Justice & Law

Who Gets to Be a Citizen Today?

PUBLISHED 6/30/2026 by

In a highly anticipated decision, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, reaffirming that children born in the United States are citizens under the 14th Amendment, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The ruling preserves one of the Constitution’s clearest guarantees, and averts what would have been one of the most sweeping assaults on American citizenship since Reconstruction.

The ruling was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson; Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch dissented in full, and Brett Kavanaugh in part.

The Court reached the correct result. But no constitutional democracy should take comfort in the fact that four justices were prepared to strip citizenship from children born on American soil, embracing Trump’s effort to narrow the Citizenship Clause and erase a constitutional promise that has defined U.S. democracy for more than 150 years. Their willingness to do so exposes just how vulnerable even our most fundamental constitutional commitments have become.

The Supreme Court Decided Who Gets to Be a Girl. We Disagree. 

PUBLISHED 6/30/2026 by

On Tuesday, June 30, in a complete distortion of federal laws requiring equal opportunities in education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to further the Trump administration’s political agenda to persecute, ostracize and erase transgender students. This decision allowing states to ban transgender athletes from girls’ sports, is not about Title IX or equal opportunities for girls. In fact, it is the exact opposite.

To enforce these bans, someone has to decide which girls look female enough to compete. Schools and athletic associations must actively investigate students who don’t fit a sufficiently feminine profile.

We have watched this machinery run before. It is the same machinery that told women they were too aggressive for the boardroom, too strong for the field, too mannish for the ballot box. It has always been used to shrink what women and girls are allowed to be.

Women’s rights and trans rights are not competing causes. They never were. They share a common enemy: the rigid gender hierarchy that has always used “protection” as a cover story for control.

None of us are free until the category of “woman” is big enough to hold all of us.

Read the Most Chilling Lines From Justice Sotomayor’s ‘Slaughter’ Dissent on Trump’s Expanding Power: ‘Chaos Will Follow’

PUBLISHED 6/30/2026 by

On the second-to-last day of its 2025-’26 term, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along party lines President Donald Trump can fire Rebecca Slaughter, who served as commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from 2018 until her dismissal in 2025. But the decision reaches far beyond one commissioner: By overturning nearly a century of precedent, the Court held that presidents may remove members of independent multimember agencies that Congress deliberately structured to operate with some distance from partisan politics. 

We read all 49 pages of Sotomayor’s urgent dissent and pulled out the most striking passages, so you don’t have to—though after reading them, you just might want to.

In a Forceful Dissent, Justice Elena Kagan Says the Supreme Court Ignored Evidence of Trump Administration’s Anti-Haitian Bias

PUBLISHED 6/28/2026 by

For more than 350,000 Haitians and roughly 6,000 Syrians living legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the Supreme Court’s decision in Mullin v. Doe is not simply another legal ruling. It clears the way for the Trump administration to end TPS while legal challenges continue, leaving hundreds of thousands of people who have built their lives in the United States facing the immediate possibility of deportation.

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan argues that the Court not only insulated the executive branch from meaningful judicial review, but also brushed aside compelling evidence that anti-Haitian bias may have influenced the administration’s decision. Her dissent forcefully rejects the majority’s conclusion that President Trump’s repeated derogatory remarks about Haitians are legally insignificant, calling them plainly infused with racial stereotypes.

For Kagan, the case is about much more than Temporary Protected Status. It asks whether courts will meaningfully examine executive actions that affect hundreds of thousands of lives—or instead allow those actions to proceed before serious constitutional and statutory challenges can be fully heard.

Supreme Court ‘Mullin v. Al Otro Lado’ Decision Hinges Asylum Law on a Single Word

PUBLISHED 6/27/2026 by

Just days after World Refugee Day, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a significant victory on immigration, allowing it to revive a policy that turns away asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border before they have an opportunity to present their claims.

In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion rests on an isolated reading of the word “in”—an approach the dissenters say ignores decades of asylum law and the realities facing people fleeing persecution.

Trump Holds Housing Aid Hostage to Force GOP Support for Voting Restrictions

PUBLISHED 6/27/2026 by

This week, Trump cancelled a planned signing ceremony for the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act—which would help address the worsening housing affordability crisis—and said he won’t sign it unless Republicans in the Senate vote to pass the SAVE America Act. If you recall, the SAVE Act would implement sweeping voting restrictions, including necessitating proof of citizenship to vote, and in doing so, make it much more difficult for millions of women who changed their name at marriage to vote.

His fixation on the SAVE America Act isn’t about safeguarding the elections for Americans—it’s about rigging the elections to ensure a Republican win, by suppressing the votes of those who disagree.

With Latest Immigration Decisions, the Supreme Court’s Conservative Majority Rewrites Immigration Law, One Word at a Time

PUBLISHED 6/26/2026 by

Just days after World Refugee Day, the Supreme Court issued two immigration decisions that dramatically narrow protections for asylum seekers and Temporary Protected Status holders: Mullin v. Al Otro Lado and Mullin v. Doe.

Although the cases address different legal questions, they share a troubling approach: The conservative majority isolates individual words from their statutory context to expand presidential authority while limiting humanitarian protections Congress intended to provide.

In one decision, the Court allows the Trump administration to revive a policy that turns away asylum seekers at the border before they can present their claims. In the other, it shields the administration’s termination of TPS for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and thousands of Syrians from meaningful judicial review.

Powerful dissents from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan argue that the majority ignored both the broader legal framework and the real-world consequences of its rulings.

These opinions are about far more than technical questions of statutory interpretation. By reading immigration law out of context, the Court is reshaping who can seek protection in the United States—and how much power the executive branch has to decide their fate.

Keeping Score: Abortion Bans Cost $140B Per Year; Federal Courts Protect Trans Youth and Incarcerated Trans Women; Feminists React to FBI Raid on Ohio Voting Rights Organization

PUBLISHED 6/24/2026 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) is working to get Republicans on the record on the Right to Contraception Act.
—ICE has already reported the deaths of 18 detainees this year, on pace to surpass the highest number of deaths in decades.
—Abortion restrictions could cost the U.S. economy $140 billion annually in lost earnings.
—”I love the inflation,” says Trump.
—The EEOC will no longer require federal agencies to report on race, ethnicity, sex or gender identity.
—83 percent of American voters agree that emergency contraception should be easily accessible.
—Abortion ban states are slowly losing a generation of women medical students and doctors.
—More than 770,000 children have already lost access to SNAP benefits after last year’s funding cuts.
—A new study found trans women athletes have no significant physical advantages over cis women.
—Missouri has restored access to medication abortions after a Jackson County judge struck down key state restrictions, allowing clinics to resume providing the service and marking the first time medication abortion has been available in Missouri since 2018.
—Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that provides roughly $70 billion for ICE and CBP, sending it to President Trump’s desk. (This is on top of more than $140 billion Republicans already provided for those agencies last year.)

… and more.

Four Years After Dobbs, Women’s Healthcare Is a Scarce Resource

PUBLISHED 6/24/2026 by and

This week marks four years since the Supreme Court revoked the federal right to abortion, catapulting the nation into an era of state-sanctioned deprivation of bodily autonomy for American women.

On this anniversary, we write to take stock of one of the underreported outcomes of Dobbs: the growing number of individuals and families for whom access to healthcare is diminishing because of a rise in medical deserts.

It’s common sense—there is no reason for highly mobile professionals to remain in places where they find themselves increasingly facing the prospect of personal risk for practicing medicine.

Not surprisingly, medical deserts are prevalent in conservative and rural states; the downstream pressure suggests it soon will become an issue for blue states, too.

The impact on America’s unconscionable maternal and infant mortality rates cannot be overstated. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country; as rates continue to drop worldwide, they climb higher here, with Black women more than three times more likely than white women to die in childbirth. Infant mortality has risen specifically in states that enacted abortion restrictions since 2022, again with impacts worse among Black infants.

What We Learned When We Stayed: What 50 Years of Care in the South Taught Us About Abortion and Trans Rights

PUBLISHED 6/24/2026 by and

We’ve been here before.

When Dobbs v. Jackson came for abortion care in our states, we did two things: We opened clinics across state lines so our patients would still have a legal option. And we stayed. We kept our original clinics open, expanding the care we’d always offered or always wanted to offer.

When U.S. v. Skrmetti came for gender-affirming care, we kept providing that too, because abortion care patients and transgender patients are not separate communities.

The calculation patients make before they walk through the door is identical for both communities: Will I be seen? Will I be safe? Will the person across from me treat my body with humanity, or like a problem to be managed?

June marks anniversaries of both Dobbs and Skrmetti, and that conviction has never felt more urgent. Long before these two cases, the intersection of abortion rights and trans rights was already living in our waiting rooms; in the patients who received reproductive care and gender-affirming hormone therapy under the same roof; in the person who drove hours across the state because we were the only provider they trusted; and in those who trust us with their whole-person care because their grandmothers, mothers, sisters, aunts and friends have relied on our clinics for care for 50 years.

Between our two organizations, we’ve earned a century’s worth of experience at the practice of staying and enduring. CHOICES has kept their doors open for 52 years, and the Women’s Health Centers of West Virginia and Maryland will celebrate 50 years of care on June 24—the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned four years ago.

Support independent clinics in hard places keeping the doors open. And when the next fight comes, show up for the communities under pressure. Remember that those targeted first won’t be the last, but they will be the ones to lead the way.