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      US supreme court declines to fast-track challenge to Trump tariffs

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      The US supreme court declined on Friday to speed up its consideration of whether to take up a challenge to Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs even before lower courts have ruled in the dispute.The supreme court denied a request by a family-owned toy company, Learning Resources, that filed the legal challenge against Trump’s tariffs to expedite the review of the dispute by the nation’s top judicial body.The company, which makes educational toys, won a court ruling on 29 May that Trump cannot unilaterally impose tariffs using the emergency legal authority he had cited for them. That ruling is currently on hold, leaving the tariffs in place for now.Learning Resources asked the supreme court to take the rare step of immediately hearing the case to decide the legality of the tariffs, effectively leapfrogging the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit in Washington, where the case is pending.Two district courts have ruled that Trump’s tariffs are not justified under the law he cited for them, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Both of those cases are on appeal. No court has yet backed the sweeping emergency tariff authority Trump has claimed. More

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      Appeals court likely to keep Trump in control of national guard deployed in LA

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      A federal appeals court on Tuesday seemed ready to keep Donald Trump in control of California national guard troops after they were deployed following protests in Los Angeles over immigration raids.Last week, a district court ordered the US president to return control of the guard to Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who had opposed their deployment. US district judge Charles Breyer said Trump had deployed the Guard illegally and exceeded his authority. But the administration quickly appealed and a three-judge appellate panel temporarily paused that order.Tuesday’s hearing was about whether the order could take effect while the case makes its way through the courts, including possibly the supreme court.It’s the first time a US president has activated a state national guard without the governor’s permission since 1965, and the outcome of the case could have sweeping implications for Trump’s power to send soldiers into other US cities. Trump announced on 7 June that he was deploying the guard to Los Angeles to protect federal property following a protest at a downtown detention center after federal immigration agents arrested dozens of immigrants without legal status across the city. Newsom said Trump was only inflaming the situation and that troops were not necessary.In a San Francisco courtroom, all three judges, two appointed by Trump in his first term and one by Joe Biden, suggested that presidents have wide latitude under the federal law at issue and that courts should be reluctant to step in.“If we were writing on a blank slate, I would tend to agree with you,” Judge Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee, told California’s lawyer, Samuel Harbourt, before pointing to a 200-year-old supreme court decision that she said seemed to give presidents the broad discretion Harbourt was arguing against.Even so, the judges did not appear to embrace arguments made by a justice department lawyer that courts could not even review Trump’s decision.It wasn’t clear how quickly the panel would rule.Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, opened the hearing by asking whether the courts have a role in reviewing the president’s decision to call up the national guard. Brett Shumate, an attorney for the federal government, said they did not.“The statute says the president may call on federal service members and units of the Guard of any state in such numbers that he considers necessary,” Shumate said, adding that the statute “couldn’t be any more clear”.Shumate made several references to “mob violence” in describing ongoing protests in Los Angeles. But mayor Karen Bass lifted a curfew for downtown Los Angeles Tuesday, saying acts of vandalism and violence that prompted her curfew a week ago had subsided.“It is essential that this injunction be stayed, otherwise, lives and property will be at risk,” Shumate said.Harbourt argued that the federal government didn’t inform Newsom of the decision to deploy the guard. He said the Trump administration hasn’t shown that they considered “more modest measures to the extreme response of calling in the national guard and militarizing the situation”.Harbourt told the panel that not upholding Breyer’s ruling would “defy our constitutional traditions of preserving state sovereignty, of providing judicial review for the legality of executive action, of safeguarding our cherished rights to political protest”.Breyer’s order applied only to the national guard troops and not the marines, who were also deployed to LA but were not yet on the streets when he ruled.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNewsom’s lawsuit accused Trump of inflaming tensions, breaching state sovereignty and wasting resources just when guard members need to be preparing for wildfire season. He also called the federal takeover of the state’s national guard “illegal and immoral”.Newsom said in advance of the hearing that he was confident in the rule of law.“I’m confident that common sense will prevail here: the US military belongs on the battlefield, not on American streets,” Newsom said in a statement.Breyer ruled the Trump violated the use of title 10, which allows the president to call the national guard into federal service when the country “is invaded”, when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government,” or when the president is unable “to execute the laws of the United States”.Breyer, an appointee of former president Bill Clinton, said the definition of a rebellion was not met.“The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of ‘rebellion,’” he wrote. “Individuals’ right to protest the government is one of the fundamental rights protected by the First Amendment, and just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone.”The national guard hasn’t been activated without a governor’s permission since 1965, when President Lyndon B Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 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      US supreme court to hear case involving anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center

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      The US supreme court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a New Jersey anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center operator’s bid to block the Democratic-led state’s attorney general from investigating whether it deceived women into believing it offered abortions.The justices took up an appeal by First Choice Women’s Resource Centers of a lower court’s ruling that the Christian faith-based organization must first contest Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s subpoena in state court before bringing a federal lawsuit challenging it.The justices are expected to hear the case in their next term, which begins in October.Crisis pregnancy centers provide services to pregnant women with the goal of preventing them from having abortions. Such centers do not advertise their anti-abortion stance, and abortion rights advocates have called them deceptive. The case provides a test of the ability of state authorities to regulate these businesses.First Choice, which has five locations in New Jersey, has argued that it has a right to bring its case in federal court because it was alleging a violation of its federal rights to free speech and free association under the first amendment of the US constitution. First Choice is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has brought other cases on behalf of anti-abortion plaintiffs including an effort to restrict distribution of the abortion pill that has since been taken over by Republican states.New Jersey is targeting First Choice because of its views, Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Erin Hawley said.“We are looking forward to presenting our case to the supreme court and urging it to hold that First Choice has the same right to federal court as any other civil rights plaintiff,” Hawley said in a statement.Platkin said that his office may investigate to ensure nonprofits are not deceiving residents and that First Choice has for years refused to answer questions about “potential misrepresentations they have been making, including about reproductive healthcare”.“First Choice is looking for a special exception from the usual procedural rules as it tries to avoid complying with an entirely lawful state subpoena, something the US Constitution does not permit it to do. No industry is entitled to that type of special treatment – period,” Platkin added.First Choice sued Platkin in New Jersey federal court in 2023 after the attorney general issued a subpoena seeking internal records including the names of its doctors and donors as part of an investigation into potentially unlawful practices. First Choice argued that there was no good cause for the subpoena, which it said chilled its first amendment rights.Platkin moved to enforce the subpoena in state court. Essex county superior court Judge Lisa Adubato granted that motion, finding that First Choice had not shown that the subpoena should be quashed at the outset of the investigation, but ordered the parties to negotiate a narrower subpoena and said that the constitutional issues could be litigated further going forward.The US district judge Michael Shipp then dismissed the federal case, finding that First Choice’s federal claim was not ripe because it could continue to make its constitutional claims in the state court and did not face any immediate threat of contempt.The Philadelphia-based third circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 ruling in December 2024 upheld Shipp’s ruling, prompting First Choice to appeal to the justices.In asking the supreme court to hear the case, First Choice argued that federal civil rights law is intended to guarantee parties a federal forum to assert their constitutional rights. It said that forcing it to litigate in state court would effectively deny it that forum, since the constitutional claims would be decided before a federal court could ever hear them.Crisis pregnancy centers have also drawn the attention of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who in 2024 sued 11 centers for advertising abortion pill reversal, a treatment whose safety and effectiveness is unproven. That case remains pending. Several New York crisis pregnancy centers sued James and in August won an order allowing them to continue touting abortion pill reversal. More

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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