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    Is Trump’s expansion of presidential powers setting the stage for future Oval Office holders?

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    Near corn dog and cookie vendors, Ray Seeman was washing his hands on a sweltering day. He had come to the rally in a Maga cap and a T-shirt that proclaimed: Cult 45: proud member. Is this a cult? “It seems like it,” he laughed. “It seems like you’re either in or you’re out.”A cult, perhaps, but not an imperial presidency, Seeman insisted, though he does understand Donald Trump’s frustrations. “I don’t like executive orders,” he said. “I like it to go through due process. But at the same time you’ve got to get stuff done sometimes.”A few thousand people had gathered at the Iowa state fairgrounds on Thursday to witness the president kick off a year-long celebration of the US’s 250th anniversary of independence from a tyrannical king. No one here seemed concerned that the US might now be propping up a monarch of its own. But Trump’s critics warn of an expansion of presidential power unlike anything seen in modern American history.In less than six months, Trump has taken a series of executive actions that have established new norms for the authority of whoever occupies the Oval Office. Longstanding mechanisms designed to limit executive power – Congress, the judiciary and internal safeguards – are being undermined or proving ineffective in restraining him.Last month, Trump ordered a military strike on Iran without seeking congressional approval. A solitary Republican, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, spoke out to describe the move as unconstitutional because only Congress has the power to declare war. Trump scorned him and, setting another dangerous precedent, imposed a limit on classified information shared with senators and representatives.Trump took unilateral action to impose tariffs under the cover of declaring a national emergency. He dismantled agencies, fired civil servants and froze spending that was approved by Congress and assumed to be protected by law; he has, for example, blocked more than $6bn in federal funding that helps fund after-school and summer programmes.Trump shattered another norm when he took control of California’s national guard and deployed it to quell mostly peaceful protests over immigration raids in Los Angeles, despite opposition from state governor Gavin Newsom and other state officials.The president has breached the justice department’s traditional independence, ordering it to scrutinise his political opponents and punish his critics through measures such as stripping their Secret Service protections. At the same time, he pardoned his supporters who took part in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, abandoning any notion that pardons be used sparingly.While courts have acted to block some executive actions, the US supreme court’s recent ruling limiting nationwide injunctions and Trump’s direct attacks on judges signal the weakening of another democratic guardrail.And even as Trump brazenly accepts gifts from foreign countries, seeks to profit from the presidency through a cryptocurrency venture and bullies law firms, media companies and universities – all unthinkable under his predecessors – there is only token resistance from Congress.Republicans hold the majority in both chambers and have a cultish devotion to Trump, or visceral fear of his wrath. On Thursday, they rammed through his “big, beautiful bill” despite warnings that it will rip the social safety net from millions of Americans and add trillions of dollars to the national deficit.Hours later, a triumphant Trump was greeted in Des Moines, Iowa, by supporters in a car park festooned with 55 national flags. One man wore a T-shirt entirely covered with a photo of a bloodied Trump with fist raised after last year’s assassination attempt. A bearded vendor in a red T-shirt, checked shorts and plastic flip-flops spread red Trump 2028 caps on the ground. Flags and T-shirts declared: “Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president.”Michelle Coon, 57, a psychotherapist, denied that Trump is behaving like an autocrat. “I don’t think he has been given that kind of power,” she said. “I see people in Congress having a voice. He’s lucky enough to have both houses right now; he might not have that in two years. The supreme court has come down both on his side and against his perspective so I see it fairly balanced right now.”Coon added: “He’s a great leader but I don’t think that’s necessarily authoritarian. He’s trying to gather a lot of people around him to get good wisdom from others. I don’t think we have anything to fear here.”Josue Rodriguez, 38, a pastor who works for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, was equally sanguine. “We have a wonderful system called checks and balances where, if they feel that an individual has become all too powerful, too mighty, they have the right to take him to court and the supreme court will decide what is correct and not correct,” he said.Rodriguez also retains faith in political parties, saying: “If they feel that the president is acting in a manner that goes against the American people or what is allowed legally, he will be challenged within his own party. At the end of the day, these people want to get re-elected and they’re not going to allow things that will cause them to lose their re-elections.”But some analysts suggest that extreme partisanship is preventing effective congressional oversight, as members of the president’s party are unwilling to challenge Trump’s overreach. They are sounding the alarm about an erosion of democratic norms that could have lasting implications for future presidencies.Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, this week initiated a new executive power project because he considers it the most important constitutional issue of the moment.“It didn’t start with President Trump but it may end there,” Galston said. “It’s hard to imagine a subsequent president seeking to advance executive power as a deliberate project to the extent that President Trump has been doing.“This is not an accident. This was something that was carefully planned as both a political strategy and a legal strategy and I have to say I’m impressed with the administration’s strategic focus on the issue of presidential power and the elimination of long-established limits to it.”Galston pointed to a drive to undermine the autonomy of so-called independent agencies. A legal challenge has been set in motion that will likely culminate in a supreme court decision next term that, Galston suspects, may effectively eliminate a 90-year precedent that guaranteed the independence of agencies.Trump is not the first American president to see how far he can go. In 1973, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr published The Imperial Presidency, acknowledging that, while he had cheered on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the expansion of executive authority now threatened to “override the separation of powers and burst the bonds of the Constitution”.The book was timely because the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam war saw a reassertion of congressional authority in the domestic and foreign spheres. Presidential power began to expand again, however, under Ronald Reagan.Galston noted: “Young conservatives who came of age serving in the Reagan administration chafed more and more against congressional restraints, culminating in the publication in 1989 of a collection of essays by the American Enterprise Institute called The Fettered Presidency.“So in 16 years, the adjective switches from ‘imperial’ to ‘fettered’ and I trace a lot of the modern conservative drive to expand the powers of the president at Congress’s expense to that experience.”The trend accelerated with George W Bush’s aggressive response to the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks. But other factors were in play: whereas divided government was once cause for negotiation, deepening polarisation between the parties made gridlock more likely, much to the frustration of the White House occupant.Barack Obama duly used an executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme. He stepped up his use of such actions in 2014 as he became frustrated with how difficult it was to push legislation through Congress, saying: “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.”Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There’s a long history here and it’s not just Trump. Look at just this century. Bush expanded presidential powers in ways that Obama took advantage of and then Obama expanded presidential powers in ways that Trump then expanded on.“You can think of this as a loaded gun that’s left on the table in the Oval Office. It’s quite alarming. The next president who comes in, whether Democrat or Republican, is going to see the office through the eyes of their predecessor, not through the eyes of George Washington, who was leery of using his powers.” More

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      If the US president threatens to take away freedoms, are we no longer free?

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      Threats of retribution from Donald Trump are hardly a novelty, but even by his standards, the US president’s warnings of wrathful vengeance in recent days have represented a dramatic escalation.In the past week, Trump has threatened deportation, loss of US citizenship or arrest against, respectively, the world’s richest person, the prospective future mayor of New York and Joe Biden’s former homeland security secretary.The head-spinning catalogue of warnings may have been aimed at distracting from the increasing unpopularity, according to opinion surveys, of Trump’s agenda, some analysts say. But they also served as further alarm bells for the state of US democracy five-and-a-half months into a presidency that has seen a relentless assault on constitutional norms, institutions and freedom of speech.On Tuesday, Trump turned his sights on none other than Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who, before a recent spectacular fallout, had been his closest ally in ramming through a radical agenda of upending and remaking the US government.But when the Tesla and SpaceX founder vowed to form a new party if Congress passed Trump’s signature “one big beautiful bill” into law, Trump swung into the retribution mode that is now familiar to his Democratic opponents.“Without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, menacing both the billions of dollars in federal subsidies received by Musk’s companies, and – it seemed – his US citizenship, which the entrepreneur received in 2002 but which supporters like Steve Bannon have questioned.“No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE.”Trump twisted the knife further the following morning talking to reporters before boarding a flight to Florida.View image in fullscreen“We might have to put Doge on Elon,” he said, referring to the unofficial “department of government efficiency” that has gutted several government agencies and which Musk spearheaded before stepping back from his ad hoc role in late May. “Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible.”Musk’s many critics may have found sympathy hard to come by given his earlier job-slashing endeavors on Trump’s behalf and the $275m he spent last year in helping to elect him.But the wider political implications are worrying, say US democracy campaigners.“Trump is making clear that if he can do that to the world’s richest man, he could certainly do it to you,” said Ian Bassin, co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy. “It’s important, if we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in it whether it is being weaponized against someone that we have sympathy for or someone that we have lost sympathy for.”Musk was not the only target of Trump’s capricious vengeance.He also threatened to investigate the US citizenship of Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats’ prospective candidate for mayor of New York who triumphed in a multicandidate primary election, and publicly called on officials to explore the possibility of arresting Alejandro Mayorkas, the former head of homeland security in the Biden administration.Both scenarios were raised during a highly stage-managed visit to “Alligator Alcatraz”, a forbidding new facility built to house undocumented people rounded up as part of Trump’s flagship mass-deportation policy.After gleefully conjuring images of imprisoned immigrants being forced to flee from alligators and snakes presumed to reside in the neighbouring marshlands, Trump seized on obliging questions from friendly journalists working for rightwing fringe outlets that have been accredited by the administration for White House news events, often at the expense of established media.“Why hasn’t he been arrested yet?” asked Julio Rosas from Blaze Media, referring to Mayorkas, who was widely vilified – and subsequently impeached – by Republicans who blamed him for a record number of immigrant crossings at the southern US border.“Was he given a pardon, Mayorkas?” Trump replied. On being told no, he continued: “I’ll take a look at that one because what he did is beyond incompetence … Somebody told Mayorkas to do that and he followed orders, but that doesn’t necessarily hold him harmless.”Asked by Benny Johnson, a rightwing social media influencer, for his message to “communist” Mamdani – a self-proclaimed democratic socialist – over his pledge not to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) roundups of undocumented people if he is elected mayor, Trump said: “Then we will have to arrest him. We don’t need a communist in this country. I’m going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation.”He also falsely suggested that Mamdani, 33 – who became a naturalized US citizen in 2018 after emigrating from Uganda with his ethnic Indian parents when he was a child – was in the country “illegally”, an assertion stemming from a demand by a Republican representative for a justice department investigation into his citizenship application. The representative, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, alleged that Mamdani, who has vocally campaigned for Palestinian rights, gained it through “willful misrepresentation or concealment of material support for terrorism”.View image in fullscreenThe threat to Mamdani echoed a threat Trump’s border “czar” Tom Homan made to arrest Gavin Newsom, the California governor, last month amid a row over Trump’s deployment of national guard forces in Los Angeles to confront demonstrators protesting against Ice’s arrests of immigrants.Omar Noureldin, senior vice-president with Common Cause, a pro-democracy watchdog, said the animus against Mamdani, who is Muslim, was partly fueled by Islamophobia and racism.“Part of the rhetoric we’ve heard around Mamdani, whether from the president or other political leaders, goes toward his religion, his national origin, race, ethnicity,” he said.“Mamdani has called himself a democratic socialist. There are others, including Bernie Sanders, who call themselves that, but folks aren’t questioning whether or not Bernie Sanders should be a citizen.”Retribution promised to be a theme of Trump’s second presidency even before he returned to the Oval Office in January. On the campaign trail last year, he branded some political opponents – including Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives – as “the enemy within”.Since his inauguration in January, he has made petty acts of revenge against both Democrats and Republicans who have crossed him. Biden; Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and last year’s defeated Democratic presidential nominee; and Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent, have all had their security clearances revoked.Secret Service protection details have been removed from Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who served in Trump’s first administration, despite both being the subject of death threats from Iran because of the 2020 assassination of Qassem Suleimani, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander.Similar fates have befallen Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases specialist who angered Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as Biden’s adult children, Hunter and Ashley.Trump has also targeted law firms whose lawyers previously acted against him, prompting some to strike deals that will see them perform pro bono services for the administration.View image in fullscreenFor now, widely anticipated acts of retribution against figures like Gen Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff of the armed forces – whom Trump previously suggested deserved to be executed for “treason” and who expressed fears of being recalled to active duty and then court-martialed – have not materialised.“I [and] people in my world expected that Trump would come up with investigations of any number of people, whether they were involved in the Russia investigation way back when, or the election investigation, or the January 6 insurrection, but by and large he hasn’t done that,” said one veteran Washington insider, who requested anonymity, citing his proximity to people previously identified as potential Trump targets.“There are all kinds of lists floating around … with names of people that might be under investigation, but you’ll never know you’re under investigation until police turn up on your doorstep – and these people are just getting on with their lives.”Yet pro-democracy campaigners say Trump’s latest threats should be taken seriously – especially after several recent detentions of several elected Democratic officials at protests near immigration jails or courts. In the most notorious episode, Alex Padilla, a senator from California, was forced to the floor and handcuffed after trying to question Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, at a press conference.“When the president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, threatens to arrest you, that’s as serious as it gets,” said Bassin, a former White House counsel in Barack Obama’s administration.“Whether the DoJ [Department of Justice] opens an investigation or seeks an indictment, either tomorrow, next year or never is beside the point. The threat itself is the attack on our freedoms, because it’s designed to make us all fear that if any one of us opposes or even just criticises the president, we risk being prosecuted.”While some doubt the legal basis of Trump’s threats to Musk, Mayorkas and Mamdani, Noureldin cautioned that they should be taken literally.“Trump is verbose and grandiose, but I think he also backs up his promises with action,” he said. “When the president of the United States says something, we have to take it as serious and literal. I wouldn’t be surprised if at the justice department, there is a group of folks who are trying to figure out a way to [open prosecutions].”But the bigger danger was to the time-honored American notion of freedom, Bassin warned.“One definition of freedom is that you are able to speak your mind, associate with who you want, lead the life that you choose to lead, and that so long as you conduct yourself in accordance with the law, the government will not retaliate against you or punish you for doing those things,” he said. “When the president of the United States makes clear that actually that is not the case, that if you say things he doesn’t like, you will be singled out, and the full force of the state could be brought down on your head, then you’re no longer free.“And if he’s making clear that that’s true for people who have the resources of Elon Musk or the political capital of a Mayorkas or a Mamdani, imagine what it means for people who lack those positions or resources.” More

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      As Trump targets birthright citizenship, the terrain is once again ‘women’s bodies and sexuality’

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      One day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, five pregnant immigrant women – led by an asylum seeker from Venezuela – sued over the president’s executive order limiting automatic birthright citizenship, out of fear that their unborn children would be left stateless.The case went before the supreme court, which sided with the Trump administration Friday by restricting the ability of federal judges to block the order.The legal drama recalls a scene a century and a half earlier, when a different cohort of immigrant women went to the country’s highest court to challenge a restrictive California law. In 1874, San Francisco officials detained 22 Chinese women at the port after declaring them “lewd and debauched” – a condition that allowed for denial of entry.The supreme court sided with the women and struck down the law, delivering the first victory to a Chinese litigant in the US. But its ruling also established the federal government’s exclusive authority over immigration, paving the way for the passage of the Page Act of 1875, the first piece of federal legislation restricting immigration.Trump’s hardline immigration-enforcement strategy, which has focused on birthright citizenship and sparked a family-separation crisis, bears resemblance to the restrictive laws against Chinese women in the late 19th century, which historians say led to lasting demographic changes in Chinese American communities. Political campaigns of both eras, experts say, sought to stem the growth of immigrant populations by targeting women’s bodies.“What the Page Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act and birthright citizenship all have in common is the battle over who we deem admissible, as having a right to be here,” said Catherine Lee, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University whose research focuses on family reunification in American immigration. “And the terrain on which we’re having these discussions is women’s bodies and women’s sexuality.”The Page Act denied entry of “lewd” and “immoral” women, ostensibly to curb prostitution. While sex workers of many nationalities immigrated to the US, experts say local authorities almost exclusively enforced the law against women of Chinese descent. More than curbing immigration, Lee said, the legislation set a standard for determining who was eligible for citizenship and for birthing future generations of Americans.The law placed the burden of proof on Chinese women themselves, research shows. Before boarding a ship to the US, the women had to produce evidence of “respectable” character by submitting a declaration of morality and undergoing extensive interrogations, character assessments and family background checks.At the same time, doctors and health professionals smeared Chinese women as carriers of venereal diseases, Lee said. J Marion Sims, a prominent gynecologist who led the American Medical Association at the time, falsely declared that the arrival of Chinese women had caused a “Chinese syphilis” epidemic.Bill Hing, a law and migration studies professor at the University of San Francisco and author of Making and Remaking Asian America, said the Page Act was “an evil way at controlling the population” to ensure that the Chinese American community wouldn’t grow.The law did drastically alter the demographics of the Chinese population. In 1870, Chinese men in the US outnumbered Chinese women by a ratio of 13 to 1. By 1880, just a half decade after the law’s passage, that gap had nearly doubled, to 21 to 1.One legacy of the Page Act, Hing said, was the formation of “bachelor societies”. The de facto immigration ban against Chinese women made it virtually impossible for Chinese men to form families in the US, as anti-miscegenation laws forbade them from marrying women outside their race.Today, Hing said, attempts to repeal birthright citizenship is another way of suppressing the development of immigrant populations. “It falls right into the same intent of eliminating the ability of communities of color to expand,” he said.View image in fullscreenTrump’s January executive order, which would deny citizenship to US-born babies whose parents aren’t citizens or green-card holders, employs a gendered line of argument similar to that of the Page Act, Lee said. (The government has lost every case so far about the executive order, as it directly contradicts the 14th amendment.)In a 6-3 vote Friday, the supreme court ruled that lower courts could not impose nationwide bans against Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship. The ruling, which immigrant rights advocates say opens the door for a partial enforcement of the order, doesn’t address the constitutionality of the order itself.“Birthright citizenship assumes that women are having sex,” Lee said, “and whether she’s having sex with a lawful permanent resident or a citizen determines the status of her child.”Congressional Republicans continue to employ gendered and racialized rhetoric in their attacks on birthright citizenship and so-called “birth tourism”, the practice of pregnant women traveling to the US specifically to give birth and secure citizenship for their children. Political and media attention on the latter issue has been disproportionately focused on Chinese nationals.Last month, the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee introduced a bill that bans foreign nationals from “buying” American citizenship. She called “birth tourism” a “multimillion-dollar industry” exploited by pregnant women from “adversaries like communist China and Russia”.Although the extent of “birth tourism” is unknown, studies have shown that it comprises just a small portion of US-born Chinese infants. Many are born to US citizens or permanent residents, who form more than a majority of the foreign-born Chinese population. (A decade ago, Chinese “birth tourists” accounted for just 1% of all Chinese tourists visiting the US.)Virginia Loh-Hagan, co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project, said a long-lasting ramification of the Page Act is the “exploitation, fetishization and dehumanization” of Asian women that has led to deadly hate crimes, such as the spree of shootings at three Asian-owned Atlanta spas in 2021.“If immigrants in this country were denied the opportunity to build families and communities,” Loh-Hagan said, “then they have less community strength, less voice and power in politics and governance of this country.” 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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      Court strikes down Louisiana law requiring display of Ten Commandments in schools

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      A panel of three federal appellate judges has ruled that a Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in each of the state’s public school classrooms is unconstitutional.The ruling on Friday marked a major win for civil liberties groups who say the mandate violates the separation of church and state – and that the poster-sized displays would isolate students, especially those who are not Christian.The mandate has been touted by Republicans, including Donald Trump, and marks one of the latest pushes by conservatives to incorporate religion into classrooms. Backers of the law argue the Ten Commandments belong in classrooms because they are historical and part of the foundation of US law.Heather L Weaver, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said Friday’s ruling “held Louisiana accountable to a core constitutional promise: public schools are not Sunday schools, and they must welcome all students, regardless of faith”.The plaintiffs’ attorneys and Louisiana disagreed on whether the appeals court’s decision applied to every public school district in the state or only the districts party to the lawsuit.“All school districts in the state are bound to comply with the US constitution,” said Liz Hayes, a spokesperson for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which served as co-counsel for the plaintiffs.The appeals court’s rulings “interpret the law for all of Louisiana”, Hayes added. “Thus, all school districts must abide by this decision and should not post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.”Louisiana’s attorney general, Liz Murrill, said she disagreed and believed the ruling only applied to school districts in the five parishes that were party to the lawsuit. Murrill added that she would appeal the ruling, including taking it to the US supreme court if necessary.The panel of judges reviewing the case was unusually liberal for the fifth US circuit court of appeals. In a court with more than twice as many Republican-appointed judges, two of the three judges involved in the ruling were appointed by Democratic presidents.The court’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last year by parents of Louisiana schoolchildren from various religious backgrounds, who said the law violates language in the US constitution’s first amendment guaranteeing religious liberty and forbidding government establishment of religion.The ruling also backs an order issued last fall by US district judge John deGravelles, who declared the mandate unconstitutional and ordered state education officials not to enforce it and to notify all local school boards in the state of his decision.The state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, signed the mandate into law last June.Landry said in a statement on Friday that he supports the attorney general’s plans to appeal.“The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our laws – serving both an educational and historical purpose in our classrooms,” Landry said.Law experts have long said they expect the Louisiana case to make its way to the US supreme court, testing the court on the issue of religion and government.Similar laws have been challenged in court.A group of Arkansas families filed a federal lawsuit recently challenging a near-identical law passed in their state. And comparable legislation in Texas currently awaits Governor Greg Abbott’s signature.In 1980, the supreme court ruled that a Kentucky law violated the establishment clause of the US constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. The court found that the law had no secular purpose but served a plainly religious purpose.And in 2005, the supreme court held that such displays in a pair of Kentucky courthouses violated the US constitution. At the same time, the court upheld a Ten Commandments marker on the grounds of the Texas state capitol in Austin. More

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      Former Harvard president urges people to ‘speak out’ against threats to US democracy

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      A recent former president of Harvard University urged people to “speak out” in defense of “foundational threats” to values such as freedom, autonomy and democracy in the US, as those whose deaths for such causes in war were being honored on Memorial Day.Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, also warned on Monday of US constitutional checks and the rule of law being “at risk” under the current administration, even as Donald Trump issued a fresh threat against the elite university as it seeks to repel his assaults on its independence and funding.“We are being asked not to charge into … artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which [the US civil war dead] gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?” Faust wrote in a guest opinion essay for the New York Times.She highlighted, in particular, the principles fought and died for by Union soldiers in the US civil war and the roles played by assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and leading Black civil rights leader of the 19th century.“We must honor these men,” she wrote.Faust, who led Harvard between 2007 and 2018 and still teaches there, did not mention the US president by name but she referred to his position and made a direct link between the civil war and now.Noting that about 2.7 million men, mostly volunteers, in 1861-1865 “took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth”, she went on to warn: “Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires.”View image in fullscreenFaust said that Lincoln regarded the Confederacy’s split from the Union, when southern states seceded in order to defend slavery and evade federal government intervention, as a “direct assault” on government by the majority “held in restraint” by constitutional checks.“Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders,” she wrote in her essay.Critics of Trump lament congressional Republicans’ acquiescence to the president’s expansions of his authority and challenges to constitutional constraints, Democrats’ lackluster resistance, and the administration’s defiance of court orders over various anti-immigration extremes and partisan firings of federal officials and watchdogs without cause.Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly accused Harvard of antisemitism and bias against Jewish students and attacked its efforts towards greater diversity on campus, and the administration has further demanded cooperation with federal immigration authorities, while harnessing federal powers to try to punish the university.Last Friday, Harvard sued prominent government departments and cabinet secretaries for what it said was a “blatant violation” of the US constitution when the Trump administration announced it would revoke federal permission for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institution to enroll international students. A federal judge issued an injunction within hours, temporarily blocking such a ban.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarvard had previously sued in April over what it said was Trump’s attempt to “gain control of academic decision-making” at the university and the administration’s threat to review about $9bn in federal funding.On Monday, Trump posted on his social media platform: “I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” adding: “What a great investment that would be for the USA.”By Monday afternoon the president had not followed up with action or further explanation or statements.Harvard’s current president, Alan Garber, who is Jewish, has called the Trump demands “illegal” and said the administration was trying “to control whom we hire and what we teach”.Faust, a historian and research professor at Harvard, who was also its first president to have been raised in the US south, concluded her essay by acknowledging that those who fought in the US civil war did, in fact, save the nation and subsequently gave opportunities to the generations that followed.“They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future,” she wrote, adding that “we possess a reciprocal obligation to the past” and that “we must not squander what they bequeathed to us”. More

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      Trump administration mulling end to legal right to challenge one’s detention

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      The Trump administration is considering suspending the writ of habeas corpus, the legal right to challenge one’s detention, Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser, said on Friday.“The constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus could be suspended in time of invasion. So that’s an option we’re actively looking at. A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” Miller said to a group of reporters at the White House.The US constitution says: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The writ of habeas corpus has only been suspended four times in US history, most notably by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war. It was also suspended during efforts to fight the Ku Klux Klan in the 19th century in South Carolina, in the Philippines in 1905 and after Pearl Harbor.Suspending habeas corpus would be an extremely aggressive move that would dramatically escalate the Trump administration’s efforts to attack the rule of law in American courts as it tries to deport people without giving them a chance to challenge the basis of their removals.Miller, long known for his far-right positions on immigration, has sought to deploy a maximalist approach in carrying out mass deportations. The US government has already produced little evidence to justify immigrant deportations and in some cases has sought to remove students in the United States legally for expressing their views, specifically support for Palestinians.Many of the immigrants that the Trump administration has moved aggressively to deport – including Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk – have filed habeas petitions challenging efforts to deport them.The administration has already attempted to deport people without due process by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that allows the president to do so in a time of war.The Trump administration has justified its actions by arguing that the US is under “invasion” by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. Multiple judges have rejected the idea that the United States is under invasion and tried to halt the removals.But, while courts have tried to stop the administration’s efforts to unlawfully deport people, Trump has attacked judges for ruling against him and in some cases openly defied the courts. More

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      ‘What is left of our democracy?’: freed Palestinian human rights advocate warns of US authoritarian rule

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      Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia University student freed on Wednesday after more than two weeks in immigration detention, has issued a stark warning about the US’s descent into authoritarianism.“Once the repression of dissent, in the name of security, becomes a key objective of a government, authoritarian rule and even martial law are not far off. When they look at my case, all Americans should ask themselves: what is left of our democracy, and who will be targeted next?” said Mahddawi in an op-ed for the New York Times.Mahdawi, a Palestinian human rights advocate based in Vermont, was detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being prosecuted of any crime – and without due process. The philosophy student was arrested by masked Ice agents in Colchester, Vermont, during what should have been his citizenship naturalization interview.He is among a growing number of international students who have been ordered deported for their Palestinian rights advocacy by the Trump administration, which is using an obscure law to accuse these individuals of posing a threat to US foreign policy interests. Unlike the others, Mahdawi avoided being sent to a Louisiana detention facility after the Ice agents narrowly missed the flight, allowing his attorneys to challenge the deportation order in Vermont.“Despite spending 16 nights in a jail cell, I never lost hope in the inevitability of justice and the principles of democracy. I wanted to become a citizen of this country because I believe in the principles that it enshrines,” writes Mahdawi.“The American government accuses me of undermining US foreign policy, a patently absurd pretext for deportation for political speech that the Trump administration dislikes. The government is scraping the bottom of the barrel in its attempts to smear me. My only ‘crime’ is refusing to accept the slaughter of Palestinians, opposing war and promoting peace. I have simply insisted that international law must be respected. I believe the way to a just and long-lasting peace for Palestinians and Israelis is through diplomacy and restorative justice.”Mahdawi was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, where as a child he bore witness to the death of his brother after he was denied access to medical care, and the detention and imprisonment of multiple close relatives including his grandfather and father by Israeli forces.Moving to the US in 2014 was his first experience of freedom, he said.“Ultimately, I sought American citizenship not only because I did not want to lose the freedom I enjoyed as a permanent resident but even more so because I believe in the principles and values of democracy, which this country stipulates in its founding documents,” he wrote in the Times.“These very freedoms are under attack today, both for me and for others like me. The Trump administration is hewing to Israel’s playbook: Under the thinly veiled guise of security, rights are being denied and due process eliminated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“By seeking to deport me, the Trump administration is sending a clear message: There is no room for dissent, free speech be damned. It seems willing to shield an extremist Israeli government from criticism at the expense of constitutional rights, all while suppressing the possibility of a peaceful future for both Palestinians and Israelis, a future free of trauma and fear.”Israel’s war on Gaza since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack has killed at least 52,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities. Thousands more people are missing and feared dead, while tens of thousands have suffered injuries and preventable diseases including acute malnutrition.In the ruling ordering Mahdawi’s release on bail on Wednesday, Judge Geoffrey W Crawford wrote: “Legal residents not charged with crimes or misconduct are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day.” He likened the Trump administration’s crackdown on students and free speech to the red scare and the McCarthy era.Upon his release, Mahdawi told supporters and the media: “I am saying it clear and loud. To President Trump and his cabinet: I am not afraid of you.” More

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      The case against Mahmoud Khalil is meant to silence American dissent | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      On Friday afternoon, a federal immigration judge in Louisiana ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, the lawful permanent resident who was arrested last month for his advocacy for Palestinian rights at Columbia University, was removable – that is to say, deportable – under the law.Let’s be absolutely clear about how outrageous this decision is. The judge, Jamee Comans, had given the Trump administration a deadline to produce the evidence required to show that Khalil should be deported. In a functional state, such evidence would rise to a standard of extreme criminality necessitating deportation.But not in this case and certainly not with the Trump administration, which has summarily deported hundreds of Venezuelan men based not on any verifiable criminal activity but simply on the basis of their body art. In response to the judge’s order, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, produced a flimsy one-and-a-half-page memo that admits that Khalil engaged in no criminal conduct. Instead, the memo, citing an arcane law, stated that Khalil’s “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful … compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest”. In other words, the government was saying that Khalil’s views – including even his future views – were sufficient grounds for his deportation.Make no mistake. The government is seeking to deport Khalil solely for his constitutionally protected speech, a protection that applies to everyone in the United States. If the government succeeds, you could well be next. And don’t think that your citizenship will protect you. If the government can deny the basic right of freedom of speech to lawful permanent residents, what’s to stop them from going after citizens next? (The administration already has a plan to denaturalize US citizens.)Do we really want to live in a country where the government can decide which ideas are allowed to be heard and which cannot? I’m surprised that I even have to write these words. In an open society, free debate is encouraged and needed, while in a closed society, lists of proscribed ideas circulate and proliferate, and it’s frighteningly clear which way we’re headed. The Trump administration has already banned the use of words and phrases such as “equity”, “women” and “Native American” from government websites and documents, showing us how the open door of American democracy is slamming shut faster and louder than we could have imagined. And Khalil’s case is the test of what this government can achieve.Rubio alleges that Khalil engaged in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States”. But he provides no evidence whatsoever. Meanwhile, here’s what Khalil told CNN last year: “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other. Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.”It would seem that Rubio believes the phrase “freedom and equality for everyone” undermines US foreign policy interests. He may finally be right about something. But he’s wrong about Khalil, who clearly is not antisemitic. If Rubio wanted to cleanse the country of the noxious hatred of Jewish people, he could start by examining members of his own party. Marjorie Taylor Greene once speculated publicly that California wildfires were started by a beam from “space solar generators” linked to “Rothschild, Inc”, a disgusting nod to bizarre antisemitic conspiracy theories. Robert F Kennedy Jr said that the coronavirus had been manipulated to make “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people” the most immune to Covid-19. Elon Musk can barely keep his arm from extending into a salute, Dr Strangelove-style.It’s not some illusory antisemitism that has brought the wrath of the Trump administration raining down on Khalil. It’s the fact that he was standing up for Palestinian rights and calling out Israel’s actions, labelled genocidal by jurists, experts and international human rights organizations alike. But the US government does not want the American people to even entertain this discussion, which includes American complicity in this human catastrophe that is also US foreign policy, and so it will use every means at its disposal to forestall the possibility, including the bluntest instrument in the political book: mass fear.The attempt to deport Khalil is meant primarily to discipline the people of the United States into silence and conformity. For that reason alone, the government’s actions must be resisted. Healthy societies are based on free thinking and dissent. Unhealthy societies mobilize fear and intimidation to regulate opinion and manufacture consent. Today, that consent is about Israel. Tomorrow, it will be about something else. Either way, it will never be your choice, and it will always be theirs.Many legal observers were anticipating today’s ruling by Comans. Immigration judges are appointed by the Department of Justice. As such, they are employees of the executive branch and not the federal judiciary. The New York Times even noted that, had Comans dissented from the government, she would also have “run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters”. The ACLU speculated that the decision to deport Khalil had been “pre-written”, as it was delivered so fast. And Comans stated that the constitutional questions raised by the case will be heard in federal court in New Jersey and not in immigration court in Louisiana.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat doesn’t mean that Judge Comans couldn’t have ruled otherwise. On the contrary, the decision is another dangerous illustration of how much power the executive branch in the United States always wields, how much more power the Trump administration is willing to assume, and how deferential the institutions that could rein in this administration have become.This structural cowardice on the part of these institutions is doing great harm to the integrity of American democracy, often expressed in some sort of embarrassed whisper. Khalil, on the other hand, speaks loudly and eloquently for his position. At the end of his hearing in Louisiana, Khalil asked to address the court. “You said last time that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” he said. “Neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me are afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”Mahmoud Khalil is clearly a remarkable, principled man. He doesn’t deserve this unjust detention the US government is subjecting him to. The irony is that this United States doesn’t deserve a Mahmoud Khalil.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More