President Trump is considering an executive action to block Central American migrants from entering the United States, several administration officials told The New York Times on Thursday.

The Times reports that as soon as Tuesday, Trump, citing national security concerns, could issue a proclamation invoking broad presidential powers to block migrants from coming into the country. The administration would also enact new rules making it so migrants who cross the border between ports of entry can no longer claim asylum. Officials stressed to the Times that the plan could be dropped or revamped.

With the midterm elections less than two weeks away, Trump has been playing to his base, claiming that a caravan of several thousand migrants from Central America, now 1,000 miles away from the southern U.S. border, is a threat. No one knows when the caravan will arrive, or how many of the people will try to enter the U.S. Most are from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, citing poverty and violence as the reasons why they left. Kerri Talbot, director of the Immigrant Hub organization, told Politico Trump is attempting to make the migrant caravan major news in order to energize his base and "distract voters from core issues like health care." Catherine Garcia

The Federal Aviation Administration said in a tweet Wednesday that it had found a new flaw in Boeing's grounded 737 Max jets that could delay the return of the once top-selling planes to the air.

The FAA said it discovered the "potential risk" in simulator tests. The regulator did not provide further specifics but said "Boeing must mitigate" the problem. The FAA previously said it could approve by late June changes Boeing made to fix problems suspected of contributing to two fatal crashes in recent months. Airlines once hoped they would be able to return the Boeing 737 Max airliners to service this summer, but the date has been pushed back to later in the year. Harold Maass

President Trump arrived in Japan on Thursday evening, local time, for what is shaping up to be a high-stakes and contentious Group of 20 summit in Osaka. Trump is scheduled to meet one-on-one with nine world leaders, starting with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, but observers are most interested in his meeting Saturday with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump insisted on the meeting and has said if he and Xi don't restart trade talks, he will levy tariffs on the remaining untaxed $300 billion in Chinese imports. China will ask that Trump drop its ban on telecom firm Huawei Technologies and scale back its demands for China to buy even more U.S. exports, The Wall Street Journal reports. The U.S. believes China scuttled the last round of talks in April and is expecting China to make the first move to restart them. Xi, under pressure from nationalists at home, is not expected to offer Trump any large concessions in Japan.

Trump will also meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is in a new trade dispute with Trump's administration, and the president is expected to face pushback from European leaders over his skepticism of climate change. Trump demanded in a tweet that Modi remove reciprocal tariffs on 30 U.S. products, and in an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday, Trump confirmed a report that he is considering withdrawing the U.S. from its foundational treaty with Japan. "If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III ... with our lives and with our treasure," Trump said. "If we're attacked, Japan doesn't have to help us at all" and "can watch it on the Sony television, okay, the attack." Peter Weber

U.S. asylum officers asked the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday to block President Trump's "Remain in Mexico" asylum policy, arguing in a friend-of-the-court brief that Trump's policy of making asylum-seekers stay in Mexico while awaiting their immigration hearing puts migrants in mortal danger, is unnecessary, and is "fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our nation and our international and domestic legal obligations." A lower court put the policy on hold in April, saying it is probably illegal, but the appellate court allowed it to continue during litigation. Trump and Mexico expanded the policy earlier this month at Trump's insistence.

Since January, 12,000 asylum seekers have been returned to Mexico, The Washington Post reports. The 37-page brief, filed by American Federation of Government Employees Local 1924, a union representing 2,500 asylum officers and other federal workers, says that "asylum officers are duty-bound to protect vulnerable asylum seekers from persecution," that "Mexico is simply not safe for Central American asylum seekers," and that the U.S. asylum system is "not, as the administration has claimed, fundamentally broken," but instead "has the foundation and agility necessary to deal with the flow of migrants through our Southern Border."

"The legal filing is an unusual public rebuke of a sitting president by his own employees, and it plunges a highly trained officer corps that typically operates under secrecy into a public legal battle over one of Trump's most prized immigration policies," the Post reports. "Under Trump, the asylum division has become a target of internal ire, often assailed for approving most initial asylum screenings and sending migrants to immigration court for a full hearing." Last week, new acting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services chief Ken Cuccinelli implicitly rebuked the asylum officers in an internal email for being overly generous with asylum screenings. Peter Weber

Marshae Jones, 27, was taken into custody in the Birmingham, Alabama, area on Wednesday after a Jefferson Country grand jury indicted her on manslaughter charges over the death of her unborn child after a December 2018 incident where another woman shot her in the stomach. The woman who had the gun and pulled the trigger, 23-year-old Ebony Jemison, also faced manslaughter charges, but the grand jury declined to indict her so the charges were dismissed, AL.com reports.

Police argued that Jones, five months pregnant, started the fight and was ultimately responsible for the death of her fetus. The altercation was over the father, according to Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid. "The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby," Reid said after the Dec. 4 shooting, outside a Dollar Store. "It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby."

Not everyone agreed with Reid. "The state of Alabama has proven yet again that the moment a person becomes pregnant their sole responsibility is to produce a live, healthy baby and that it considers any action a pregnant person takes that might impede in that live birth to be a criminal act,'' said Amanda Reyes, executive director of the Yellowhammer Fund. "Today, Marshae Jones is being charged with manslaughter for being pregnant and getting shot while engaging in an altercation with a person who had a gun. Tomorrow, it will be another black woman, maybe for having a drink while pregnant. And after that, another, for not obtaining adequate prenatal care." Read more at AL.com. Peter Weber

Ten Democratic presidential hopefuls took the stage in Miami on Wednesday night, and The Late Show thinks you can catch 'em all.

"We are live after the first of two Democratic presidential debates," and "I'm going to tell you all about it — if Bill de Blasio doesn't interrupt me," Stephen Colbert said in his monologue. This debate pitted "Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Beto O'Rourke against seven people angling for MSNBC shows." NBC had some technical difficulties, he added, "but it was an excellent dress rehearsal for tomorrow actual debate."

"The biggest early moment was a linguistic surprise from Beto O'Rourke," Colbert said. "He's either trying to lock up the Hispanic vote, or he's running for embarrassing dad at a Mexican restaurant." He suggested John Delaney was just doing this as a dare from his brother-in-law, Jay Inslee had never set foot in a McDonalds, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) made up her "all foam and no beer" zinger: "If that's a metaphor you frequently use, senator, then, as we say back in South Carolina, 'I'm a shrimp sandwich in a thunder storm.'" Colbert mocked Booker's Spanish, and Beto's, again, and stepped into the fight between Reps. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) and Tim Ryan (Ohio): "Tulsi! Tim! Please don't fight — you're both not going to be president."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was kinder about all the Spanish spoken onstage. "I loved it because I represent the Bronx, there was a lot of Spanglish in the building," she told Colbert. "I thought it was humorous sometimes," but also "a good gesture to the fact that we are a diverse country." As for the candidates, Ocasio-Cortez said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) "knocked it out of the park," Julián Castro "did a phenomenal job tonight," and "Cory Booker did a great job in talking about criminal justice," and "there were some surprises, too," though she didn't name them. She also explained her skepticism of Joe Biden's electability. Watch below. Peter Weber

This past week has shone a spotlight on the deplorable conditions at facilities where the U.S. is holding children seeking asylum in the U.S. "Most of the kids in those overcrowded facilities come from Central America's Northern Triangle countries: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador," Samatha Bee said on Wednesday's Full Frontal. President "Trump and his supporters claim it's fine warehouse them like pallets of generic peanut butter because it's their fault for coming to America. But the truth is, the U.S. is a huge reason they were forced to flee here in the first place."

Bee's history lesson began in Ronald Reagan's 1980s and America's Cold War in Central America, and she focused on El Salvador. "When we stomped out communism, we also stomped out pretty much every thing else. For many civilians, getting the hell out of El Salvador became a matter of life or death," she said. "Many of the migrants ended up in Los Angeles, where some younger Salvadorans would wind up in street gangs," which over time became MS-13. "That's right, President Trump's favorite foreign threat was made in the U.S.A. — unlike his ties and two-thirds of his wives," she said.

And MS-13 didn't didn't turn into today's machete-wielding killers until "the American prison system helped transform them from the juvenile delinquents of the '80s to the violent gang we know today," Bee said. Then, starting in the '90s, the U.S. deported tens of thousands of gang members, "brutalized by American prisons," back to Central America, where they took root and made the Northern Triangle one of the most violent regions in the world, sending civilians feeling north for safety, she said. "It's the circle of life, except death."

"All refugees deserve basic compassion, but we owe a special debt to Central American refugees," Bee said. "At the very least, we own their kids some f---ing toothpaste." There is some NSFW language. Peter Weber