What comes next after the Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling: From the Politics Desk
Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team's latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.
Happy Friday! The weekend is upon us, unless you're a member of the U.S. Senate who's set to spend the next couple days working on the 'big, beautiful bill.' Today also marks the one-year anniversary of the now-infamous presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
In today's edition, our legal team breaks down what comes next after the Supreme Court's major ruling in the birthright citizenship case. Plus, Kristen Welker previews her exclusive interview this weekend with Zohran Mamdani.
— Adam Wollner
— Adam Wollner
Supreme Court birthright citizenship ruling sparks new round of legal fights
By Lawrence Hurley and Gary Grumbach
Almost as soon as the Supreme Court released its ruling limiting the ability of judges to block President Donald Trump's plan to end birthright citizenship, challengers brought new legal claims seeking the same result by a different means.
While the Supreme Court said judges cannot issue sweeping 'universal injunctions' that can apply nationwide in many cases, it left open the option of plaintiffs seeking broad relief via class action lawsuits.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed such a lawsuit in New Hampshire on behalf of immigrants whose children may not obtain U.S. citizenship at birth if Trump's order was to go into effect.
In a separate case in Maryland, in which groups had previously obtained a nationwide injunction, lawyers filed an amended complaint seeking similar class-wide relief for anyone affected by Trump's plan within hours of the ruling authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Under Trump's plan, birthright citizenship would be limited to those who have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. That is at odds with the widely accepted understanding of the Constitution's 14th Amendment — that it grants citizenship to anyone born in the U.S., with a few minor exceptions.
Samuel Bray, a critic of nationwide injunctions at Notre Dame Law School whose work was cited in the ruling, said both the states and individual plaintiffs can still get broad injunctions against the birthright citizenship executive order, potentially even on a nationwide basis.
'I don't expect the executive order will ever go into effect,' he added.
How Trump is responding: At a news conference, Trump made it clear the administration would proactively use the Supreme Court ruling not just to bolster its birthright citizenship proposal but also to push forward on other policies that have been blocked by judges on a nationwide basis.
'Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,' the president said.
Steve Bannon urges Republicans to take Zohran Mamdani's rise 'seriously'
By Kristen Welker
Zohran Mamdani pulled off a stunning upset in New York City's mayoral primary this week, sending shock waves through the Democratic Party. A little-known state lawmaker, Mamdani ran a campaign that energized key Democratic constituencies and ultimately forced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to concede.
And now, even Republicans are starting to pay attention. Steve Bannon, a close ally to President Donald Trump, told me the GOP should take Mamdani's rise seriously.
'He did something that AOC and Bernie haven't been able to do — he connected populism to affordability,' Bannon told me. 'Republicans better start taking this guy seriously and they better stop wishing that he wins, and they will automatically run against his policies in 2026. This guy is a very skilled politician. He's clearly had a lot of training. He's got radical ideas, but he presents them in a sunny upbeat way and people feel like he's fighting for them, particularly on an issue that Republicans haven't connected on yet: affordability.'
Mamdani has the momentum at the moment, but if elected mayor this fall, he would face immediate questions about whether he and his fellow democratic socialists can effectively govern the nation's largest city. He would oversee a $115 billion budget, more than 300,000 city employees and the country's largest police force.
Mamdani has pledged to expand affordable housing, make city buses free and lower the cost of living by raising taxes on large corporations and the top 1% of earners. But his record in Albany offers limited evidence of legislative success: The New York Times reported that only three relatively minor bills he sponsored became law.
Delivering on his promises would be difficult. Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul — who has said she's not ready to back Mamdani yet — already rejected his proposed tax hikes on the wealthy, and making public buses free would require state approval.
So, if given the opportunity to govern, how would Mamdani do it, given these challenges?
I'll talk to Mamdani about all of this in an exclusive interview on 'Meet the Press' this Sunday.
🎙️ Here's the Scoop
This week, NBC News launched ' Here's the Scoop,' a new evening podcast that brings you a fresh take on the day's top stories in 15 minutes or less.
In today's episode, host Yasmin Vossoughian discusses the Supreme Court's ruling in the birthright citizenship case with NBC News senior legal correspondent Laura Jarrett and senior Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley.
✉️ Mailbag: Is Trump delivering on his deportation promises?
Thanks to everyone who emailed us! This week's reader question is about Trump's mass deportation agenda.
'The president says they are deporting rapists, drug dealers and child molesters. I was wondering how many of the arrests are of real criminals and how many are just illegal entry workers?'
To answer this, we turned to an exclusive report this week from our colleagues Julia Ainsley and Laura Strickler.
They obtained internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data of every person booked from Oct. 1 through May 31, part of which was during the Biden administration. It shows a total of 185,042 people arrested and booked into ICE facilities during that time; 65,041 of them have been convicted of crimes. The most common categories of crimes they committed were immigration and traffic offenses.
Last fall, ICE told Congress that 13,099 people convicted of homicide and 15,811 people convicted of sexual assault were on its non-detained docket, meaning it knew who they were but did not have them in custody.
The new data shows that from Oct. 1 to May 31, ICE arrested 752 people convicted of homicide and 1,693 people convicted of sexual assault, meaning that at the most, the Trump administration has detained only 6% of the undocumented immigrants known to ICE to have been convicted of homicide and 11% of those known to ICE to have been convicted of sexual assault.
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The Guardian
36 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The US supreme court has dramatically expanded the powers of the president
Those of us who cover the US supreme court are faced, every June, with a peculiar challenge: whether to describe what the supreme court is doing, or what is claims that it is doing. What the supreme court says it was doing in Friday's 6-3 decision in Trump v Casa, Inc, the birthright citizenship case, is narrowing the power of federal district judges to issue nationwide injunctions, in deference to presidential authority. The case effectively ends the ability of federal judges on lower courts to issue nationwide stays of executive actions that violate the constitution, federal law, and the rights of citizens. And so what the court has actually done is dramatically expand the rights of the president – this president – to nullify constitutional provisions at will. The ruling curtails nationwide injunctions against Trump's order ending birthright citizenship – meaning that while lawsuits against the order proceed, the court has unleashed a chaotic patchwork of rights enforceability. The Trump administration's ban on birthright citizenship will not be able to go into effect in jurisdictions where there is no ongoing lawsuit, or where judges have not issued regional stays. And so the supreme court creates, for the foreseeable future, a jurisprudence of citizenship in which babies born in some parts of the country will be presumptive citizens, while those born elsewhere will not. More broadly the decision means that going forward, the enforceable rights and entitlements of Americans will now be dependent on the state they reside in and the status of ongoing litigation in that district at any given time. Donald Trump, personally, will now have the presumptive power to persecute you, and nullify your rights in defiance of the constitution, at his discretion. You can't stop him unless and until you can get a lawyer, a hearing, and a narrow order from a sympathetic judge. 'No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,' writes Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by the court's other two liberals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing separately, adds that the decision is 'profoundly dangerous, since it gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate'. She also calls the ruling an 'existential threat to the rule of law'. The case concerns an executive order by the Trump administration, issued the day that Trump returned to office, purporting to end birthright citizenship – in defiance of the 14th amendment. When immigrant rights groups, representing American newborns and their migrant parents, sued the Trump administration to enforce their clients' constitutional rights, a nationwide injunction was issued which paused the Trump administration's plainly illegal order from going into effect while the lawsuit proceeded. These injunctions are a standard tool in the arsenal of federal judges, and an essential check on executive power: when the president does something wildly illegal, as Trump did, the courts can use injunctions to prevent those illegal actions from causing harm to Americans while litigation is ongoing. Nationwide injunctions have become more common in the Trump era, if only because Trump himself routinely does plainly illegal things that have the potential to hurt people and strip them of their rights nationwide. But they are not used exclusively against Republican presidents, or in order to obstruct rightwing policy efforts. Throughout the Obama and Biden administrations, Republican appointed judges routinely stymied their policy agendas with national injunctions; the Roberts court blessed these efforts. But once Donald Trump returned to power, the court adopted a newer, narrower vision of judges' prerogatives – or at least, of the prerogatives of judges who are not them. They have, with this ruling, given Donald Trump the sweeping and unprecedented authority to claim presumptive legality of even the most fundamental of American rights: the right of American-born persons to call themselves American at all. Part of why the supreme court's behavior creates dilemmas for pundits is that the court is acting in with a shameless and exceptional degree of bad faith, such that describing their own accounts of their actions would mean participating in a condescending deception of the reader. In her opinion for the conservative majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett says that the court is merely deferring to the rights of the executive, and ensuring that the president has the freedom to do what the voters elected him to do. Putting aside the ouroboros-like nature of the majority's conception of electoral legitimacy –that having received a majority of Americans' votes would somehow entitle Donald Trump to strip them of the rights that made those votes free, meaningful, and informed in the first place – the assertion is also one of bad faith. Because the truth is that this court's understanding of the scope of executive power is not principled; it is not even grounded in the bad history that Barrett trots out to illustrate her point about the sweeping power of other executives in the historical tradition – like the king of England. Rather, the court expands and contracts its vision of what the president is allowed to do based on the political affiliation of the president that is currently in office. When a Democrat is the president, their vision of executive power contracts. When a Republican is in office, it dramatically expands. That is because these people's loyalty is not to the constitution, or to a principled reading of the law. It is to their political priors. Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion Another danger of reporting the court's own account of itself to readers is this: that it can distract from the real stakes of the case. In this decision, the court did not, technically, reach the merits of Trump's absurd and insulting claim that the constitution somehow does not create a birthright entitlement to citizenship. But in the meantime, many children – the American-born infants of immigrant parents – will be denied the right that the 14th amendment plainly guarantees them. The rightwing legal movement, and the Trumpist judges who have advanced it, have long believed that really, this is a white man's country – and that the 14th amendment, with its guarantees of equal protection and its vision of a pluralist nation of equals, living together in dignity across difference – was an error. Those babies, fully American despite their differences and their parents' histories, are squirming, cooing testaments to that better, more just future. They, and the hope that they represent, are more American than Trump and his crony judges will ever be. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Sky News
an hour ago
- Sky News
Trump's 'giant win' frees him up to push on with his agenda with fewer blocks and barriers
As the president himself said, this was a "giant" of a decision - a significant moment to end a week of whiplash-inducing news. The decision by the US Supreme Court is a big win for President Donald Trump. By a majority of 6-3, the highest court in the land has ruled that federal judges have been overreaching in their authority by blocking or freezing the executive orders issued by the president. Over the last few months, a series of presidential actions by Trump have been blocked by injunctions issued by federal district judges. The federal judges, branded "radical leftist lunatics" by the president, have ruled on numerous individual cases, most involving immigration. They have then applied their rulings as nationwide injunctions - thus blocking the Trump administration's policies. "It was a grave threat to democracy frankly," the president said at a hastily arranged news conference in the White House briefing room. "Instead of merely ruling on the immediate case before them, these judges have attempted to dictate the law for the entire nation," he said. In simple terms, this ruling, from a Supreme Court weighted towards conservative judges, frees up the president to push on with his agenda, less opposed by the courts. "This is such a big day…," the president said. "It gives power back to people that should have it, including Congress, including the presidency, and it only takes bad power away from judges. It takes bad power, sick power and unfair power. "And it's really going to be... a very monumental decision." The country's most senior member of the Democratic Party was to the point with his reaction to the ruling. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called it "an unprecedented and terrifying step toward authoritarianism, a grave danger to our democracy, and a predictable move from this extremist MAGA court". In a statement, Schumer wrote: "By weakening the power of district courts to check the presidency, the Court is not defending the Constitution - it's defacing it. "This ruling hands Donald Trump yet another green light in his crusade to unravel the foundations of American democracy." 2:57 Federal power in the US is, constitutionally, split equally between the three branches of government - the executive branch (the presidency), the legislative branch (Congress) and the judiciary (the Supreme Court and other federal courts). They are designed to ensure a separation of power and to ensure that no single branch becomes too powerful. This ruling was prompted by a case brought over an executive order issued by President Trump on his inauguration day to end birthright citizenship - that constitutional right to be an American citizen if born here. A federal judge froze the decision, ruling it to be in defiance of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has deferred its judgement on this particular case, instead ruling more broadly on the powers of the federal judges. The court was divided along ideological lines, with conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent. 👉 Follow Trump100 on your podcast app 👈 In her dissent, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote: "As I understand the concern, in this clash over the respective powers of two coordinate branches of Government, the majority sees a power grab - but not by a presumably lawless Executive choosing to act in a manner that flouts the plain text of the Constitution. "Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are... (wait for it)... the district courts." Another liberal Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, described the majority ruling by her fellow justices as: "Nothing less than an open invitation for the government to bypass the constitution." Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump appointed during his first term, shifting the balance of left-right power in the court, led this particular ruling. Writing for the majority, she said: "When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too." The focus now for those who deplore this decision will be to apply 'class action' - to file lawsuits on behalf of a large group of people rather than applying a single case to the whole nation. There is no question though that the president and his team will feel significantly emboldened to push through their policy agenda with fewer blocks and barriers. The ruling ends a giddy week for the president. 0:51 Last Saturday he ordered the US military to bomb Iran's nuclear sites. Within two days he had forced both Israel and Iran to a ceasefire. By mid-week he was in The Hague for the NATO summit where the alliance members had agreed to his defence spending demands. At an Oval Office event late on Friday, where he presided over the signing of a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, he also hinted at a possible ceasefire "within a week" in Gaza.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
NYC Mayor Eric Adams rips into Mamdani's ‘socialist' agenda, says he ‘doesn't have the authority' to tax the rich
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has ripped into Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani 's so-called 'socialist' agenda, saying he 'doesn't have the authority' to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers. In a political upset Tuesday night, Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, beat former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary. Mamdani will be on the ballot against Adams, who dropped out of the primary to run as an independent after his corruption charges were dropped by the Trump administration. Cuomo is also staying in the race on the 'Fight & Deliver' ballot line, CNN reported, citing unnamed sources. Mamdani, who started as a little-known Queens assemblyman, is campaigning on affordability for average New Yorkers. He has promised to freeze rent for stabilized units and make buses free. In an interview with CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday evening, Mamdani said freezing the rent doesn't cost the city any money, but making buses free would cost around $700 million. He defended his proposed social programs, saying they would be paid for in part by increasing the income taxes on the top one percent of New Yorkers by two percent. Adams criticized Mamdani's platform while on The Lead with Jake Tapper Friday evening, telling the CNN host, 'I'm competing against him because this is not a socialist city.' It's unclear what Adams meant by a 'socialist city.' The key characteristic of socialism is that the government controls the means of production rather than private citizens. The New York Times described democratic socialism in a recent article as 'an ideology rooted in its opposition to capitalism and wanting to shift power to workers from corporations.' Adams said Mamdani ' doesn't have the authority to raise income tax on the top one percent of New Yorkers. Assemblymens have that authority, and that's who he is. He couldn't do it in the [New York State] Assembly. How you gonna deliver it as the mayor of the city?' The mayor also said Mamdani had the authority to make buses free in the Assembly, and that he gave Mamdani a pilot project for it, which he 'failed' to carry out. Adams argued with Tapper when the host said Mamdani has the authority to freeze the rent. 'There's an independent rent guideline boards that independently make their decisions, so he does not have the authority to do that,' the mayor insisted. Mamdani did say during his interview with Burnett that freezing the rent is 'something that's determined by the rent guidelines board, composed of nine members.' But that 'the mayor picks each of those members.' Since Adams took office in 2022, the board has raised the rent each year, The City reported. While Mamdani may wish to replace members of the board if he's elected, it may not be that easy, as board members are appointed to terms as long as four years.
