America's role in the Middle East
President Donald Trump helped to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, after America bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. All sides are claiming victory, but what does the conflict —and existing ceasefire— mean for the leaders of all three countries?
John Prideaux hosts with Charlotte Howard and Idrees Kahloon.
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The Independent
31 minutes ago
- The Independent
What's next for birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court's ruling
The legal battle over President Donald Trump 's move to end birthright citizenship is far from over despite the Republican administration's major victory Friday limiting nationwide injunctions. Immigrant advocates are vowing to fight to ensure birthright citizenship remains the law as the Republican president tries to do away with more than a century of precedent. The high court's ruling sends cases challenging the president's birthright citizenship executive order back to the lower courts. But the ultimate fate of the president's policy remains uncertain. Here's what to know about birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court 's ruling and what happens next. Birthright citizenship makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally. The practice goes back to soon after the Civil War, when Congress ratified the Constitution's 14th Amendment, in part to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship. 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,' the amendment states. Thirty years later, Wong Kim Ark, a man born in the U.S. to Chinese parents, was refused re-entry into the U.S. after traveling overseas. His suit led to the Supreme Court explicitly ruling that the amendment gives citizenship to anyone born in the U.S., no matter their parents' legal status. It has been seen since then as an intrinsic part of U.S. law, with only a handful of exceptions, such as for children born in the U.S. to foreign diplomats. Trump has long said he wants to do away with birthright citizenship Trump's executive order, signed in Januar,y seeks to deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are living in the U.S. illegally or temporarily. It's part of the hardline immigration agenda of the president, who has called birthright citizenship a 'magnet for illegal immigration.' Trump and his supporters focus on one phrase in the amendment — 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' – saying it means the U.S. can deny citizenship to babies born to women in the country illegally. A series of federal judges have said that's not true, and issued nationwide injunctions stopping his order from taking effect. 'I've been on the bench for over four decades. I can't remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,' U.S. District Judge John Coughenour said at a hearing earlier this year in his Seattle courtroom. In Greenbelt, Maryland, a Washington suburb, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote that 'the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed' Trump's interpretation of birthright citizenship. Is Trump's order constitutional? The justices didn't say The high court's ruling was a major victory for the Trump administration in that it limited an individual judge's authority in granting nationwide injunctions. The administration hailed the ruling as a monumental check on the powers of individual district court judges, whom Trump supporters have argued want to usurp the president's authority with rulings blocking his priorities around immigration and other matters. But the Supreme Court did not address the merits of Trump's bid to enforce his birthright citizenship executive order. 'The Trump administration made a strategic decision, which I think quite clearly paid off, that they were going to challenge not the judges' decisions on the merits, but on the scope of relief,' said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor. Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the administration is 'very confident' that the high court will ultimately side with the administration on the merits of the case. Questions and uncertainty swirl around next steps The justices kicked the cases challenging the birthright citizenship policy back down to the lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the new ruling. The executive order remains blocked for at least 30 days, giving lower courts and the parties time to sort out the next steps. The Supreme Court's ruling leaves open the possibility that groups challenging the policy could still get nationwide relief through class-action lawsuits and seek certification as a nationwide class. Within hours after the ruling, two class-action suits had been filed in Maryland and New Hampshire seeking to block Trump's order. But obtaining nationwide relief through a class action is difficult as courts have put up hurdles to doing so over the years, said Suzette Malveaux, a Washington and Lee University law school professor. 'It's not the case that a class action is a sort of easy, breezy way of getting around this problem of not having nationwide relief,' said Malveaux, who had urged the high court not to eliminate the nationwide injunctions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned the court's dissenting opinion, urged the lower courts to 'act swiftly on such requests for relief and to adjudicate the cases as quickly as they can so as to enable this Court's prompt review" in cases 'challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order.' Opponents of Trump's order warned there would be a patchwork of polices across the states, leading to chaos and confusion without nationwide relief. 'Birthright citizenship has been settled constitutional law for more than a century," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that supports refugees and migrants. 'By denying lower courts the ability to enforce that right uniformly, the Court has invited chaos, inequality, and fear.' ____ Associated Press reporters Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington and Mike Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey, contributed.
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
U.S. law firm Susman Godfrey defeats Trump executive order
June 27 (Reuters) - Law firm Susman Godfrey convinced a judge on Friday to permanently block a White House executive order against it, capping a string of court victories for firms targeted for their association with U.S. President Donald Trump's perceived enemies. U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan said Trump's order unlawfully retaliated against Susman for cases it has taken and its efforts to promote racial diversity, violating the firm's rights to free speech and due process of law under the U.S. Constitution. AliKhan is the fourth federal judge in Washington to reach a similar conclusion, following wins for Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale in parallel cases. The rulings by a mix of Democratic and Republican-appointed judges each decisively rejected Trump's orders suspending security clearances at the firms, restricting their access to government officials and seeking to cancel federal contracts held by their clients. Nine prominent law firms, including Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps, Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis, have settled with the White House to avoid similar actions against them by the administration. Those firms cumulatively pledged nearly $1 billion in free legal services to support causes backed by Trump. Some later argued that the threat of being targeted by the administration left them no alternative. Susman in its lawsuit called Trump's order retaliation for its defense of the integrity of the 2020 presidential election that Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. The firm represents election technology supplier Dominion Voting Systems in cases that challenged false claims the election was stolen from Trump through widespread voting fraud. Trump also had accused Susman of racial discrimination in its hiring practices. AliKhan at a hearing on May 8 repeatedly questioned a lawyer for the Justice Department about the administration's failure to show that the firm's employment programs or its work for Dominion violated the law. The Justice Department and White House have defended Trump's executive orders against law firms as lawful exercises of presidential power. Trump accused the firms of "weaponizing" the justice system against him and his political allies.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Amy Coney Barrett tears into liberal fellow Supreme Court justice over birthright citizenship
Friday's bombshell Supreme Court opinion featured brutal exchanges between Justice Amy Coney Barrett and dissenter Ketanji Brown Jackson, with legal discourse providing clues to growing discord on the court. Barrett, 53, a Trump appointee, repeatedly rips Jackson's arguments in her 6-3 majority opinion in a major birthright citizenship case, with comments that come close to mocking her intellectual rival. 'Rhetoric aside, Justice Jackson's position is difficult to pin down,' Barrett writes in just one of her missives. Some lines resemble jabs from a political debate. 'Justice Jackson appears to believe that the reasoning behind any court order demands 'universal adherence,' at least where the Executive is concerned,' goes one. In perhaps the most sneering comment, Barrett writes: 'We will not dwell on Justice Jackson's argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.' The tough opinion – which gave Trump a freer hand to act without facing nationwide injunctions, raising alarms he couldn't be stopped from lawless actions – came in the a ruling on a major birthright citizenship case. The opinion immediately registered with President Donald Trump, who has reportedly stewing that Barrett has been 'weak' after joining with liberals on some key opinions. 'I want to thank justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly,' Trump wrote, before running through the names of each conservative who voted for it. He called them all 'great people.' Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, had issued ominous warnings in her own blistering dissent. 'Disaster looms,' she warned. 'What I mean by this is that our rights-based legal system can only function properly if the Executive, and everyone else, is always bound by law. Today's decision is a seismic shock to that foundational norm. Allowing the Executive to violate the law at its prerogative with respect to anyone who has not yet sued carves out a huge exception—a gash in the basic tenets of our founding charter that could turn out to be a mortal wound,' she wrote. 'What is more, to me, requiring courts themselves to provide the dagger (by giving their imprimatur to the Executive Branch's intermittent lawlessness) makes a mockery of the Judiciary's solemn duty to safeguard the rule of law,' she added. Jackson, 71, cited a ruling about the 'accretion of dangerous power, and wrote that the Court has 'cleared a path for the Executive to choose law-free action at this perilous moment for our Constitution—right when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law's constraints.' 'I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.' She warned of a 'rule-of-kings governing system' compared to a 'rule of law regime.' 'At the very least, I lament that the majority is so caught up in minutiae of the Government's self-serving, finger-pointing arguments that it misses the plot.' Jackson even began the opening section of her argument by dispensing with the traditional saying that she 'respectfully' dissents. 'With deep disillusionment, I dissent,' she wrote.
