WASHINGTON — Nearly all Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee failed to show up for a Wednesday hearing convened by Democrats to highlight President Donald Trump’s aggressive tactics in his mass deportation campaign that have ensnared U.S. citizens. 

It marked a rare full committee hearing that Democrats were allowed to conduct because of Minority Day in the House. 

Democrats used the opportunity to call witnesses who are U.S. citizens and were harmed, in some cases shot, by federal immigration officers. Lawmakers also focused on two U.S. citizens killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

Following the deadly shootings in January, Democrats refused to approve any more funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which has led to a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security since mid-February.  

“Under President Trump, ICE and CBP have killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood, and shot, beat, harassed, arrested, or locked up countless more innocent people,” the top Democrat on the committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said. “Congress cannot stand idly by while Americans are hurt and killed by their own government.”

Democrats also invited Trump officials tasked with crafting and carrying out the president’s immigration agenda: White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, the border czar. 

Neither Miller nor Homan showed up. The White House did not answer questions from States Newsroom regarding Miller or Homan’s absence from the hearing. 

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson blamed Democrats for keeping “the Department of Homeland Security shuttered, not caring about vital services – like TSA, FEMA, and ICE – going unfunded.” 

“Instead of lying about President Trump’s extremely successful deportation operations of criminal illegal aliens, House Democrats should fully reopen the Department of Homeland Security and stop putting illegal aliens before American citizens,”Jackson said.

The chair of the committee, Andrew Garbarino, called Wednesday’s hearing “a distraction from the fact that DHS has been shut down for over 65 days and the security impacts of that (are) real.”

Garbarino, a New York Republican, and the other GOP lawmakers on the committee did not ask any of the witnesses any questions. 

Americans under fire

The Americans harmed by federal immigration officials include:

• Marimar Martinez, a Chicago preschool worker whom Border Patrol officers shot five times.
• Rev. David Black, whom ICE officials shot in the face with pepper-ball rounds while he protested outside an Illinois detention facility.
• George Retes Jr., an Army veteran in California whom immigration agents apprehended on his way to work, tear-gassed and kept detained for three days.
• Ryan Ecklund, a real estate agent in Minnesota whom federal agents detained after he filmed them while at a grocery store. 

Martinez has appeared in the past before Congress in unofficial Democratic events to share her story about how on Oct. 4, she was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum. 

DHS shared her photo online, falsely claimed she rammed into Border Patrol with her car and labeled her a domestic terrorist. The Trump administration tried to indict her on federal charges, but eventually dismissed the case against her.

“On Friday I was teaching the young children at the Montessori school and we were singing and dancing and getting ready for spooky season preparing fall activities to do the following week and on Saturday my own government was calling me a ‘domestic terrorist’ and I was in a federal detention center with bullet holes all over my body,” she told the committee. “There were times where I did not believe this was all real and then I would touch my bullet wounds and knew it was certainly real.”

She said she was concerned other people would be shot and killed by federal immigration agents, as Pretti and Good were.

“It’s bound to happen sooner or later if we don’t hold these agents accountable for their actions,” she said.

No apologies

Following the two deadly shootings by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the leaders of ICE and CBP appeared before the Senate and House committees that have jurisdiction over DHS. 

While there, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott and ICE acting head Todd Lyons refused to apologize to the families of Good and Pretti. Lyons has announced he will resign at the end of May, saying he wants to spend more time with his family. 

The aggressive immigration deportation campaign in Minneapolis, which has a high Somalian refugee population, also spurred calls from Republicans to push then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign. She stepped down last month after Senate Republicans grilled her over an ad campaign and slow response to providing disaster relief. 

The president tapped former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin to steer the department. The Senate last month confirmed Mullin. 

One of the witnesses, Retes, said his goal is for Congress to pass legislation in order to hold federal immigration agents accountable.

“Federal officials are basically impossible to sue,” Retes said. “Federal agents basically have immunity.” 

He added that he wants Congress to do something, and expressed his frustration that “change doesn’t move fast enough.” 

Ecklund criticized federal agents within DHS, and pointed out the irony of the department’s unofficial slogan of going after “the worst of the worst” in conducting immigration enforcement. 

“‘Your best’ and the ‘best of DHS’ is the least that the American public deserve,” he said. “You have not given us your best.”

Martinez said agents are not held accountable. 

“I’ve been through hell and back,” she said. “These agents — Charles Exum — have not even been held accountable for their actions.” 

She added that she doesn’t even know if Exum is still working for CBP.

Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green asked Martinez if she would feel comfortable showing lawmakers where she was shot. She agreed and rolled up her sleeve, showing a dark scar on her upper arm, and pulled up her pants to show another wound across her upper thigh. 

“It’s hard to manage all this, to even process what happened,” she said. “Being shot for protecting your community. I want the world to see my pain, my trauma. This is not something to joke about. This is my life.”

Green thanked her and told her that “you deserve justice.” 

Minister shot with pepper balls

Black told the committee that he was “horrified by the radical evil being perpetrated by my government.”

He said he was outside a detention facility in Chicago and was in the middle of praying when he was shot by federal agents with pepper balls. 

“I am outraged by the blasphemy of those who support brutal ICE and CBP tactics yet call themselves Christians,” he said. “They make a mockery of the sacrifice of God’s love on behalf of the world. 

“Yet instead of living into Christ’s rich promise of a Kingdom of peace, freedom, and prosperity, many of those calling themselves Christian are blindly supporting institutions like ICE and CBP, even as they dominate, coerce, and terrorize American communities,” he continued. 

The only path forward, he argued to lawmakers, is to dismantle ICE and CBP, and redirect that funding to “support programs that feed the hungry, sate the thirsty, welcome strangers, clothe the naked, and care for the sick — for in the words of Jesus, ‘just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’”

WASHINGTON — Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will step down from her post, the Trump administration announced Monday, following multiple reports alleging work misconduct including misuse of funds and more.

Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican from Oregon who lost her U.S. House reelection bid in 2024, will take a role in the private sector, White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung wrote in a social media post. 

“She has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives,” Cheung said. 

Keith Sonderling will lead the agency as acting secretary of Labor, he added. Sonderling also worked at the Department of Labor during the first Trump administration, in the Wage and Hour Division. 

Chavez-DeRemer is the most recent member of the Donald Trump Cabinet to be ousted, following former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The Department of Labor’s independent watchdog started an investigation into Chavez-DeRemer and her top aides over allegations of sending inappropriate messages to young staffers at the department, according to the New York Times. 

The department’s inspector general was also investigating reports of misuse of department funds for personal travel and into allegations Chavez-DeRemer had an extramarital affair with a member of her security detail.

Separately, her husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, was barred from entering the Department of Labor after female staffers said he touched them inappropriately, according to the Times. 

WASHINGTON — New Hampshire’s Republican governor, frustrated with little information about the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to put a new detention facility in her state, joined local Democrats to oppose the move and disclosed DHS plans to retrofit warehouses across the nation to expand immigrant detention.

Two Republican members of the U.S. Senate, one who chairs the Armed Services Committee and another running for governor, personally lobbied DHS to find other locations for planned large-scale detention centers in rural Byhalia, Mississippi, and Lebanon, Tennessee. 

And a city manager for a small town in Georgia that overwhelmingly voted to put President Donald Trump back in the White House placed a lock on a meter to prevent water access to a newly purchased warehouse for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At every turn, DHS has faced pushback from Republicans in its drive to quickly scale up immigrant detention to 92,600 people by September, a pillar of the president’s mass deportation plan as Trump aims to remove 1 million immigrants without legal status each year. Republicans warn that the move to convert warehouses into hulking detention sites in rural areas will strain local communities’ water, sewage, electricity, heat and health care. 

Yet Republicans also cheered Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric on deportation, voted to return him to the White House and in Congress last year, GOP lawmakers spearheaded $45 billion for ICE detention. 

Experts on detention say the growing burden on communities and the subsequent uproar should be no surprise to members of the GOP. 

“You cannot have a successful deportation agenda, which is the president’s obsession of wanting to have 1 million a year … unless you scale up detention,” said Muzaffar Chishti, Migration Policy Institute senior fellow and director of the MPI office at New York University School of Law. 

Billions for detention

Last year, congressional Republicans provided a separate funding pool of $175 billion for immigration enforcement through the massive tax cuts and spending package, with $45 billion set aside specifically for the detention of immigrants. 

Of that sum, the Trump administration plans to use $39 billion to overhaul its current detention model of using existing jails and prisons and instead consolidate 34 facilities owned by the federal government for detention. 

That would include eight mega-sites of refurbished warehouses to hold as many as 10,000 people each; 16 processing centers, also refurbished warehouses, to each hold 1,000 to 1,500 people; and 10 “turnkey” facilities, which would be the preexisting jails and prisons with ICE contracts. 

Those plans for DHS to expand immigrant detention became public after New Hampshire’s GOP Gov. Kelly Ayotte released documents about a now-canceled site planned for Merrimack, as well as sites across the rest of the country.

The eight large-scale sites would hold more people than the largest federal prison in the United States, which houses roughly 4,000 inmates.

“I think for a lot of people, it sounds and looks a lot like we’re building an infrastructure for concentration camps,” said Elliott Young, a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College.

The Trump administration’s rapid expansion of detention — as many as 68,000 immigrants, as of February — has proven deadly. In 2025, there were 31 known detainee deaths, the highest in 20 years. This year alone, more than a dozen immigrants already have died in detention, and advocates are concerned the plans to detain up to 10,000 immigrants in mega-sites will only lead to more deaths. 

This is not the kind of economic development many rural communities may have envisioned.

“Having such a big amount of people detained in one place comes with its own issues, but the second thing is that industrial warehouses are just not equipped, and they will never be equipped, to be able to detain that many folks,” said Luis Suarez, the senior field advocacy manager at Detention Watch Network.

“With the current facilities that ICE is managing, we have seen an unprecedented amount of inhumane conditions and deaths, and we feel that with this large-scale expansion that we’re going to continue to see it on a larger scale,” Suarez continued.

Public opinion on detention centers

The GOP pushback on warehouses in communities grew after two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal immigration agents in Minnesota, and public opinion ratings on ICE and the president’s agenda took a dive. 

“This is just coming off the heels of what happened in Minneapolis,” Suarez said. “I feel like for people it’s sending a signal that if these facilities open up, there might be increased enforcement, and they don’t want to continue to see the violence that DHS and ICE has been inflicting on communities.”

How the DHS push to acquire warehouses develops over the coming months could also be affected by the newly confirmed Homeland Security secretary, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem.

While NBC reported on March 31 that Homeland Security is pausing plans to buy more warehouses, quoting two senior DHS officials, the officials “stressed the decision may only be temporary.” 

During Mullin’s confirmation hearing, he agreed to work with local communities concerned with large detention centers after New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim raised the issue. 

Kim said in the town of Roxbury, New Jersey, which has a volunteer fire department and 42 police officers, DHS purchased a warehouse as a processing center to detain up to 1,500 people. 

Roxbury is in western Morris County, where Trump gained 50% of the presidential vote in 2024. City officials filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to prevent the conversion of the warehouse. 

“Does that sound like the kind of town that has the resources to take on a warehouse of this magnitude?” Kim asked Mullin during his confirmation hearing.

Mullin pledged to personally visit the facility himself, if confirmed. 

Out west, red states object

In Mullin’s own Republican-led state, officials in Oklahoma City met with the owners of a warehouse that DHS was looking to purchase, and the owners eventually backed out of talks with the federal government.

Oklahomans were only made aware of the potential warehouse because of a local law requiring a mandatory disclosure that any property purchased will not impact the historic preservation of certain buildings. 

But not all officials have received warning. 

Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, along with congressional lawmakers from both parties, were blindsided by the sale of a warehouse in Salt Lake City to the federal government.

“When the sale went through, we were not given any notice,” Cox told reporters during a press conference. “No members of our congressional delegation were given any notice. No locals were given any notice. That’s, I think, a little frustrating for everyone. We want to work closely together to get things right.”

In response, Salt Lake City officials have placed restrictions on how much water ICE can use.

So far, DHS has purchased 10 warehouses among the 34 planned. 

But communities and lawmakers have been able to end the bids of another 13 proposed detention centers, according to Project Salt Box, which is tracking the purchases of warehouses by the federal government.

In Social Circle, Georgia, and Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, located in counties that gave Trump more than 70% of the vote in the 2024 presidential election, local leaders are opposed to the government’s purchase of two large-scale warehouses.

Social Circle City Manager Eric Taylor said a lock would remain on the water meter at a recently purchased facility until ICE officials can demonstrate that the warehouse can operate without overburdening water and sewer services. DHS plans to use the warehouse as one of its mega-facilities to detain up to 10,000 immigrants, which is double the entire population of Social Circle.

The GOP lawmaker who represents that area, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, also raised concerns about the huge detention center in Social Circle. He voted for the tax cuts and spending package that added billions for detention. 

“I’m all for helping DHS, and I’m behind that to make sure we get rid of these illegal criminals that have been throughout our country, but I also understand Social Circle’s concerns, from not just the infrastructure but the resources that may be needed,” Collins said in an interview with a local TV station. 

Collins also shepherded a bill through the House, now law, that requires mandatory detainment by DHS of immigrants charged with local theft, burglary or shoplifting. The bill was named after Georgia college student Laken Riley, whose murder by a Venezuelan immigrant conservatives blamed on the immigration policies of the Biden administration.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said he’s opposed to the detention center in Schuylkill and another proposed facility, and noted the pushback did not come from Democrats alone. 

“I’m going to do everything in my legal power and my regulatory power to see to it that these facilities are not sited here in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said at a press conference. “After concluding this meeting here today, I’m even more determined … To hear from Republicans and Democrats alike expressing opposition to this, I think speaks volumes about how unwanted these facilities are in our communities.”

Rural America as a home for detention centers

It’s no surprise to Young, a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College, that the federal government is aiming to place detention centers in rural areas, which often lean Republican. 

“I think there’s a number of reasons for that,” he said. “One, these rural areas tend to be poorer areas where space is available cheaply, but it’s also areas where the local community might be lobbying for jobs that would come as a result of it. I think the other reason why they put them in these remote areas is it makes it very difficult for lawyers and advocates to access immigrants.”

Two Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, petitioned DHS to halt its plans to acquire warehouses for the purpose of detaining thousands of immigrants. 

Wicker wrote a letter to then-Homeland Security Secretary Noem, asking that ICE look elsewhere for its proposed 8,500 bed-space detention center other than the rural town of Byhalia, which has a population of under 1,500.

“Existing medical and human services infrastructure in Byhalia is insufficient to support such a large detainee population,” Wicker said. “Establishing a detention center at this site would place significant strain on local resources.”

Blackburn also worked with DHS to end plans to build a mega-detention center to hold up to 16,000 immigrants. She told her residents that the planned facilities for detention in Lebanon “will not move forward.”

Additionally, Young said “there is some sort of early version of” the federal government trying to retrofit warehouses to detain immigrants.

“If you go back to the origins of immigrant detention, late 19th century, under Chinese exclusion, there was absolutely no infrastructure for detaining immigrants,” Young said. “And so the first immigrant, Chinese immigrants, were detained and jailed in dock warehouses in San Francisco.”

The most recent example of the federal government turning to quickly constructed detention facilities to detain thousands of immigrants is the mass deportation campaign of 1954.

Most recently was the 1980s, when Mariel Cubans were held on military bases. One of the bases in Arkansas held up to 20,000 Cubans, and a riot erupted. It was a disaster that nearly ended then Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinon’s political career, and the blunder continued to follow him to the White House.

Detention centers and communities

Deirdre Conlon, an associate professor of geography at the University of Leeds, and Nancy Hiemstra co-wrote a book about the web of financial relationships that detention centers have with local communities and private corporations.

“The people who are detained become commodities out of which revenue is generated, that not only the private provider makes money off, but then the county government becomes dependent on,” Conlon said.

When the federal government disinvests in some communities, filling in budget gaps tends to come from detention centers owned and operated by private companies, Hiemstra added. 

“But the warehouse model just axes that relationship,” she said.

Hiemstra, an associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York, points out that even though DHS is trying to pitch to these communities that the operation of a warehouse will create jobs, those skills needed to run a facility are unlikely to come from the local community. A considerable amount of the labor for the facility comes from the migrants detained, who typically earn up to $1 a day in cleaning and cooking.

“For the size of some of these facilities and the skills that are required … they will have to pull people from the outside (of the community) in,” she said. “That is not going to benefit the existing community at all.”

Hiemstra said it’s no surprise that DHS is facing opposition to operate  large-scale detention facilities in communities. 

“It removes the economic benefit to local communities that is present with the existing model,” she said. “Not that we want that to continue, but this will just pull it out of local communities even more and make it a total corporate money grab.”

But the main concern, she added, is using a warehouse to detain thousands of people.

“If these come to pass and it seems normal to throw humans in warehouses that will further normalize the deaths that are occurring and this dehumanization of people,” Hiemstra said. 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday seemed poised to reject the Trump administration’s attempt to redefine the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, and instead uphold the country’s long understanding of citizenship by birth on American soil. 

If a majority of Supreme Court justices strikes down President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born to parents without legal status or temporary immigration statuses like visas, it will be the second recent major blow to the president via the high court. Earlier this year, a majority of justices struck down his use of sweeping tariffs. 

Trump, who signed the executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship as one of his first acts after his inauguration in 2025, came to the courtroom to hear the oral arguments, a first for a sitting president. 

‘Quirky’ administration argument

A majority of the justices during Wednesday’s oral arguments were skeptical of Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s arguments that the citizenship clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment was only intended to grant citizenship to the children of newly freed African American slaves, not immigrants. 

Chief Justice John Roberts called one of Sauer’s key arguments “quirky,” and questioned how it could be applied to an entire class of immigrants without legal status. 

Sauer argued that the children born to parents without legal status or temporary visitors are not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” and are instead subject to the laws of their home country. He cited carve outs in birthright citizenship, such as the children born to foreign diplomats.

“You expand it to a whole class of illegal aliens,” Roberts said. “I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples.”

Along with Roberts, the liberal wing of the court and conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett also did not seem swayed by Sauer’s argument. 

Gorsuch asked Sauer if, under the Trump administration’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, Native Americans would be considered birthright citizens “under your test.” 

“Uh, I think so,” Sauer said.

Indigenous people were granted U.S. citizenship by Congress in 1924, but were not granted citizenship under the 14th Amendment because those children were born to parents who were citizens of tribal governments. 

Sauer also contended the 1898 Supreme Court ruling that upheld citizenship based on birth on American soil, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, was wrongly decided. 

He argued that the Wong Kim Ark case did not take into consideration “sojourn travelers,” who are temporary visitors in the U.S. and give birth.   

Sauer also said the Trump administration was not looking for the justices to overturn that case. 

ACLU arguments

Liberal justice Elena Kagan said that Sauer’s argument to the court was an effort to create a “revisionist history” of the Wong Kim Ark case. 

“Everyone took Wong Kim Ark to say that, as a result of that, birthright citizenship was the rule,” she said. “And I think everybody has believed that for a long, long time.”

American Civil Liberties Union lead attorney Cecillia Wang said during oral arguments that when the federal government tried to strip Ark of his citizenship, “largely on the same grounds (the Trump administration) raised today,” the Supreme Court rejected those efforts.

“This Court held that the 14th Amendment embodies the English common law rule (that) virtually everyone born on U.S. soil is subject to its jurisdiction and is a citizen,” said Wang, who is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants.

Her parents were in the U.S. on student visas when she was born in Oregon, meaning that if Trump’s executive order were in effect at that time, she would have been denied U.S. citizenship.

“Ask any American what our citizenship rule is and they’ll tell you, everyone born here is a citizen alike,” Wang said. “That rule was enshrined in the 14th Amendment to put it out of the reach of any government official to destroy.”

Birthright citizenship has been a longstanding core principle in the United States, where nearly any child — regardless of their parents’ immigration status — born on U.S. soil is automatically granted citizenship. 

The text of the clause is: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Experts have warned that if the constitutional right to birthright citizenship were struck down, it would effectively create a class of millions of stateless people, leaving them without a country to call home.

If the high court determines that Trump violated the Constitution with his executive order, it would be a major block to the president’s goal in defining who is American, as Trump has aimed to reshape the country’s racial and ethnic makeup through limits to migration and an aggressive immigration campaign of mass deportations. 

A decision from the high court on the case, Trump v. Barbara, is likely not going to come until the end of the court term, in late June or early July. If the court decides to uphold the executive order, it would go into effect 30 days after the ruling. 

New world, old Constitution

Sauer argued that birthright citizenship should not be applied to children of temporary visitors, such as foreigners who partake in what opponents call “birth tourism.”

Roberts asked Sauer how much of an issue birth tourism is – the idea that foreign visitors specifically travel to the U.S. for the purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for their soon-to-be born children.

“No one knows for sure,” Sauer said, citing media reports that many Chinese tourists travel to the U.S. and give birth. 

However, China does not allow its citizens to have dual citizenship. 

Roberts seemed skeptical that birth tourism should be considered in Sauer’s legal arguments for the purpose of restricting birthright citizenship. He told Sauer that birth tourism “wasn’t an issue in the 19th century.” 

“We’re in a new world now,” Sauer said. “Where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child as a U.S. citizen.” 

But Roberts shot back, “Well, it’s a new world, it’s the same Constitution.”

Other countries

Sauer also argued that the U.S. should fall in line with the citizenship laws of other countries.

“Unrestricted birthright citizenship contradicts the practice of the overwhelming majority of modern nations,” he said. “It demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship.”

Kavanaugh questioned why the U.S. should worry about the citizenship requirements of other countries. 

“Obviously we try to interpret American law with American precedent based on American history,” Kavanaugh said. “I’m not seeing the relevance as a legal, constitutional interpretive matter necessarily, although I understand it’s a very good point.”

Shortly after oral arguments ended, Trump took to his social media site, Truth Social, where he falsely said the U.S. is the only country to have birthright citizenship. Argentina, Brazil, Canada and Mexico are among several countries that have birthright citizenship.

“We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” he wrote. 

Trump left Wednesday’s oral arguments after Sauer was finished presenting his argument to the justices, and about a few minutes into arguments from the ACLU’s Wang, according to White House pool reports. Oral arguments lasted for about two-and-a-half hours.

Earlier decision

This is the second time the Trump administration has brought a birthright citizenship case before the justices. 

Last year, after federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Washington state struck down the president’s executive order, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, but asked the justices to consider the lower courts’ use of universal injunctions, rather than the merits of birthright citizenship.

The justices took up the case, and in a 6-3 vote divided along ideological lines, the use of universal injunctions was curtailed by the conservative wing of the high court. 

After the ruling, immigration advocates and the ACLU filed class action suits, which were successful in blocking the birthright citizenship executive order. The suits argued that future children born in the United States without gaining citizenship constituted a nationwide class.

“If you credit the government’s theory, the citizenship of millions of Americans past, present and future could be called into question,” Wang said. 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in a case that could reshape the understanding of who is American by birth.

The case, Trump v. Barbara, challenges President Donald Trump’s executive order that redefines citizenship to exclude children born to parents who either do not have legal status, or hold temporary legal visas. 

It has the potential to upend the guarantee of birthright citizenship in effect since a Supreme Court decision in 1898 that extended citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States. There is a small carveout for children born to foreign diplomats. 

The Trump administration petitioned the high court in December after multiple lower courts struck down the executive order, finding it violated the Constitution.

Birthright citizenship has been a longstanding core principle in the United States, where nearly any child — regardless of their parents’ immigration status — born on U.S. soil is automatically granted citizenship. Experts have warned that if birthright citizenship were struck down, it would effectively create a class of millions of stateless people.

But what was once a fringe legal theory has been pushed into the mainstream by the president and his far-right allies, who have sought to redefine who is American. 

They argue the citizenship clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which is the basis for birthright citizenship, was meant to apply to newly freed African American slaves after the Civil War, not to children of immigrants. Most legal scholars and historians disagree with that interpretation. 

The text of the clause is: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

After oral arguments are heard on Wednesday, a decision from the Supreme Court is expected before the court’s summer recess begins at the end of the term in late June or early July. 

19th-century case

This is not the first time the Trump administration has brought a birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court. 

Last year, after federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Washington state struck down the president’s executive order, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, but asked the justices to consider the lower courts’ use of universal injunctions, rather than the merits of birthright citizenship.

The justices took up the case, and in a 6-3 vote divided along ideological lines, the use of universal injunctions was curtailed by the conservative wing of the high court. 

After the ruling, immigration advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union filed class action suits, which were successful in blocking the birthright citizenship executive order. The suits argued that future children born in the United States without gaining citizenship constituted a nationwide class.

Cody Wofsy, of the ACLU, is a co-lead attorney in the case and told reporters last week that the Supreme Court already decided the issue of birthright citizenship in 1898.

“The constitutional text is clear, the precedent is clear and the history is clear,” Wofsy said.

The 1898 case, United States vs. Wong Kim Ark, settled the idea that automatic citizenship was granted to children born on U.S. soil, Wofsy said.

Ark, born in San Francisco, was denied entry back into the country after visiting China. Officials at the time argued that because his parents were Chinese citizens in the United States on temporary visas at the time of his birth, and therefore were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S., he was not a citizen. He took the issue to the high court and in 1898 the Supreme Court affirmed that children born in the United States were guaranteed citizenship.

Arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, Solicitor General D. John Sauer has said that the 1898 case is being misinterpreted, and that it meant to only include children born to parents who were granted authorization to be in the U.S.

“Illegal aliens are not ‘permitted by the United States to reside here,’ and thus their children are excluded from citizenship,” Sauer argued in briefs. 

However, Trump’s executive order would also deny citizenship to children born to parents on temporary visas, such as for work or school. 

Sauer also relies on an 1884 Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to John Elk, a Native American man born in Nebraska, who was no longer a member of his tribe and tried to become a naturalized U.S. citizen in order to vote. 

Elk was denied citizenship, because he was not “subject to the jurisdiction of” the U.S. because of his “political allegiance” to his tribe, even though he had renounced his tribal citizenship. Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans in 1924.

Sauer cites the Elk case in his argument that the citizenship clause does not apply to children born to immigrants on temporary visas or undocumented people and “only to those born of parents with primary allegiance to the United States.” The administration is not arguing that Indigenous people should be denied birthright citizenship.

Torey Dolan, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said Sauer’s argument wrongly conflates Indigenous people with migrants, despite a long U.S. legal tradition of treating them distinctly. 

“American law has always found a way to distinguish Indigenous people from non-Indigenous people in a way that has never been applied to immigrants,” Dolan, an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said. 

She noted that in the Declaration of Independence, which includes the grievances of the colonists, one complaint was how British King George III refused to allow for migration into the colonies in order to occupy land stolen from Indigenous tribes. 

“This conflation of immigrants and Indigenous people, for the sake of this argument, I think, is pretty egregious, and I think it really obfuscates American history and its colonial history in particular,” she said. 

‘Pure chaos’

Legal advocates challenging the executive order are confident they will win at the Supreme Court. 

“President Trump’s executive order is plainly unconstitutional and unlawful, and we’re confident that the Supreme Court will reaffirm existing legal precedent and strike down this executive order once and for all,” Hannah Steinberg, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told reporters. 

In briefs, the ACLU has also argued that if Trump’s executive order were to go into effect, it would create a stateless class of people. The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that studies migration, found that the end of birthright citizenship would increase the unauthorized population by an additional 2.7 million by 2045. 

Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship is part of the administration’s broader goal to curtail migration to the U.S., arguing that birthright citizenship is an incentive for unauthorized immigration.

But the idea that people migrate to the U.S. so their children can be born as citizens is not supported by research, Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said.

“People move mainly for opportunity for themselves and their children and also for safety,” she said. “There are many unauthorized immigrants who have come to the United States with their own children, who were born in another country, who won’t be U.S. citizens, and they still come.” 

“I don’t think there’s any evidence that birthright citizenship specifically is an independent pull factor. It’s more the safety, the rule of law and the earnings potential that people see in the United States, and the opportunity to reunite with other families is another major factor,” she continued. 

Ama S. Frimpong, the legal director for the immigrant rights group We Are CASA, told reporters that there are practical questions to how Trump’s executive order would even work. 

“What happens in a household in which there are older children who are born here and now, suddenly they have a new baby who’s born tomorrow, and that baby is not going to have the same rights that their siblings have?” she asked. “Is a baby going to be subject to detention and deportation by their very own government that is meant to protect them because they were born here?” 

That reality of birthright citizenship being stripped, Frimpong said, would be “just pure chaos.”

WASHINGTON — The two chambers of Congress, both controlled by Republicans, were at odds Friday over how to fund the Department of Homeland Security, prolonging the shutdown that began in mid-February. 

The Senate voted before dawn to approve a funding bill that would have reopened every agency within the department impacted by the funding lapse. But that legislation didn’t include additional money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol.

House GOP leaders, infuriated by their colleagues’ decision to leave out that money, didn’t put it on the floor for a vote. They chose instead to take up an eight-week stopgap spending bill for the department, which has little chance of moving through the Senate.

The House bill passed on a 213-203 mostly party-line vote. Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, North Carolina Rep. Donald Davis and Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, all Democrats, voted with all Republicans present. The Senate bill passed by voice vote, with Democratic support. Both chambers are now out of session for a two-week spring break. 

The development reduces hope for the tens of thousands of federal workers within DHS who have gone without a full paycheck since the stalemate began when Senate Democrats demanded new constraints on immigration enforcement after federal officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Customs and Border Protection have been largely exempt from the impacts of a shutdown since Republicans approved tens of billions for their operations in their “big, beautiful” law. But federal workers throughout other DHS agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration, haven’t been in the same situation. 

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced in the afternoon the House would not even consider the Senate-passed funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security, and would instead vote on a temporary measure that would run through May 22.

“We’re going to send that over to the Senate and we hope that they’ll accept that,” Johnson said.

President Donald Trump hasn’t weighed in publicly on whether he would sign either of the bills, if they ever reach his desk, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment. But Johnson said Trump backs House Republicans over the Senate. 

“I spoke to the president a few moments ago,” he said. “He understands exactly what we’re doing and why, and he supports it.”

Trump signed an order Friday that would provide pay for TSA workers, which a senior administration official said would come from Republicans’ signature tax and spending bill. A DHS spokesperson, in an email, said that TSA workers should see paychecks as early as Monday.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote in a social media post that any stopgap bill to fund DHS “that locks in the status quo is dead on arrival in the Senate, and Republicans know it.”

“We’ve been clear from day one: Democrats will fund critical Homeland Security functions—but we will not give a blank check to Trump’s lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms,” Schumer wrote. 

Overnight Senate vote

The Senate approved a modified DHS spending bill by voice vote around 2:30 a.m. Eastern after a week of mounting pressure on lawmakers to end the stalemate that has led to hourslong wait times in airport security lines.

The Senate-passed DHS bill didn’t include funding for ICE or Border Patrol. GOP lawmakers signaled ahead of the vote they’ll try to pass another boost in funding for immigration enforcement and deportation in a second party-line package later this year.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said during brief floor debate that funding DHS through a “piecemeal” approach wouldn’t have happened if Democrats handled negotiations differently.  

“They wanted reforms to Immigration and Custom Enforcement, and Republicans offered to give that to them,” he said. “The White House made offer after offer putting forward a robust list of additional reforms. And Democrats just kept moving the goal posts, and today they just walked away.”

Democrats, he said, “might think twice before” before they tried to use this as a campaign issue during November’s midterm elections, when voters throughout the country will decide whether Republicans keep both chambers of Congress.

“We could be standing here right now passing a funding bill with a list of reforms, if Democrats had made the smallest effort to actually reach an agreement, but they didn’t, because it’s now clear to everyone, Democrats didn’t actually want a solution,” he said. “They wanted an issue, politics over policy, self-interest over reform, pandering to their base over actually solving a problem.” 

Schumer said the bill to fund most of DHS “could have been accomplished weeks ago if Republicans hadn’t stood in the way.” 

“Democrats held firm in our opposition that Donald Trump’s rogue and deadly militia should not get more funding without serious reforms, and we will continue to fight for those reforms,” he said. 

More money for immigration deportations pledged

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt said he and other Republican lawmakers would seek to bolster funding for immigration and deportations through budget reconciliation, the complex process the party used last year to approve its “big, beautiful” law.

That, he said, would allow Republicans to move funding through the Senate with just a simple majority vote, skipping the procedural steps that would otherwise require 60 senators to end debate on a bill. 

“To my Democrat colleagues, this bill is the moderate option. What’s coming next is going to supercharge deportations,” he said. “To my Republican colleagues, let this be a rallying cry every time the Democrats obstruct the safety of American families, the wall gets 10 feet higher and ICE gets another $100 billion.”

New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim said Democrats have been clear for months they would “not support providing more funding for ICE without also including common sense reforms to rein in the abuses we have seen in Minnesota and elsewhere, particularly after two Americans were shot and killed.” 

“All we’ve been demanding here is what the American people are demanding — body-worn cameras; no masks; keeping ICE agents out of our hospitals, schools and churches; and ensuring ICE follows the same practices and procedures as local law enforcement,” he added. 

‘Republicans have relented’

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, wrote in a statement that earlier negotiations included “proposals to expand the use of body-worn cameras; limit civil immigration enforcement in sensitive areas such as schools and hospitals; increase oversight of detention facilities; and implement visible officer identification.”

“While Republicans worked in good faith to try to reach agreement, Democrats remained intransigent and unreasonable with their list of demands,” she wrote. 

Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote in a statement that since “Republicans have relented” lawmakers were “on track to fund the areas we agree on and get TSA agents paid, get our airports moving again, and fund important disaster relief and cybersecurity work.”

“But it is a shame that instead of working with Democrats to land the plane on several common-sense reforms to ICE and Border Patrol that the White House had already agreed to, Republicans walked away from constructive conversations and ultimately rejected some basic steps to reform these agencies,” she wrote. “I will keep fighting to secure real, meaningful steps to help rein in these rogue agencies—we just need Republicans to join us.”

WASHINGTON — U.S. Supreme Court justices seemed split Tuesday on whether the Trump administration should be allowed to turn away asylum-seekers who present themselves at ports of entry at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The question presented to the justices was whether migrants have to fully cross into the United States in order to have the right to apply for asylum and be processed, or if they can apply for asylum when they appear at a port of entry while on Mexico’s side of the border. 

The policy requiring a full crossing, known as metering, is defunct, but the Trump administration is asking the high court to make a determination in order to potentially revive the practice for future use at the southern border.

“This is an important tool in the government’s toolbox for dealing with border surges when they occur,” Vivek Suri, assistant to the U.S. solicitor general, told the court during oral arguments on the asylum case. “I can’t predict when the next border surge occurs, but I can say that when it does occur, this is a tool that (the Department of Homeland Security) would want in its toolbox. It’s not something the court should leave to future uncertainty.”

The six conservative justices seemed to agree with the Trump administration’s position, and questioned the definition of when a migrant “arrives” in the United States and can therefore seek asylum — legal protection granted to those fleeing danger or persecution in their home country.

The three liberals of the Supreme Court — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson —  asked whether the policy violated federal law protecting refugees. 

Lower and appeals courts have repeatedly blocked the metering policy, finding it violated U.S. asylum and refugee law for those escaping persecution after the first Trump administration expanded its use in 2017. The Biden administration rescinded the policy in 2021. 

A 2020 investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General found that up to 680 migrants per day were turned around as a result of the metering policy. 

The ‘magic thing’

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Kelsi Corkran, an attorney who argued on behalf of the immigrant legal aid and humanitarian group Al Otro Lado, how close an asylum seeker has to be to qualify as “arriving” in the U.S.

The immigration advocacy group originally brought the challenge in 2017 after asylum seekers were turned away by border officials at U.S. ports of entry. 

“What is the magic thing, or the dispositive thing, that we’re looking for, where we say, ‘Ah, now that person we can say arrives in the United States?’” Barrett asked. 

Corkran said someone arrives in the U.S. at a port of entry “when they are at the threshold of the port’s entrance, about to step over.” 

“I think that’s consistent with ordinary meaning,” she said. “I arrive at my house, or I arrive in my yard, when I’m going through the gate. Now that process of arriving is interrupted by the border officer physically blocking them from completing the arrival.”

Barrett also asked Suri if the Trump administration plans to reinstate the metering policy. 

Suri said the Trump administration would like to, “when border conditions justify.”

Jackson noted the policy, in practice, would require an asylum seeker to violate U.S. immigration law by entering into the country without authorization, based on the Trump administration’s argument that a migrant has to be on U.S. soil before making an asylum claim. 

That would be considered entering the U.S. unlawfully.

“So imagine a polite asylum seeker who wants to do everything by the book, he approaches the border but does not cross precisely because the law says you are not supposed to enter the United States without authority,” Jackson said. “If we’re trying to think about what ‘arriving in’ means, surely Congress was contemplating that a person would be coming to the United States, would be doing so with an intent to comply with the law that says you’re not supposed to enter, and thereby asking for entry.” 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh also questioned Suri about how the policy seems to give preference to migrants to enter the U.S. without authorization, rather than those who are seeking to make an asylum claim. 

Suri said the metering policy doesn’t prevent a migrant from seeking asylum. 

“It’s saying ‘our port (of entry) is at capacity today, try again some other day,’ and that time when that person comes in, that person could come in legally,” he said. 

Refugee laws

Sotomayor questioned Suri how the metering policy didn’t violate the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951. That act, which the U.S. signed in 1967, was created after the M.S. St. Louis ship, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees during World War II, was prevented entry to the U.S. and turned back to Europe. 

Some passengers were able to find refuge in other countries, but 254 died in the Holocaust.

Suri said the metering policy doesn’t send people back to their home country. 

“No, you’re just telling them to walk back,” Sotomayor said, adding that if the turn-back policy were applied to the Jewish refugees on the St. Louis, it would be the same as telling them to swim back. 

“They happened to be on a boat, but that’s what we did,” she said. “We didn’t let them dock. We didn’t consider whether they were being persecuted. And the majority of those people were shipped back or had to go back from where they came and were killed. That’s what we’re doing here, isn’t it?”

Suri said that he does “not deny the moral weight of claims made by refugees, but that is not the question before the court.”

He said the issue is whether Congress imposed the obligation “in the asylum and inspection statutes, and those refer only to aliens who arrive in the United States.”

Sotomayor pushed back and noted that if someone were to fly into LaGuardia Airport in New York, they “may not have put their foot on U.S. land, but they’ve arrived in the United States. They’re knocking on the door.” 

The justices are likely to make a decision on the case by late June. 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate voted Monday evening to confirm Markwayne Mullin to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. 

The 54-45 vote means that Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, will take over the department in the midst of a five-week shutdown. He will replace outgoing Secretary Kristi Noem, whom the president reassigned to another role in the administration.

Mullin voted for himself. Democratic Sens. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico were the only Democrats to back Mullin’s confirmation.

Just before the Senate adjourned, Mullin submitted his resignation letter.

The department has been shut down since mid-February while Democrats have called for restraints on federal immigration agents after officers killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. On Jan. 7, Renee Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and on Jan. 24, Alex Pretti was pinned down and killed by Customs and Border Protection officers.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said on the Senate floor before the vote Monday that Mullin will be entering DHS at a difficult time. 

“It’s a tough assignment, made all the more challenging right now by Democrats having shut DHS down for five weeks,” Thune said. “We all know that Markwayne isn’t afraid of a challenge.”

Speaking to reporters early Monday, Trump said that Mullin is “gonna be fantastic” as DHS secretary. 

As an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, Mullin will be the first Indigenous DHS secretary. 

Shutdown effects

Though DHS is shuttered, ICE and CBP are still fully funded because the Republican-led Congress last year passed a separate funding stream of $175 billion for immigration enforcement. 

Trump over the weekend directed his administration to place ICE agents in several airports in an attempt to aid Transportation Security Administration agents, who are working without pay. ICE and TSA are both agencies within DHS.

Mullin does not have any experience on a committee that handles policy for Homeland Security and will be tasked with leading a department of 260,000 employees.

Some senators have raised concerns about Mullin’s temperament, citing a 2023 incident in which he physically challenged a witness before Congress. Mullin also expressed sympathy toward a man who attacked Sen. Rand Paul, breaking six of the Kentucky Republican’s ribs and damaging a lung. 

Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, voted against advancing Mullin’s nomination to the Senate floor. Paul also voted against Mullin’s confirmation Monday night. 

The Senate advanced Mullin’s nomination in a 54-37 procedural vote Sunday. Two Democrats, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, joined all Republicans who voted Sunday. Paul did not vote on Sunday. 

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is again trying to send the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the west African nation of Liberia and urging a federal judge to dismiss a bar on his removal, according to legal documents filed over the weekend. 

Abrego Garcia, of Maryland, has agreed to be deported to Costa Rica, which will accept him as a refugee, and is fighting his removal to another third country. The Trump administration cannot remove him to his home country of El Salvador, after he was mistakenly deported there in 2025 and kept in a brutal Salvadoran prison. 

His erroneous deportation cast a national spotlight on the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.

Acting U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons, in a Friday court declaration, said he was disregarding Abrego Garcia’s proposal to accept removal to Costa Rica for two reasons. 

Lyons said Abrego Garcia did not designate Costa Rica as a third country of removal in 2019, when he was granted a withholding from removal to El Salvador. Lyons argues that Abrego Garcia therefore “forfeited his right to designate an additional country of removal when he failed to designate any other country prior to the completion of his removal proceedings.”

Lyons said the second reason is the Trump administration has already invested in “high-stakes political negotiations” with Liberia’s government to accept Abrego Garcia and if the administration were to abandon “agreements negotiated at the highest levels of government (it) could cast doubt on the diplomatic reliability of the United States in relation not only to the Republic of Liberia but also other nations with whom it negotiates on these and other matters.” 

Lyons said for those reasons, federal Judge Paula Xinis of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland should dissolve her injunction that prevents the Trump administration from removing Abrego Garcia. 

Third-country removals were somewhat rare until the second Trump administration, which is relying more on them as the president aims to carry out mass deportations. 

Abrego Garcia’s situation dates back years. In 2019, when Abrego Garcia was granted the withholding of removal because a judge found he would face violence from gangs if removed to El Salvador, he had an agreement with ICE to check in yearly. 

In 2025, ICE agents stopped Abrego Garcia while he was picking his son up from day care and he was informed there was a change in his immigration status. He was placed on a deportation flight with hundreds of other men to the brutal Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT. 

Later in 2025, the courts ordered Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.

The Trump administration is asking for Xinis to make her decision by April 17. Xinis was appointed by former President Barack Obama.