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      Judge halts Trump administration from detaining immigrant children after they turn 18

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      A federal judge has temporarily halted a Trump administration initiative that would have kept immigrant children in custody after their 18th birthdays, preventing their transfer to adult detention centers that advocates said were planned for this weekend.On Saturday, US district judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington DC issued a temporary restraining order directing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to stop placing unaccompanied immigrant children into adult detention once they reached legal adulthood, reported the Associated Press.Contreras ruled that automatically detaining these individuals violates an earlier 2021 court order that explicitly prohibited such actions. The ruling adds to a growing list of federal clashes over Trump’s controversial immigration policies, particularly those involving minors.Just a day earlier, it was reported by the Guardian that the Trump administration has plans to offer immigrant children $2,500 to self-deport, with a “one-time resettlement support stipend” given to children in exchange for their voluntary departure.“This policy pressures children to abandon their legal claims and return to a life of fear and danger without ever receiving a fair hearing,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. “The chaos built into this policy will devastate families and communities – and it is targeted to hurt children.”Under federal law, unaccompanied minors are housed in facilities overseen by the office of refugee resettlement, which operates under the Department of Health and Human Services, not Ice.Contreras’s 2021 ruling required that when these children turn 18, they must be released to “the least restrictive setting available”, provided they aren’t considered a danger to themselves or others and aren’t likely to flee. Many are placed with relatives or foster families.Despite the ruling, attorneys representing immigrant youth have also reported receiving alerts that Ice had instructed shelters to stop releasing soon-to-be 18-year-olds, even those with approved release plans, and instead prepare to send them to adult detention, according to the AP.The Trump administration is also facing accusations of reviving the practice of separating families in order to coerce immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US, as attorneys and former immigration officials have spoken out against the practice.In several cases, officials have retaliated against immigrants who challenged deportation orders by forcibly separating them from their children, a Guardian investigation found. The officials misclassified the children as “unaccompanied minors” before placing them in government-run shelters or foster care.It was also reported earlier this year that Ice officials are actively seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US.Over the past several years, the government has imposed stricter screening before releasing children to relatives or sponsors in the US, extending the average time minors spend in custody. That process, which now involves fingerprinting, DNA tests and home visits, has slowed releases considerably.Data released last month also revealed that immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group held in US immigration detention, surpassing the number of detainees who have been charged with crimes. More

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      Trump says Gaza peace deal ‘very close’ as Israel continues airstrikes

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      Donald Trump said in an interview on Saturday that “we are very close” to a peace deal in Gaza, even as Israel continued bombing the territory.Speaking to Axios, Trump said he would push to finalize a deal between Israel and Hamas in the coming days. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a 20-point plan this week. Hamas has accepted part of the deal but is pushing to negotiate other aspects.The US president recounted a conversation he had with the Israeli prime minister as the proposal took place.“I said: ‘Bibi, this is your chance for victory.’ He was fine with it,” Trump told Axios. “He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice. With me, you got to be fine.”On Friday, Trump ordered Israel to “immediately” stop bombing Gaza after Hamas agreed to release all hostages in return for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. On Saturday, Israeli army radio reported that the Israeli military had been ordered to halt its campaign in Gaza City. However, Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israel had continued to carry out dozens of airstrikes and artillery shelling on the area.Trump told Axios: “We had great receptivity for our plan – every country of the world in favor. Bibi is in favor. Hamas went a long way – they want to do it. Now we will need to close it.”He said Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, had been “very helpful” in pressing Hamas to agree to release hostages.“Erdoğan helped a lot. He is a tough guy, but he is a friend of mine and he was great,” Trump said.The White House plan calls for an immediate ceasefire, an exchange of hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, a staged Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas disarmament and a transitional government led by an international body.Trump said he intended to help rehabilitate Israel’s global image, which has suffered as its military intervention has killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza.“Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back,” Trump said. More

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      How Democrats are trying to bust Republican lies about healthcare for undocumented immigrants

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      Leading up to the government shutdown on Wednesday, congressional Republicans and Donald Trump have repeated misleading claims that Democrats were trying to pass a resolution that would provide “free healthcare for illegals”. It’s become a well-rehearsed refrain fueling GOP lawmakers as government funding lapsed this week.At the White House on Wednesday, the vice-president JD Vance said the Democrats’ spending plan “would have undone” the work of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) – which ended the eligibility of many types of lawfully present immigrants to access federally funded health coverage, like Medicaid, Medicare and Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies for private health insurance.Meanwhile Republican leadership on Capitol Hill has maintained their colleagues across the aisle are holding the government “hostage”, while dueling funding bills continue to fail in the Senate.“They have made a decision that they would rather give taxpayer funded benefits to illegal aliens, than to keep the doors open for the American people,” said Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, in a news conference on Thursday.Democrats have lambasted Republicans’ claims.“Not a single federal dollar goes to providing health insurance for undocumented immigrants. NOT. ONE. PENNY,” said the top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer. “Republicans would rather lie and shut down the government down than protect your healthcare.”In an interview with ABC News, on the first day of the government shutdown, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries fact-checked Republican claims. “Federal law prohibits the use of Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Affordable Care Act to provide health insurance in any way, shape or form, to undocumented immigrants. Period, full stop,” he said. “And Democrats aren’t trying to change that.”By framing the issue as being about illegal immigration, it shifts the debate to ground that is politically “friendlier” for the GOP, according to Jonathan Oberlander, professor of healthcare policy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.“[Republicans] absolutely do not want to talk about the healthcare provisions,” Oberlander said. “Whereas Democrats, in general, don’t want to talk a lot about immigration. They do want to talk a lot about healthcare and people losing health insurance, and so that’s exactly what they’re doing.”Undocumented immigrants remain ineligible for federally funded health insurance, and are only able to receive emergency Medicaid treatment, according to longstanding US laws. Instead, Democrats’ funding patch seeks to reverse many of the cuts to Medicaid that are set to take effect after Trump’s sweeping domestic policy agenda passed earlier this year.View image in fullscreenThis includes allowing lawfully present noncitizens – which includes several groups, such as refugees and asylum seekers, those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and survivors of domestic abuse and human trafficking who are awaiting visas or documentation – to still enroll in certain federal health care programs. All of these immigrants have entered the country legally and are accounted for by the federal government.The congressional budget office (CBO) estimates that the impact of the OBBBA will leave around 1.4 million lawfully present noncitizens without coverage.While the impasse in Washington continues, vocalizing any of this nuance seems futile, says Oberlander. “These are all groups that potentially could command political sympathy, but I’m not sure they can break through the misinformation, the toxic environment and the restrictive era we’re living in right now,” he added.“I think what they [Democrats] are going to do, and what they have been doing, is simply to say this has nothing to do with undocumented immigrants. This is not about them. You’re taking health insurance away from Americans.”According to Michael Trujillo, a veteran Democratic strategist, Republicans have been able to land their messaging around the government shutdown by playing “offense”, mainly because Democrats’ language of preservation is harder to sell.“What we’re trying to do is keep what people have today,” Trujillo said.Trujillo noted that Democrats also have to “repeat the lie” in order to dismantle Republicans’ rapid and spurious claims that their funding bill will provide healthcare for undocumented immigrants.“If their [Republicans’] debate is, we’re accusing you of liking sour milk. And then our response is, ‘we in fact do not like sour milk’. Well, guess what, sour milk just became the issue,” Trujillo said.This week, Karoline Leavitt said that programs like TPS are a “complete abuse of the immigration system” that allow “illegals from all over the world to get free benefits”, while speaking to reporters. Since returning to office, Trump has attempted to end temporary protections for several countries through a series of lawsuits with varying degrees of success.Notably, the White House press secretary was unclear when answering a question from a reporter, who asked whether doctors should treat patients in emergency rooms regardless of their immigration status – which is required under federal law. “I don’t speak for emergency rooms across the country, I speak for the president of the United States,” she replied.Through their continuing resolution, Democrats are also trying to remedy the OBBBA’s cuts to Medicaid dollars hospitals receive from the federal government – for emergency care they are mandated to provide to individuals who do not have an eligible immigration status, but would otherwise qualify for Medicaid. According to a recent analysis by KFF, this kind of emergency Medicaid spending accounted for less than 1% of the program’s total expenditure between 2017-2023.Larry Levitt, executive vice-president for health policy at KFF, said the false claim about who is getting access to healthcare has been the “biggest effort at misinformation on a health policy issue since Republicans claimed that the Affordable Care Act included ‘death panels’”.“I’m sure it’s an effective talking point to say the Democrats want to expand health care for undocumented immigrants, but it’s just not true,” he said.A key aspect of the Democrats’ funding bill, and one they have emphasized more than the reversal of the cuts in the Republican budget law, is a permanent extension of the widely popular ACA premium tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of this year. KFF estimates that healthcare costs are set to double for the vast majority of enrollees when these subsidies lapse. Meanwhile, the CBO has projected that around 4 million people stand to lose their health insurance if enhanced tax credits expire at the end of 2025.“My sense is that they [Democratic leadership] would take a deal if they just get the subsidies extended,” Oberlander said. He also underscored that Democrats’ push to reverse the wider healthcare cuts in the president’s sweeping tax legislation may be more of a statement than a demand: “They want to call attention to the fact that Republicans enacted them and what the consequences are, but they know, realistically, there’s no chance that they’re going to reverse what they just passed.” More

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      Kristi Noem warns immigrants away from Super Bowl: ‘We’ll be all over that place’

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      Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, has said that only Americans should attend next year’s Super Bowl and warned that Ice agents “will be all over” the event.Speaking to the rightwing podcaster Benny Johnson on Friday, Noem also said the NFL will “not be able to sleep at night” over its decision to choose Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper who has criticized the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies, as its half-time performer.Asked whether “there will be Ice enforcement at the Super Bowl”, Noem said: “There will be, because the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for keeping it safe, so I have the responsibility for making sure everybody goes to the Super Bowl, has the opportunity to enjoy it and to leave, and that’s what America is about.”She added: “So yeah, we’ll be all over that place … We’re going to enforce the law. So I think people should not be coming to the Super Bowl unless they’re law-abiding Americans who love this country.”Bad Bunny was confirmed as the headline act at the Super Bowl last week. In September, the musician said he had excluded the US from his upcoming world tour due to concerns over potential immigration raids.“There was the issue of – like, fucking Ice could be outside [my concert],” he told i-D magazine. “And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.”The selection of the Puerto Rican has upset several conservatives, with Johnson complaining this week that Bad Bunny has “no songs in English”.Asked about the NFL choosing Bad Bunny, Noem said: “Well, they suck, and we’ll win, and God will bless us, and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night, because they don’t know what they believe, and they’re so weak, we’ll fix it.”Noem’s insistence that Ice agents will be “all over” the Super Bowl appeared to clash slightly with the White House.On Friday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters: “As far as Ice being at the Super Bowl, as far as I’m aware there’s no tangible plan for that in store right now.”She added: “However, of course this administration is always going to arrest and deport illegal immigrants when we find them if they are criminals. We’re going to do the right thing by our country.” More

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      Judge says prosecution against Kilmar Ábrego García for human smuggling may be illegal retaliation

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      A federal judge has concluded that the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Kilmar Ábrego García on human-smuggling charges may be an illegal retaliation after he successfully sued the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador.The case of Ábrego, a Salvadorian national who was a construction worker in Maryland, has become a proxy for the partisan struggle over Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration policy and mass deportation agenda.US district court judge Waverly Crenshaw granted a request late on Friday by lawyers for Ábrego and ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in Ábrego’s effort to show that the federal human-smuggling case against him in Tennessee is illegally retaliatory.Crenshaw said Ábrego had shown that there is “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive”. That evidence included statements by various Trump administration officials and the timeline of the charges being filed.The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security did not immediately respond to inquiries about the case on Saturday.In his 16-page ruling, Crenshaw said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern”, but one stood out.That statement, by the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, on a Fox News program after Ábrego was charged in June, seemed to suggest that the Department of Justice charged him because he won his wrongful deportation case, Crenshaw wrote.Blanche’s ”remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Ábrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights” to sue over his deportation “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct”, Crenshaw wrote.Likewise, Crenshaw noted that the Department of Homeland Security reopened an investigation into Ábrego days after the US supreme court said in April that the Trump administration must work to bring him back.Ábrego was indicted on 21 May and charged on 6 June, the day the US returned him from a prison in El Salvador. He pleaded not guilty and is now being held in Pennsylvania.If convicted in the Tennessee case, Ábrego will be deported, federal officials have said. A US immigration judge has denied Ábrego’s bid for asylum, although he can appeal.The Salvadorian national has an American wife and children and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the United States illegally as a teenager.In 2019, he was arrested by immigration agents. He requested asylum but was not eligible because he had been in the US for more than a year. But the judge ruled he could not be deported to El Salvador, where he faced danger from a gang that targeted his family.The human-smuggling charges in Tennessee stem from a 2022 traffic stop. He was not charged at the time.Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Ábrego, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang, among other things, despite the fact he has not been convicted of any crimes.Ábrego’s attorneys have denounced the criminal charges and the deportation efforts, saying they are an attempt to punish him for standing up to the administration.Ábrego contends that, while imprisoned in El Salvador, he suffered beatings, sleep deprivation and psychological torture. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has denied those allegations. More

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      Small US college towns reel amid Trump immigration crackdown: ‘They need international students’

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      For a town of 20,000 residents a few miles from the Indiana state line in rural Ohio, the city of Oxford boasts an outsized number of international eateries.On High Street, the Phan Shin Chinese restaurant sits a few doors down from the Happy Kitchen, another Chinese food joint, which is next door to the Krishna Indian restaurant. There’s a French bakery and even a Uyghur restaurant selling central Asian fare.The diversity of international restaurants mirrors the student population attending Miami University, which in 2019 had a student body including more than 3,000 international students.But in recent years, the number of international students coming to study at US colleges has plummeted, a trend that could have devastating consequences for small college towns.It was the large number of Chinese students attending Miami University that prompted Fei Yang to open the MImian Chinese restaurant in Oxford, a full 60 miles from his home, in 2018.“There used to be 2,000 to 3,000 [Chinese] students but now there is like 300, 400 maybe,” says Yang. “Covid-19 stopped a lot of people coming. Before we used to make real Chinese food, now we make the American versions.”In fall 2019, Miami University admitted 2,895 international students, mainly from China, Vietnam, India, and elsewhere – last year, the number plummeted to 750. Since international students at Miami University are not receiving scholarships, they typically pay more than $65,000 in tuition, fees, housing and food, according to 2024-25 estimated cost of attendance figures, which represents a potential loss of about $140m for the university, local businesses and the thousands of workers they collectively employ.Across the US, an estimated 150,000 fewer international students are expected to study at US colleges and universities this fall compared to last year, a 40% drop.While the reasons are varied, the Trump administration’s response to protests on campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza has played a major role in fueling the falloff by driving fear of arrest and deportation into many would-be incoming international students.In June, the state department announced more severe screening and vetting processes for international students intending on studying in the US, including ordering applicants to turn their social media profiles public.Students from Turkey, Palestine, and Iran have been detained, imprisoned and deported or self-deported for expressing their first amendment rights, rights that are protected by the US constitution, regardless of whether they are citizens of the country or not. About 6,000 student visas have been revoked this year with some students seeing their visas revoked for alleged minor wrongdoings such as speeding.International student enrolment, however, has been in decline since before the current administration’s crackdown. The tariffs regime initiated on China during the first Trump administration, as well as Covid-19 pandemic travel restrictions in 2020, prompted a massive fall in students traveling to the US for higher education five years ago. In the years since, Chinese students have increasingly chosen to study in the UK and Australia in place of the US.While mid-sized and large cities and wealthy small towns such as Ithaca, New York, – home to Cornell University – can typically take the financial hit from the loss of thousands of international students due to their diversified economies, less affluent towns, whose economies have never fully recovered from the loss of students on-site during the pandemic, remain imperiled.According to the US Department of Commerce, international students are thought to have contributed around $50bn to the US economy in 2023 in tuition, rent, food, taxes and a host of other ways. In Ohio, Kentucky, and Iowa, which rank among the lowest states for GDP growth in the country, and which are Trump strongholds, their economies are set to lose as much as $200m, $45m and nearly $43m respectively. Florida’s economy could see losses reaching as much as $243m.“We tend to think that foreign students only go to big Ivy League schools in big cities. But if you look at a recent Brookings Institution report, it is clear that every school, small, medium and large, in every town or city – small, medium or large need income from international students,” says Tara Sonenshine, Edward R Murrow professor of practice in public diplomacy at Tufts University.In West Lafayette, Indiana, the 50,000 students who attend Purdue University make up the overwhelming majority of the city’s population. Almost one in four of those at Purdue in 2024 were international students, most paying full tuition and board costs. These students, many who attend to learn cutting-edge agriculture practices, help employ more than 10,000 people, making Purdue University the largest employer in the region.It’s a similar story for rural Illinois, where one-quarter of students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus are from overseas – one of the highest ratios of any private or public college in the country. There, an international student studying for a four-year undergraduate degree can net the college and offshoot businesses about $200,000 in tuition and other fees.In Oxford, Ohio, one of the biggest issues international students help local businesses with is providing custom during the six-week period from mid-December to the end of January when there are no classes at Miami University. At that time, other than permanent residents, the only people in town are international students.“Our business community is very dependent on Miami University students. Oxford’s population is about 20,000, of which 17,000 or more are Miami University students,” says Oxford city manager Doug Elliott.“We have a lot of homes that were converted into student housing. That’s typical for small college towns like us.”Elliott notes that aside from the financial benefit, international students bring energy and diversity in the form of festivals and gatherings to parts of the US that would otherwise never get to experience the wider world.“Cutting off visas for international students, combined with demographic shifts in America and the declining enrolment in college, in addition to the general disdain for immigrant populations coming here,” says Sonenshine, “would all add up to chaos and potential closures of small schools who rely on a broader pool on enrolment.” More

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      Mike Johnson hasn’t sworn in this new Democrat. Is it because she wants to release the Epstein files?

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      Congress’s newest member, Adelita Grijalva, came to Washington DC this week, expecting to be officially sworn in by the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.Two days later, she returned to her southern Arizona district disappointed, if not a little confused. No swearing-in ceremony had been organized, meaning Grijalva, a Democrat who easily won a special election last month to replace her late father, Raúl M Grijalva, was not able to start her new job.Trapped in the purgatorial status of representative-elect, she had to be escorted around the Capitol building by her soon-to-be-colleagues, like any other member of the public. Her name is on the door of her new office, but she does not have the keys.“I want to get to work and I can’t,” Grijalva said.She thinks she knows the reason why Johnson is in no rush to administer the oath: in addition to co-sponsoring bills on the environment, public education and other issues she campaigned on addressing, Grijalva plans to provide the final signature on a petition that would force a vote on legislation to release files related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – which the speaker and Donald Trump oppose.“I can’t think of any other reason. It’s not like my being sworn in changes the majority,” she said.The matter of the Epstein files has for months been a thorn in the side of the president and his allies in Congress. Though Trump has decried it as a “Democrat hoax”, a small group of dissident Republicans have joined with all of the Democrats in the House of Representatives to pursue the legislative maneuver, known as a discharge petition. It just needs the signatures of 218 lawmakers to succeed, and has currently received 217 – Grijalva’s would be the last one.The petition is a rare instance of defiance among congressional Republicans, who have given Trump much of what he wants ever since he returned to the White House. But even if it succeeds and the legislation passes the House, it is unlikely to go far. The Senate’s Republican leaders have shown little interest in the issue, and it is difficult to imagine Trump signing the bill.Another complication, both for the petition and Grijalva’s hopes to taking her seat: the House was out of session all this week. Johnson last month called off planned work days to pressure Senate Democrats into voting for legislation the chamber has approved to fund the government and end the ongoing shutdown.However, the House did hold a three-and-a-half-minute procedural session on Tuesday – one Grijalva attended along with dozens of Democrats, in hopes of getting Johnson to swear her in. No luck, even though Johnson administered the oath to two Republicans who won special elections in Florida during a similar session earlier this year.“That doesn’t make sense, why I wouldn’t be sworn in, in the same pace that they were?” Grijalva said. “And who is losing out are the constituents that need a Congress to work for them.”A spokesperson for Johnson pointed to his comments signaling that Grijalva will be sworn in when the House returns to session, but that will not happen until funding is restored to the government.“The House will come back into session and do its work as soon as Chuck Schumer allows us to reopen the government,” Johnson said today, referring to the top Senate Democrat whom the Republicans blame for the funding lapse.Grijalva along with her family had planned to be in Washington again by Tuesday of next week, in hopes the House would be back to work. On Friday afternoon, Johnson announced that it would take the whole week off.“Now I have to change, blow up all of the travel plans that I made for everybody,” she said. “So, that’s frustrating.” More

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      Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is trying to warn us about something. Are we listening?

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      Her sharpest words were not in the body of her opinion. They were tucked away in a footnote.That subtle placement speaks volumes about Ketanji Brown Jackson, the supreme court’s newest member and already its fiercest liberal voice.The footnote in question can be found in Trump v Casa, the June ruling that gave a big boost to Donald Trump by clipping the wings of federal judges and limiting their use of nationwide injunctions to block the president’s worst excesses.Over 21 pages of taut dissent against Casa, Jackson decried the 6-3 ruling as “an existential threat to the rule of law” and a “sad day for America”. The ruling was “profoundly dangerous”, she wrote, because it gives Trump permission “to wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate”.Looking ahead, she added that the decision would “surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise”.This is strong medicine. But then there is footnote No 5, which takes her dissent to another level entirely.In it, she cites The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel, a German Jewish labor lawyer who fled the Nazis in 1938. Fraenkel’s book analysed how the Nazis had created two coexistent legal systems.There was the normative one that kept the economy of Germany running as usual. And then there was the separate legal system that operated alongside it, in which anyone deemed an enemy of the regime was stripped of all rights and subjected to arbitrary violence.In the footnote, Jackson quotes The Dual States’s description of the way unchecked power is incompatible with the rule of law:
      See E Fraenkel, The Dual State, pp xiii, 3, 71 (1941) (describing the way in which the creation of a ‘Prerogative State’ where the Executive ‘exercises unlimited arbitrariness … unchecked by any legal guarantees’ is incompatible with the rule of law)
      The footnote is three and a half lines of small print. But its import is booming.By citing Fraenkel’s work, the justice is drawing a parallel between the drift in jurisprudence that is taking place under the combined actions of Trump and the supreme court, and the legal structure of Nazi Germany.View image in fullscreenAziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, has studied The Dual State and wrote about it in the Atlantic a month before the Casa decision came down. Pointing to Jackson’s footnote, he said that it was clearly charged.“It’s hard not to see that as a kind of warning,” he said.On Monday, the nine justices of the US’s top court will assemble at the start of a new judicial term. They will share the usual niceties, make congenial small talk, then get down to business.It will be a tough time for Jackson, who has carved out a role as the “great dissenter” and has been challenging the conservative bloc that now controls the court.Outnumbered and outgunned by the rightwing supermajority, she and her two other liberal colleagues have had to watch from the sidelines as critical constitutional laws that have been settled for half a century have been torn up by the very court on which they sit.So far, the list of casualties includes the right to an abortion, affirmative action, environmental protections, voting rights and much more.Over the summer, the majority has also supercharged its shadow docket, in a series of temporary emergency decisions that have overturned lower court rulings and handed Trump almost everything he wants. That includes the ability to mass-fire federal employees, summarily deport migrants to war-torn countries, withhold billions of dollars in funds already approved by Congress and more.The liberal justices have granted us rare glimpses into the hardship of their working lives. Last year, Sonia Sotomayor told an audience at Harvard that there were days after the announcement of a ruling when she retreated to her office, closed the door and cried.Asked about her colleague’s mournful behavior a few weeks later, Elena Kagan said: “I’m not much of a crier. I’m more of a wall-slammer.”Jackson, who is 55, has studiously restrained herself in public. In recent book readings and talks she has come across as invariably cheerful and upbeat.She has reserved her evident frustrations – about the current state of the US, its presidency and its top court – exclusively for her dissents. Of which there have been many.Last term, Jackson wrote 10 dissents, more than any other justice including the ever vociferous far-right Clarence Thomas with nine. In her dissents, Jackson has piercingly criticised the court under the chief justice, John Roberts, for undermining the US’s foundations as a country of rules: no one is above the law and everyone has equal access to justice.In addition to her most searing writing in the Trump v Casa case, with its Fraenkel footnote, there have been a stream of other pointed dissents. In July, she castigated the court’s decision to allow Trump to go ahead with mass firings of federal workers, saying that it was “the wrong decision at the wrong moment”.In August, she lamented the decision by Roberts and his fellow rightwingers to allow Trump to cut almost $800m in federal health grants. She said the majority “bends over backward to accommodate” the administration’s wishes.Like Huq, Franita Tolson, dean of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, sees Jackson’s dissents as sending a message. She is speaking directly to the American people, as well as to lower court judges who will have to interpret and apply the supreme court’s rulings going forward.View image in fullscreen“It is a warning,” Tolson said. “She is warning us about the state of our democracy, about threats to the rule of law. There’s a lot of unfair criticism, but she’s consistent. She believes what she believes, and she says it bravely.”The billion-dollar question is: amid all the noise, will Jackson’s message be heard?Jackson has paid a heavy price for sticking her neck so high above the parapet. She has been scoffed at for somehow stepping outside normal supreme court decorum by speaking out so forcefully.Some of the most caustic attacks have come from her own fellow justices on the right. The most scathing rebuke was made by Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, who disdainfully dismissed Jackson’s dissent in Trump v Casa as being untethered to conventional legal thinking or “frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever”.The comment must have stung. But Jackson has been accustomed to being criticised and maligned ever since she was a child.In her memoir Lovely One – the title is a translation of her African name, Ketanji Onyika – she recalls as a teenager asking her grandmother: “Why do they think just because I’m Black I’m going to steal from them?”Her grandmother replied: “Guard your spirit, Ketanji. To dwell on the unfairness of life is to be devoured by it.”She has kept that advice close as she has risen up the judicial ladder. “I rejected self-doubt and self-loathing,” she writes. “Instead I chose possibility. I chose purpose.”She has needed such personal armor. A year into her tenancy on the supreme court, she was targeted by Charlie Kirk, the rightwing activist who was murdered last month, as one of four prominent Black women whom he denigrated as “affirmative-action picks”.“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously,” he said on his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show.The attacks coming at Jackson from fellow justices on the conservative wing of the supreme court have not been tainted with such overt racism. But some of the brickbats thrown at her have been bruising.Barrett’s riposte to Jackson in the Casa case was dripping with condescension. “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument,” Barrett wrote in her majority opinion.View image in fullscreenShe slammed Jackson’s dissent as being at odds with more than 200 years of precedent, “not to mention the Constitution itself”. She went on to accuse her of embracing “an imperial judiciary”.Barrett’s criticism was rooted in a textual approach to the law in which judgments are made up-close and line by line. Jackson, by contrast, is stretching for the bigger picture: she is standing back, widening the frame, and seeking to capture the peril of this singularly dangerous moment.The clash between the two justices raises questions. At a time when democracy and adherence to the rule of law is being tested to the breaking point, when the supreme court is under more pressure to safeguard democracy than at any time in recent history, is there a place for decorum? And if there is, who is breaching it?Is it the justice who is warning about the threat posed by an authoritarian-minded president? Or is it her peers who control the court, whom she argues are emboldening him?Jackson’s determination to sound the alarm can be traced in part to her personal history. She was born in Washington DC on 14 September 1970, just a few years after the civil rights movement achieved its crowning glories: the 1964 Civil Rights Act that ended southern segregation, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that ensured access to the ballot box for African Americans.In her memoir, Jackson recalls growing up in Miami as the “only dark-skinned girl in rooms full of white kids”. Hard work and success in the high school debating team helped her walk into those rooms “with my head held high”.In her letter of application to Harvard (she was accepted as an undergraduate and went on to study at Harvard Law School), she said her dream was to become “the first Black, female supreme court justice to appear on a Broadway stage”.Audacious perhaps, but she did both. She joined the court as its first Black female justice in June 2022, and in December made a one-night guest appearance in the Broadway musical & Juliet.In Lovely One, she describes how she imbibed fundamental legal principles from the former supreme court justice Stephen Breyer, for whom she clerked (it was his seat on the court that she later assumed). He taught her about the importance of seeing legal theory not as a thing in itself, but as part of the great American experiment, with its commitment to government by and for the people and its rejection of monarchs and dictators.Jackson also articulates her sense of responsibility, as a Black woman standing on the shoulders of those who came before her, to protect the achievements of the civil rights struggle. As she noted the day after she was confirmed as a justice in her speech on the south lawn of the White House: “In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the supreme court of the United States.”“She understands the assignment,” said Tolson, the USC School of Law dean. “She understands that she is standing on a legacy that is built on a constitution that works for everybody, not just some people.”View image in fullscreenThat assignment will be tougher than ever as Jackson enters her fourth year on the court on Monday. The nine-month term that lies ahead has the potential to profoundly affect the state of American democracy and the extent of presidential power.Enormous questions are on the docket, including whether Trump gets away with scrapping birthright citizenship and other blatantly unconstitutional moves. At stake are the future of Trump’s tariffs, the fate of hundreds of thousands of people facing deportation and similar numbers of federal workers who could lose their jobs, and the independence of the Federal Reserve.Voting rights are also on the line. Two cases coming before the justices have the potential to gut the final vestiges of the Voting Rights Act, eviscerating one of those crowning glories of the civil rights movement without which Jackson might not have hoped to climb to the top.The spotlight will be intense. The consequences will be immense.“She’s been preparing for this moment,” Tolson said, anticipating further poignant Jackson dissents in the months to come.“There’s a sadness to her dissents,” she added. “A sadness about where we are, a reflection of our politics. But there’s also a resolve. That we don’t have to be like this.” More