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      Blow to Biden-era Program Plunges Migrants Into Further Uncertainty

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      A Supreme Court ruling on Friday ended temporary humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of people. But it is unclear how quickly many could be deported.For thousands of migrants from some of the world’s most unstable countries, the last several months in United States have felt like a life-or-death legal roller coaster.And after a Supreme Court ruling on Friday in favor of a key piece of the Trump administration’s deportation effort, hundreds of thousands of migrants found themselves plunged once again into a well of uncertainty. They face the prospect that after being granted temporary permission to live in the United States, they will now be abruptly expelled and perhaps sent back to their perilous homelands.“One court said one thing, another court said another, and that just leaves us all very confused and worried,” said Frantzdy Jerome, a Haitian who lives with his partner and their toddler in Ohio.Immigration lawyers reported that they had been fielding calls from families asking whether they should continue to go to work or school. Their clients, they say, were given permission to live and work temporarily in the United States.Now, with that permission revoked while legal challenges work their way through lower courts, many immigrants fear that any encounter with the police or other government agencies could lead to deportation, according to lawyers and community leaders.“Sometimes I have thought of going to Canada, but I don’t have family there to receive me,” said Frantzdy Jerome, who came to the United States from Haiti and lives in Ohio.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Is ‘Optimistic’ About Cancer Treatment in First Remarks Since Diagnosis

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      The former president said on Friday that he was taking a single pill daily to treat aggressive prostate cancer.Former President Biden said on Friday afternoon that he was feeling good after beginning treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer.“The prognosis is good,” he said.“We’re working on everything. All the folks are optimistic,” he added, referring to his medical team. He said that one of the surgeons treating him was given the same diagnosis 32 years ago.Mr. Biden spoke to reporters after an event honoring veterans in New Castle, Del., making his first public remarks since May 18, when his office announced his illness and said the cancer had metastasized to the bone. Mr. Biden attended the event, which fell on the 10th anniversary of the death of his son Beau, with Beau’s son, Robert Biden II, who graduated from high school this week.Mr. Biden said that his treatment was “all a matter of taking a pill, one particular pill.”“The expectation is we’re going to be able to beat this,” he said.Mr. Biden’s cancer was given a Gleason score of 9. The score is used to describe how prostate cancers look under a microscope; 9 and 10 are the most aggressive.Mr. Biden, 82, left office in January as the oldest-serving president in American history.Asked about a new book, “Original Sin,” by the journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which details how Mr. Biden’s advisers curbed discussion of his age-related limitations in the run-up to the 2024 election, he responded tongue-in-cheek, saying, “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk.”He added that he “could beat the hell out of both of” the authors.Mr. Biden also said that he had no regrets for deciding to run for re-election, before ultimately dropping out. He responded to a question about Democrats who hold that he should not have by saying: “Why didn’t anyone run against me then?”“We have a lot going on, and I think we’re in a really difficult moment, not only in America, but in the world,” Mr. Biden quickly added. “I think that this is one of those inflection points in history.”He said that he was “very proud” of his time in office. “I put my record as president against any president at all,” he said. He added that leading presidential historians ranked his term highly, and that President Trump was rated last. More

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      Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration, for Now, to End Biden-Era Migrant Program

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      The Trump administration had asked the court to allow it to end deportation protections for more than 500,000 people facing dire humanitarian crises in their home countries.The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration, for now, to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian program intended to give temporary residency to more than 500,000 immigrants from countries facing war and political turmoil.The court’s order was unsigned and provided no reasoning, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying the majority had not given enough consideration to “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”The ruling, which exposes some migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to possible deportation, is the latest in a series of emergency orders by the justices in recent weeks responding to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies.Friday’s ruling focused on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s expansion of a legal mechanism for immigration called humanitarian parole, in which migrants from countries facing instability are allowed to enter the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they have a private sponsor to take responsibility for them.Earlier this month, the justices allowed the Trump administration to remove deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Blocks Shutdown of Biden-Era Migrant Entry Programs

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      The sweeping order applied to hundreds of thousands of people legally in the country through programs put in place for Ukrainians, Afghans and others.A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from pulling legal protections from hundreds of thousands of people who entered the United States through Biden-era programs, ordering the government to restart processing applications for migrants who are renewing their status.In a sweeping order that extended to Ukrainians and Afghans, as well as military members and their relatives, the judge, Indira Talwani of Federal District Court in Massachusetts, wrote that the Trump administration’s categorical termination of legal pathways for those groups was probably unlawful and had the potential to sow discord across the country.The decision is a major victory for civil and immigrant rights groups that had sued to stop the administration amid a wider campaign by President Trump to strip legal status from a variety of groups living, working and studying in the country on a temporary basis.Judge Talwani wrote that the overarching campaign to strip the protections from those who had already been granted them represented a major escalation by the Trump administration that would cause chaos once the programs were wound down.In April, she had issued a similar order that applied more narrowly to hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with temporary legal status through another program. The government is seeking a reversal of that decision before the Supreme Court.“This court emphasizes, as it did in its prior order, that it is not in the public interest to manufacture a circumstance in which hundreds of thousands of individuals will, over the course of several months, become unlawfully present in the country, such that these individuals cannot legally work in their communities or provide for themselves and their families,” Judge Talwani wrote. “Nor is it in the public interest for individuals who enlisted and are currently serving in the United States military to face family separation, particularly where some of these individuals joined the military in part to help their loved ones obtain lawful status.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner

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      Paul Walczak’s pardon application cited his mother’s support for the president, including raising millions of dollars and a connection to a plot to publicize a Biden family diary.As Paul Walczak awaited sentencing early this year, his best hope for avoiding prison time rested with the newly inaugurated president.Mr. Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.Mr. Walczak’s pardon application argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother’s efforts for Mr. Trump than by his admitted use of money earmarked for employees’ taxes to fund an extravagant lifestyle.Still, weeks went by and no pardon was forthcoming, even as Mr. Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.Then, Ms. Fago was invited to a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Ravages of Age Are Ravaging the Democratic Party

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      Now is the time for the Democratic Party to get serious about its oldsters problem.The furor over President Joe Biden’s cognitive issues is not going away any time soon. On Tuesday it bubbled up in the California governor’s race, when one candidate, Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles, accused two other Democrats eyeing the governor’s mansion — former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra — of participating in a “cover-up” of Mr. Biden’s fading fitness in office.“Voters deserve to know the truth. What did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Mr. Villaraigosa fumed in a statement, spurred by tidbits from the new book “Original Sin,” which chronicles the efforts of Mr. Biden’s inner circle to conceal his mental and physical decline. Mr. Villaraigosa called on Ms. Harris and Mr. Becerra to “apologize to the American people.”Is Mr. Villaraigosa, who is 72 himself, exploiting the orgy of Biden recriminations for political ends? Probably. Does he have a point? Absolutely. Team Biden deserves much abuse for its sins. That said, last week also reminded us that the Democrats’ flirtation with gerontocracy is not confined to a single office or branch of government when, on Wednesday, the House was shaken by the death of Representative Gerry Connolly.Mr. Connolly, a 75-year-old lawmaker from Northern Virginia, had been in poor health. On Nov. 7 last year, two days after his re-election to a ninth term, he announced he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and would undergo treatments. Even so, in December he won a high-profile contest against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. The race was seen as a struggle over the future of the seniority system that has long shaped how Democrats pick committee leaders. Despite concerns about his health, seniority carried the day. On April 28, he announced that his cancer had returned and that he would not seek re-election next year. Less than a month later, he was gone.Washington being Washington, his death was greeted with sadness but also with chatter about the political repercussions in the narrowly divided House. It was not lost on Beltway pundits that if Democrats had had one more “no” vote in their deliberations over President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” Republicans would have had to sway another of their holdouts to ram it through the House last week.Mr. Connolly was the third House Democrat to die in recent months, after the deaths in March of Raúl Grijalva and Sylvester Turner, both septuagenarians. All three seats are vacant for now. Axios pointed out that eight members of Congress have died in office since November 2022. All were Democrats, with an average age of 75.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bruce Springsteen Will Never Surrender to Donald Trump

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      Since the 1980s Bruce Springsteen has been writing songs that emphasized, even romanticized, a polyglot vision of America and what it means to be an American. That vision is, broadly speaking, an updated version of New Deal America: one that recognizes not only the dignity and pride of honest labor but also the importance of respecting our differences, whether they are based on culture, gender, ethnicity or race. It’s a vision of unity summed up in the phrase that in past concert tours Mr. Springsteen has used to close out the show: “Nobody wins unless everybody wins.” And when Mr. Springsteen says “everybody,” he means everybody — including undocumented migrants and border patrol agents, unwed mothers, distant and irresponsible fathers, Black victims of police brutality and the cops who (regret) shooting them, emotionally scarred Vietnam vets and Southeast Asian war refugees trying to make America their new home.The 1980s also saw the rise of an alternative vision of America: one that sought to tear down what was left of the New Deal. Its exemplar was Donald Trump, then a tacky developer and a tabloid fixture. It was based on the idea that could be summarized as: I win only if everybody else loses. Today Mr. Trump is president, and full of petty rage at Mr. Springsteen for daring to criticize him at the opening show on his current European tour.Nothing irks Mr. Trump quite as much as the disrespect of a fellow celebrity. But it’s more than that. Mr. Springsteen, 75, and Mr. Trump, 78, are in many respects two opposing faces of modern America as it was built and performed by their generation. They offer their fan bases a promise of entirely different futures.Just as Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign sought to make (his) America great again, Mr. Springsteen’s current Land of Hope and Dreams Tour is a nod to his idea of another, more generous vision. The lyrics to the song of the same name offer up an idealistic vision of inclusion with a train packed with “saints and sinners,” “losers and winners,” “whores and gamblers” and “lost souls.” It promises, “Dreams will not be thwarted” and “faith will be rewarded” with “bells of freedom ringing.” It may also be a reference to Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration celebration, where he sang the same tune.Introducing “Land of Hope and Dreams” as the first song on the tour’s opening night in Manchester, England, Mr. Springsteen told the crowd that the United States was “currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration” that has “no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”Mr. Trump heard this as a challenge. The president threatened an “investigation” into Mr. Springsteen’s support for Kamala Harris and blustered on Truth Social that this “Highly Overrated … not a talented guy” was “Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK.” Later he put out a fake video in which he hits Mr. Springsteen with a golf ball.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Targets Harris Campaign’s Links to Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen

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      The president claimed without evidence on Monday that Kamala Harris had violated campaign-finance law, essentially by paying superstars for endorsements “under the guise of paying for entertainment.”President Trump is calling for a “major investigation” into the celebrities Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Bono, bringing his retribution campaign to the music industry.Mr. Trump, in a pair of posts on Truth Social on Monday, argued that Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party nominee was violating campaign-finance law, essentially by paying those figures for endorsements “under the guise of paying for entertainment.”There is no evidence that Ms. Harris paid for the endorsements, although details on celebrity engagements can be somewhat murky. Under campaign finance law, campaigns are required to pay the fair-market value for the costs of events so as to make sure that a company or individual is not donating in excess of federal contribution limits.Ms. Harris paid $1 million to Ms. Winfrey’s production company for a live-streamed town hall in Detroit, according to campaign-finance records. Ms. Winfrey has said the money paid for costs and salaries related to the event and was not a personal fee.Beyoncé headlined a rally for Ms. Harris in her hometown of Houston for an abortion-rights event, and Ms. Harris’s campaign paid the singer’s company $165,000 in November for “campaign event production,” according to campaign-finance records. Mr. Trump falsely claimed on Monday that her payment was $11 million, citing unspecified “news reports.” The artist’s mother has called that figure a “lie.”Mr. Trump’s angry posts come as his ire has been raised against Mr. Springsteen, who sharply criticized Mr. Trump during a concert in Manchester, England, last week. Mr. Trump responded with a social media post calling him a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker.” Mr. Springsteen performed at a rally in Atlanta in the final weeks of the presidential race, though no records available yet show any payment from Ms. Harris’s campaign.It was not clear why Mr. Trump named Bono, the Irish singer-songwriter who fronts the band U2. While he is a friend of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and received from him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award, he did not appear at any campaign events with Ms. Harris, nor did he endorse her. More