Latest news with #citizenship
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- Politics
- 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
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- Politics
- 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
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
US soldier's son, born on Army base in Germany, is deported to Jamaica
(KTLA) — A man born to an active-duty member of the United States military on an Army base in Germany in 1986 before coming to the states as a child was deported last week to Jamaica, a country he's never been to, according to a report by The Austin Chronicle. Jermaine Thomas, whose Jamaican-born dad became a U.S. citizen during his 18-year military career, spent much of his early life moving from base to base with his father and mother, the latter a citizen of Kenya at the time of his birth. At 11 years old, after his parents' divorce and his mother's second marriage to another soldier, he went to live with his father, who had since retired, in Florida. Unfortunately, his father passed away in 2010 from kidney failure shortly after Thomas had arrived. Much of his life after that, The Chronicle reported, was spent in Texas, homeless and in and out of jail. It's unclear when exactly Thomas was first ordered to leave the country, but court records from 2015 show a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, in which the U.S. Department of Justice argued that he was not a citizen simply because he was born on a U.S. Army base in Germany. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the DOJ, upholding the U.S. Court of Appeals decision and denied Thomas' petition for a review of the deportation order, saying in part that 'his father did not meet the physical presence requirement of the statute in force at the time of Thomas's birth.' The court also noted Thomas' prior criminal convictions, one for domestic violence and two 'crimes involving moral turpitude.' Without U.S., German or Jamaican citizenship, Thomas was stateless, though he remained in the states, most recently living in Killeen, a city about an hour north of Austin. Army vet, Purple Heart recipient, self-deports after 48 years in U.S. He told The Chronicle that deportation to Jamaica started with an eviction from his apartment. While moving his belongings out of the apartment, he was arrested by local police on suspicion of trespassing, a misdemeanor in Texas. Told by a court-appointed lawyer that he'd likely stay in jail for the better part of a year while waiting for a trial, Thomas, who had lost his job while in lockup, signed a release agreement with certain conditions, but instead of being released from Bell County Jail, he was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention camp just north of Houston, where he was detained for two and a half months. Now in Kingston, he told The Chronicle he's living in a hotel, though he's unsure who is paying for it, the U.S. or Jamaican government, and does not know how long he'll be able to stay there. Unsure how to get a job or if he's even allowed, Thomas added that he's unsure if it's even legal for him to be in the country at all. 'If you're in the U.S. Army, and the Army deploys you somewhere, and you've got to have your child over there, and your child makes a mistake after you pass away, and you put your life on the line for this country, are you going to be okay with them just kicking your child out of the country?' Thomas said in a phone call with the outlet's reporter. Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to The Chronicle's request for comment. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Supreme Court gives Trump more power after ‘birthright citizenship' ruling curbs nationwide injunctions
The Supreme Court's conservative majority has stripped federal courts' authority to issue nationwide injunctions that have blocked key parts of Donald Trump's agenda. Friday's 6-3 ruling, written by Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett, states that federal judges went too far blocking his executive order that seeks to unilaterally redefine who gets to be a citizen. Those nationwide injunctions 'exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to the federal courts,' according to the ruling. The ruling opens the door for partial enforcement of Trump's executive order, putting thousands of American-born children at risk of being denied their constitutional rights. Trump's executive order will be blocked for another 30 days, however, allowing lower courts to revisit the scope of their injunctions and giving time for opponents to file new legal challenges. Department of Justice attorneys will now 'promptly file' legal challenges in cases where the president's executive actions were temporarily blocked, Trump told reporters at the White House. Moments after the ruling, plaintiffs filed a new lawsuit that would protect citizenship rights for all newborn Americans, not just in the states that initially sued. But the ruling does not definitively resolve challenges to birthright citizenship. A series of federal court rulings across the country earlier this year struck down the president's attempt to block citizenship from newborn Americans who are born to certain immigrant parents. The government argued those decisions should only impact the individual states — and the unborn children of pregnant mothers in them — who sued him and won. Opponents have warned that such a decision would open a backdoor to begin stripping away constitutional rights. In a blistering dissent, Justices Sonia Sotomayor called the court's ruling 'a travesty for the rule of law.' Allowing the president to unilaterally redefine who gets to be a U.S. citizen in states subject to Trump's rewriting of the 14th Amendment would create a patchwork system of constitutional rights and citizenship benefits — including voting rights. More than 150,000 newborns would be denied citizenship every year under Trump's order, according to the plaintiffs. 'Make no mistake: Today's ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent. The court's decision gifted Trump the 'prerogative of sometimes disregarding the law' that opens the door to 'put both our legal system, and our system of government, in grave jeopardy,' Jackson warned. 'It is not difficult to predict how this all ends,' she wrote. 'Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more." In January, more than 20 states, immigrants' advocacy groups and pregnant plaintiffs sued the administration to block the president's executive order. Three federal judges and appellate court panels argued his order is unconstitutional and blocked the measure from taking effect nationwide while legal challenges continue. During oral arguments, the Supreme Court's liberal justices appeared shocked at the president's 'unlawful' measure. But the administration used the case not necessarily to argue over whether he can change the 14th Amendment but to target what has become a major obstacle to advancing Trump's agenda: federal judges blocking aggressive executive actions. The government asked the court to limit the authority of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have imperilled a bulk of the president's agenda. In cases across the country, plaintiffs have pushed for injunctions as a tool for critical checks and balances against an administration that critics warn is mounting an ongoing assault against the rule of law. More than half of the injunctions issued over the last 70 years were against the Trump administration, according to the Harvard Law Review, as Trump pushed the limits of his authority. In arguments to the Supreme Court, Trump's personal attorney John Sauer, who was appointed by the president to serve as U.S. solicitor general, called the 'cascade of universal injunctions' against the administration a 'bipartisan problem' that exceeds judicial authority. Trump's allies, however, have relied on nationwide injunctions to do the very same thing they commanded the Supreme Court to strike down. Critics have accused right-wing legal groups of 'judge shopping' for ideologically like-minded venues where they can sue to strike down — through nationwide injunctions — policies with which they disagree. After the government's arguments fell flat in front of a mostly skeptical Supreme Court last month, Trump accused his political opponents of 'playing the ref' through the courts to overturn his threat to the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment plainly states that 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.' For more than 100 years, the Supreme Court has upheld the definition to apply to all children born within the United States. But under the terms of Trump's order, children can be denied citizenship if a mother is undocumented or is temporarily legally in the country on a visa, and if the father isn't a citizen or a lawful permanent resident. The president's attempt to redefine citizenship is central to his administration's sweeping anti-immigration agenda. His administration has also effectively ended entry for asylum seekers; declared the United States under 'invasion' from foreign gangs to summarily remove alleged members; and stripped legal protections for more than 1 million people — radically expanding the pool of 'undocumented' people now vulnerable for arrest and removal. The administration 'de-legalised' tens of thousands of immigrants, and thousands of people with pending immigration cases are being ordered to court each week only to have those cases dismissed, with federal agents waiting to arrest them on the other side of the courtroom doors. The White House has also rolled back protections barring immigration arrests at sensitive locations like churches and bumped up the pace of immigration raids in the interior of the country. To carry out the arrests, the administration has tapped resources from other state and local agencies while moving officers from federal agencies like the FBI and DEA to focus on immigration. There are more people in immigration detention centers today than in any other point in modern history.
The Independent
16 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Supreme Court rules in Trump birthright citizenship case
The Supreme Court's conservative majority has stripped federal courts' authority to issue nationwide injunctions that have blocked key parts of Donald Trump's agenda. The court's anticipated ruling in a case attached to a question of whether the president can unilaterally redefine who gets to be a citizen states that nationwide injunctions 'exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to the federal courts.' A series of federal court rulings across the country struck down the president's attempt to block citizenship from newborn Americans who are born to certain immigrant parents. But the government argues those decisions should only impact the individual states — and the unborn children of pregnant mothers in them — who sued him and won. Opponents have warned that such a decision would open a backdoor to begin stripping constitutional rights. Allowing the president to unilaterally redefine who gets to be a U.S. citizen in states subject to Trump's unilateral rewriting of the 14th Amendment would create a patchwork system of constitutional rights and citizenship benefits — including voting rights. More than 150,000 newborns would be denied citizenship every year under Trump's order, according to the plaintiffs. In January, more than 20 states, immigrants' advocacy groups and pregnant plaintiffs sued the administration to block the president's executive order that attempts to redefine the Constitution to determine who is eligible for citizenship. Three federal judges and appellate court panels have argued his order is unconstitutional and blocked the measure from taking effect nationwide while legal challenges continue. During oral arguments, the Supreme Court's liberal justices appeared shocked at the president's 'unlawful' measure. But the administration used the case not necessarily to argue over whether he can change the 14th Amendment but to target what has become a major obstacle to advancing Trump's agenda: federal judges blocking aggressive executive actions. The government asked the court to limit the authority of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have imperiled a bulk of the president's agenda, which has thus far been dictated largely through an avalanche of executive orders, not legislation. The government pushed the Supreme Court to reduce the federal judiciary's power to issue nationwide injunctions, cutting off one of the few critical checks and balances against an administration that critics warn is mounting an ongoing assault against the rule of law. More than half of the injunctions issued over the last 70 years were against the Trump administration, according to the Harvard Law Review, as Trump pushed the limits of his authority. In Trump's first term in office, his administration faced 64 injunctions, compared to 14 injunctions against Joe Biden and 12 against Barack Obama The second administration faced 17 within its first two months. In arguments to the Supreme Court, Trump's personal attorney John Sauer, who was appointed by the president to serve as U.S. solicitor general, called the 'cascade of universal injunctions' against the administration a 'bipartisan problem' that exceeds judicial authority. 'The vision of the district courts that's reflected in the issuance of these nationwide injunctions is a vision of them as a roving commission to correct every legal wrong that they can consider and to exercise general legal oversight over the executive branch,' he said. Trump's allies, however, have relied on nationwide injunctions to do the very same thing they commanded the Supreme Court to strike down. Critics have accused right-wing legal groups of 'judge shopping' for ideologically like-minded venues where they can sue to strike down — through nationwide injunctions — policies with which they disagree. After the government's arguments fell flat in front of a mostly skeptical Supreme Court last month, Trump accused his political opponents of 'playing the ref' through the courts to overturn his threat to the 14th Amendment. 'The Radical Left SleazeBags, which has no cards remaining in its illegal bag of tricks, is, in a very coordinated manner, PLAYING THE REF with regard to the United States Supreme Court,' Trump wrote. 'They lost the Election in a landslide, and with it, have totally lost their confidence and reason. They are stone cold CRAZY! I hope the Supreme Court doesn't fall for the games they play,' he added. In a separate post, written in all-caps, he claimed the nation's high court is 'BEING PLAYED BY THE RADICAL LEFT LOSERS' whose 'ONLY HOPE IS THE INTIMIDATION OF THE COURT, ITSELF.' The 14th Amendment plainly states that 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.' But under the terms of Trump's order, children can be denied citizenship if a mother is undocumented or is temporarily legally in the country on a visa, and if the father isn't a citizen or a lawful permanent resident. The president's attempt to define a key component of the 14th Amendment is central to his administration's sweeping anti-immigration agenda. His administration has effectively ended entry for asylum seekers, declaring the United States under 'invasion' from foreign gangs to summarily remove alleged members, and stripped legal protections for more than 1 million people — radically expanding the pool of 'undocumented' people now vulnerable for arrest and removal. The administration has also effectively 'de-legalized' tens of thousands of immigrants, and thousands of people with pending immigration cases are being ordered to court each week only to have those cases dismissed, with federal agents waiting to arrest them on the other side of the courtroom doors. The White House has also rolled back protections barring immigration arrests at sensitive locations like churches and bumped up the pace of immigration raids in the interior of the country. To carry out the arrests, the administration has tapped resources from other state and local agencies while moving officers from federal agencies like the FBI and DEA to focus on immigration.
