A judge on Monday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to admit around 12,000 refugees into the United States, a blow to the government’s efforts to reshape America’s immigration policy.

The order clarifies the limits imposed by an appeals court ruling, which allowed the Trump administration to suspend the refugee admissions system, but said it must admit people already granted refugee status with travel plans to the United States.

The Trump administration argued at a hearing last week that it should only have to admit 160 refugees who were scheduled to travel within two weeks of an executive order in January halting the system.

But US District Judge Jamal Whitehead overruled the claim on Monday, saying “the government’s interpretation is, to put it mildly, ‘interpretive jiggerypokery’ of the highest order.

“It requires not just reading between the lines” of the appeal decision “but hallucinating new text that simply is not there,” Whitehead wrote in his order.

Whitehead had originally blocked Trump’s executive order halting refugee admissions, ruling in February that it likely violated the 1980 Refugee Act.

But his decision was overruled by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals a month later.

“Had the Ninth Circuit intended to impose a two-week limitation — one that would reduce the protected population from about 12,000 to 160 individuals — it would have done so explicitly,” Whitehead wrote.

“This Court will not entertain the government’s result-oriented rewriting of a judicial order that clearly says what it says,” he added.

The lawsuit had been brought by Jewish refugee non-profit HIAS, Christian group Church World Service, Lutheran Community Services Northwest, and a number of individuals.

Those nonprofits said in their February lawsuit that several people who had been about to travel, having sold all their belongings in their own country, were abruptly left in limbo by Trump’s order.

Refugee resettlement had been one of the few legal routes to eventual US citizenship and had been embraced by former president Joe Biden, who expanded eligibility for the program to include people affected by climate change.

Trump’s White House campaign was marked by vitriol about immigrants.

He has also pushed a vigorous program of deportations, with highly publicised military flights taking handcuffed people to countries in Latin America.

AFP

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) may free social media influencer Martins Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan on Tuesday.

it was gathered that there are plans to formally charge him to court on Thursday.

A senior official within the anti-graft agency, who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed the development on Monday, noting that while Otse remains in custody, he has not yet been formally arraigned.

His legal representative, Deji Adeyanju, who confirmed Otse’s arrest on X, said a team of policemen arrested VDM along with his friend, C Park.

Scores of youths on Monday took to the streets of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, to protest the arrest of the activist.

The protesters, who marched from the headquarters of EFCC to the premises of a commercial bank where he was reportedly arrested, held placards with inscriptions such as “Release Very Dark Man,” and “Seyi Tinubu, Are You Involved?,” among others.

They described VDM’s arrest and detention as illegal and demanded transparency from the authorities as they vowed to take their grievance to the Nigerian Human Rights Commission, in the Maitama district of the nation’s capital.

Nation

There were increased concerns over the implementation of Nigeria’s 2025 budget, weekend, as oil price dropped further to $59 per barrel from more than $70 per barrel, the lowest this year.

This is about 15.7 percent lower than this year’s peak price of over $70 per barrel.

Funding of the budget was benchmarked on $75 per barrel and more than two million bpd, including condensate. Also, in its April 2025 Monthly Oil Report, the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, NUPRC, said the nation’s March 2025 oil output, including condensate dropped marginally to 1.6 million bpd from 1.7 million bpd in February, showing more than 300,000 bpd below the budget benchmark.

Oil prices have slumped since last Wednesday when President Donald Trump of the United States announced sweeping tariffs, expected to raise the effective U.S. tariff rate to its highest level in more than a century.

Also, checks by Vanguard indicated that the global oil market was negatively impacted, due to increased production and export from many nations even as the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, and its allies, popularly known as OPEC+, move to phase out their voluntary oil output cuts by ramping up output in May by 411,000 barrels per day. In a telephone interview with Vanguard, yesterday, the National President of Oil and Gas Service Providers Association of Nigeria, OGSPAN, Mazi Colman Obasi, said: “The oil market has become very volatile in recent times, due to factors beyond Nigeria. The nation needs to start looking beyond crude oil to generate adequate foreign exchange.”

Similarly, the Chief Executive Officer of Petroleum Price NG, Olatide Jeremiah, said: “We have a major drop in crude oil prices, which is capable of affecting the execution of the nation’s 2025 budget.”

On his part, the Chief Executive Officer, CEO, Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, NMDPRA, Farouk Ahmed, had said: “As consumers, we are happy that the price is coming down, but as a nation, it’s not good for our economy because our revenue inflow is also impacted.

“Most importantly, what is even destabilising the market is inconsistencies in the way President Trump also sends his policies. He moves today. Tomorrow, he reverses. So, it’s been challenging to predict the next level.

“Recently, as we all know, the global oil market, not only oil market, but the global economy has been a bit volatile, in the sense of the new American government’s policy of tariffs, not only targeted at China but the whole countries across the world.

Investors and traders in not only the oil and gas industry but in general economies of the world are moving left and right to the extent that some are doing day trading.

That means you do your trading today. You close by the end of today because you never know what tomorrow’s policy will drive the market into.

“So, the crude oil and petrol products market continues to have a downward trajectory because of these inconsistencies and policies of the government of United States, and the key aspect of it is the aspiration of the American President to ensure that the crude oil pricing, or the crude oil price come down to maybe below $50 a barrel, that’s why he encourages more exploration in his country.”

He also, said: “We are happy as consumers of the derivatives of product pricing that the price is coming down, but when you look at it globally as a nation, it’s not good for our economy because our revenue inflow is also impacted.

“If the crude oil price, like what happened some Fridays ago, where it dropped in one day from about $73 a barrel to $60, you can see that in terms of our crude oil production, our revenue is impacted severely.

“This volatility will continue because as recently as yesterday, when President Trump again exempted some sectors from tariff, particularly to China, like in terms of vehicular tariffing, you saw the market again started to go up.”