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    US supreme court rules Doge can access social security data during legal challenge

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    The US supreme court on Friday permitted the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a key player in Donald Trump’s drive to slash the federal workforce, broad access to the personal information of millions of Americans in Social Security Administration data systems while a legal challenge plays out.At the request of the justice department, the justices put on hold Maryland-based US district judge Ellen Hollander’s order that had largely blocked Doge’s access to “personally identifiable information” in data such as medical and financial records while litigation proceeds in a lower court. Hollander found that allowing Doge unfettered access likely would violate a federal privacy law.The court’s brief, unsigned order did not provide a rationale for siding with Doge. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented.Doge swept through federal agencies as part of the Republican president’s effort, spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk, to eliminate federal jobs, downsize and reshape the US government and root out what they see as wasteful spending. Musk formally ended his government work on 30 May.Two labor unions and an advocacy group sued to stop Doge from accessing sensitive data at the SSA, including social security numbers, bank account data, tax information, earnings history and immigration records.The agency is a major provider of government benefits, sending checks each month to more than 70 million recipients, including retirees and disabled Americans.In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that the SSA had been “ransacked” and that Doge members had been installed without proper vetting or training and had demanded access to some of the agency’s most sensitive data systems.Hollander in a 17 April ruling found that Doge had failed to explain why its stated mission required “unprecedented, unfettered access to virtually SSA’s entire data systems”.“For some 90 years, SSA has been guided by the foundational principle of an expectation of privacy with respect to its records,” Hollander wrote. “This case exposes a wide fissure in the foundation.”Hollander issued a preliminary injunction that prohibited Doge staffers and anyone working with them from accessing data containing personal information, with narrow exceptions. The judge’s ruling did allow Doge affiliates to access data that had been stripped of private information as long as those seeking access had gone through the proper training and passed background checks.Hollander also ordered Doge affiliates to “disgorge and delete” any personal information already in their possession.Based in Richmond, Virginia, the fourth US circuit court of appeals in a 9-6 vote declined on 30 April to pause Hollander’s block on Doge’s unlimited access to SSA records.Justice department lawyers in their supreme court filing characterized Hollander’s order as judicial overreach.“The district court is forcing the executive branch to stop employees charged with modernizing government information systems from accessing the data in those systems because, in the court’s judgment, those employees do not ‘need’ such access,” they wrote.The six dissenting judges wrote that the case should have been treated the same as one in which a fourth circuit panel ruled 2-1 to allow Doge to access data at the US treasury and education departments and the office of personnel management.In a concurring opinion, seven judges who ruled against Doge wrote that the case involving social security data was “substantially stronger” with “vastly greater stakes”, citing “detailed and profoundly sensitive Social Security records”, such as family court and school records of children, mental health treatment records and credit card information. More

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      Trump keeps being overruled by judges. And his temper tantrums won’t stop that | Steven Greenhouse

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      It’s hard to keep track of all the temper tantrums that Donald Trump has had because he’s so ticked off that one judge after another has ruled against his flood of illegal actions. In seeking to put their fingers in the dike to stop the US president’s lawlessness, federal judges have issued a startling high number of rulings, more than 185, to block or temporarily pause moves by the Trump administration.Livid about all this, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has railed against “judicial activism”, while Trump adviser Stephen Miller carps about a “judicial coup”. As for Trump, the grievance-is-me president has gone into full conniption-mode, moaning about anti-Trump rulings and denouncing “USA-hating judges”. On Truth Social, he said: “How is it possible for [judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP’? What other reason could it be?”Trump is acting like the 10-year-old bully who pummeled a dozen classmates in the schoolyard, but when his teacher called him out for his thuggishness, he burst into tears and screamed: “This is so unfair! Why are you picking on me?”A word of advice to Trump: you should realize that dozens of judges keep ruling against you because you have flouted the law more than any previous president and because you and your flunkies keep misinterpreting and stretching the nation’s laws far beyond their meaning.Take Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, when he announced steep, across-the-board tariffs against 57 countries. On that day, Trump became the first president to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose tariffs. To Trump’s dismay, three judges on the US court of international trade unanimously ruled that he had overstepped his authority and gone far beyond what that 1977 law allows presidents to do. The trade court wrote that the constitution gives Congress, not the president, power over tariff policy and that the 1977 law didn’t give Trump “unbounded” authority to impose tariffs.After that 28 May ruling, Trump’s latest tantrum began.Then, there’s his chest-thumping, cold-hearted rush to expel as many immigrants as possible. To accomplish that, Trump became the first president to invoke the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act in peacetime. twisting that law’s language to declare that several dozen gang members from Venezuela constitute a war-like invasion force, similar to an enemy army, who could therefore be deported without due process. But several sane, sober judges told Trump that he is full of it. There’s no war-like invasion here.And then there’s Trump’s effort to stomp on several prestigious law firms that have done things or hired people he doesn’t like. Trump became the first president to essentially put a gun to various law firms’ heads to try to make them submit to him. He sought to undermine those firms’ business with astonishingly vengeful executive orders that not only said that their lawyers couldn’t enter federal buildings and would lose their security clearances, but that their corporate clients might lose their federal contracts. And then there was the unspoken threat that Trump would block corporate deals that those firms’ lawyers were working on. This is poisonous stuff, punishing law firms for doing what our legal system has long called on firms to do: represent clients, even unpopular ones (even ones Trump doesn’t like).Here, Trump was engaging in a shakedown, in effect saying: “That’s a nice law firm you have. It’s a shame if something happens to it. (So you’d be smart to submit to my demands.)” Again, several judges told Trump he’s full of it, that the law firms hadn’t done anything wrong to warrant such illegal shakedown efforts.There are cases galore in which judges found that Trump acted illegally. Judges have provisionally blocked his push to bar international students from attending Harvard and ordered the release of several immigrant graduate students his administration arrested. Judges have ruled against Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education, his freezing up to $3tn in funding for the states and his firing thousands of federal civil servants.Hating to see judges rule against his boss, Stephen Miller absurdly asserted: “We are living under a judicial tyranny,” while Leavitt carped that judges have “usurp[ed] the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him”. (What mandate? Trump didn’t even receive 50% of the vote, beating Kamala Harris by a mere 1.5 percentage points. Nor did Americans vote for Trump’s tariff chaos or his all-out war against universities.)What we’ve heard from Trump (and mouthpieces Leavitt and Miller) is dangerous stuff. Trump is essentially rejecting the idea of judicial review. Like many authoritarian rulers, he hates having judges weigh whether his actions have violated the law. Trump forgets that under the constitution, judges (not the president) are the umpires who rule whether the president or Congress is following or flouting the law. As Ty Cobb, a former lawyer for Trump, said: “Trump’s attack on the judges is an attempt to undo the separation of powers. It’s an attempt to take what is three coequal branches and make it one dominant branch.”Trump’s attacks against the judiciary are dangerous in another way – they have literally endangered judges’ safety. In the five months before 1 March, 80 judges received threats, but after Trump’s tirades against judges began to crescendo in February, the number of threats soared: more than 160 judges received threats in the six weeks after 1 March. On Memorial Day, Trump loosed another rant, calling judges who ruled against him “monsters who want our country to go to hell”.With these diatribes, Trump is seeking to delegitimize the judiciary and turn the public against judges, just as his unrelenting attacks against the news media have helped cause many people to lose faith in the media, no matter that many news organizations are as accurate and fair-minded as ever (and far more truthful than Trump).Trump’s war against the judiciary has taken another form – his administration has evaded, skirted and ignored numerous judicial orders – stonewalling a judge’s request for information in an immigration case, failing to comply with the US supreme court’s call to “facilitate” the return of a wrongly deported immigrant, dragging its feet in restoring funding that had been illegally frozen.After the trade court’s ruling, Leavitt griped that judges issued more “injunctions in one full month of office, in February, than Joe Biden had in three years”. Leavitt is blind to the obvious reason for this – Trump, in churning out more than 150 executive orders, a record number – has far too often violated the law and the constitution with abandon, while Biden was far more scrupulous in complying with the law.Trump and cronies should recognize that there’s a very simple way to get judges to stop overruling his actions. All Trump has to do is stop taking all these illegal, vindictive actions and stop issuing all these destructive, lawless executive orders. What’s more, considering that Trump once tweeted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he needs to stop acting like a modern-day king or Napoleon who is above the law.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Stakes are high for US democracy as conservative supreme court hears raft of cases

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      A year has proved to be a long time on the scales of US justice.Less than 12 months ago, the US supreme court was in serious disrepute among liberals following a series of ethics scandals and a spate of highly contentious, conservative-leaning rulings. It culminated in a ruling last July vastly expanding a president’s immunity from prosecution, virtually guaranteeing that Donald Trump would escape criminal censure for the 6 January 2021 insurrection and retaining classified documents.So far had the court’s stock with Democrats fallen, that Joe Biden called for radical reforms on how the court was run and a constitutional amendment asserting that no president was above the law or immune for crimes committed in office.Now, with a re-elected and vengeful Trump having run rampant over democratic norms by issuing a fusillade of often illegal and unconstitutional executive orders, the same court – with the same nine justices on the bench – is being cast in the unlikely role of potential saviour of American democracy.Critics who once derided the judicial consequences of the court’s six-three conservative majority hope that the justices will show enough fealty to the US constitution to mitigate the effect of Trump’s all-out assault on a range of rights, from birthright citizenship to basic due process appeals against deportation, and preserve the constitutional republic’s defining contours.“The court is certainly a very important institution at this moment since Congress is completely pliant and not asserting its own prerogatives and the executive branch doesn’t seem to be guided by any internal legal constraint,” said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University and a former high-ranking justice department official in the Biden administration.The court has already adjudicated in several high-profile cases since Trump’s return – notably ruling against the administration in ordering it to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador.But it has ruled in Trump’s favour, at least temporarily, in several others.The stakes are about to be raised further still as a spate of cases arising from rulings against the administration by lower-court judges awaits the supreme court’s final say before its current term ends this month.These include: the rights of lower courts to issue injunctions against Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed in the constitution; an attempt by Tennessee to ban or limit transgender care for minors; a complaint by parents in Maryland against allowing LGBTQ+ books in elementary schools; the need for insurers to cover preventive healthcare costs under the Affordable Care Act; and attempts to cut off public funding for Planned Parenthood.Added to that daunting schedule, the justices can expect additional unaccustomed summer workload in the shape of seemingly unending emergency cases generated by Trump’s no-holds-barred attempt to transform government.Most experts believe the court will ultimately rule against Trump’s attempt to undermine birthright citizenship rights, given that they are so clearly defined in the 14th amendment of the constitution. Yet the devil may be in the detail. Some analysts believe the court has already lent the administration’s case unwarranted credibility by agreeing to consider its challenge against lower courts’ powers to issue nationwide injunctions on the subject. Perhaps tellingly, the court has not called for a supplemental briefing on whether Trump’s 20 January executive order was legal.Hopes that the current court can act as a brake on Trump seem forlorn given its conservative majority and the fact that three of its members – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed to the bench by Trump himself. In addition, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito consistently take hardline positions that seem predisposed to favour Trump.Yet speculation that the chief justice, John Roberts, and Coney Barrett have become disenchanted by the brazenness of Trump’s actions has fueled optimism. Some believe they could vote with the court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – who consistently issue dissenting opinions on rightwing rulings – frequently enough on key occasions to form an effective bulwark.But Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of a book on the court entitled Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, is sceptical.A recent ruling upholding the president’s firing of the head of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, which gave Congress the power to limit a president’s ability to remove officials from independent agencies – shows the conservative justices’ reverting to type, she said.“Some people wondered: ‘Was the court going to have second thoughts about, for example, their immunity decision giving Donald Trump such leading powers, including powers to act outside of the law and above it?’” Litman argued. “I think the Wilcox ruling underscored that the answer is definitively no.”Underpinning the conservative justices’ approach is the unitary executive theory, which posits that the president has sole authority over the government’s executive branch, allowing him to fire members of nominally independent agencies without cause.“They have been pushing this theory for over three decades and now they have a chance to make a pretty muscular version of it the law,” Litman said. “Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett understand that the court can’t let Donald Trump get away with everything, including usurping Congress’s power or obviously depriving individuals of due process. But short of that, I don’t think they are having any kind of second thoughts about their own views of executive power or about the law more generally.”The few cases of the court standing up to Trump, argues Litman, have been “overplayed” and pale in importance compared with other rulings that have emboldened the president, including upholding the stripping of temporary protected status from about 300,000 Venezuelans.Greene defined the court’s approach as “formalist” and ill-suited to counter Trump’s lawbreaking. He contrasted it with the much bolder ethos under Chief Justice Earl Warren’s leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, when the court became renowned for creatively enforcing racial desegregation and civil rights orders in the south.“Trump’s modus operandi is to exploit what he perceives as weaknesses in the system of enforcement and accountability,” Greene said. “If he thinks that courts are not going to be able to step in, he will try to exploit that as much as he can, unless and until he’s stopped by some political actor or an actor with more power.“The Trump administration is exploiting the formality and the lack of creativity of courts in general, but the supreme court in particular.”The court’s writ has already been exposed as limited by Trump’s failure to comply with its order to facilitate the return of Ábrego García to the US.According to Greene, the White House’s failure to police its own actions to ensure they are in line with the law and the constitution already amounts to a constitutional crisis, because the courts lack the time and resources to counter unbridled violations.That puts added onus on the supreme court to fulfill its role as ultimate arbiter, argues Litman.“We should continue to demand that they actually do uphold the law,” she said. “I don’t think we should just give up and give in to their inclination to not enforce the law and allow Donald Trump to get away with legal violations. If they don’t, force them to expend the capital and pay a price in their public approval rating.” More

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      Four queer business owners on Pride under Trump: ‘Our joy is resistance’

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      As the first Pride month under Donald Trump’s second presidency approaches, LGBTQ+ businesses are stepping up, evolving quickly to meet the community’s growing concerns.Since day one, Trump has signed executive orders targeting the LGBTQ+ community, particularly the trans and gender non-conforming population. He aims to eradicate “gender ideology” by enforcing a two-sex binary determined at conception, reinstating and expanding the military ban on transgender service members, and directing agencies to prevent gender-affirming care for youth.This leaves the LGBTQ+ community feeling apprehensive about losing further rights and protections.The Guardian spoke with four queer business owners, and one message was clear: queer businesses are here to support the community now more than ever and spread joy as resistance.Uptick in weddingsBusiness is surging for New England-based wedding photographer Lindsey “Lensy” Michelle as queer couples decide to take their vows, fearing the Trump administration will go after marriage equality. Michelle says she’s only getting louder and even “more queer”.“I’m not changing anything about my business, no matter what the government says,” Michelle said. “We elected a president who doesn’t support this type of marriage, or at the very least doesn’t care enough to try to protect it.”View image in fullscreenShe is seeing queer couples accelerate their wedding plans in fear of Trump and the supreme court overturning 2015’s ruling on Obergefell v Hodges, which recognized same-sex marriages. Michelle currently offers accessible pricing for queer couples.“[Pride] is a good time to remind wedding vendors to stop advertising to only brides or using very gendered language, or assuming that every couple has a bride and a groom,” she said. “Performative allyship is really dangerous, and for businesses June can be a time of greater reflection on how they can be more clear and inclusive.”According to Michelle, there is an emerging trend for queer couples to distinguish legal marriage from a wedding ceremony. Many of her clients explained that they are registering their marriage now out of an “abundance of caution” because they don’t feel like “their rights will be protected”, she said.“It’s a privilege when you’re able to celebrate instead of protest and queerness is always rebellious,” she said. “You protest when things aren’t welcoming to begin with and you celebrate when you’re able to but I think also you have to do both. Otherwise, it becomes quite sad.”After noticing an uptick in demand, she created an LGBTQ+ wedding directory of more than 130 businesses. She didn’t stop there: Michelle then teamed up with five other vendors to throw a queer mass wedding ball for six lucky couples on 5 January.“We don’t really feel like celebrating. We feel like crying and we feel helpless and all we’re trying to do is get married,” Michelle said. “We just wanted to throw a party. This event is coming out of the time of fear and uncertainty, but that’s always been the queer story.”View image in fullscreenThe team behind the wedding ball are “open to the idea” of hosting a similar event in other states, particularly in Republican-led ones.Nine states are urging the supreme court to reverse Obergefell v Hodges.“We’re scared, and I don’t put that lightly,” Michelle said.We will surviveIn Decatur, Georgia, Charis Books & More aims to alleviate the fears the queer and trans community are experiencing.“My job is to support young people and those with children and to say: ‘Look, we have spent most of our history as queer and trans people as outlaws and we can be outlaws again. But, we will survive, we are very creative and we’ll figure out how to get through this time,’” said Errol Anderson, the executive director of Charis Books & More’s non-profit arm, Charis Circle.View image in fullscreenCharis Circle hosts events like story time and offers support groups, especially for the trans community. They have four support groups for trans and gender non-conforming individuals across ages. Georgians in less welcoming parts of the state see Charis “as a beacon”, according to Anderson.“We’re seeing these particularly aggressive attacks on trans people for the past couple years now being mirrored in national legislation and it’s very scary,” Anderson said. “A lot of people right now feel very hopeless, but we need to remember we do actually have a lot of power to speak up for what we believe in and our voices do matter.”Joy as resistanceNew York’s 34-year-old queer bar Henrietta Hudson is returning to its roots as a political activist space, especially as Pride approaches.View image in fullscreen“Acutely since the inauguration, but really since the election, there’s a different tone to how people come to [the bar]. It feels more necessary,” Hutch Hutchinson said. “People are craving to be around other queer people and to be in a safer space. We have to buckle down for the family we have here.”Hutchinson, who uses he/they pronouns, is the director of operations at Henrietta Hudson. He said Pride is already in the air as the bar has seen a surge in energy and purpose.“[Pride] often does feel like a protest and we call our Pride as occupying Hudson, a very definitive statement on us taking up space in the West Village,” he said. “The general feeling at Henrietta Hudson is that we’ve just become more political. This place has been through so many eras of queer resistance and uprising. We are relighting that fire.”They lend their bar to vetted non-profits and local grassroots organizations for events giving back to the LGBTQ+ community, such as a Pride week fundraiser benefiting the BTFA Collective for Black trans femme artists and the annual NYC Dyke March.Hutchinson explained that the bar will always take explicit stances to protect and support the community. It posted a message on their Instagram, calling out the “immoral”, “dangerous” and “unlawful” attacks by Trump’s administration.“We talk, as a [staff] about, what does resistance look like? Sure, resistance is showing up to rallies and supporting the ACLU, learning your rights, marching and protesting,” he added. “But it’s so important for us to dance and to see each other smile and laugh and sing. Our joy is resistance.”Being visible is more importantDown in St Louis, Missouri, art collective Swan Meadow plans to be a safe third space for the community where members can “simply exist as who they are”. Partners Fern and Mellody Meadow, who both use they/them pronouns, emptied their savings to open the collective last fall after a close presidential election.View image in fullscreen“We are always trying to craft events and spaces for people to come to and to sit with complicated emotions and thoughts and to talk to people about them,” Fern said. “It can be isolating and so frustrating to know that things are wrong that are outside of our control, but when you come together as a community, so much positive change can happen.”They open their workshop multiple times a month for free community-focused events such as “crafternoons”. ​Some events act as fundraisers for local mutual aid organizations such as the Community Closet, which distributes free household, cleaning and hygiene items. The collective also offers branding, photography and printing services.The Meadows envision Swan Meadow taking on a larger role in political advocacy for the community.“As pushback becomes more prevalent and discrimination becomes more normal, being visible is more important than ever,” Mellody said. “I’m tired of living through history.” More

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      Supreme court allows White House to revoke temporary protected status of many migrants

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      The US supreme court on Friday announced it would allow the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, bolstering the Republican president’s drive to step up deportations.The court put on hold Boston-based US district judge Indira Talwani’s order halting the administration’s move to end the immigration humanitarian “parole” protections granted to 532,000 people by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to rapid removal from the country, while the detailed case plays out in lower courts.As with many of the court’s emergency orders – after rapid appeals brought the case to their bench – the decision issued on Friday was unsigned and gave no reasoning. However two of the court’s three liberal-leaning justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, publicly dissented.The court “botched” its assessment of whether the administration was entitled to freeze Talwani’s decision pending the litigation, Jackson wrote in an accompanying opinion.The outcome, Jackson wrote, “undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending”.Jackson also said that “it is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum pre-decision damage.”She added that those living under parole protections in this case now face “two unbearable options”.One option is to “elect to leave the United States and thereby, confront ‘dangers in their native countries,’ experience destructive ‘family separation’ and possibly ‘forfeit any opportunity to obtain a remedy based on their … claims”, Jackson wrote.The other option is that they could remain in the US after parole termination and “risk imminent removal at the hands of government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences”.To Jackson, “either choice creates significant problems for respondents that far exceed any harm to the government … At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgement regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the government’s application would not have anything close to the kind of practical impact.”Immigration parole is a form of temporary permission under American law to be in the country for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”, allowing recipients to live and work in the US. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s approach to handling migrants entering at the US-Mexico border.Such a status does not offer immigrants a long-term path towards citizenship but it can typically be renewed multiple times. A report from the American Immigration Council found that halting the program would, apart from the humanitarian effect, be a blow to the US economy, as households in the US where the breadwinners have temporary protected status (TPS) collectively earned more than $10bn in total income in 2021 while paying nearly $1.3bn in federal taxes.Trump called for ending humanitarian parole programs in an executive order signed on 20 January, his first day back in office. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently moved to terminate them in March, cutting short the two-year parole grants. The administration said revoking the parole status would make it easier to place migrants in a fast-track deportation process called “expedited removal”.The case is one of many that the Trump administration has brought in an emergency fashion to the nation’s highest judicial body seeking to undo decisions by judges impeding the president’s sweeping policies, including several targeting immigrants.The supreme court on 19 May also let Trump end TPS that had been granted under Biden to about 350,000 additional Venezuelans living in the United States, while that legal dispute plays out.Jackson was the only justice to publicly dissent then, while House Democrats condemned the supreme court’s decision.In a bid to reduce unauthorized border crossings, Biden starting in 2022 offering limited extra pathways to come to the US legally, allowing Venezuelans who entered the US by air to request a two-year parole if they passed security checks and had a US financial sponsor. Biden expanded that eligibility process to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those countries.The plaintiffs in this case, a group of migrants granted parole and Americans who serve as their sponsors, sued administration officials claiming they violated federal law governing the actions of government agencies.Talwani in April found that the law governing such parole did not allow for the program’s blanket termination, instead requiring a case-by-case review. The Boston-based first US circuit court of appeals declined to put the judge’s decision on hold and the government appealed.The justice department told the supreme court that Talwani’s order had upended “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry”, effectively “undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election” that returned Trump to the presidency.The plaintiffs told the supreme court they would face grave harm if their parole is cut short given that the administration has indefinitely suspended processing their pending applications for asylum and other immigration relief.They said they would be separated from their families and immediately subject to expedited deportation “to the same despotic and unstable countries from which they fled, where many will face serious risks of danger, persecution and even death”.Speaking at the White House on Friday afternoon, Donald Trump praised the decision, saying “a couple of hours ago we had a great decision from the supreme court that’s very important”.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Will Donald Trump defy the US supreme court? | Steven Greenhouse

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      With the most authoritarian and lawless president in history sitting in the White House, the US supreme court is no doubt worried about looking weak in one of two ways. First, the court fears it will look pathetically weak if it becomes the first supreme court in history to have a president defy its rulings in a wholesale way. With that in mind, the court seems to be taking pains to avoid provoking Donald Trump’s defiance – it has issued several decisions upholding the president’s actions while in other cases, it has given him lots of wiggle room even as it objected to his administration’s moves.Then there’s the court’s second, big worry – that it will look pathetically weak if it doesn’t stand up to the most authoritarian president in US history. Many legal experts criticize the court for not standing up more to Trump, even though he has brazenly attacked the court and many lower-court judges, has defied several judicial orders and has, according to numerous judges, repeatedly violated the law – whether by deporting immigrants without due process or by freezing funds approved by Congress.The court’s six conservative justices have let themselves seem like Trump’s chumps because they’ve often bowed to him instead of standing up and ruling against him. The foremost example is last year’s supreme court ruling giving Trump astonishingly broad immunity from criminal prosecution.The image-conscious chief justice, John Roberts, and his court have to decide which of two paths to take. One path – which the court’s conservative supermajority seems to be following – is to issue pro-Trump rulings to avoid inciting his ire and defiance. That approach might spare the court the Maga movement’s anger, but historians will look dimly on the court for bending in Trump’s favor – they’ll accuse it of complicity and sacrificing principle for not blocking Trump moves that, many legal experts, conservative, centrist and progressive, say, violate federal law and the constitution.The court can choose a more courageous path: stick to principle and not shrink from ruling against Trump. That might spur the bull-headed president to defy the court, but under that scenario, historians would praise the justices for upholding the law and the court’s constitutional role and for not letting themselves become stooges for a power-hungry president.The Roberts court has given us some hope, but not much. In a surprise ruling at 1am one April night, it seemed to develop a few inches of backbone by ordering the Trump administration not to deport several dozen Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador without first giving them due process.That was a promising ruling, but on the other side of the ledger, the court has often bowed to Trump, for instance, by overturning a lower court ruling and letting Trump fire 16,000 probationary federal employees and by letting his administration suspend $65m in teacher-training grants. Moreover, the rightwing supermajority did Trump a big favor by letting him provisionally remove the heads of two independent agencies, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protections Board. That hurried ruling, made without full briefing or arguments, indicated that the court’s conservatives are eager to overturn a unanimous, 90-year-old supreme court decision that limits presidents’ ability to fire officials at independent agencies. In this way, the Roberts court is giving more power to our dangerously authoritarian president.Let’s not forget how weak the court has looked for failing to act firmly to assure the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, an immigrant from El Salvador who even Trump administration officials acknowledged was deported illegally. On 10 April, the court issued a wimpy decision that called on the Trump administration to “facilitate” Ábrego Garcia’s return – it stopped short of using the district court’s more muscular language to “effectuate” his return. More than six weeks have passed since the high court called on Trump to bring back Ábrego García, but Trump hasn’t done so. His administration has sidestepped outright defiance by pretending that it is seeking to facilitate Ábrego García’s return.Not only that, Trump has smeared the justices by saying: “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” Trump has also savaged several federal district court judges, calling one a “radical left lunatic” and denouncing others as “MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL”.With their hard-right ideology, the court’s supermajority evidently sympathizes with many of Trump’s moves and has blessed such moves far more often than many legal scholars would like. In doing so, the court has emboldened Trump to take even more actions that push – and often overstep – the boundaries of what is legal. In a worrisome development, the court has, at least thus far, shown surprisingly little concern about Trump’s defiance of district court judges’ orders and his authoritarian effort to assert his dominance over the two, other theoretically co-equal branches of government: the judiciary and Congress.For its own good and for the nation’s good, the supreme court needs to step up and do its utmost to stop Trump’s lawlessness and his unprecedented efforts to defy district court rulings and lash out against the judiciary. Trump has called for impeaching judges who ruled against him, and as his tirades against judges have increased, the number of judges who have received threats has soared.The court needs to issue some strong, clarion decisions that make clear to the nation that Trump has shown repeated contempt for the constitution, the rule of law and the judiciary. The justices should move quickly to issue an outrage-filled ruling that finds that Trump violated law firms’ free speech rights by punishing several firms for taking cases he didn’t like or employing lawyers he didn’t like. The justices should also move swiftly to issue a strong ruling in favor of Harvard University and against Trump’s vindictive assault – an assault that violated Harvard’s first amendment rights by seeking to suppress speech and ideas that Trump doesn’t like and by trying to dictate much of Harvard’s hiring, curriculum and admissions policies.The court should also issue a forceful ruling that demolishes Trump’s arguments that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members en masse without due process. The court should trumpet the absurdity of Trump’s claim that Venezuelan immigrants constitute an invasion force the way, for instance, British troops constituted an invasion force during the war of 1812.The court should also shoot down Trump’s efforts to gut federal agencies and freeze funding by making it emphatically clear that those efforts violate Congress’s article I spending power. The conservative supermajority should also rethink its intention to overturn the 1935 ruling that limits presidents’ ability to fire members of independent agencies. That ruling sought to ensure that those agencies didn’t become partisan puppets that do whatever a president wants – something that no one should want when the nation has such a vengeful and capricious president.With the Roberts court slated to issue a flood of rulings by early July, the justices have an important choice: to bend to Trump or to grow a real backbone. Does the Roberts court want to be remembered as cowardly enablers who helped the most authoritarian and lawless president in history consolidate power? Or do the justices want to be remembered as determined defenders who stood up to an authoritarian bully to protect our laws, our constitution and our democracy?

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      FBI to reinvestigate 2023 White House cocaine find and leak of supreme court Dobbs draft

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      The FBI will launch new investigations into the 2023 discovery of a bag of cocaine at the White House during Joe Biden’s term, as well as into pipe bombs discovered at Democratic and Republican party headquarters before the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot by supporters of Donald Trump, and the leak of the supreme court’s draft opinion before the historic overturning of national abortion rights with the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v Wade in 2022.Dan Bongino, a rightwing podcaster turned deputy director of the FBI, made the announcement on X, where he said he had requested weekly briefings on any progress in looking into the old cases. The incidents have been popular talking points on America’s political right wing and among conspiracy theorists.Bongino said that he and the FBI director, Kash Patel, had been evaluating “a number of cases of potential public corruption that, understandably, have garnered public interest” and had made a decision “to either re-open, or push additional resources and investigative attention, to these cases”.The FBI deputy director made an appeal for “investigative tips on these matters”.The discovery of a small, zippered bag of cocaine in a cubby near the entrance to the West Wing two years ago drew excited commentary from Republicans, including then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has said it was implausible the drugs could belong to anyone beyond Joe Biden or son Hunter Biden – even though the Biden family was away from Washington at the time.Bongino has previously alleged, without presenting any evidence, that he was in touch with whistleblowers who told him they were “suspicious” that evidence from the White House cocaine bag “could match a member of the inner Biden circle”.A formal laboratory test confirmed that the powder found was indeed cocaine and the Secret Service said the substance was found in a “highly trafficked” area of the White House and it was reviewing visitor logs to determine how it had gotten there.Then White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that public tours of the West Wing had taken place over the weekend when the discovery was made, prompting an evacuation of the executive mansion.“We have confidence that they will get to the bottom of this,” Jean-Pierre later said, referring to the Secret Service. A White House spokesperson said that the allegations that Hunter Biden was involved was “incredibly irresponsible”.But in his first interview as a president in February this year, Trump returned to the subject, arguing that forensic analysis should have revealed fingerprints but the evidence appeared to have been deliberately wiped clean. He described the cocaine discovery as a “terrible thing”.The pre-emptive publication of the supreme court’s opinion ending the constitutional right to abortion in Politico on 2 May 2022 provoked condemnation from Trump, who called the source of the leak “slime” and demanded that the journalists involved be imprisoned until they revealed who it was.Eight months later, the supreme court released a 23-page report into the leak saying the investigative team “has to date been unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence”.Investigations into both cases ended without identifying who was responsible for the cocaine or the leak.Bongino also announced more resources for the FBI’s investigation into the placement of pipe bombs at the Democratic national committee and the Republican national committee in Washington.The bombs, which were later defused, had been planted the night before Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in a failed bid to block Congress from certifying Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      This doctor calls LGBTQ+ rights ‘satanic’. He could now undo healthcare for millions

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      Steven Hotze, a Republican donor from Texas, has spent decades fighting against LGBTQ+ rights, with campaigns seeking to roll back protections for people he has deemed “termites”, “morally degenerate” and “satanic”.The Houston-area physician is not well-known in mainstream politics, and his efforts targeting queer and trans people have generally been local, with limited impact.His latest cause could be different. Hotze, 74, has sued the federal government to roll back healthcare coverage for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), the HIV prevention medication. The case is now before the US supreme court, which is expected to rule in the coming weeks. A decision in his favor could upend healthcare access for LGBTQ+ people across the country – and derail a wide array of preventive treatments for tens of millions in the process.“People will die,” said Kae Greenberg, staff attorney with the Center for HIV Law and Policy, which filed a brief in the case. “Preventive healthcare saves lives, and this case is about whose lives we consider worth protecting. It’s about cutting off people’s care based on them being gay or substance users or living their lives in a way the plaintiffs do not approve of. It’s using the law to legitimize bigotry.”The case, Kennedy v Braidwood, originated with Hotze’s Christian healthcare firm, Braidwood Management, which filed a lawsuit in 2020 objecting to the federal requirement that his company’s insurance plan cover PrEP. Braidwood, another Christian business and two individuals argued the daily PrEP medications “facilitate and encourage homosexual behavior”, saying the government violated their religious beliefs by making them support “sexual promiscuity”.Braidwood challenged the requirement under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, that insurers and group health plans cover preventive services, a provision that includes diabetes and cancer screenings, medications to reduce heart disease risks, contraception and vaccinations. Along with opposing PrEP, Hotze explicitly objected to STI screenings, counseling for alcohol use and childhood obesity interventions.A Texas district court sided with Braidwood, saying the US violated the firm’s religious freedom. The ruling also found that a taskforce of medical experts that recommended the preventive services covered by the ACA was unconstitutional because the experts hadn’t been confirmed by the Senate, and therefore health plans should not be required to cover the care.The US government appealed the ruling on the taskforce, which is the issue now before the supreme court. The coverage mandates have remained in effect as the case has progressed, though the individual plaintiffs have been shielded from covering the services. The Trump administration has continued to defend the taskforce’s constitutionality, and the supreme court is not weighing religious objections.If the supreme court sides with Braidwood, it could lead to widespread loss of access to free preventive healthcare, with one study finding 39 million people received the threatened services. A 2023 Yale study estimated the loss of free PrEP could result in more than 2,000 preventable HIV infections within one year.The outcome of the case could threaten coverage for every service recommended by the taskforce, not just the provisions opposed by the right. “We’re talking about people who cannot afford this care, who will have to choose between a mammogram and rent,” added Susan Polan, associate executive director of the American Public Health Association.A decades-long missionThe high-stakes case, and Hotze’s role in it, have flown under the radar. But research from the progressive watchdog organization Accountable.US, which shared its findings with the Guardian, reveal the rightwing activist’s long history of pushing fringe ideologies before getting a signature cause before the supreme court.Hotze and his lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.In 1982, 31-year-old Hotze launched a petition in the city of Austin to legalize housing discrimination against gay people, the AP reported at the time. Heading a group called Austin Citizens for Decency, Hotze called gay residents “criminals” and “sodomites”, saying: “The issue is not housing. The issue is whether we allow our city council to grant public sanction to homosexual activity.” He said protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination is “like thieves or murderers trying to gain political power”. Hotze said in one interview he was less concerned about “property rights” and more worried about the “deviant, perverted lifestyle”. Voters overwhelmingly rejected his referendum.In 1985, Hotze backed a group of eight “anti-homosexual” Houston city council candidates identified as the “straight slate”. On ABC News, he stated, “We’re intolerant of those who participate in homosexual activity.” All eight candidates lost.Hotze runs the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, which has been in operation since 1989; Braidwood is his management firm that employs the center’s staff. He has marketed hormone therapies to treat a wide range of conditions and sold a vitamin product called Skinny Pak, the New York Times reported. Over the years, he has donated extensively to the Republican party and Texas politicians, including Senator Ted Cruz.Hotze’s public anti-LGBTQ+ activism picked up after the supreme court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015, with Hotze launching a “Faith Family Freedom Tour” and using the same homophobic language from his activism decades prior. Hotze said he was fighting a “wicked, evil movement” that celebrates anal sex, telling the Houston Chronicle: “Kids will be encouraged to practice sodomy in kindergarten.”View image in fullscreenDuring the tour, he said “satanic cults” were behind gay rights, brandished a sword during a speech, and likened his fight to battling Nazis, the Texas Observer reported. That year, he and other rightwing activists successfully campaigned to repeal an equal rights Houston ordinance.At a 2016 evangelical conference, Hotze was filmed describing the LGBTQ+ rights movement as “termites [that] get into the wood of the house and … eat away at the moral fabric”. In 2017, Hotze rallied for Roy Moore, the failed Alabama senate candidate accused of sexually coercing teenagers in the 1970s.Hotze has also recently promoted anti-trans causes, testifying in 2023 in favor of a school district policy requiring staff to notify parents if students change their names or pronouns. Trans people, he said, “have a reprobate, perverted and morally degenerate mind”.His ACA case was not his first effort to undo federal civil rights protections. In a case that began in 2018, Braidwood sued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), challenging a ban on anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in the workforce. Braidwood said it enforces a “sex-specific dress code that disallows gender-non-conforming behavior”, the courts summarized, prohibiting women from wearing ties and men from wearing nail polish. Hotze said he would not employ candidates engaged in “sexually immoral” behaviors.In 2023, an appeals court ruled that a religious freedom law protected Hotze’s rights to enforce dress codes and refuse to hire LGBTQ+ people.In that case, and in the one now before the supreme court, Hotze has been represented by America First Legal, the rightwing legal group co-founded by Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s influential adviser. The organization has brought a string of lawsuits, including efforts to undo trans rights and complaints accusing companies of discriminating against white men.Hotze has also been represented by Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion lawyer behind Texas’s so-called “bounty hunter law” that allows private citizens to sue providers or people who “aid or abet” the procedure.America First Legal and Mitchell did not respond to inquiries.Gabbi Shilcusky, Accountable.US senior investigative specialist, noted that Hotze’s supreme court case was founded on hypotheticals: “He’s not hiring men who wear nail polish or are asking for PrEP. This is manufactured to build upon his most fringe beliefs and not about actual issues he’s being confronted with in his company.”Hotze has in recent years made headlines outside of anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy. In 2020, during George Floyd protests, he left a voicemail for the Texas governor urging that he “kill the son of a bitches”, referring to demonstrators. Later that year, the Food and Drug Administration sent his company a warning advising it was promoting “unapproved and misbranded products” for Covid.In 2022, Hotze was charged with unlawful restraint and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in an elections dispute. Hotze hired a contractor who claimed a local air conditioner repairman was holding fraudulent ballots in his truck. The contractor ran his vehicle into the man’s car and held him at gunpoint, according to prosecutors, who said the voter fraud claims were false. Hotze was later charged with aggravated robbery and organized criminal activity from the incident.View image in fullscreenHotze pleaded not guilty, and this week, a newly elected DA dropped the charges, accusing his predecessor of bringing a politically motivated case. The criminal case did not stop his attacks on voting rights; in October, just before the election, he filed a lawsuit against the local registrar seeking to invalidate tens of thousands of voters.It’s unclear if Hotze will succeed at the supreme court. In oral arguments last month, some justices, including conservatives, appeared skeptical of the arguments by Hotze’s lawyers. The case hinges on whether the taskforce members who make ACA recommendations are akin to department heads requiring Senate approval or are “inferior” officers. Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett at times appeared sympathetic to the notion that the experts are not sufficiently independent so as to merit a congressional vote.The case is part of longstanding attacks against the ACA, with legal strategies focused on religious claims as well as objections to how the law was crafted. Hotze previously challenged the ACA in a failed lawsuit that began in 2013, an effort he promoted with a bizarre original song called God Fearing Texans Stop Obamacare.Even if Hotze fails, the threats to PrEP and LGBTQ+ healthcare will continue, said Jeremiah Johnson, executive director of advocacy group PrEP4All, noting the Trump administration’s continued funding cuts and dismantling of HIV prevention, and ongoing rightwing efforts to attack civil rights under the guise of religious liberty.The case also comes as the FDA is considering a new injectable PrEP considered a major prevention breakthrough, he said. “We’re at the precipice of science delivering real pathways to ending this epidemic, but if we turn our backs now on all these protections, including private insurance through the ACA, we’re not just going to backtrack on progress, we’re going to lose out on that promise for the future.” More

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      What is temporary protected status and who is affected by Trump’s crackdown?

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      Millions of people live legally in the United States under various forms of temporary legal protection. Many have been targeted in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.The latest move has been against people who have what’s known as “temporary protected status” (TPS), which grants people the right to stay in the US legally due to extraordinary circumstances in one’s home country such as war or environmental catastrophe.The Trump administration has in recent weeks announced its plan to end TPS for Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans and Cameroonians. The move may force more than 9,000 Afghan refugees to move back to the country now ruled by the Taliban. The administration also is ending the designation for roughly half a million Haitians in August.Here’s what to know about TPS and some other temporary protections for immigrants:What is temporary protected status?Temporary protected status allows people already living in the United States to stay and work legally for up to 18 months if their homelands are unsafe because of civil unrest or natural disasters.The Biden administration dramatically expanded the designation. It covers people from more than a dozen countries, though the largest numbers come from Venezuela and Haiti.The status does not put immigrants on a long-term path to citizenship and can be repeatedly renewed. Critics say renewal has become effectively automatic for many immigrants, no matter what is happening in their home countries. According to the American Immigration Council, ending TPS designations would lead to a significant economic loss for the US. The non-profit found that TPS households in the country earned more than $10bn in total income in 2021, and paid nearly $1.3bn in federal taxes.What is the latest supreme court ruling on Venezuelans?On Monday, the supreme court allowed the administration to end protections that had allowed some 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants to remain in the United States.Many Venezuelans were first granted TPS in 2021 by the Biden administration, allowing those who were already in the US to apply for protection from deportation and gain work authorization. Then, in 2023, the Biden administration issued an additional TPS designation for Venezuelans, and in January – just before Trump took office – extended those protections through October 2026.The Trump administration officials had ordered TPS to expire for those Venezuelans in April. The supreme court’s decision lifted a federal judge’s ruling that had paused the administration’s plans, meaning TPS holders are now at risk of losing their protections and could face deportation.What other forms of legal protection are under attack?More than 500,000 people from what are sometimes called the CHNV countries – Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela – live in the US under the legal tool known as humanitarian parole, which allows people to enter the US temporarily, on the basis that they have an urgent humanitarian need like a medical emergency. This category, however, is also under threat by the Trump administration.In late March, the Trump administration announced plans to terminate humanitarian parole for approximately 530,000 Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians. In April, a federal judge issued a temporary order barring the elimination of the humanitarian parole program.But last week, the administration took the issue to the supreme court, asking it to allow it to end parole for immigrants from those four countries. The emergency appeal said a lower-court order had wrongly encroached on the authority of the Department of Homeland Security.US administrations – both Republican and Democratic – have used parole for decades for people unable to use regular immigration channels, whether because of time pressure or bad relations between their country and the US.The case now returns to the lower courts. For the California-based federal court, the next hearing is on 29 May. For the Massachusetts case, no hearings are scheduled and attorneys are working on a briefing for the motion to dismiss filed by the government, according to WGBH, a member station of National Public Radio in Massachusetts. The appeals court hearing will be the week of 11 July. More