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      Trump basks in triumph as supreme court kicks away another guard rail

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      He strode into the White House briefing room feeling invincible. In his own telling, he had fixed the Middle East. He had made Nato pay up. He had pacified the heart of Africa. And now Napoleon Trump had once again just been crowned emperor by the US supreme court.“We’ve had a big week,” Donald Trump, orange hair shimmering, blue tie drooping below the waist, mused from a lectern anointed with the presidential seal. “We’ve had a lot of victories this week.”The highest court had just handed the president another win by curbing the power of federal judges to impose nationwide rulings impeding his policies – though it left unresolved the issue of whether he can limit birthright citizenship.Unable to contain his glee, Trump came to talk to the press – something his predecessor Joe Biden rarely did – to goad the “fake news” while basking in glory from the Maga-friendly media.The president hailed the court’s decision as a “monumental victory for the constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law” and gloated – with some hyperbole – that “there are people elated all over the country”. He looked forward to taking aim at targets such as birthright citizenship, sanctuary city funding and refugee resettlement.In the abstract, there is a reasonable debate to be had over how much power the judiciary should have to curb an elected leader’s agenda. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, has described it as a “bipartisan problem” that has plagued five different presidents. A decade ago Barack Obama expressed frustration when a district court temporarily blocked his executive actions on immigration.In the court’s majority opinion, the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s contention that they were neglecting their duty to protect the people from government overreach. “Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary,” Barrett wrote.But context is everything. Trump has marginalised Congress, sued the media in an effort to chill free speech, assailed cultural institutions and universities and deployed the military against peaceful protesters. The courts have been leading the way in safeguarding democracy from his authoritarian impulses. Now they too are on the ropes.Asked by a reporter if the supreme court decision concentrates too much power in the White House, Trump insisted: “The question is fine but it’s the opposite. The constitution has been brought back.”Yet the supreme court that decided to make the strongman even stronger contains three Trump appointees and last year found that former presidents have presumptive immunity from prosecution for “official acts” – in effect putting Trump above the law. The four criminal investigations that once dogged him now feel like ancient history.View image in fullscreenTrump was asked a question by a reporter from LindellTV, a news organisation founded by Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist and founder of MyPillow, about whether he would like to see a justice department investigation of the judges whose rulings allowed the cases to proceed against him while he was out of office.“I love you,” Trump said in response to the question, adding: “I hope so.”It has been exactly 12 months since he debated with Biden and discovered an opponent in chronic decline. Democrats panicked and imploded, Trump survived an assassination attempt and rode his good fortune all the way to the White House.It is small wonder that the 79-year-old now considers himself untouchable, acting with impunity at home and abroad, holding freewheeling press conferences like Friday’s without fear of consequences.“Illegal crossings at the border are at zero now,” a reporter said.Trump interjected: “Zero! Does everyone hear that?”A cameraman in the briefing room shouted: “Trump 2028!”Later Trump reiterated his claim that Iran’s nuclear sites had been obliterated and lamented: “We had some fake news for a little while – the same people that covered the Hunter Biden laptop was from Russia … I don’t believe that they’re going to go back into nuclear anytime soon.”He also used the briefing to take a swipe at Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, for not lowering interest rates. “We have a man who’s not a smart man, and he probably has Trump Derangement Syndrome.”Later on Friday the White House would host leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda to sign a peace deal to end years of fighting. Trump cheerfully admitted: “I’m a little bit out of my league in that one because I didn’t know too much about it.” He also noted that the US would gain access to critical minerals in the region.Trump even ruminated on threats to his life, including proxy groups from Iran that may issue threats, and referenced the bullet that struck his ear last summer in an attempted assassination. He gets “that throbbing feeling every once in a while”, he said.“What I do is a dangerous business. You know, I tell the story of the car companies and different people in different professions. You have race car drivers, as an example, one-tenth of 1% die. Bull riders, one-tenth of 1%. That’s not a lot, but people die. When you’re president, it’s about 5%. If somebody would have told me that, maybe I wouldn’t have run. This is a very different profession.”As raised hands in the room clamoured for attention his political lizard brain spotted an opportunity to bash his predecessor. “This is the opposite of Biden. Biden would take a half a question and he’d leave without answering it … You tell me when it gets boring, OK?” More

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      University of Virginia president resigns under pressure from White House over DEI programs

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      The president of the University of Virginia (UVA) has resigned from his position after coming under pressure from the Trump administration over diversity efforts.James Ryan was facing political pressure from Washington to step aside in order to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing three people briefed on the matter.Ryan had a reputation for trying to make the UVA campus more diverse and encouraging students to perform community service.“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in a message to the university reviewed by the Guardian.He added: “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.“This was an excruciatingly difficult decision, and I am heartbroken to be leaving this way.”The apparent campaign against a prominent public sector university in the US follows Donald Trump’s agenda since returning to the White House to cancel programs and policies aimed at greater diversity, equity and inclusion in government, workplaces, and various establishments and organizations across American society.In parallel, the US president set about attacking and taking funds from elite private sector universities, with Harvard at the forefront, in an assault on the academic and research independence of higher education more broadly.The New York Times first reported late on Thursday that the justice department had demanded that Ryan step down as part of an agreement to settle a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices, as Trump further erodes the government agency’s distance from the White House by enlisting its investigative powers as part of his political agenda.Ryan said in a letter, briefed to the Times by a source, that he was going to step down next year but “given the circumstances and today’s conversations” he had decided “with deep sadness” to resign now.The justice department had reportedly told UVA that the government thought it was prioritizing race-based factors during its admissions process and other aspects of student life in a way that constitutes “widespread practices throughout every component and facet of the institution”.Ryan’s removal is another example of the Trump administration using “thuggery instead of rational discourse,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents university presidents, told the Associated Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more of the same,” Mitchell said. “It’s clear the administration is not done and will use every tool that it can make or invent to exert its will over higher education.”In a joint statement, Virginia’s Democratic senators said it was outrageous that the Trump administration would demand Ryan’s resignation over “‘culture war’ traps.” “This is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future,” Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine said.UVA is located in Charlottesville, and found itself in the global headlines early on in the first Trump administration when, in August 2017, hundreds of far-right demonstrators wielding torches and shouting racist slogans marched on to the historic campus ahead of a so-called Unite the Right rally in the small city, crowding towards a smaller group of counterprotesters.The subsequent rally, to try to prevent the removal of Confederate statues from a park, was massive and became very violent as neo-Nazi groups gathered and attacked counterprotesters, then later a white supremacist drove a car into such a group and killed a woman.Trump sparked uproar by blaming both sides for the violence, on the one hand and, on the other, saying: “You had people that were very fine people on both sides.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Liberal supreme court justices’ dissents reveal concerns that the US faces a crisis

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      On Friday the conservative-dominated US supreme court handed down a series of important judgments on issues ranging from the power of the judiciary to religious rights in schools. Media attention generally focused on the wording of the rulings and their impact.But the court’s liberal minority of just three justices penned dissenting opinions that were similarly potent, revealing the sharp divisions on America’s top legal body and also showed their deep concern at the declining health of American civic society and the authoritarian bent of the Trump presidency.Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered an acidic sermon against the court’s 6-3 decision to end lower courts’ practice of issuing nationwide injunctions to block federal executive orders, reading her dissent directly from the bench in a move meant to highlight its importance.The decision is seen as limiting the power of judges to halt or slow presidential orders, even those whose constitutionality has not yet been tested, such as Trump’s attempt to remove the right to automatic US citizenship for anyone born inside US borders.“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” states Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown-Jackson. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”As opinion season ends in the first months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, the court’s decisions have expanded the power of the presidency and limited the power of lower courts to block Trump’s agenda.The opinion in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v Casa Inc, in which the court was silent on the underlying question about the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order, nonetheless undermines the rule of law, Sotomayor said.Even though defending the order’s legality is “an impossible task” given the plain language of the 14th amendment, the court’s opinion means each person must challenge the order individually in states that are not a party to the suit, unless class-action status is granted.In a concurring dissent, Jackson explained the burden it places on people to defend their rights in court.“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,” Jackson’s dissent states. “This perverse burden shifting cannot coexist with the rule of law. In essence, the Court has now shoved lower court judges out of the way in cases where executive action is challenged, and has gifted the Executive with the prerogative of sometimes disregarding the law.”Jackson added ominously, the ruling was an “existential threat to the rule of law”.Reading from the bench has historically been an uncommon act meant to emphasize profound disapproval of a justice to a ruling. The court’s liberal wing has made it less rare lately, inveighing against profound legal changes wrought by the court’s six-judge conservative bloc.Other decisions handed down on Friday also permit parents to opt their children out of classroom activities that depict LGBTQ+ characters in books (Mahmood v Taylor), and allow states to require age verification on pornographic web sites (Free Speech Coalition Inc, v Paxton), both decided on ideological lines.Age verification has already begun to drive porn website operators out of Texas, given a cost estimated at $40,000 for every 100,000 verifications, Kagan noted in her acerbic dissent.The Texas law creates a barrier between adults and first amendment-protected content that previous supreme court decisions on speech would not have permitted, she noted. Providing ID online is fundamentally different than flashing a driver’s license at a bar.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It is turning over information about yourself and your viewing habits – respecting speech many find repulsive – to a website operator, and then to … who knows?” she wrote. “The operator might sell the information; the operator might be hacked or subpoenaed.”The ruling granting a religious exemption will have a chilling effect on schools, which may strip classroom material of any reference to LGBTQ+ content rather than risk costly litigation, Sotomayor wrote in dissent.Her dissent highlights the deliberate work done by the Montgomery county school board to create an inclusive curriculum, adding “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” to its library in 2022. The children’s book, one of five with LGBTQ+ characters, describes a same-sex couple’s wedding announcement and plans.“Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” she wrote. “The Court’s ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards.”In three of the five decisions handed down on Friday, that conservative bloc had the majority. But in two cases the conservative bloc split: Kennedy v Braidwood Management, which reversed lower court rulings that declared an appointed board overseeing preventive care under the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, and FCC v Consumers’ Research, which upheld the constitutionality of fees collected for a rural broadband program.Each of these cases split conservatives between those who support more expansive executive power – Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett – and others at war with the administrative state: Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas.But collectively, conservatives on the court have continued to upend longstanding precedent, while weakening the legal avenues of challengers to use the courts to defend their rights, the court’s remaining liberal justices lament.“The rule of law is not a given in this Nation, nor any other. It is a precept of our democracy that will endure only if those brave enough in every branch fight for its survival,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent on the birthright citizenship case. “Today, the Court abdicates its vital role in that effort.” More

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      US supreme court limits federal judges’ power to block Trump orders

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      The US supreme court has supported Donald Trump’s attempt to limit lower-court orders that have so far blocked his administration’s ban on birthright citizenship, in a ruling that could strip federal judges of a power they’ve used to obstruct many of Trump’s orders nationwide.The decision represents a fundamental shift in how US federal courts can constrain presidential power. Previously, any of the country’s more than 1,000 judges in its 94 district courts – the lowest level of federal court, which handles trials and initial rulings – could issue nationwide injunctions that immediately halt government policies across all 50 states.Under the supreme court ruling, however, those court orders only apply to the specific plaintiffs – for example, groups of states or non-profit organizations – that brought the case.The court’s opinion on the constitutionality of whether some American-born children can be deprived of citizenship remains undecided and the fate of the US president’s order to overturn birthright citizenship rights was left unclear, despite Trump claiming a “giant win”.To stymie the impact of the ruling, immigration aid groups have rushed to recalibrate their legal strategy to block Trump’s policy ending birthright citizenship.Immigrant advocacy groups including Casa and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (Asap) – who filed one of several original lawsuits challenging the president’s executive order – are asking a federal judge in Maryland for an emergency block on Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. They have also refiled their broader lawsuit challenging the policy as a class-action case, seeking protections for every pregnant person or child born to families without permanent legal status, no matter where they live.“We’re confident this will prevent this administration from attempting to selectively enforce their heinous executive order,” said George Escobar, chief of programs and services at Casa. “These are scary times, but we are not powerless, and we have shown in the past, and we continue to show that when we fight, we win.”The decision on Friday morning decided by six votes to three by the nine-member bench of the highest court in the land, sided with the Trump administration in a historic case that tested presidential power and judicial oversight.The conservative majority wrote that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts”, granting “the government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue”.The ruling, written by the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not let Trump’s policy seeking a ban on birthright citizenship go into effect immediately and did not address the policy’s legality. The fate of the policy remains imprecise.With the court’s conservatives in the majority and its liberals dissenting, the ruling specified that Trump’s executive order cannot take effect until 30 days after Friday’s ruling.Trump celebrated the ruling as vindication of his broader agenda to roll back judicial constraints on executive power. “Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” Trump said from the White House press briefing room on Friday. “It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on a vacation.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered a scathing dissent. She argued that the majority’s decision, restricting federal court powers to grant national legal relief in cases, allows Trump to enforce unconstitutional policies against people who haven’t filed lawsuits, meaning only those with the resources and legal standing to challenge the order in court would be protected.“The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.”Speaking from the bench, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor called the court’s majority decision “a travesty for the rule of law”.Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the 14th amendment following the US civil war in 1868, specifically to overturn the supreme court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied citizenship to Black Americans.The principle has stood since 1898, when the supreme court granted citizenship to Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents who could not naturalize.The ruling will undoubtedly exacerbate the fear and uncertainty many expecting mothers and immigrant families across the US have felt since the administration first attempt to end birthright citizenship.Liza, one of several expecting mothers who was named as plaintiff in the case challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship policy, said she had since given birth to a “happy and healthy” baby, who was born a US citizen thanks to the previous, nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s order. But she and her husband, both Russian nationals who fear persecution in their home country, still feel unsettled.“We remain worried, even now that one day the government could still try to take away our child’s US citizenship,” she said at a press conference on Friday. “I have worried a lot about whether the government could try to detain or deport our baby. At some point, the executive order made us feel as though our baby was considered a nobody.”The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) condemned the ruling as opening the door to partial enforcement of a ban on automatic birthright citizenship for almost everyone born in the US, in what it called an illegal policy.“The executive order is blatantly illegal and cruel. It should never be applied to anyone,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.Democratic attorneys general who brought the original challenge said in a press conference that while the ruling had been disappointing, the silver lining was that the supreme court left open pathways for continued protection and that “birthright citizenship remains the law of the land”.“We fought a civil war to address whether babies born on United States soil are, in fact, citizens of this country,” New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew Platkin, said, speaking alongside colleagues from Washington state, California, Massachusetts and Connecticut. “For a century and a half, this has not been in dispute.”Trump’s January executive order sought to deny birthright citizenship to babies born on US soil if their parents lack legal immigration status – defying the 14th amendment’s guarantee that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens – and made justices wary during the hearing.The real fight in Trump v Casa Inc, wasn’t about immigration but judicial power. Trump’s lawyers demanded that nationwide injunctions blocking presidential orders be scrapped, arguing judges should only protect specific plaintiffs who sue – not the entire country.Three judges blocked Trump’s order nationwide after he signed it on inauguration day, which would enforce citizenship restrictions in states where courts had not specifically blocked them. The policy targeted children of both undocumented immigrants and legal visa holders, demanding that at least one parent be a lawful permanent resident or US citizen.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      I’m glad we have rules. I just don’t expect people to follow them | Dave Schilling

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      Rules are great. I think most of us over the age of five will agree that having them is preferable to not. Perhaps there are a few stragglers out there reading this who would love to cosplay a lesser sequel of The Purge, swinging baseball bats at strangers and urinating in the street, but I would imagine you are in the minority on that. Rules are the backbone of what we have left of society. I’m not happy about where we are, but I don’t make the rules. At least not yet. I just need to host a popular reality show – then my political career can really take off.A recent interaction has me reflecting on this. I was wandering over to my local coffee shop one morning, off a wide boulevard where motorists scream through intersections like the car from Ghostbusters late for a particularly aggressive haunting. A crosswalk, with accompanying yellow yield light, was recently installed to combat the minor issue of pedestrians being flattened by drivers on their way to the hair salon or texting about being late to the hair salon. The light has been mostly successful in preventing the human waffle-ironing, but it requires walkers to actually press the button to activate it. This is a step that people often dismiss, hoping and praying that the drivers out there are lucid enough to acknowledge the existence of others. Without the yellow light, we’re all operating on the honor system for not killing each other.That morning, someone confidently strolled into the intersection, and was mortified that the car screaming down the road didn’t immediately stop for him. The pedestrian hollered and moaned as the vehicle screeched to a halt. Once he was done cursing and spitting on the street, the man crossed and the befuddled driver carried on. Besides my relief at not witnessing a homicide, I was left wondering why the man was so upset. Was he expecting the driver to follow the rules? How naive. Let’s pray this guy never ends up involved in global foreign policy.I couldn’t help but think of this beautifully trusting pedestrian during the last week of nail-biting brinkmanship between the United States and Iran. A few bombs here, a couple of missiles there. Some erratic social media posts later, and we have something akin to a ceasefire for the time being. Donald Trump claimed the Iranian nuclear capability had been “obliterated”, though experts say the country’s program was only set back by a few months.It all comes back to the rules we make. We had an Obama-era deal to cap Iran’s atomic ambitions – but Trump pulled the US out of it back in 2018, drastically curtailing the west’s ability to hold the ayatollah to his promises. It’s like if Los Angeles decided to take the crosswalk out of my neighborhood and instead ask people nicely not to run each other over with giant piles of metal going over 40mph – and if someone got hit, to blow up the area with a bunker buster.We need rules, even if we assume people will break them early and often. Because the vast majority of us won’t. Most of us are too timid, too square or, in my case, too lazy. The alternative to rules is anarchy: a fistfight in the supermarket or a bachelor party in Atlantic City. Still, it’s time to expect that the arc of the universe will not bend in our direction, that our fellows might not be considering whether or not to slow down through the intersection of life.I don’t want to wade too deeply into the finer points of foreign policy, because, as I mentioned above, I have never hosted a reality television program. But I am highly qualified to complain about things, which I will continue doing in this space for the foreseeable future. Assume the worst, as I do, and your life will be much simpler. Expect those around you to fail and flout the rules that govern our world. Does this sound cynical? Of course it does. Does that mean it’s wrong? Absolutely not. Look around. Not just at the inside of your living room, the bathroom stall or wherever it is you’re reading this. I mean, look around metaphorically. Our institutions are wobbly, our trust in order is at an all-time low, and Vanderpump Rules might never come back for new episodes. Where is the justice?The Democratic primary victory of the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has been the talk of the entire US, acting as a lighthouse of hope in the choppy pea-soup shit fog of 2025. But in order for Mamdani to win that primary, people had to show up. They had to vote for him and not assume someone else would. Better to assume everyone around you had a nasty fall on the head and can’t stop saying “Cuomo” over and over again. Expect the worst, then enjoy the surprise of being wrong.If I did host a reality show, and therefore became eligible for the presidency, this would be the primary tenet of my foreign policy. “If we bomb Iran, people will be upset. And upset people do nasty things” – sure, that won’t fit on a campaign button, but I’m sure I could hire someone to workshop it into something catchier. I’m obviously thrilled we all haven’t been vaporized, but decisions made today do have this pesky way of leading to calamities of the future. You only need to think back to the 1953 CIA coup that led to the overthrow of the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Cleverer people than me (with a higher word-count maximum) could explain the connection between that regime change and Iran’s persistent conflict with the United States.What will be the long-term effects of the US-Israeli bombing campaign? Unfortunately, I’m stuck in the present and can’t give you a definitive answer. That is one of the many drawbacks of corporeal existence, another of which is getting hit by a car. Whatever happens next, don’t expect it to be fun.But if it is, and we’re all drinking champagne in Tehran in a decade, you can come back here and tell me I’m stupid. What a lovely surprise that would be.

      Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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      Some immigrants chose to leave the US. But is ‘self-deportation’ really becoming a thing?

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      Their stories have emerged in new reports and on social media feeds: individuals and families, sometimes of mixed immigration status, who have lived in the United States for years and are now choosing to leave. Or, as it’s sometimes called, “self-deport”.There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former deputy communications director Diego de la Vega, who lived as an undocumented New Yorker for 23 years before he and his wife left for Colombia in December, shortly after Donald Trump’s election. Or the decorated army veteran, a permanent resident in the US for nearly 50 years, who left for South Korea this week after being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Or newlyweds Alfredo Linares, an undocumented chef, and his wife, Raegan Klein, a US citizen, who recently moved their lives from Los Angeles to Mexico.But experts warn that just because we see stories of so-called “self-deportation”, we should be careful about believing there’s any real trend. Not only does taking this route create potentially serious legal and financial issues for those leaving, convincing the public that a lot of people are self-deporting is also part of Trump’s larger strategy to create an illusion of higher deportation numbers than he can truly deliver.The emphasis on self-deportation is clearly a recognition by the administration that they can’t really accomplish what they’ve promised, says Alexandra Filindra, professor of political science and psychology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “It’s way too costly to identify, arrest, process and deport large numbers of immigrants, especially when there are so many court fights and so many organizations that are willing to support the rights of immigrants.”Filindra says Trump is trying to take the cheap route, hoping his performative politics – everything from the widespread Ice raids across the US to sending the national guard to Los Angeles – will get people to pack up their own accord.Leaving everything behindIt’s impossible to put a precise number on how many immigrants have decided to leave the country since Trump took power. But for those who have, the decision is deeply personal.Linares, who was born in Mexico, still thinks of California as home because it was where he came as a teen and lived undocumented for decades. Klein was born in Canada and became a naturalized US citizen nearly two decades ago. They married last year in Los Angeles.“We received a small amount of money for our wedding,” Klein said. “We planned to use it to start Alfredo’s immigration process.” After Trump won, though, Klein was the first to have second thoughts.View image in fullscreen“I didn’t like Trump in his first term, and then when he got away with 34 felonies and was elected again as the president, I just was like, well, come on! I mean, he’s going to do any and everything he wants to do. No one’s holding him accountable for anything, so I’m not sitting around.”Linares – as well as most of their family and friends – thought Klein was overreacting. The couple met with three immigration attorneys. Though he married a legal US citizen, Linares crossed the border as a teen illegally. Attempting to rectify his status would be expensive and take untold years of waiting – with no guarantee of a path to legal residency or citizenship. Furthermore, beginning the legal process to adjust his status would put him on the government’s radar and may have even increased his risk of deportation.In fact, immigration court has become a dragnet of sorts. People lawfully going through the process of becoming a citizen have been showing up for mandatory court dates and getting arrested by Ice officers outside the courtrooms.Klein was eventually able to persuade Linares that they should take their small nest egg and leave while they still could.They created a video about their departure to Mexico that was equal parts love story and epic adventure. “Apparently our video went really, really viral,” said Klein, who kept busy as a freelance television producer until a big industry slowdown a couple of years ago. Friends started contacting them and saying influencers were reposting their video. Major media outlets soon amplified the newlyweds’ saga.Klein and Linares now dream of opening a restaurant together in Mexico. They say they don’t think of their situation as self-deportation but rather “voluntary departure” – the government didn’t force them out or pay them to leave, they made the decision themselves.Self-deportation: a catchy term, or a real trend?Filindra also takes issue with the phrase “self-deportation”, and warns against the rebranding of an old phenomenon known as return migration.“Return migration has always been a phenomenon,” she says. Filindra points out that migration levels between the US and Mexico are “practically zero” because so many people eventually go back home to Mexico, so the numbers of those arriving and those going back all but even out. According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 870,000 Mexican migrants came to the US between 2013 and 2018, while an estimated 710,000 left the US for Mexico during that period. During the decade prior, however, more migrants left the US for Mexico than came here.“The same was true in the 20th century with European migrants who often spent 20 or 30 years here, made enough money to retire and then went back home,” says Filindra.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut this isn’t exactly self-deportation, and the phrase itself has a problematic history. Though now being used in serious policy discussions, it was created as a joke by comedians Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul in the early 90s. The duo posed as conservative Latinos supporting Hispanics Against a Liberal Takeover (Halto). They even invented a militant self-deportationist and sent fake press releases to media outlets promoting satirical self-deportation centers. In 2012 Mitt Romney, seemingly unaware of – or perhaps unbothered by – the comedic roots of the term, started using “self-deportation” during his unsuccessful bid for the presidency.Now the US Department of Homeland Security has latched on to the term. In May, the DHS claimed that 64 people took a government-funded flight to Colombia and Honduras as part of its new program encouraging undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”.View image in fullscreenThe International Organization for Migration (IOM) is one agency supporting the effort, which it calls “assisted voluntary return” (AVR). Undocumented people can apply for AVR using the CBPHome app. Though the details remain murky, applicants supposedly receive a $1,000 stipend and travel assistance home.However, according to a source familiar with the program who requested anonymity, approximately 1,000 individuals have been referred by the US government to the IOM through the AVR program, but to date the agency has facilitated the departure of “only a few” people.Immigration experts say this also squares with what they are seeing.“A thousand dollars is chump change when it comes to giving up a life in the United States,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at American Immigration Council. “The majority of undocumented immigrants have been here for more than 15 years. They have a job. Many have family here, some own property. Some run their own businesses.”Furthermore, many immigrants are here because of dire situations and life-threatening conditions in their home countries. They have nowhere to return to. Immigration attorneys also warn that because the Trump administration hasn’t been transparent, too little is known about the program to trust it. In fact, an additional directive from the administration on 9 June announced that the DHS would “forgive failure to depart fines for illegal aliens who self-deport through the CBP Home app” – though most people would have no idea that fines are levied or how much those fines are.Even with the administration’s recent Ice raids and the supposed sweetening of the self-deportation deal, Filindra says most migrants will still not just leave. “What is more likely is that people who have a non-permanent status and need to visit immigration offices to extend their status, or those who have hearings, will not go out of fear of being arrested and deported.”And she says we should all hope that the administration’s obsession with all types of deportation is a flop. If too many immigrants are forced, threatened or incentivized to leave, industries from agriculture to healthcare will take a huge hit.“Economically, this could be devastating for the US,” said Filindra.Linares and Klein also warn that while they believe they made the right decision, leaving home is rough.Linares describes it as a rollercoaster. “The people have embraced us in Mexico, but it’s also been a challenge to figure out how things work here.” He’s still trying to get his Mexican driver’s license and passport. And he misses his LA friends, co-workers and even Griffith Park, his favorite place to hike with his dog. “It was 20 years of my life there that I dedicated to building something. It’s gone.”After going public with her story, Klein expected to hear from many undocumented people or mixed-status families choosing, or at least considering, leaving the US on their own terms – but so far, she hasn’t.“I don’t think a lot of undocumented people are leaving right now,” she says. “But if something doesn’t change – like if Trump isn’t put into check very soon – I think you will see a lot more people abandoning the US in 2026.” More

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      How refugees have helped save these midwestern cities: ‘That’s really something we celebrate’

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      At a time in life when many are winding down, Gunash Akhmedova, aged 65, fulfilled a lifelong dream of opening her first business.A member of the Ahiska, or Meskhetian, Turk community who came to the US as a refugee from western Russia in 2005, Akhmedova opened Gunash’s Mediterranean Cusine two years ago on the site of a converted freight house alongside other international food vendors in a formerly industrial corner of Dayton, Ohio.Akhmedova is one of several thousand Ahiska Turks to have moved to Dayton over the past 15 years. In that time, the new community has bought and rebuilt dozens of homes in blighted parts of the city, turning them into thriving neighborhoods replete with Turkish restaurants, community centers and a wrestling club.While in Utah, where Akhmedova was first resettled by the US government, she found her opportunities were limited to dish washing and cooking at retirement homes and hospitals. Here in Ohio, her longstanding goals have been realized.“We Turkish people are all cooks, from a young age,” she says. “I saw that here, there is a lot of opportunities to do something that you like.”While cities such as New York, Miami and Los Angeles have long enjoyed the diversity of life and economic growth fueled by refugees and immigrants, recent years have seen smaller, more homogeneous towns in so-called “flyover states” transformed into vibrant, growing communities thanks to immigrants.Ohio’s foreign-born population has grown by 30% over the last decade, helping to offset a decades-long population decline that was fueled by the offshoring of manufacturing and the Great Recession of 2008. Neighboring Kentucky resettled more refugees per capita than any other state in 2023, where between 2021 and 2023 their numbers grew from 670 to 2,520.In places such as Springfield, Ohio; Logansport, Indiana; and beyond, refugees and immigrants have stepped in to fill critical entry-level jobs such as packaging and manufacturing, the demand for which locals find themselves unwilling or unable to meet.In Owensboro, a town of 60,000 people in western Kentucky, hundreds of Afghan refugees and humanitarian parolees have brought a diversity to the area not previously seen. There, three refugees ran a restaurant serving central Asian food for several years out of a diner whose owners allowed them to use their facilities. In 2023, the restaurant, called Pamir Afghan Cuisine and since closed, was voted the best international restaurant in town.In Lexington, nearly 2,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine and elsewhere have brought diverse vibrancy to a city formerly mostly known for horses and whiskey.Refugees are people unable or unwilling to return to their country of nationality due to the threat of persecution or war. According to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, there are roughly 36.8 million refugees around the world, and despite the US being the world’s second-richest country based on purchasing power parity, the number of refugees being admitted has been falling since the beginning of the program, in 1980.Similar experiences are playing out in Indianapolis, a city that saw years of population and economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, it finds itself home to the largest Burmese community in the US, a haven for more than 30,000 immigrants from the south-east Asian country who have fled the Myanmar military regime’s decades-long crackdown on democracy activists and minority religions.“Indiana is at the crossroads of America, where a lot of logistics and manufacturing companies are located. Those jobs are readily available for refugees,” says Elaisa Vahnie, who heads the Burmese American Community Institute in Indianapolis, an organization helping refugees and immigrants from the country adapt to life in Indiana.“There’s also around 150 small businesses – insurance and real estate companies, restaurants, housing developers – run by Burmese people in central Indiana.”Since 2011, the Burmese American Community Institute has helped more than 17,000 people adjust to life in the midwest, and has even driven up college attendance rates among young Burmese Americans. About 40% of the community in Indiana was initially resettled elsewhere in the US but moved to the midwestern state due to family connections and job opportunities.Data from the US Census Bureau shows that 70% of Indiana’s population growth in 2024 was due to international immigration, driving the largest population growth the state has seen in nearly two decades.However, like in 2017, these communities find themselves facing a host of new immigration restrictions and controls introduced by the Trump administration.This month, the White House barred entry to the US by citizens of Myanmar, Afghanistan and 10 other countries, in order to, it claims, “protect the nation from foreign terrorist and other national security and public safety threats”.“We have heard that church pastors, family members, friends and those who have been planning to visit find themselves in a very sudden situation. The community here has been impacted already,” says Vahnie.A refugee who fled Myanmar due to persecution for his pro-democracy advocacy, Vahnie has recently been to Washington DC to canvass state department officials and congressional staffers to end the travel ban.“If this ban continues, the impact will not just be on Burmese Americans. The United States is a leader of global freedom, human rights and democracy. It’s in our best interest to invest in the people of Burma. We need to carefully think through this, and I hope the administration will consider lifting the ban as quickly as possible,” he says.Last year, more than 100,000 people entered the US as refugees. On 27 January, the newly inaugurated Trump administration suspended the country’s entire refugee program due to what the White House called the US’s inability “to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities”.But many community leaders don’t see it that way.“I respectfully disagree with the idea that we are not able to take legal migrants,” says Vahnie.“After 20 to 25 years of welcoming Burmese people here, they bring a high educational performance, economic contribution and diversity to enrich Indiana. That’s really something we celebrate.”Born in Uzbekistan, Akhmedova saw first-hand the ethnic violence that affected her community during the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. She and her family fled to the Krasnodar region of western Russia, where her community again faced attacks and discrimination.She moved from Utah to Dayton in 2017 to be nearer to family.“I was always dreaming about [opening a restaurant] to show my culture, my food, my attitude,” she says.“Ninety-nine per cent of people tell me they’ve never eaten this kind of food.” More

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      Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet

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      US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.“By limiting oversight, it could slow the transition away from fossil fuels and reduce incentives for more energy-efficient AI energy reliance,” Guidi said.“We talk a lot about what AI can do for us, but not nearly enough about what it’s doing to the planet. If we’re serious about using AI to improve human wellbeing, we can’t ignore the growing toll it’s taking on climate stability and public health.”Donald Trump has vowed that the US will become “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and has set about sweeping aside guardrails around AI development and demolishing rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution.The “big beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives would bar states from adding their own regulations upon AI and the GOP-controlled Senate is poised to pass its own version doing likewise.Unrestricted AI use is set to deal a sizable blow to efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, by causing surging electricity use from a US grid still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels such as gas and coal. AI is particularly energy-hungry – one ChatGPT query needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.Carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled since 2018, with an upcoming Harvard research paper finding that the largest “hyperscale” centers now account for 2% of all US electricity use.“AI is going to change our world,” Manu Asthana, chief executive of the PJM Interconnection, the US largest grid, has predicted. Asthana estimated that almost all future increase in electricity demand will come from data centers, adding the equivalent of 20m new homes to the grid in the next five years.The explosive growth of AI has, meanwhile, worsened the recent erosion in climate commitments made by big tech companies. Last year, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48% since 2019 due to its own foray into AI, meaning that “reducing emissions may be challenging” as AI further takes hold.Proponents of AI, and some researchers, have argued that advances in AI will aid the climate fight by increasing efficiencies in grid management and other improvements. Others are more skeptical. “That is just a greenwashing maneuver, quite transparently,” said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “There have been some absolutely nonsense things said about this. Big tech is mortgaging the present for a future that will never come.”While no state has yet placed specific green rules upon AI, they may look to do so given cuts to federal environmental regulations, with state lawmakers urging Congress to rethink the ban. “If we were expecting any rule-making at the federal level around data centers it’s surely off the table now,” said Hanna. “It’s all been quite alarming to see.”Republican lawmakers are undeterred, however. The proposed moratorium cleared a major hurdle over the weekend when the Senate parliamentarian decided that the proposed ban on state and local regulation of AI can remain in Trump’s tax and spending mega-bill. The Texas senator Ted Cruz, the Republican who chairs the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation, changed the language to comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits “extraneous matters” from being included in such spending bills.The provision now refers to a “temporary pause” on regulation instead of a moratorium. It also includes a $500m addition to a grant program to expand access to broadband internet across the country, preventing states from receiving those funds if they attempt to regulate AI.The proposed AI regulation pause has provoked widespread concern from Democrats. The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, a climate hawk, says he has prepared an amendment to strip the “dangerous” provision from the bill.“The rapid development of artificial intelligence is already impacting our environment, raising energy prices for consumers, straining our grid’s ability to keep the lights on, draining local water supplies, spewing toxic pollution in communities, and increasing climate emissions,” Markey told the Guardian.“However, instead of allowing states to protect the public and our planet, Republicans want to ban them from regulating AI for 10 years. It is shortsighted and irresponsible.”The Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss has also called the proposal “a terrible idea and an unpopular idea”.“I think we have to realize that AI is going to suffuse in rapid order many dimensions of healthcare, media, entertainment, education, and to just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless,” he said.Some Republicans have also come out against the provision, including the Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn and the Missouri senator Josh Hawley. An amendment to remove the pause from the bill would require the support of at least four Republican senators to pass.Hawley is said to be willing to introduce an amendment to remove the provision later this week if it is not eliminated beforehand.Earlier this month, the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted she had missed the provision in the House version of the bill, and that she would not have backed the legislation if she had seen it. The far-right House Freedom caucus, of which Greene is a member, has also come out against the AI regulation pause. More