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      How do we resist and rise? We have to believe the impossible is possible | V (Formerly Eve Ensler)

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      In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse, where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.Every day people are kidnapped by masked men in unmarked cars, taken to hidden sites and left in deplorable conditions; starving people in Gaza are slaughtered as they clamor for a bag of flour; public officials and leaders humiliated and murdered; the T erased from LGBT; brain-dead women forced to give birth; the glib language of hate and cruelty and easy thoughtless threats of world war, assassination, and dehumanization circling like invisible poison. What feels most perilous is the steady evaporation of the boundaries of what seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. Morality, compassion, care – slashed and burned.And yet I think of Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”, “The world is essentially over. I will fight for another day”, “I have lost my faith in humans. I commit to love them more.”To live as Jung said – with two existing opposite thoughts at the same time. Survival right now depends on our ability to swim in this duality. To not linger in the pain, but to allow ourselves to be moved by it. To not whitewash reality, but also not to take up lodging in the house of despair. This is the dance of our times.We must become agile and flexible. To feel responsible but not so guilty we are immobilized. To feel rage but to learn how to direct it into action and passion and purpose. To lift ourselves to a more existential absurdist place where the fascists cannot touch us. Not disassociation or numbness, but finding the grace, energy and humor that come when we commit ourselves more deeply to one another.Before “No Kings” Day there was a part of me that frankly was tired of marching, wondering if these demonstrations really add up to anything. But then on 14 June, with an estimated 4 million to 6 million people in the streets of America, I realized something profound. Marches and demonstrations are not merely acts of resistance and refusal, but they are community events in which we meet and strengthen our resolve and bonds with our own tribe of like-minded people.They are public moments to show the rest of the world that we are the majority and we do not want and will not accept a king, or genocide in Gaza or precious immigrants being dragged off and separated from their families. They are places to let off steam and make great art and music and network and ultimately they are what we have, the expression of our collective sorrow and outrage, thereby saving our own souls.So how do we resist and rise? We have to believe the impossible is possible.I think of my sisters at the City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who give me inspiration and direction daily. The center is literally in the middle of a war zone. When the M23 militias invaded Bukavu in February, they made a radical decision to keep the center open despite the madness outside – gunfire, bombs and sometimes dead bodies on the road. They refused to stop building the world they dreamed. Instead, they developed strategies – coming to work on scooters, changing cars to avoid being noticed, keeping their hearts tuned to the work of healing survivors. It is now June and the 27th class of City of Joy is about to graduate and a new class is on the way.I think of one of my great inspirations, the former congresswoman Cori Bush who saw that in St Louis, after the recent tornado no local or national Fema had come or were coming. The majority of people had lost their homes or had huge holes in them. So she joined with local groups to provide tarps and food, cleaning products and formula. They formed hubs of care. They went to the senior homes who had lost electricity so there was no refrigeration for food or medicine and gave them both.She told me, “It’s my community. I believe that we take care of us. I learned through the Ferguson uprising that we can’t wait on politicians or leaders. We have to dive in and get to work. We have to talk to one another and know our communities. We need to organize in our living rooms, local businesses backyards – find out who amongst us are doctors, nurses, chefs, teachers. Knowing your community and what skills they can offer.” This is what we need to understand now more than ever.It is so clear something essential is dying. The illusion and seduction of the American dream is over. Neoliberalism is dead. There are huge cracks, openings in the old structures and narratives. These are opportunities to plant the seeds for the new world as we protect those suffering now.What the fascists want more than anything is our fear, exhaustion and despair. Or they want us angry, reactive, cruel and violent like them. In Cherien Dabis’s staggeringly brilliant saga about a family in Palestine, All That’s Left of You, (one of the best films I have ever seen), a married couple comes to a moral crisis and they turn to an iman for advice. This wise and very gentle iman tells them: “Your humanity is also your resistance. Don’t underestimate its power. It’s the only thing they can’t take away from you.” Every action matters now. Every effort small or large counts. And moving – movement is the essential key to dispelling despair. How we care now, how we love, how we come together, how we build and protect each other is in itself the building of the new world.

      V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls More

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      Fired federal workers lobby for help on Capitol Hill – is anyone listening?

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      The Tuesday Group was feeling something familiar as its members milled around a bank of elevators in the bustling basement of a Senate office building: rejection.They had often been told no over the past months – when the government moved to fire them with Donald Trump’s blessing, when judges rejected challenges to that decision and when the lawmakers who they have taken to tracking down on Capitol Hill once a week when Congress is in session would turn a deaf ear to their pleas.More than 59,000 federal workers have lost their jobs since Trump took office, according to government data, but those in power have not changed their tune.This Tuesday morning, it was staffers of Maine’s Republican senator Susan Collins who had told them no, even after they staged an impromptu sit-in in her office for the better part of a half hour. So they proceeded five floors down to the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, hoping that some senator – any senator – would give them a moment of their time.Then the elevator doors opened and who should come out but Collins. “Senator Collins!” someone in the group yelled. Another tried to introduce themselves: “I’m a fired federal worker.” But the senator began waving her hands in front of her in an unmistakable sign of: I don’t have time for this.“Thank you,” Collins said, as she made her way down the hall.“It’s somewhat typical,” observed Whitt Masters, a former USAID contractor who has been unemployed since the end of March, when the company employing him decided to file for bankruptcy after its client began to shut down.“You know, I don’t expect every senator to stop and speak with us. I wish she’d been a bit more approachable, especially since we had spent some time in her office earlier today.”What’s been dubbed the Tuesday Group has come around the Capitol since mid-February, as Trump and Elon Musk’s campaign to thin out the federal workforce began to bite. Some who show up have been fired, others are on paid leave while a judge considers whether it is legal to fire them, and those who work for USAID expect to officially lose their jobs next Tuesday, when the agency shuts down.Democrats often welcome them, but when it comes to the Republicans who control Congress – and are weighing legislation to codify some cuts and make deeper ones in the next fiscal year – the reception has been uneven. They’ve been ignored, blown off and belittled – all things they would experience last Tuesday, their 17th visit to the Hill.Their encounter with Collins fruitless, the group formed something of a gauntlet at the intersection of a hallway leading between office buildings and to the Senate subway, a place where lawmakers were sure to pass on a scorcher of a day.They would call out to any face they recognized, but the group of 10 was nothing a determined senator couldn’t handle. Montana Republican Tim Sheehy speed-walked by with a reporter and cameraman in pursuit; Washington Democrat Patty Murray pounded past in sneakers; and Arkansas Republican John Boozman ambled through alone, displaying no sign that he knew the group was even there.“Would you like to hear how we are impacting your constituents?” asked Stephie Duliepre, who was fired from her Science for Development fellowship program at USAID, when Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn came around the corner. The senator pushed on, the answer apparently being no.John Hoeven, a Republican from North Dakota, exited a stairwell that deposited him right in the middle of the group. He appeared to recognize them – on a previous visit, attendees said that Hoeven had discussed his support for folding a major USAID food assistance program into the state department. “I see you’re still working on it,” he quipped, before heading off.The Democrats they encountered uttered words of encouragement, and a few stopped to talk. “Don’t give up,” Dick Durbin of Illinois said when he encountered the group. “I’m with you,” Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin called out.South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham attempted the silent treatment as he came past, but Amelia Hertzberg, who was on administrative leave from her job in the Environmental Protection Agency, was not having it. She followed him down the hall, and started prancing around to get his attention.“You have a bright future,” Hertzberg recalls the senator saying. “Well, I was going to have a bright future, and then I was fired,” she replied.The group spotted Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican and prominent Trump ally. “Senator Hawley, these are fired federal workers. Do you have a second to talk to them?” asked Melissa Byrne, a community organizer who had put together the group.“No,” he replied.The group was aghast, but they’d been treated worse. When Mack Schroeder encountered Indiana Republican Jim Banks one Tuesday and introduced himself as having been fired from the Department of Health and Human Services, the senator replied, “You probably deserved it,” before calling him “a clown”.That was in April. The incident made the news, Banks refused to apologize, and the Tuesday Group kept showing up.“I’ve spoken to the media and been on the radio. I’ve called my senators, my representatives, and it feels a little bit like shouting into a void,” said Hertzberg, who has made about 12 visits to the Capitol now.“So it feels good to go into senator’s offices and be there and take up space for a while and make them see, or their staff see that there is a person behind all this.” More

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      Ice arrests of US military veterans and their relatives are on the rise: ‘a country that I fought for’

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      The son of an American citizen and military veteran – but who has no citizenship to any country – was deported from the US to Jamaica in late May.Jermaine Thomas’s deportation, recently reported on by the Austin Chronicle, is one of a growing number of immigration cases involving military service members’ relatives or even veterans themselves who have been ensnared in the Trump administration’s mass deportation program.As the Chronicle reported, Thomas was born on a US army base in Germany to an American citizen father, who was originally born in Jamaica and is now dead. Thomas does not have US, German or Jamaican citizenship – but Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency deported him anyway to Jamaica, a country in which he had never stepped foot.Thomas had spent two-and-a-half months incarcerated while waiting for an update on his case. He was previously at the center of a case brought before the US supreme court regarding his unique legal status.The federal government argued that Thomas – who had previously received a deportation order – was not a citizen simply because he was born on a US army base, and it used prior criminal convictions to buttress the case against him. He petitioned for a review of the order, but the supreme court denied him, finding his father “did not meet the physical presence requirement of the [law] in force at the time of Thomas’s birth”.From Jamaica, Thomas told the Chronicle: “If you’re in the US army, and the army deploys you somewhere, and you’ve gotta have your child over there – and your child makes a mistake after you pass away – and you put your life on the line for this country, are you going to be OK with them just kicking your child out of the country?”He added, in reference to his father: “It was just Memorial Day [in late May]. Y’all are disrespecting his service and his legacy.”In recent months, US military veterans’ family members have been increasingly detained by immigration officials, as the administration continues pressing for mass deportations.A US marine veteran, during an interview on CNN, said he felt “betrayed” after immigration officials beat and arrested his father at a landscaping job. The arrested man had moved to the US from Mexico in the 1990s without documentation but was detained by Ice agents this month while doing landscaping work at a restaurant in Santa Ana, California.In another recent case, the wife of another Marine Corps veteran was detained by Ice despite still breastfeeding her three-month-old daughter. According to the Associated Press, the veteran’s wife had been going through a process to obtain legal residency.The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to detain and deport people nationwide. During a May meeting, White House officials pressed Ice to increase its daily arrests to at least 3,000 people daily. That would result in 1 million people being arrested annually by Ice.Following the tense meeting, Ice officials have increased their enforcement operations, including by detaining an increasing number of people with no criminal record. Being undocumented is a civil infraction – not a crime.According to a recent Guardian analysis, as of mid-June, Ice data shows there were more than 11,700 people in immigration detention arrested by the agency despite no record of them being charged with or convicted of a crime. That represents a staggering 1,271% increase from data released on those in Ice detention immediately preceding the start of Trump’s second term.In March, Ice officials arrested the daughter of a US veteran who had been fighting a legal battle regarding her status. Alma Bowman, 58, was taken into custody by Ice during a check-in at the Atlanta field office, despite her having lived in the US since she was 10 years old.Bowman was born in the Philippines during the Vietnam war, to a US navy service member from Illinois stationed there. She had lived in Georgia for almost 50 years. Her permanent residency was revoked following a minor criminal conviction from 20 years ago, leading her to continue a legal battle to obtain citizenship in the US.Previously, Bowman was detained by Ice at a troubled facility in Georgia, where non-consensual gynecological procedures were allegedly performed on detained women. In 2020, she had been a key witness for attorneys and journalists regarding the controversy. According to an interview with The Intercept from that year, Bowman said she had always thought she was a US citizen.In another recent case, a US army veteran and green-card holder left on his own to South Korea. His deportation order was due to charges related to drug possession and an issue with drug addiction after being wounded in combat in the 1980s, for which he earned the prestigious Purple Heart citation.“I can’t believe this is happening in America,” Sae Joon Park, who had held legal permanent residency, told National Public Radio. “That blows me away – like, [it is] a country that I fought for.” More

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      ‘You open the fridge – nothing’: renewed threat of US hunger as Trump seeks to cut food aid

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      Jade Johnson has a word to describe the experience of going hungry in one of the world’s richest countries. “Humbling.”The last time she endured the misery of skipping meals was about 18 months ago. She was working two jobs as a home health aide and in childcare, but after paying the rent and bills she still didn’t have enough to feed herself and her young daughter Janai.She would always make sure Janai had all she needed and then, when the money ran out, trim her own eating habits accordingly. Three meals a day became one, solids would be replaced with copious amounts of water to dull the hunger pangs.“It’s like you get humbled,” Johnson, 25, says in the apartment where she is raising Janai, six, in Germantown, Maryland. “You open the fridge, close it, open it again but nothing’s gonna change – there’s nothing in there.”Those lean times were in the days before Johnson was accepted on to Snap, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, that provides low-income families with help to buy nutritious groceries. Johnson had applied several times, but had been knocked back.She was finally approved, with the help of an adviser whom she met at a parents’ evening at Janai’s kindergarten. For more than a year now she has received $520 every month to buy good food – equivalent to $8.50 for her and Janai each day, or under $3 a meal.View image in fullscreenThat may not sound much, but it has been transformative. “Snap has been a blessing for me,” she says. “I can provide for Janai when I come home, cook dinner for myself. It’s improved my relationship with my kid, my friends, my clients.”Now Johnson is bracing herself for a return to those grim days of food insecurity. Donald Trump’s multi-trillion dollar domestic policy legislation, his “big, beautiful bill” which is currently battling through Congress, would slash up to $300bn from the Snap program in order to fund extended tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.The cuts amount to the largest in the program’s history. They come at a time when food insecurity is already on the rise in all 50 states.Voting is meant to begin soon in the US Senate, an attempt to clear the bill through the upper chamber in time to meet Trump’s ambition to sign it into law by 4 July. Senate Republican leaders are mindful that any revisions they write into the bill must avoid causing further acrimony when the legislation moves back for final approval to the House of Representatives, where the package was passed this spring by an agonising single vote.Under the House version of the bill, parents of children seven and above would become liable for stringent work requirements from which they are currently exempted until their child is 18. Johnson would be affected by the new restriction, as Janai turns seven in November.If that seven-year cutoff remains in the final bill (the Senate is proposing that parents must meet work requirements once their child reaches 14), Johnson will have to prove from Janai’s next birthday that she is working at least 20 hours a week. Otherwise she would lose her Snap benefits.That would be a tough burden to meet, given that her hours fluctuate week by week as clients’ needs change. She has very little slack in her calendar to work further hours, because on top of her two jobs she is studying part-time at night to become a dialysis technician.So Johnson is nervously following the passage of the bill, and preparing for the worst. Should her food assistance be pulled, it will be back to “grind mode” and a renewed state of humbling.Johnson is one of millions of struggling Americans who are threatened with losing their Snap benefits under Trump’s bill. Most of the political attention in Congress has focused on Medicaid, the health insurance scheme for low-income families which faces even greater cuts of at least $800bn under the House version of the bill.Anti-hunger advocates fear that the potential devastation of Snap cuts is being overlooked. “I just don’t think it’s getting the sort of press and general public attention it demands,” said Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, executive director of Children’s HealthWatch.She described the proposed cuts as a “catastrophic attack that will change the structure of Snap, damage children’s and parents’ health, and have ripple effects that will devastate local economies”.Since it was founded as a permanent program by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Snap has grown into America’s most effective weapon against hunger. It currently helps put food on the table for over 40 million people, almost half of whom are children.Poverty experts have been stunned by the scale of Trump’s proposed cuts. They say they would deliver a terrible blow to one of the country’s core values – that all Americans should have enough to eat.“It’s like we are throwing in the towel, and saying hunger won,” said Salaam Bhatti, Snap director at the Food Research & Action Center (Frac). “It’s upsetting that one of the wealthiest countries in the world is on the brink of increasing hunger for millions of people.”The proposed cuts fall under several headings. The one that Johnson will feel most immediately is the expanded work requirements that will put about 8 million people at risk of losing some or all of their Snap benefits.In addition to the expanded work requirements for parents of children aged seven to 18, older adults aged 55 to 64 would also now have to meet heavy work stipulations. That cohort includes Johnson’s mother, Jámene, who currently receives Snap but might be thrown off it as she is 55 and would be subject to the expanded demands.Jámene currently receives $52 a month in Snap benefits. Again, that might sound minimal, but without it she would be unable to buy fresh vegetables and meat and she would be hard pressed to offer any help to her daughter and granddaughter when reserves are running low.The bill also transfers some of the costs of benefits, for the first time in the program’s 61-year history, from the federal government to individual states. Under the House bill, states would be liable for up to 15% of the benefit costs, while the portion of administrative costs they already bear would rise from 50% to 75%.A state like Virginia would have to fork out an extra $500m a year. In Bhatti’s estimation, many states are simply going to be unable or unwilling to foot that bill – and will pass on the pain to their poorer citizens.“States don’t have that type of money, and so they would either reduce costs by removing families from the program, or by pulling out of the program entirely.”Were Virginia to bail out of Snap, that would put over 800,000 people at immediate risk of food insecurity, including over 300,000 children.Paradoxically, many of the states that would be most impacted, and by extension a large proportion of the families that could be left struggling to feed themselves, are in the rural Republican heartlands that voted heavily for Trump. One of the hardest hit would be Louisiana, which has 44% of its population on Snap or Medicaid or both.The stakes are almost as high in deep red Arkansas (38%) and Mississippi (37%). “I don’t understand why policymakers are pursuing this bill when this will obviously hurt a large majority of their own constituents for whom Snap is a lifeline,” said Lelaine Bigelow of the Georgetown Center for Poverty and Inequality.West Virginia, with 38% of its population in receipt of Snap or Medicaid, is an especially poignant example. This was the state where the food assistance program was born: John F Kennedy opened a pilot program there following his tour of the economically stricken Appalachian coal country.“I don’t know whether the cuts will give rise to what Kennedy saw – hungry children with bloated bellies,” said Tracy Roof, a political scientist at the University of Richmond who is writing a book on the history of food stamps. “But I do know that in a country as wealthy as the US, it’s unforgivable that you should have people going hungry to bed.”Trump’s hydra-headed cuts would also make it harder for low-income families to claim benefits in areas with high unemployment rates. The basket of food against which Snap is calculated would also be frozen, so that over the next 10 years the value of the benefit would decline in real terms from the current average of $6 a day, which many experts already consider inadequate.As a further threat, food assistance will be removed from up to 250,000 refugees and other people granted humanitarian protections in the US.In some ways, the Senate iteration of the bill is even more extreme than the House one. It targets millions of people in special groups, forcing them to meet tough work requirements to which they had been exempted. That includes military veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young people in foster care.Research by the Georgetown Center exposes the staggering disparity that underpins Trump’s plan. Under the House bill, over $1tn would be withdrawn in Snap and Medicaid cuts from 31% of the American people who earn on average $30,000 a year.The money would then be handed over, in the form of tax cuts, to the top 2% of the population, with average incomes of $1.5m a year.The transfer of resources would not only exacerbate America’s gaping inequality, it would also have a calamitous effect on the local economies in poorer parts of the country. Disrupting the flow of Snap food deliveries could send shock waves through the entire food supply chain, from farmer to truck driver to grocery store.Numerous studies have also revealed the damage done to the health and prospects of children when they endure food insecurity at a young age. A child’s developmental arc for language, hearing, vision and other critical faculties all peak by four, which means that if they receive insufficient nourishment in the early years it can have crushing long-term consequences.View image in fullscreen“Small deprivations have outsized impacts,” Ettinger de Cuba said. “Kids who are food insecure are more likely to be at risk of poor health, hospitalizations, and developmental delays.”In Johnson’s case, she knows Janai will be protected from such a disaster because as a parent she will do everything she can to provide for her daughter. Even if that means giving up her dream of getting on in life, or going hungry herself.What puzzles Johnson about the difficult future she is now facing, courtesy of the “big, beautiful bill”, is that it feels like she is being punished for doing everything she can to be a good American. She’s raised her daughter right, works two jobs to pay the bills, studies at night at her own cost to improve herself and find more stable work.“I’m just trying to be a decent, functioning human being,” she says. “Can’t they let me get my life together first, before they start snatching stuff away from me?” More

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      Trump dropped an F-bomb this week – and just for a moment, I warmed to him | Gary Nunn

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      I did not get out of bed this morning expecting to praise the public use of an expletive, but such is 2025. If any president was going to break this presidential norm, as NPR put it, it was always going to be Donald Trump.“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” the president told a group of reporters this week. “Do you understand that?” he asked, before storming off.It appears to be the first time a president has deliberately used the F-word live on camera to a press scrum or in a public forum, instead of being “caught” using the term accidentally on a hot mic (even that has only happened a handful of times). Cue plenty of puns from journalists about the “dropping of the F-bomb”.For the record, Trump actually used the F-word about Iran in 2020, but the slightly delayed radio broadcast bleeped it out. Plus, as this 2016 video compilation shows, it’s not unusual for him to swear.But what was different about this time – coming as it did at a moment of heightened global anxiety about military escalation – is that it came across as … authentic. Many people watching will have felt, heard and even shared that frustration about Israel and Iran’s alleged breaking of the ceasefire. Trump’s swearing made the point more forcefully than any diplomatic “disappointment” could have done. It wasn’t eloquent, but I believed it.We know other presidents – such as Lyndon Johnson, and especially Richard Nixon – swore in private. They wouldn’t have dreamed of risking the reputational damage to do so in public, and would have had to apologise if they did. No British prime minister has ever said “fuck” publicly to my knowledge. Few world leaders ever have.Which is potentially part of the problem. The most common complaint about the political elite is that they’re out of touch; that we can’t trust a word that comes out of their mouths because it’s all untrustworthy scripted spin. Yet at the same time we believe they’re swearing like sailors – and saying what they really think – behind closed doors (a perception bolstered by iconic roles such as Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick of It, or the blue-mouthed Roger Furlong from Veep.)Of course, swearing doesn’t equate to honesty. And, in Trump’s case, the obscenity only masked his own complicity in creating the situation that frustrated him – from pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 to his “monumental” airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend. But my point is that the public clearly doesn’t trust the polished and sanitised scripts that characterise so much political speech.I’m not suggesting world leaders all suddenly disrespect the gravitas of their office. Can you imagine Keir Starmer being encouraged to swear? He’d sound like a headteacher attempting to rap. What I am saying is there’s power in judicious swearing.You want to appear more human to voters? Act more like one. YouGov polling reported in April revealed that just 8% of Britons never swear. Perhaps an occasional curse or two would allow politicians to ally themselves with the 92% of us who do.Linguistic norms are always changing. For six years, I wrote a regular column for the Guardian’s Mind your language section. During that time, I saw changes that would incense any purist. For instance, the BBC made even less use of those with received pronunciation accents and started broadcasting more voices that really sound like people across the country. Such “real” accents are supposed to make the institution seem less remote and more trustworthy. The same is true of the institution of politics. Sounding more like real people does nobody any real harm.If the stakes are literally life and death, and people aren’t listening, a well-placed, truly meant expletive will wake everyone up. At time of writing, the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran is holding. Maybe the F-bomb did the job after all.

      Gary Nunn is a freelance journalist and author More

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      US supreme court limits federal judges’ power to block Trump orders

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      The US supreme court has supported Donald Trump’s attempt to limit lower-court orders that have so far blocked his administration’s ban on birthright citizenship, in a ruling that could strip federal judges of a power they’ve used to obstruct many of Trump’s orders nationwide.The decision represents a fundamental shift in how US federal courts can constrain presidential power. Previously, any of the country’s more than 1,000 judges in its 94 district courts – the lowest level of federal court, which handles trials and initial rulings – could issue nationwide injunctions that immediately halt government policies across all 50 states.Under the supreme court ruling, however, those court orders only apply to the specific plaintiffs – for example, groups of states or non-profit organizations – that brought the case.The court’s opinion on the constitutionality of whether some American-born children can be deprived of citizenship remains undecided and the fate of the US president’s order to overturn birthright citizenship rights was left unclear, despite Trump claiming a “giant win”.To stymie the impact of the ruling, immigration aid groups have rushed to recalibrate their legal strategy to block Trump’s policy ending birthright citizenship.Immigrant advocacy groups including Casa and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (Asap) – who filed one of several original lawsuits challenging the president’s executive order – are asking a federal judge in Maryland for an emergency block on Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. They have also refiled their broader lawsuit challenging the policy as a class-action case, seeking protections for every pregnant person or child born to families without permanent legal status, no matter where they live.“We’re confident this will prevent this administration from attempting to selectively enforce their heinous executive order,” said George Escobar, chief of programs and services at Casa. “These are scary times, but we are not powerless, and we have shown in the past, and we continue to show that when we fight, we win.”The decision on Friday morning decided by six votes to three by the nine-member bench of the highest court in the land, sided with the Trump administration in a historic case that tested presidential power and judicial oversight.The conservative majority wrote that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts”, granting “the government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue”.The ruling, written by the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not let Trump’s policy seeking a ban on birthright citizenship go into effect immediately and did not address the policy’s legality. The fate of the policy remains imprecise.With the court’s conservatives in the majority and its liberals dissenting, the ruling specified that Trump’s executive order cannot take effect until 30 days after Friday’s ruling.Trump celebrated the ruling as vindication of his broader agenda to roll back judicial constraints on executive power. “Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” Trump said from the White House press briefing room on Friday. “It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on a vacation.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered a scathing dissent. She argued that the majority’s decision, restricting federal court powers to grant national legal relief in cases, allows Trump to enforce unconstitutional policies against people who haven’t filed lawsuits, meaning only those with the resources and legal standing to challenge the order in court would be protected.“The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.”Speaking from the bench, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor called the court’s majority decision “a travesty for the rule of law”.Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the 14th amendment following the US civil war in 1868, specifically to overturn the supreme court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied citizenship to Black Americans.The principle has stood since 1898, when the supreme court granted citizenship to Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents who could not naturalize.The ruling will undoubtedly exacerbate the fear and uncertainty many expecting mothers and immigrant families across the US have felt since the administration first attempt to end birthright citizenship.Liza, one of several expecting mothers who was named as plaintiff in the case challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship policy, said she had since given birth to a “happy and healthy” baby, who was born a US citizen thanks to the previous, nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s order. But she and her husband, both Russian nationals who fear persecution in their home country, still feel unsettled.“We remain worried, even now that one day the government could still try to take away our child’s US citizenship,” she said at a press conference on Friday. “I have worried a lot about whether the government could try to detain or deport our baby. At some point, the executive order made us feel as though our baby was considered a nobody.”The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) condemned the ruling as opening the door to partial enforcement of a ban on automatic birthright citizenship for almost everyone born in the US, in what it called an illegal policy.“The executive order is blatantly illegal and cruel. It should never be applied to anyone,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.Democratic attorneys general who brought the original challenge said in a press conference that while the ruling had been disappointing, the silver lining was that the supreme court left open pathways for continued protection and that “birthright citizenship remains the law of the land”.“We fought a civil war to address whether babies born on United States soil are, in fact, citizens of this country,” New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew Platkin, said, speaking alongside colleagues from Washington state, California, Massachusetts and Connecticut. “For a century and a half, this has not been in dispute.”Trump’s January executive order sought to deny birthright citizenship to babies born on US soil if their parents lack legal immigration status – defying the 14th amendment’s guarantee that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens – and made justices wary during the hearing.The real fight in Trump v Casa Inc, wasn’t about immigration but judicial power. Trump’s lawyers demanded that nationwide injunctions blocking presidential orders be scrapped, arguing judges should only protect specific plaintiffs who sue – not the entire country.Three judges blocked Trump’s order nationwide after he signed it on inauguration day, which would enforce citizenship restrictions in states where courts had not specifically blocked them. The policy targeted children of both undocumented immigrants and legal visa holders, demanding that at least one parent be a lawful permanent resident or US citizen.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      A socialist underdog makes history in New York – podcast

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      Archive: CBS News, CBS New York, PBS Newshour, Eyewitness News ABC7NY, Fox 5 New York, MSNBC, NBC News, CNN, Newsweek, PIX11 News
      Here’s a link to Carter Sherman’s new book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future
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      Briefing on Iran strikes leaves senators divided as Trump threatens new row

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      Republican and Democratic senators have offered starkly contrasting interpretations of Donald Trump’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities after a delayed behind-closed-doors intelligence briefing that the White House had earlier postponed amid accusations of leaks.Thursday’s session with senior national security officials came after the White House moved back its briefing, originally scheduled for Tuesday, fueling Democratic complaints that Trump was stonewalling Congress over military action the president authorized without congressional approval.“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said following the initial postponement, which he termed “outrageous”.Even as senators were being briefed, Trump reignited the row with a Truth Social post accusing Democrats of leaking a draft Pentagon report that suggested last weekend’s strikes had only set back Iran’s nuclear program by months – contradicting the president’s insistence that it was “obliterated”.“The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran. They should be prosecuted!” he wrote.The partisan divisions were on display after the briefing, which was staged in the absence of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who previously told Congress that Iran was not building nuclear weapons, before changing her tune last week after Trump said she was “wrong”.Instead, the briefing was led by CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who had publicly assailed journalists over their reporting on the strikes at a Pentagon press conference.With intelligence agencies apparently in open dispute over the strikes’ effectiveness, Thursday’s briefing did little to clear up the clashing interpretations on Capitol Hill.Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator and close Trump ally, said “obliteration” was a “good word” to describe the strikes’ impact.“They blew these places up in a major-league way. They set them back years, not months,” he said. “Nobody is going to work in these three sites any time soon. Their operational capability was obliterated.”But he warned that Iran would be likely to try to reconstitute them, adding: “Have we obliterated their desire to have a nuclear weapon? As long as they desire one, as long as they want to kill all the Jews, you still have a problem on your hands. I don’t want the American people to think this is over.”But Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Trump was “misleading the public” in claiming the program was obliterated and questioned why Gabbard had not attended the briefing.His skepticism was echoed by Schumer, who said the briefing gave “no adequate answer” to questions about Trump’s claims.“What was clear is that there was no coherent strategy, no endgame, no plan, no specific[s], no detailed plan on how Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” he said, adding that Congress needed to assert its authority by enforcing the War Powers Act.Gabbard and Ratcliffe had scrambled on Wednesday to back Trump, with Gabbard posting on X: “New intelligence confirms what POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed.”The ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jim Himes, dismissed the destruction claims as meaningless. “The only question that matters is whether the Iranian regime has the stuff necessary to build a bomb, and if so, how fast,” he posted.The destruction response has also rankled Republican senators in the anti-interventionist wing of the party such as Rand Paul, who rejected claims of absolute presidential war powers.“I think the speaker needs to review the constitution,” said Paul. “And I think there’s a lot of evidence that our founding fathers did not want presidents to unilaterally go to war.”The Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution requiring congressional approval for future military action against Iran, though the measure appears unlikely to pass given Republican control of the chamber.The White House also admitted on Thursday to restricting intelligence sharing after news of the draft assessment leaking.Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the administration wants to ensure “classified intelligence is not ending up in irresponsible hands”. Leavitt later said the US assessed that there “was no indication” enriched uranium was moved from the nuclear sites in Iran ahead of the strikes.Trump formally notified Congress of the strikes in a brief letter sent on Monday, two days after the bombing, saying the action was taken “to advance vital United States national interests, and in collective self-defense of our ally, Israel, by eliminating Iran’s nuclear program”.The administration says it remains “on a diplomatic path with Iran” through special envoy Steve Witkoff’s communications with Iranian officials. More