WASHINGTON — It’s not really about the books.

President Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of top officials at the Library of Congress and equally sudden attempt to appoint a slate of loyalists as replacements has instead morphed into an enormous fight over the separation of powers, as the White House tries to wrest control of what has for centuries been a legislative institution.

It’s a power struggle with potentially vast consequences. The Library of Congress not only stores the world’s largest collection of books but also an office overseeing reams of copyrighted material of untold value.

There is a research institute that has long been protected from outside influence. Its servers house extremely sensitive information regarding claims of workplace violations on Capitol Hill, as well as payments and other financial data for the legislative branch’s more than 30,000 employees. There’s even speculation that the whole affair is tied to an ongoing debate over whether big tech companies can use copyrighted material for artificial intelligence systems.

Because of this, the battle over control of the Library of Congress has prompted Republican leaders on Capitol Hill to deliver rare pushback against a president who has pressed to expand the boundaries of his own power to enact his priorities. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other Republicans have been talking with the White House about a potential path to détente.

This all has left the library in a bizarre state of purgatory.

For now, Trump’s choices for interim library leaders — most notably Todd Blanche, a deputy attorney general who had represented the president in his criminal proceedings — have not appeared to challenge the assertion by the library that one of its veteran officials would be the acting head. It would be unheard of for an executive branch official such as Blanche to simultaneously serve in the legislative branch, according to experts.

“This egregious overreach into the legislature by the executive branch is just unwarranted and, we believe, unprecedented,” said New York Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees the Library of Congress.

The controversy began to unfold publicly last week, when Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was fired in a terse email from a White House official. She had just one year left in her 10-year term.

Then this week, Blanche was tapped by the White House to be the interim librarian, and two other Justice Department officials were chosen for other senior library posts. Those officials, Brian Nieves and Paul Perkins, tried unsuccessfully to enter the U.S. Copyright Office on Monday, but left voluntarily after library officials called Capitol Police.

Thune told The Associated Press that Congress was “not entirely” consulted ahead of Trump’s dismissal of Hayden.

Lawmakers want to ensure that “congressional legislative branch equities are protected,” Thune said. He speculated that discussions with the White House to resolve the standoff would bleed into next week.

The White House has said Trump was within his authority to dismiss Hayden, a former head of the library systems in Baltimore. It cited “quite concerning” behavior from Hayden involving diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as well as books for children that the White House found inappropriate.

A copy of virtually every book published in the U.S. is sent to the Copyright Office, then the library decides whether to include it in the main collection. No one under 16 can get a reader card to access the collection.

Existing regulations and past practices call for an acting librarian to come from the Library of Congress’ current ranks if there is a vacancy. But the White House has argued that a law governing federal vacancies applies, even though the 1998 law deals with the executive branch, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

When Nieves and Perkins showed up on Monday, they held a letter that invoked the vacancies law to justify their appointments, according to one of the people.

Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who leads the panel overseeing funding for the Library of Congress, argued that in practice, the librarian is not a legislative branch employee, saying: “It’s an appointment by the president of the United States, because we have to confirm her.”

Yet there is deep concern among lawmakers and aides about any unjustified intrusion of the administration into the Library of Congress and its operations.

Especially worrisome to them is potential meddling with the Congressional Research Service, known as the nonpartisan think tank of Capitol Hill. It fields roughly 75,000 requests from members of Congress every year for research, legal expertise and other information critical for policymaking.

The discussions between lawmakers and the Congressional Research Service are considered so sensitive that they are protected under the speech or debate clause of the Constitution, which shields members of Congress from being questioned -– such as in court -– about official legislative acts.

The service’s “utility and trustworthiness would be substantially undercut if these inquiries were not protected or the Administration sought to shape responses to reflect its priorities,” said Hope O’Keeffe, a former associate general counsel at the Library of Congress.

The library also oversees the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights, which functions as the human resources office of the legislative branch, fielding complaints about harassment, discrimination and other workplace violations. It also stores financial information about legislative branch employees, who include not just those at the Library of Congress, lawmakers and their aides, but employees of the Capitol Police, the Architect of the Capitol and the Government Accountability Office.

Robert Newlen, the principal deputy librarian, told library staffers shortly after Hayden’s firing that he will serve as the acting librarian. He said in a note this week that while the White House had appointed its own acting librarian, “we have not yet received direction from Congress about how to move forward,” indicating that the library was defying Trump’s wishes.

California Sen. Alex Padilla, the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, this week said flatly that Newlen is the acting librarian of Congress. Asked whether Blanche was respecting that, Padilla said, “that’s my understanding.”

But a White House official stressed on Thursday that Trump selected Blanche to be the acting librarian. The official, granted anonymity because of the ongoing private discussions with lawmakers, said Trump chose Blanche because the president is “appointing highly-qualified individuals who are wholeheartedly committed to advancing the America-first agenda.” The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Some suspect that the Copyright Office is the true aim of the administration. Housed in the Library of Congress with a leader chosen by the librarian, the office accepts millions of copies of copyrighted material such as books, artwork and music every year as part of the copyright registration process.

Shortly before the director of the office, Shira Perlmutter, was fired, her office released a report that questioned whether it was legal for the tech industry to use copyrighted material to “train” their artificial intelligence systems. Tech companies contend that doing so is legal when used for educational or research purposes or creating something new. Perlmutter’s report said doing so, in some circumstances, would go beyond established boundaries of fair use when the AI-generated content is competing with creative works made by people.

The material there is extremely valuable. For instance, copyright violation damages for the office’s existing collection — if, for instance, tech companies scraped the material for AI purposes and then later were found liable for copyright infringement — would likely exceed $1.5 trillion, according to a person familiar with the calculations.

Morelle noted that the firing came “one day after, and I doubt there’s any coincidence to this, a report which is in many ways at odds with what Elon Musk wants to do around intellectual property and copyright.” Musk is the billionaire outside adviser for Trump who operates his own AI startup, called xAI. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

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Associated Press writer Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.

DENVER — Tucked deep in the thousand-plus pages of the multitrillion-dollar budget bill making its way through the Republican-controlled U.S. House is a paragraph curtailing a court’s greatest tool for forcing the government to obey its rulings: the power to enforce contempt findings.

It’s unclear whether the bill can pass the House in its current form — it failed in a committee vote Friday — whether the U.S. Senate would preserve the contempt provision or whether courts would uphold it. But the fact that GOP lawmakers are including it shows how much those in power in the nation’s capital are thinking about the consequences of defying judges as the battle between the Trump administration and the courts escalates.

Republican President Donald Trump raised the stakes again Friday when he attacked the U.S. Supreme Court for its ruling barring his administration from quickly resuming deportations under an 18th-century wartime law: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” Trump posted on his social media network, Truth Social.

The most intense skirmishes have come in the lower courts.

One federal judge has found that members of the administration may be liable for contempt after ignoring his order to turn around planes deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Trump’s administration has scoffed at another judge’s ruling that it “facilitate” the return of a man wrongly deported to El Salvador, even though the Supreme Court upheld that decision.

In other cases, the administration has removed immigrants against court orders or had judges find that the administration is not complying with their directives. Dan Bongino, now Trump’s deputy director of the FBI, called on the president to “ignore” a judge’s order in one of Bongino’s final appearances on his talk radio show in February.

“Who’s going to arrest him? The marshals?” Bongino asked, naming the agency that enforces federal judges’ criminal contempt orders. “You guys know who the U.S. Marshals work for? Department of Justice.”

The rhetoric obscures the fact that the administration has complied with the vast majority of court rulings against it, many of them related to Trump’s executive orders. Trump has said multiple times he will comply with orders, even as he attacks by name judges who rule against him.

While skirmishes over whether the federal government is complying with court orders are not unusual, it’s the intensity of the Trump administration’s pushback that is, legal experts say.

“It seems to me they are walking as close to the line as they can, and even stepping over it, in an effort to see how much they can get away with,” said Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor. “It’s what you would expect from a very clever and mischievous child.”

Mike Davis, whose Article III Project pushes for pro-Trump judicial appointments, predicted that Trump will prevail over what he sees as hostile judges.

“The more they do this, the more it’s going to anger the American people, and the chief justice is going to follow the politics on this like he always does,” Davis said.

The clash was the subtext of an unusual Supreme Court session Thursday, the day before the ruling that angered the president. His administration was seeking to stop lower courts from issuing nationwide injunctions barring its initiatives. Previous administrations have also chafed against national orders, and multiple Supreme Court justices have expressed concern that they are overused.

Still, at one point, Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Solicitor General D. John Sauer over his assertion that the administration would not necessarily obey a ruling from an appeals court.

“Really?” asked Barrett, who was nominated to the court by Trump.

Sauer contended that was standard Department of Justice policy and he assured the nation’s highest court the administration would honor its rulings.

Some justices have expressed alarm about whether the administration respects the rule of law.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, both nominated by Democratic presidents, have warned about government disobedience of court orders and threats toward judges. Chief Justice John Roberts, nominated by a Republican president, George W. Bush, issued a statement condemning Trump’s push to impeach James E. Boasberg, the federal judge who found probable cause that the administration committed contempt by ignoring his order on deportations.

Even after the Supreme Court upheld a Maryland judge’s ruling directing the administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the White House account on X said in a post: “he’s NOT coming back.”

Legal experts said the Abrego Garcia case may be heading toward contempt.

U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis has complained of “bad faith” from the administration as she orders reports on what, if anything, it’s doing to comply with her order. But contempt processes are slow and deliberative, and, when the government’s involved, there’s usually a resolution before penalties kick in.

Courts can hold parties to civil litigation or criminal cases in contempt for disobeying their orders. The penalty can take the form of fines or other civil punishments, or even prosecution and jail time, if pursued criminally.

The provision in the Republican budget bill would prohibit courts from enforcing contempt citations for violations of injunctions or temporary restraining orders — the two main types of rulings used to rein in the Trump administration — unless the plaintiffs have paid a bond. That rarely happens when someone sues the government.

In an extensive review of contempt cases involving the government, Yale law professor Nick Parrillo identified only 67 where someone was ultimately found in contempt. That was out of more than 650 cases where contempt was considered against the government. Appellate courts reliably overturned the penalties.

But the higher courts always left open the possibility that the next contempt penalties could stick.

“The courts, for their part, don’t want to find out how far their authority goes,” said David Noll, a Rutgers law professor, “and the executive doesn’t really want to undermine the legal order because the economy and their ability to just get stuff done depends on the law.”

Legal experts are gaming out whether judges could appoint independent prosecutors or be forced to rely on Trump’s Department of Justice. Then there’s the question of whether U.S. marshals would arrest anyone convicted of the offense.

“If you get to the point of asking the marshals to arrest a contemnor, it’s truly uncharted territory,” Noll said.

There’s a second form of contempt that could not be blocked by the Department of Justice –- civil contempt, leading to fines. This may be a more potent tool for judges because it doesn’t rely on federal prosecution and cannot be expunged with a presidential pardon, said Justin Levitt, a department official in the Obama administration who also advised Democratic President Joe Biden.

“Should the courts want, they have the tools to make individuals who plan on defying the courts miserable,” Levitt said, noting that lawyers representing the administration and those taking specific actions to violate orders would be the most at risk.

There are other deterrents courts have outside of contempt.

Judges can stop treating the Justice Department like a trustworthy agency, making it harder for the government to win cases. There were indications in Friday’s Supreme Court order that the majority didn’t trust the administration’s handling of the deportations. And defying courts is deeply unpopular: A recent Pew Research Center poll found that about 8 in 10 Americans say that if a federal court rules a Trump administration action is illegal, the government has to follow the court’s decision and stop its action.

That’s part of the reason the broader picture might not be as dramatic as the fights over a few of the immigration cases, said Vladeck, the Georgetown professor.

“In the majority of these cases, the courts are successfully restraining the executive branch and the executive branch is abiding by their rulings,” he said.

PHILADELPHIA — Twin brothers who were born conjoined recently celebrated their first birthday after undergoing successful separation surgery.

Amari and Javar Ruffin, whose family lives in Philadelphia, were born via cesarean section on Sept. 29, 2023. The brothers — who shared part of their sternum, diaphragm, abdominal wall and liver — weighed a combined 6 pounds.

On Aug. 21, a surgical team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia with more than two dozen specialists, including surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists, nurses, and many others, operated for eight hours to separate the boys. Their abdomens were closed and rebuilt using layers of mesh and plastic surgery techniques.

The boys went home on Oct. 8 to be with their parents, Tim and Shaneka, and their siblings, Kaylum and Anora.

“Seeing them each in their own beds was an indescribable feeling,” Shaneka Ruffin said. “It feels like we are beginning a new journey as a family of six. We are so grateful to CHOP for helping make this day possible and letting us start this next chapter.”

The Ruffins learned the twins were conjoined through a routine ultrasound 12 weeks into the pregnancy. Shaneka Ruffin said it was recommended to her that she terminate her pregnancy. They got a second opinion, and the hospital told them that though the boys had a rare condition, they could be separated successfully.

Conjoined twins occur roughly once in every 35,000-80,000 births. The hospital is one of only a few in the U.S. with expertise in separating them.

PHILADELPHIA — Twin brothers who were born conjoined recently celebrated their first birthday after undergoing successful separation surgery.

Amari and Javar Ruffin, whose family lives in Philadelphia, were born via cesarean section on Sept. 29, 2023. The brothers — who shared part of their sternum, diaphragm, abdominal wall and liver — weighed a combined 6 pounds.

On Aug. 21, a surgical team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia with more than two dozen specialists, including surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists, nurses, and many others, operated for eight hours to separate the boys. Their abdomens were closed and rebuilt using layers of mesh and plastic surgery techniques.

The boys went home on Oct. 8 to be with their parents, Tim and Shaneka, and their siblings, Kaylum and Anora.

“Seeing them each in their own beds was an indescribable feeling,” Shaneka Ruffin said. “It feels like we are beginning a new journey as a family of six. We are so grateful to CHOP for helping make this day possible and letting us start this next chapter.”

The Ruffins learned the twins were conjoined through a routine ultrasound 12 weeks into the pregnancy. Shaneka Ruffin said it was recommended to her that she terminate her pregnancy. They got a second opinion, and the hospital told them that though the boys had a rare condition, they could be separated successfully.

Conjoined twins occur roughly once in every 35,000-80,000 births. The hospital is one of only a few in the U.S. with expertise in separating them.

WASHINGTON — 

Nearly 1,100 migrant families have been separated while being processed at the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego since September, immigrant advocacy groups said in a letter sent Thursday to the Department of Homeland Security that seeks an investigation into the matter.

The separations stem from U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s ongoing practice of releasing high volumes of migrants to street locations around San Diego County without coordinated reception plans, according to the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy and three other groups that signed the letter. As migrant arrivals at the California-Mexico border have increased, Customs and Border Protection has turned to street releases and holding migrants between border walls to reduce the number of people in its short-term facilities.

According to the letter, immigration law group Al Otro Lado documented 1,081 family separations among the hundreds of migrants it serves each day at a border welcome center in San Diego, where it provides legal aid and translation services. Of that total, there were almost 400 separations of spouses and about 200 separations of adult children from the parents they were traveling with, including 43 children between age 18 and 21. Separations of those in other family relationships, such as adult siblings, cousins and common-law partners, make up the remainder of the total.

In at least 39 cases, families remained separated after one or more members were transferred to long-term immigrant detention facilities. In at least two cases, one family member was deported while the others remain in the U.S.

Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

“The trauma families experience during the periods of separation is compounded by CBP’s lack of communication and the near-total opacity of their practices,” states the letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s office of civil rights and civil liberties, which was also signed by the ACLU Foundation of San Diego and Imperial Counties, and Jewish Family Service of San Diego.

To prevent further separations, the organizations are asking Homeland Security to broaden the definition of a family group under agency practice to include parents with adult children, couples without marriage certificates, adult siblings and extended family members. The groups are also asking that Homeland Security agents document all relationships among family groups and ensure families are released together, or to communicate the whereabouts of any family members that aren’t released at the same time.

The letter comes after a federal judge in San Diego approved a court settlement last week that bars widespread separations of parents from their underage children at the U.S.-Mexico border for the next eight years. The settlement stems from a 2018 ACLU lawsuit over the separations, including those that took place under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that led to the prosecutions of migrant parents who crossed the border without authorization.

The settlement doesn’t affect family separations like those documented by Al Otro Lado, which the group believes are undercounted.

An April 20 Customs and Border Protection memo obtained by The Times, which offers guidance on processing family groups, states that Homeland Security is “committed to protecting the unity of families encountered at the border to the extent legally and operationally feasible.”

The guidance included in the memo pertains to parents or guardians with unmarried adult children up to age 25, grandparents with unmarried adult grandchildren up to age 25 and spouses and unmarried adult siblings up to age 25. Agents are required under the guidance to consider any verifiable documentation acknowledging such relationships and to link those individuals as a family group, with the goal of processing them out of custody together.

“If the guidance truly is in furtherance of CBP’s stated commitment to maintaining unity of families, then in practice it should be implemented in a way that allows for families to report and have documented their relationships in accordance with the realities of people who are forced to flee their countries,” said Monika Langarica, an attorney with the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA.

Most separated families said they had informed Customs and Border Protection that they were traveling in a family group, according to the letter, but families were rarely told they would be separated or how to locate their relatives.

In October, Customs and Border Protection detained nearly 30,000 migrants near San Diego, up from nearly 18,000 in October 2022, according to agency figures.

Meghan Zavala, data and policy analyst for Al Otro Lado, said these kinds of separations aren’t unique to San Diego.

But Priscilla Orta, a supervising attorney at Brownsville, Texas-based Lawyers for Good Government, which provides legal aid to migrants, said separations aren’t common in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, noting that Customs and Border Protection drops people off at designated locations. Few migrants stay overnight because even if family members are processed separately, there is little delay before they reunite at a welcome center. Spouses are often processed together, she said.

“If you came here you’d have absolutely no idea that thousands of people were processed daily,” Orta said. “There’s zero chaos.”

Just under half of the families recently separated at the border near San Diego are from Colombia, with smaller numbers from China, Brazil, Afghanistan and Peru, according to Al Otro Lado. Some separations have lasted hours or days, while others documented by the organization have lasted more than a month.

Separations involving families who speak languages other than Spanish are particularly difficult, causing advocates to scramble to find interpreters, Zavala said. Some families spend days in crowded San Diego shelters waiting to see whether their relatives will be released, she said.

“Our organization along with others continue to be very strained in our capacity and yet are given all these additional hurdles,” Zavala said. “We try to do our best to get information for these families who are quite desperate to know where the person they were traveling with is now being held.”

In one case documented by Al Otro Lado, a husband and wife from Colombia were taken into Border Patrol custody in September. The husband was released just across the border from Tijuana in San Diego’s San Ysidro district without his wife, who had been transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana and was deported before she could speak with a local attorney.

In another case, a husband and wife were separated during Customs and Border Protection processing. The husband was released without his wife at the San Ysidro Transit Center and returned to the center for weeks, hoping to find her. He later learned she had been transferred to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas, where she experienced medical complications. They were separated for 49 days.

Julieta, 38, who asked that only her first name be used out of fear for her safety, told The Times she arrived in Tijuana from Colombia with her 19-year-old son.

She said they turned themselves over to border agents on Nov. 22. Two days later, she was led to a bus and dropped off at a shelter, with no idea as to her son’s whereabouts.

Five days after that, Julieta’s son was dropped off at the same shelter and they reunited. She said she knew they would be detained at the border, but didn’t anticipate that they would be separated.

“It’s hell,” she said. “Not knowing if your son is safe, if he is alive, if something happened to him. All you can do is pray to God.”