Live Q&A: The Supreme Court in the Trump Era—Ask Our Reporters Your Questions
What questions do you have about the decisions the Supreme Court has made or is about to make this term?
The Court has already issued several important decisions this month, siding with the Trump administration on the deportation of migrants and giving states the ability to boot Planned Parenthood from Medicaid and restrict transgender treatments for minors. The 6-3 decisions were split along ideological lines.
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New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Harvard, University of Toronto make contingency plan to allow foreign students to study if barred from US
Harvard University and the University of Toronto have revealed a contingency plan that would allow select international Harvard graduate students to continue their education in Canada if the Trump administration's plan to impose US visa restrictions and prevent them from re-entering the US is upheld by the courts. The US Department of Homeland Security moved last month to terminate Harvard's ability to enroll international students after the university allegedly failed to provide extensive behavioral records of student visa holders the agency had requested, including footage of protest activity involving student visa holders, even if it's not criminal, and the disciplinary records of all student visa holders in the past five years. A federal judge has since blocked the government's effort to end the university's visa program. Because of potential US visa challenges, students at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government who may be unable to return to the US will be given the option to continue their studies through a visiting student program at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. The program would combine courses taught by Kennedy and Munk faculty members, according to the deans of both institutions. The contingency plans were released to ease student uncertainty, but will only be used if there is enough demand from students unable to enter the US over potential visa or entry restrictions, the deans said in a statement. The Trump administration has moved to cut billions of dollars in federal research funding for Harvard. 'With these contingency plans in place, HKS will be able to continue to provide a world-class public policy education to all of our students, even if they cannot make it to our campus this year,' Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein said. The program will be available to international students who have already completed one year at the US campus. The Trump administration has moved to cut billions of dollars in federal research funding for Harvard, in part, over its handling of alleged antisemitism and violence on campus amid anti-Israel protests sparked by the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Harvard University and the University of Toronto released contingency plans to ease student uncertainty about potential visa restrictions. AFP via Getty Images Weinstein announced staff layoffs at Kennedy in a recent email to faculty and staff, citing 'unprecedented new headwinds' creating 'significant financial challenges,' including a 'substantial proposed increase in the endowment tax' and 'massive cuts to federal funding of research.' Over the past five years, more than 50% of Kennedy students have come from outside the US, the school's media office said. A total of 739 students from 92 countries in programs aimed at developing leadership in public policy and government are enrolled at the school, according to the Harvard International Office website.
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
What we know so far about how Trump's deportation effort is unfolding in the Bay Area
As of last month, Carolina's quest for asylum from violence in her Indigenous Guatemalan community seemed to be on track. The mother of two, who speaks only her native K'iche' language, had recently completed a check-in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and was living with her family in Contra Costa County. Then she received a surprise message on her ICE smartphone app. 'This is your ICE officer,' the June 2 message said, according to Carolina's attorney. 'We want you to come in for an appointment.' Carolina did as she was told, arriving at 630 Sansome St. in San Francisco the next day. It wasn't until after she was arrested that her attorney — who shared her story with the Chronicle and asked that only her first name be used for her protection — would learn the reason for the appointment: Carolina's asylum case had been set aside without a reason given, and an old removal order reinstated. Leaving behind her husband and two young children, Carolina was flown to an ICE detention center in Arizona that same day. Carolina is among dozens of people that local advocates estimate have been arrested in the Bay Area this month in stepped-up operations by federal immigration authorities, as the Trump administration seeks to fulfill a campaign promise by boosting deportation numbers. The effort has been both expansive and disjointed, advocates say, going beyond promises to deport 'the worst of the worst ' while splitting families apart and leaving state officials scrambling for answers. While federal authorities have long had discretionary power to reject asylum applications and other temporary protections that allow people to remain in the U.S., previous administrations have typically used the tactic on a case-by-case basis, said Carolina's attorney, Hayden Rodarte, who focuses on asylum applications for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. 'But this is the first time we're seeing it in this systematic way,' Rodarte said, noting that Carolina has no criminal history and is the main caregiver for her 10-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. 'This is the new reality now.' ICE officials have declined to release information about key aspects of recent Bay Area immigration operations, including how many people have been arrested, who they are and why certain people have been targeted for removal. ICE has posted videos on social media of arrests throughout Los Angeles at workplaces and elsewhere, and photos of those detained with alleged criminal histories, but immigration attorneys said the arrests in the Bay Area target those who are trying to follow the process and show up to court. 'They should be showing up to their court hearing. It's the right thing to do but it's so scary,' said Roujin Mozaffarimehr, a managing partner at ImmiCore Law, a Silicon Valley firm. 'It's just really nerve-racking.' Inside the information vacuum, local networks of immigration advocates, attorneys and courtroom observers have worked to piece together everything they know about the cases, in hopes of better understanding how ICE operations are unfolding in the Bay Area. Catherine Seitz, the legal director at the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, said people have been arrested when they show up for a meeting with ICE during their removal proceedings, an often lengthy legal process. Those meetings typically happen once a year; ICE checks that the cases are still pending and people typically return home, Seitz said. In addition, ICE is detaining people, including those seeking asylum, who arrive to immigration courts in San Francisco and Concord for scheduled hearings. In some cases, government attorneys are attempting to remove people who have been here for less than two years by requesting their cases to be dismissed. Immigration officials then detain people and pursue expedited removal proceedings, a measure that is typically used at airports or at the border, Seitz said. 'The confusing part is, under the last administration, (a dismissed case) was a good thing,' Seitz said, adding that people could then move forward with their asylum petitions. Seitz said that by using expedited removals, the government can typically move forward with deporting someone without going before a judge. This was the case for Carolina, who arrived in the U.S. along with one of her children in January 2024, joining her husband and older child. Carolina, who is from an Indigenous rural area of Guatemala, applied for asylum while citing the violence and persecution from the government there. 'What hurts us most is seeing the children suffer through this,' Carolina's sister said in a statement translated from K'iche' and provided by immigration attorneys. 'Our country has so much violence and we fled to this country with the hopes of finding joy here. But now we're seeing things worsen here with family separations.' There is no removal order for Carolina's husband and children, and the rest of the family's asylum cases remain pending before immigration court in Concord, Rodarte said. Because federal agencies have not released information on the arrests, advocates and attorneys have sought to use their networks to keep an unreliable count of the number of people detained. Last weekend, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside of an ICE facility in San Francisco after immigrants said they had received orders to check in with the federal agency — spurring concerns from advocates that officials were planning to detain people with detention circumstances similar to Carolina's. Though a handful of immigrants showed up Saturday and Sunday, the office remained closed and ICE officials did not detain anyone, later saying that the closure was due to protests. ICE enforcement in the Bay Area has differed from Los Angeles, where the agency has targeted car washes and other workplaces, as well as gathering spots for day laborers such as Home Depot parking lots, to take people into custody — sparking conservative support along with widespread protests and accusations of racial profiling. Trump has waffled on the tactics, at times saying migrant workers are dangerous and take jobs that could go to Americans, and at other times saying they are ' almost impossible to replace.' But with the Department of Homeland Security this week reversing instructions for ICE to pause raids on farms, meat packing plants, restaurants and hotels, advocates for immigrants worry that the more aggressive actions ICE has taken in Los Angeles and parts of the Central Valley could happen in the Bay Area. Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden, said the Trump administration appears intent on reaching arrest quotas of 3,000 people per day. To achieve those goals, ICE has begun targeting immigrants who have been vetted and given a legal status to stay in the country, versus focusing on only those with criminal histories. There aren't enough people with criminal backgrounds to meet the quotas that the White House has set, Houser said. 'When you set quotas at the White House of arrests,' he said, 'ICE is going to take the easiest path to get their hands on people that they can bring into detention.' Since Trump's second term started, ICE said it has arrested over 236,000 people who were in the country illegally and deported more than 207,000, below the administration's goals but a significant increase from recent years. In his first term, Trump deported 1.5 million people, while Biden had deported 1.1 million people as of February 2024, according to Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. The detainment of more people poses other challenges for immigration courts. There are currently roughly 700 federal immigration judges — a decrease after Trump fired judges in California, Louisiana and other states — and a backlog of nearly 3 million pending cases due in part to a spike in people seeking asylum since 2022, according to government data. In many cases, it can take someone going through a removal proceeding nearly 10 years to get ahead of a judge, said Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles immigration attorney. 'If he's just going to put another million people a year in immigration court,' Shusterman said, 'it'll take 15 to 20 years to get a hearing.'
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
What the Supreme Court's latest decision on LGBTQ inclusion means for California
Parents with religious objections to schoolbooks that favorably refer to lesbians, gays or transgender people have a right to be notified and remove their young children from class, the Supreme Court has ruled in the latest of a series of cases condemned by LGBT advocates. But it may not be the last word in California. Friday's 6-3 decision in a case from Maryland came a week after the same Supreme Court majority upheld laws in Tennessee and 26 other states denying puberty blockers and other gender-affirming care for transgender minors. A month earlier, the justices allowed President Donald Trump to expel thousands of transgender troops from the U.S. military while it considers his request to ban them from service. Together, the decisions mark a broad shift that California is fighting. Two years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a $1.5 million fine on the Temecula Valley Unified School District in Riverside County for rejecting the state's social studies curriculum because it briefly discussed Harvey Milk, the gay-rights leader and San Francisco supervisor. Milk was assassinated in 1978 by former Supervisor Dan White, who also fatally shot Mayor George Moscone. After imposing the fine and shipping a supply of Milk-inclusive textbooks to the Temecula district, Newsom signed a law, Assembly Bill 1078 by Corey Jackson, D-Perris (Riverside County), that prohibits school boards from banning instructional materials because they contain discussions of a particular 'individual or group,' such as Milk and his advocates. The debate — inclusion and trans rights on one side, freedom of speech and religion on the other — was addressed Friday by a different set of referees, the Supreme Court's conservative majority. One of its most outspoken members, Justice Samuel Alito, said the Maryland school district's use of elementary-school textbooks with LGBT characters or themes violated the rights of religious parents to oversee their children's education. 'A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses a very real threat of undermining the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill,' Alito wrote. He described one storybook for grades kindergarten through five that showed Kate, apparently a transgender girl, in what Alito described as a 'sex-neutral or sex-ambiguous bathroom,' telling her friends that a bathroom 'should be a safe space.' Another book, titled 'Prince & Knight,' showed two men battling a dragon, then falling in love and marrying with applause from 'the whole kingdom,' Alito said. Even if those books do not expressly endorse LGBT rights, Alito wrote, 'they are clearly designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated' and are being presented to 'young, impressionable children' without notification to their parents. He cited the court's 1972 ruling that allowed Amish parents to remove their children from school after the eighth grade, in accordance with their religion, despite a Wisconsin law requiring attendance until age 16. Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling 'invents a constitutional right to avoid exposure' to subjects that displease students' parents. Giving children 'of all faiths and backgrounds … an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society ... is critical to our Nation's civic vitality,' said Sotomayor, joined by the court's other two Democratic appointees, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 'Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents' religious faiths.' California, unlike Maryland, has a law allowing parents with religious objections to their children's schoolbooks to remove their children from class — but only for classes related to health care. And last month a federal judge in San Diego barred a school district from assigning a book about a transgender child to a fifth-grader in a non-health care class without notifying his parents or allowing them to object. The book, 'My Shadow Is Pink,' tells the story of a boy who likes to wear dresses and is criticized at first by his father, who eventually comes to accept him. It was part of the Encinitas Union School District's 'buddy program' in which fifth-graders use school materials to mentor kindergarteners. Although state law serves 'an admirable purpose' by requiring schools to teach students about the contributions of 'historically marginalized groups,' the district appears to have violated the fifth-grader's constitutional rights by not allowing him or his parents to object, said U.S. District Judge M. James Lorenz, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton. The district has appealed Lorenz's order to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which now can rely on the Supreme Court's analysis in assessing the state law. 'I am very concerned about the practical implications' of Friday's ruling, said Jonathan Glater, a professor of educational law at UC Berkeley. 'If I am a teacher, I might share with all parents a detailed explanation of all materials students might be exposed to, so that they can pull their students out of particular segments. The burden on a school of administrating those opt-outs is clear. And of course, a parental opt-out is highly unlikely to stop kids from talking with each other about the disfavored material; that is not how kids work.' The Supreme Court's ruling drew praise and criticism. Attorney Eric Baxter of the Becket Fund, which represented the Maryland youth's parents, said the court had reaffirmed that 'parents — not government — have the final say in how their children are raised.' But Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, a union representing 2.8 million teachers, said the ruling 'could have a chilling effect on students for generations to come.' California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who filed arguments with the court supporting the Maryland district, seemed unperturbed. 'By ensuring our curriculum reflects the full diversity of our student population, we foster an environment where every student feels seen, supported, and empowered to succeed,' he said in a statement after the ruling. 'In California, we will continue to remain a beacon of inclusivity, diversity, and belonging.' The case is Mahmoud v. Taylor, No. 24-297.
