua and other organizations the Trump administration designated as foreign terrorist organizations this year.
“This is very simple. Hostile foreign adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, as well as foreign terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua, must not be allowed to own land in Texas,” Abbott said when signing the bill, The Center Square reported.
Two Chinese nationals, Peng Wang and Quinlin Li, backed by the New Jersey-based Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, sued in July to stop the law from going into effect. They sued in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas arguing the law is unconstitutional and discriminatory.
In response, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. In August, Judge Charles Eskridge agreed, dismissing their case without prejudice.
Wang and Li next appealed to the Fifth Circuit. In September, the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance also filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas Austin Division, also arguing the law is unconstitutional.
This month, a Fifth Circuit panel of three judges affirmed Judge Eskridge’s dismissal, arguing that Wang and Li lacked standing and “did not demonstrate a credible threat of enforcement of the law.”
In response to the ruling, state Rep. Cole Heffner, R-Mount Pleasant, who cosponsored SB 17 in the Texas House, said the Fifth Circuit judges “delivered a major win for the people of Texas.” The goal of the law is “to ensure foreign adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea cannot buy up Texas land – and this decision keeps those protections firmly in place.”
An issue that arose in the lawsuit stemmed from the F-1 student visa program.
Wang has lived in Texas for 16 years and is pursuing a Masters of Divinity degree at a seminary in Fort Worth through an F-1 student visa. Li, who entered the U.S. on an F-1 student visa, recently graduated from Texas A&M with an engineering degree. She then applied for an H-1B visa, lives in Austin and works as a water/wastewater treatment plant design engineer for a private company, according to court records.
Wastewater plants in Texas have been the target of cyberhackers. This year, Abbott signed cybercrime and counter-espionage bills into law to address threats posed by the CCP, The Center Square reported.
Wang argued that the student visa program requires him to leave the U.S. when it expires, meaning he could return to China and be banned from buying property under the law. The Fifth Circuit judges replied that when his visa expires he could leave the U.S. and “move to Bolivia,” “Botswana,” or “Berlin” and his claim that the law discriminated against him was unsubstantiated.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced changes to the F-1 visa system arguing foreign nationals have taken advantage of the system becoming “forever students.” Changes include limiting the program to the duration of academic studies not to exceed four years, implementing additional vetting measures, and enforcing removal of those who overstay their visas.
So far this year, the State Department has revoked 8,000 student visas, it told The Center Square, more than twice the number revoked in 2024.

When the U.S. Department of Justice released 30,000 more pages of files on Jeffrey Epstein, it also dropped an unusual warning to Americans: some of the files contain false allegations.
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the DOJ posted on X on Tuesday.
“To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already,” it added. “Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims.”
DOJ is in the process of releasing all documents related to sex trafficker Epstein and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell after a legally-binding edict from Congress. The claims Bondi attacked are found within a three-page FBI report from 2020, which stands out from the rest of the trove for its allegations against Trump.
The report documents a call made on Oct. 27, 2020, to the FBI from a man who used to be a limo driver in the 1990s.
In the report, the man recalled how in 1997 he started dating a woman with whom he previously had a son with. The woman told him about a lady who had “invited her daughters to a fancy hotel and met Donald Trump and some of his friends.” The woman also often asked the man how to spell “Ghislaine,” he said, “implying Ghislaine had given her money and would give her additional money if needed.”
On a 1999 Christmas Eve visit to the woman’s house to visit their son, the man talked about his time as a limo driver, including the time in 1995 when he said he drove Trump to the Dallas Fort Worth airport.
He claimed he overheard Trump having a “very concerning” conversation over the phone during the ride, where the name “Jeffrey” was continuously stated and Trump made references to “abusing some girl.”
As he talked about that incident, the man said he noticed a change in one of the people present in the room, whose demeanor went “stone cold.” The person proceeded to tell him that “Donald J. Trump had raped her along with Jeffrey Epstein” and that some girl with a funny name “took me into a fancy hotel or building, that’s how it happened.”
Due to redactions, it is unclear whether the person mentioned was the woman with whom he had a son or one of her daughters previously mentioned in the report.
The man said he advised the person that Christmas Eve to call the police, which she did the next day even after voicing fear that she would be killed for doing so.
On Jan. 10, 2000, the man said he received a call notifying him of her death by a shot to the head, which officers at the scene believed could not have been the suicide that the coroner ruled it to be. The man concluded that he felt “the murder is a cover for Ghislaine.”
Ghislaine is serving a 20-year prison sentence. Epstein died in jail awaiting trial in 2019.
Trump administration officials have dismissed the document as unfounded, questioning why the man waited 20 years to tell the FBI, and then exactly a week before the 2020 General Election between Trump and Joe Biden.
Social media, however, has exploded, with more than 201,000 posts on social media platform X alone gathered under the header “DOJ Releases 30,000 Epstein Pages with Unfounded Trump Claims” only four hours after DOJ’s post.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has already introduced a resolution to take legal action against the DOJ for failing to release all the files on time and heavily redacting many of them.
“The American people deserve full transparency,” Schumer said on X. “This Administration cannot be allowed to hide the truth.”