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The iconic cherry trees decorating the nation’s capital will hit peak bloom between March 29 and April 1, the National Park Service predicted Thursday.

The agency declares peak bloom when 70% of the Yoshino blossoms around the Tidal Basin, the reservoir on the National Mall, have opened.

Kevin Griess, superintendent of National Mall and Memorial Parks, said the weather could affect peak bloom, noting this winter has been colder.

“Every spring, the National Cherry Blossom Festival does more than welcome a new season,” David Moran, chair of the board of directors for the National Cherry Blossom Festival, said at a news conference Thursday. “It brings a renewed sense of joy and vitality to our entire region.”

The annual festival commemorates the 3,000 cherry trees Japan gifted to the United States as a symbol of friendship in 1912.

Japan will gift an additional 250 cherry trees this year in honor of the United States’ 250th anniversary celebration, Masatsugu Odaira, minister for public affairs for the Embassy of Japan, said Thursday.

This year’s festival will run from March 20 to April 12 and will feature an opening ceremony of traditional Japanese sword dancers, a parade along Constitution Avenue, a “pink tie” fashion show at Union Station and a street party at Navy Yard.

The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, which independently estimates peak bloom, predicted it could happen between April 3 and April 7, potentially more than a week later than last year. The last time peak bloom happened this late was April 5, 2018.

After the Texas Ranger knocked on her door and delivered the numbing news, Rachel Reyes realized she hadn’t thought to ask who shot her son. She figured it had been another Ranger that killed Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, after he allegedly failed to comply with a law enforcement officer’s orders.

But a week later, Reyes read an article from a local news outlet in South Padre Island that confused her. The police in that small, South Texas beach community were saying there had been an officer-involved shooting and a man was dead, but a separate, unnamed agency was responsible. Reyes called the Ranger who notified her and was now investigating the shooting: Who shot Ruben?

A Department of Homeland Security agent assigned to immigration enforcement was responsible, the Ranger said.

Reyes didn’t go public, instead deciding to await the results of the investigation by the Rangers, who are part of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The March 15, 2025, killing of Martinez, a U.S. citizen, drew almost no public attention, even as protests erupted over the January shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis — Renée Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse. South Padre Island Police put out a news release on Martinez but did not identify the agency responsible for his death. A two-sentence police report described Martinez striking a federal agent with his vehicle but did not mention the shooting that allegedly happened a moment later.

Texas officials, citing their ongoing investigation, declined to release footage of the incident. DHS did not publicly acknowledge that one of its agents had fatally shot Martinez until last month, when a lawsuit over a year-old public records request unearthed an internal narrative of the shooting by a Homeland Security Investigations agent. The request by American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog group, sought internal emails from the agency containing a variety of phrases and words, including “use of force.”

Martinez is now the first known American citizen shot to death by federal immigration agents during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Some Texas lawmakers are expressing alarm at the lack of transparency, demanding a public hearing and immediate release of all body-camera footage and other records. They have also raised concerns about conflicting information between DHS’s account of the shooting and a witness statement describing what happened.

“When government uses its most serious power, the power to take a life, the facts cannot remain hidden,” said State Rep. Ray Lopez, a Democrat whose district includes the city of San Antonio, where Reyes lives. “A young Texan lost his life, and the public was left without full clarity for nearly a year. That is not about politics. It is about trust.”

Michael Sierra-Arévalo, an associate professor at the University of Texas who studies policing and use of force, said DHS’s failure to promptly disclose the shooting to the public fits a pattern during the Trump administration, in which officials have at times taken extraordinary measures to defend and shield immigration officers who use deadly force from scrutiny.

“This was very much known to local authorities. What they were burying was that it happened with this particular agency,” Sierra-Arévalo said. “The ability for federal law enforcement to not be subject to the same sort of oversight that local law enforcement experiences when they’re involved in these incidents in collaboration with local police underscores the danger of federal police operating with practically unchecked power.”

Many states, including Texas, have passed laws requiring police departments to report shootings to oversight agencies, but there is no federal statute mandating a similar protocol.

A spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which includes Homeland Security Investigations, said the department’s policy requires that agents report every use-of-force incident. They are then reviewed “in accordance with agency policy, procedure, and guidelines.” Shootings, the spokesperson said, are first examined by “an appropriate law enforcement agency” and then ICE conducts an internal review.

A DHS spokesperson declined to explain why the shooting of Martinez was not publicly acknowledged by the department for 11 months. The agency documents released through the records request state that Martinez’s car struck an agent and lifted him onto the hood of Martinez’s vehicle. In a statement that followed that disclosure, a DHS spokesperson said Martinez “intentionally ran over” the agent and that another agent shot and killed him.

Those words shocked Reyes — they seemed disconnected from the young man she raised, from the story Martinez’s friend and a witness to the shooting told her, and from the narrative the Ranger shared in her living room in San Antonio, several hours after the killing. He said Martinez had tapped an officer with his car and was shot multiple times in response. No one was injured, Reyes said the Ranger told her.

The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to requests for comment on Reyes’s recollection of the Ranger’s account.

Reyes, a 48-year-old mother of three and a nurse for a medical insurance company, said she voted for Trump in 2024 and “doesn’t have a strong position” on immigration enforcement. But she does not like how officials have handled her son’s death.

“I don’t really have anything negative to say about Trump. He wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger — it was the department. How they’re handling it is irresponsible.”

Conflicting narratives

When she first learned of Martinez’s death, Reyes assumed her son had been in a car accident.

“Ruben was really nice,” Reyes said, “and he didn’t have enemies or make enemies or get in fights, so I would never in my wildest dreams imagine that someone would want to hurt him.”

He’d left the house at 2 p.m. without telling his mother where he was going. He’d just turned 23, and later, she realized, had likely kept his plans from her because she wouldn’t have approved of him celebrating his birthday in South Padre Island, which has a reputation for rowdy nighttime partying during spring break.

Joshua Orta, a friend who was in the passenger seat when Martinez was killed, later told Reyes they’d gone to a bar. Driving to their next destination, they approached the scene of a traffic accident where first responders including the South Padre Police and Homeland Security agents were directing traffic. A Ranger saw an open container of alcohol in the vehicle, Orta said. The Ranger questioned the men about it, but ultimately told them to move along.

But other officers began shouting, Orta said. Reyes said the Ranger told her that Martinez failed to follow instructions from the officers to stop his car, the car “tapped” an officer and another officer opened fire, killing Martinez.

Reyes asked if the officer was OK. The officer was “shaken up” but not injured, the Ranger said, according to Reyes.

Orta, in a written statement provided to lawyers for Reyes, disagreed with that account: “I was present, and I state clearly and without hesitation that Ruben did not hit anyone,” Orta wrote. “The trooper seemed to be trying to get in front of the car, like he wasn’t moving out of the way when we tried to turn around and leave like the police officer told us to do.”

The DHS narrative paints a different picture.

Officers and agents commanded Martinez to exit the vehicle, according to the documents released via FOIA, and Martinez “accelerated forward, striking a HSI special agent who wound up on the hood of the vehicle.” Then an agent shot Martinez through his driver’s side window.

Martinez was transported to Valley Regional Medical Center in Brownsville, Texas, and pronounced dead, according to the documents.

“The special agent who was struck was taken to a hospital for treatment of a knee injury and was later released,” the internal DHS report states.

Orta had been planning to participate in the family’s legal fight for transparency and civil compensation, lawyers for Martinez’s mother said, but was killed in February in an unrelated, fiery vehicle crash in San Antonio.

Reyes said the description of her son, paired with DHS statements following the shooting, have been difficult to stomach without seeing the evidence for herself.

“I was told there’s no injuries and that someone was tapped. That’s completely different from being told a human was ran over,” Reyes said. “That’s upsetting. It’s hurtful and inappropriate.”

‘A pattern’

For answers, and evidence, Reyes first reached out to the South Padre Island Police Department. They pointed her to the Texas Department of Public Safety, who turned her back to the Ranger handling the investigation, who said he couldn’t share any more information.

“I was just going in circles,” Reyes said. “I just didn’t know anything because I didn’t know what I could do. I felt like I was kind of helpless. I decided to just trust the process and wait to hear from him.”

Then a life insurance claim through Martinez’s employer was denied, citing the government’s claim that Martinez injured an officer. Reyes eventually retained a team of attorneys to investigate the case. They have been filling records requests and exploring potential civil actions against DHS.

Meanwhile, Reyes has been watching DHS’s actions in other cities around the country and wondering if her son’s death is not part of a pattern. Trump administration officials quickly labeled Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists” before investigations were conducted. Witness videos analyzed by the Washington Post conflict with official statements regarding both incidents.

“I thought that was callous and awful to call that woman a domestic terrorist because obviously that’s not what she was doing,” Reyes said, referring to Good. “You start to see things in a different light. There’s a pattern here of them using these statements to characterize these people, and to justify their agents’ actions, and I think that’s awful.”

Reyes said she’s prepared to fight for accountability if the same is true for her son.

On Feb. 25, days after news organizations broke news that a HSI agent was responsible for the killing, the Cameron County district attorney convened a grand jury to consider whether to press charges against the agent who fired at Martinez.

The grand jury, shown video of the incident that has not yet been made public, declined to indict the agent. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which has declined to release video of the incident while the investigation is ongoing, said that its investigation is now complete and the department is completing “proper redactions” before releasing the video.

Reyes said she won’t watch it. She plans to have people she trusts explain what happened. If video shows the government’s claims to be true, she said, “then I’ll have to live with that. I just want to know.”

Martinez’s wake was standing room only, Reyes said. An uncle gave his eulogy, drawing from Corinthians a passage that resonated with his mother: “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”

She considered burying his body, but opted instead to bring Martinez home, “where it’s safe,” she said. She had Martinez cremated and first set the urn on the dresser in his bedroom, then she brought him to a living room shelf to sit beside a framed picture of him smiling at her birthday dinner two years ago. Martinez never liked to hang out in his room, she said. He preferred to be with his family.

A federal planning commission on Thursday delayed a vote on President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom until next month, citing “significant public input,” including tens of thousands of comments — nearly all of them critical of the project.

The National Capital Planning Commission had planned to review the proposal and vote on it — the final procedural hurdle for an effort to dramatically remake one of the most revered symbols of American power and democracy.

But partway into the meeting, commission Chair Will Scharf said that he expects public comment to last five to nine hours, with over 100 people signed up to testify, which will likely require the board to recess Thursday evening and resume Friday morning. The commission will discuss and vote on the project at its April 2 meeting, he said.

Ahead of Thursday’s hearing, the agency received more than 35,000 comments about the project, according to a Washington Post analysis of submissions posted on the commission’s website. The “vast majority” came from those who oppose the plan, commission staff said. The Washington Post found that more than 97% of comments were critical of the president’s plans. (The Post used artificial intelligence to classify the submissions and measured its accuracy against a hand-checked sample.)

The delayed vote is a snag in Trump’s push to rush the project through the approval process so construction can be completed before the end of his second term. Securing approval at the commission’s next meeting, however, could keep the project on schedule; the White House has said it plans to begin aboveground construction as soon as next month.

The commission’s endorsement would be the last bureaucratic obstacle in the Trump administration’s push to secure approval for the $400 million ballroom from two federal committees charged by Congress with reviewing the designs of major construction projects in Washington. Late last year, the White House laid out a strategy to complete the process within nine weeks, a plan that’s now been pushed to just over three months.

Historic preservationists have sued to stop the project, and a federal judge is considering their challenge, which alleges that Trump is unlawfully pursuing a project that requires express authorization from Congress.

Last week, the National Capital Planning Commission’s executive director, Marcel Acosta, recommended that the 12-member panel approve the project. In an 11-page report published Friday, Acosta said the proposed structure will provide presidents with a larger permanent event space while protecting “the historic integrity and cultural landscape of the White House.”

Acosta’s assessment contrasts sharply with the public response. Tens of thousands of comments criticized what opponents described as a rushed approval process, insufficient public input and a design that would overshadow the main White House building.

The president has made the building a priority of his second term, and he returns to it often in public remarks and social media posts. He clashed with the project’s previous lead architect about the size of the addition.

Trump has made strategic moves to secure its success, including reshaping the membership of the two federal bodies that must sign off on the project: the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts. Last month, the Commission of Fine Arts, which now includes Trump’s 26-year-old executive assistant, voted unanimously to approve the project. Chair Rodney Mims Cook Jr. called it a “desperately needed” and “very beautiful structure,” whose design he credited to Trump.

The National Capital Planning Commission is led by Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and Trump’s former personal lawyer, whom the president appointed in July. The commission includes a pair of other White House officials, James Blair and Stuart Levenbach. It also has nine seats apportioned to sitting cabinet secretaries and other officials who have a role in overseeing Washington, although senior officials and lawmakers usually send a representative in lieu of attending themselves.

Although federal design commissions have traditionally acted as a constraint on government construction projects — often holding extended deliberations that last for years — Trump has pressed to move the project along swiftly so it can wrap before his term concludes.

Last year, the president ordered the rapid demolition of the East Wing annex without first seeking authorization from Congress or the review committees. Trump’s plan for a new ballroom building on the site that matches the “height and scale” of the main White House has advanced despite objections from a federal judge, architecture experts and historic preservationists, who argue that the structure would be too big, dwarfing a centuries-old American symbol.

White House officials want the commission to approve in one fell swoop the ballroom building’s preliminary and final plans, which the body normally takes up individually at separate meetings, giving agency planners time to incorporate commission feedback before resubmitting updated plans. For example, the planning commission approved a new White House perimeter fence in three steps over seven months, starting with a conceptual design in July 2016 and ending with final plans in February 2017.

Last week, Trump scored another victory on the ballroom front. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that construction on the project could proceed, citing procedural problems with a lawsuit challenging the president’s ability to unilaterally build the structure. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a congressionally chartered organization that advocates for protecting historic sites, amended and refiled its complaint Sunday, three days after Leon’s ruling.

Trump has repeatedly defended the project’s $400 million price tag, saying it is a benefit to taxpayers that the project will be paid for with private donations.

“I built many a ballroom. I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world,” Trump said Monday at a ceremony in which he awarded the Medal of Honor to three Army soldiers.

Democrats and government watchdog organizations have raised concerns about those donors, which include major corporations such as Amazon, Google, and Palantir — companies that together have billions of dollars in federal contracts. Critics have questioned whether donors could receive special access or other benefits in return. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.) Some Democrats say improvements to the White House complex may be warranted but contend that the ballroom should be far smaller and subject to congressional oversight to ensure transparency.

Polls have found that most Americans oppose the project. Twenty-five percent of respondents said they supported tearing down the East Wing to build the ballroom, compared with 58% who opposed doing so, according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted last month.

Countries across Europe and Asia are facing a potential energy crisis after an Iranian drone strike shut down Qatar’s exports of liquefied natural gas this week, cutting off nations from India to Italy from a crucial energy source and potentially increasing costs for key industries in the United States.

Qatar is a linchpin of a global energy system built on LNG, a fossil fuel less polluting than coal that many countries have embraced because it is easy to ship and store, and was sourced from generally stable countries.

Now consumers and businesses from Seoul to Islamabad to Brussels may face steeply higher energy costs, after an Iranian drone struck Qatar’s largest gas liquefaction plant in Ras Laffan, south of Doha on Monday. The strike was part of attacks by Iran on energy infrastructure in Qatar and fellow U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.

Qatar Energy, which produces and exports LNG, said in a statement Monday that it “ceased production” at the facility. On Wednesday, it announced it would not be able to honor export contracts.

It is unclear how long it will take Qatar Energy to repair the plant. Analysts say returning to full production would take another two weeks after repairs are complete.

Shipping any gas Qatar produces is another challenge, as vessel traffic through the region is halted by Iran’s attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. There are 1,000 ships idled, according to the Lloyd’s Market Association, half of them holding oil or gas. The shipping industry is trying to work out an arrangement with the U.S. government for military escorts, which President Donald Trump says will be offered.

Countries around the world are scrambling to figure out how to backfill the abrupt halt of LNG shipments from Qatar, which accounts for one-fifth of the world’s supply. Asian spot LNG prices surged nearly 40% in the past couple of days, and a key index of future LNG prices in Europe jumped 70% since Friday.

Analysts warn the natural gas crunch is likely to have more severe and far-reaching economic impacts than the Iran conflict’s disruption to oil markets, even if abundant gas supplies in the U.S. shield American consumers from short-term price spikes.

“Oil is exported from practically every country in that region,” said Pavel Molchanov, an investment strategy analyst at Raymond James. “LNG more or less comes from one country there: Qatar.”

The sudden shutoff of Qatari LNG is expected to quickly hit nations across Asia and Europe that depend on Qatari gas, with domestic energy bills likely to spike and factories at risk of shutting down.

Some countries will likely bring mothballed coal plants back online, analysts predicted, a costly reversal that could also massively increase carbon emissions and other air pollution.

The Business Standard, a Bangladeshi newspaper, reported Tuesday that officials at the country’s energy ministry had ordered an increase in power generation from coal. Taiwan is examining similar options, according to Argus, a firm that tracks global energy markets. Prices of Asian coal futures jumped sharply this week.

“The first response would likely be to seek out LNG supply from other regions,” Zhi Xin Chong, head of Asia Gas Research at S&P Global Energy, said in an email.

But producers like the U.S., Australia, and Malaysia have little extra to spare, causing prices for what is available to soar. Chong said if the fuel proves “too expensive and difficult to procure, markets like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India and Southeast Asia will likely pivot to coal where possible.”

Some of the countries most dependent on Qatar for energy are also among the least able to pay the premium for emergency replacements. In some cases the economic fallout is expected to cascade back to the U.S. due to how LNG underpins other industrial sectors.

In India, the second-largest importer of Qatari LNG, gas supplies to industrial users are being cut, according to local media reports, leading ceramics manufacturers in that country to pause operations. Utilities in Pakistan, which is even more reliant on Qatar, are also starting to cut their deliveries of gas to industrial clients, Bloomberg News reported.

In both countries, the constraints are leading to cutbacks in fertilizer production, as natural gas is the key ingredient for making urea, the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertilizer. Molchanov said prices for urea have increased 25% since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran.

“That is a big deal for the agricultural sector around the world — including the United States,” he said, warning it “will potentially translate into higher food costs in the near term.”

The global reshuffling to replace energy from Qatari LNG threatens to take a toll on the planet. Japan is currently using only about two-thirds of its 53 gigawatts of coal capacity, according to Chong. Should that country choose to tap into that capacity, millions of tons of additional carbon pollution could be released into the atmosphere within months. China has significantly more unused coal power it could tap into.

Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said as nations reassess their dependence on LNG imports some of the backsliding to coal power could become permanent.

“This will reinforce the push to generate power domestically,” she said. “It could mean more use of coal.” That could include European countries such as Germany and Poland, which are still burning coal and produce the fuel domestically.

The LNG shock may also drive extra investment into renewable energy. Some of the countries best prepared to ride out disruption to Qatari exports are those that have added the most clean energy to their power grids, Ziemba said.

China, which in recent years has installed more solar and wind power than the rest of the world combined in a drive for energy independence, is well positioned to weather a gas shortage.

France may also be able to absorb energy price shocks because of its large nuclear power capacity. And much of Europe increased its investment in solar and wind after the 2022 energy crisis on the continent precipitated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Gas makes up just 16% of Europe’s energy mix — a sharp decrease since 2020 — and renewables now provide 47% of its power.

“This is an example of how Europe’s climate policy supports energy security,” Molchanov of Raymond James said. “Any wind farm, any solar installation in Europe is less natural gas they have to import.”

“Europe is the only major economy in the world using less natural gas today than they did a decade ago,” he said. It “has accelerated its diversification strategy to reduce dependence on natural gas no matter where it comes from — whether Russia, the U.S., or Qatar.”

While Qatar’s export freeze triggers stress around the world, American gas producers are likely to benefit.

The U.S. became the world’s largest LNG exporter in 2023. Its export terminals are currently running near maximum capacity, limiting how much additional volume the U.S. can provide to replace Qatari supplies.

But the industry may find its commercial and political prospects are now favorable to expand. “This is going to set off another LNG project boom,” said Ira Joseph, a scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Not just in the U.S. but elsewhere.”

But he added that there may also be a new drive by countries and industries around the world to reduce dependence on LNG. “The push for using more natural gas was that it is very reliable,” Joseph said. “But in the last four years you had the largest exporter in the world — Russia — cut off its pipelines. And now, the second-largest has cut off its shipments. It raises the question of how much one wants to rely on gas imports in an energy mix.”