Top Senate Democrat says ‘House Republicans caved’ as deal to fund DHS moves forward – as it happened

Attorney general Pam Bondi’s job with the Trump administration is reportedly at risk.

The president is said to be unhappy with Bondi’s performance as the head of the justice department and the controversy surrounding the Epstein files, according to a newly published article in the New York Times.

Unnamed sources told the newspaper that Donald Trump has not yet made a decision, but has suggested replacing Bondi with EPA administrator Lee Zeldin. The Times reported that Trump is also upset about her department’s failure in cases launched against his critics and opponents, such as James Comey and Letitia James.

Nasa’s lunar rocket is minutes away from launching. Meanwhile, the astronauts on the first crewed lunar rocket in more than 50 years are receiving praise from across the US.

“Artemis II lifting off today represents the very best of America—bold vision, cutting-edge technology, and the courage to push beyond boundaries. Proud of the men and women making it happen,” said Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania.

“Proud moment for all Michiganders as @Astro_Christina, a Grand Rapids native and one of the four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, launches on a 10-day journey to the moon. She’s also set to become the first woman to travel beyond low-Earth orbit toward the moon. You’re an inspiration,” Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin said on social media.

Astronaut Christina Koch also got a shoutout from North Carolina.

“North Carolina is incredibly proud of our own NC State alum, Koch, a trailblazer who is an inspiration to us all. Wishing the entire crew a safe and successful journey!,” Senator Thom Tillis said.

Follow the launch live here:

Hakeem Jeffries lambasted the Trump administration in a statement reacting to the announcement of the DHS funding bill.

The House Democratic leader described Republican policies as a disaster that have led to skyrocketing costs, the deaths of US citizens at the hands of ICE, a healthcare crisis and war.

“For the last 47 days, Donald Trump and Republicans have subjected the nation to chaos at airports, jeopardized our national security and kept the government closed to allow ICE to continue to brutalize the American people without consequence,” Jeffries said in a statement.

”It’s time to pay TSA agents, end the airport chaos and fully fund every part of the Department of Homeland Security that does not relate to Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation machine.”

I just spoke with Amanda Frost, a professor of immigration law at the University of Virginia, who was watching the arguments at the court today.

She said that her “immediate reaction” is that the challengers, represented by Cecillia Wang, “will prevail”.

She added:

The justices asked all the right questions of both sides, and the solicitor general did not have the answers that they would have needed to rule for him.

Frost also underscored how the justices didn’t seem swayed by the administration’s policy-based arguments about the significance of birth tourism. As I reported earlier, D John Sauer conceded that “no one knows for sure” how significant a problem this issue is. The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration thinktank, said that there are between 20,000 to 26,000 births by women on tourist visas annually. This is less than one percent of all babies born in the US each year.

During today’s arguments, chief justice John Roberts even suggested that concerns about birth tourism have “no impact on the legal analysis”.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed legislation on Wednesday to require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote and to begin a process that will eventually unenroll voters who have not provided citizenship documentation.

Florida is now the third state to pass proof-of-citizenship laws for voting this year, after South Dakota and Utah’s governors each signed proof of citizenship bills into law in March.

The changes come as Donald Trump’s signature restrictive voting bill, the Save America Act, languishes in the US Senate with little chance of passage. The president is left weighing his options about how to move forward with its provisions, which include documented proof of citizenship requirements to register and strict photo ID requirements to vote.

The most likely path forward will be to continue to encourage conservative states to enact the same voting restrictions.

The Florida law requires the Florida department of state to identify registered voters who may not be citizens and therefore ineligible, checking their registration against state and federal records to determine citizenship. A potentially ineligible voter will be contacted by the registrar and asked to provide documentation, and unenrolled if they do not do so.

The law also adds US passport cards to the list of the types of ID acceptable as voter ID, while removing retirement center IDs, public assistance IDs, neighborhood association IDs, and debit and credit cards as acceptable ID. The changes will take effect on 1 January 2027.

Read the full report here:

Away from the supreme court, another big story today is the expected launch of the Artemis II moon mission.

Four astronauts are preparing to lift off on a 685,000-mile journey as hundreds of thousands of spectators will watch on the ground – and millions will follow it live around the globe.

You can watch and follow all the latest updates in our Artemis II blog here:

The solicitor general, D John Sauer, issued a very brief rebuttal in which he reiterated the government’s argument that the ratification of the fourteenth amendment in 1868 was about overruling the “grave injustice” of the Dred Scott decision and making sure that “allegiance” was granted the children of newly freed slaves.

However, Sauer said, there is a “very strong, impressive consensus” in the years following that the children of “temporary sojourners” are not covered by the citizenship clause.

The arguments have now concluded.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that the administration’s argument rests on a “different understanding of allegiance than what was in the English common law”, which explains that “you can have allegiance to two different sovereigns at the same time”.

Wang agrees with Jackson’s interpretation, and notes that if you want to look at the foreign national parents of those children born in the US, they owe “temporary allegiance”.

Jackson follows Wang’s argument: “So the babies get the permanent allegiance piece of this, and the parents get the local allegiance piece of this.”

Beija McCarter, an eighth grade US History teacher, and Noah Goldstein, a New Yorker who was also at last month’s trans rights rally, both arrived at Wednesday’s supreme court demonstration with clear eyes and little optimism about what the justices inside might decide.

“Checks and balances only works if there’s balance, and we’re not really having that,” said McCarter, who was born in Brazil to American military parents and had to formally apply for her own citizenship, giving her a small window into a process that is far harder for most others. “The rhetoric is that immigrants are taking our jobs, but they’re actually doing the jobs that Americans aren’t hoping to do – we should be nicer to our neighbor,” she said.

Goldstein was just as blunt about the court itself: “All nine of those justices in there know that birthright citizenship is codified in the fourteenth amendment, and I’m not confident that they are going to speak to what they know to be true.”

“You can only hope they’re going to take their jobs seriously,” McCarter chimed in.

But for both of them, the point of showing up went beyond the verdict.

“I always tell my students that they have a voice,” McCarter said, “and I can’t preach it if I’m not going to use it myself.”

There are some so-called “exceptions” to the birthright citizenship rule for children born in the US. These are outlined in Wong Kim Ark.

• Children born to foreign diplomats or ministers

• Children born on foreign public ships in US waters

• Children born to foreign enemies within the US during a hostile occupation

• Children of members of the Indian tribes, who owe direct allegiance to their tribe

A note that Congress ultimately guaranteed US citizenship for Native Americans in 1924.

In a back and forth with justice Sonia Sotomayor, Wang returns to the government’s argument about “allegiance”, and how it pertains to the citizenship of children born in the US to foreign nationals.

“The government’s rule, which really is looking at whether someone has a divided allegiance because they’re a citizen of another country, would exclude the children of all foreign nationals,” Wang said.

“I would say that the relevance of allegiance is the relevance, under the English common law rule that’s embodied in the fourteenth amendment – all persons born in the territory the sovereign owe natural allegiance.”

Bishop William Barber, the social activist and first speaker to take the stage at Wednesday’s rally outside the supreme court, framed the birthright citizenship case in explicitly spiritual terms, calling Trump’s executive order an “unholy attack on babies and children” that cuts across the teachings of many faiths.

“This is 158 years of settled law,” he told the Guardian, warning that overturning it would strip millions of children of healthcare, protection from deportation, and the basic promise of justice. “There will be nothing supreme about ending birthright citizenship.”

He also refused to accept the label of conservative for the court’s majority. “I don’t call them conservative, they’re extremists,” he said.

Barber warned that a ruling against birthright citizenship would have only one logical conclusion: “We have to go on top of that building and erase equal protection under the law.”

Throughout today’s arguments, justices have pushed back against the administration’s position about a parent’s “allegiance” to the United States. The fourteenth amendment doesn’t mention whether a parent’s so-called “allegiance” should be a determining factor for their child to be considered an American citizen.

Sauer explains that allegiance “is not a question of subjective loyalty” but rather a “reciprocal relationship” between a person and the US. “If you’re talking about an alien, if they’re just temporarily passing through. No, they don’t have allegiance,” the solicitor general said.

Robin Galeraith, who travelled from Maryland to join Tuesday’s demonstration outside the supreme court, was heartened by the size of the crowd gathered to defend birthright citizenship but cautious about what the day’s ruling might bring.

“It’s very nice to see so many people defending the constitution and defending what makes our country great – we are an immigrant nation, and that is why we thrive for so long,” she said.

She dismissed Trump’s appearance at the court as the behavior of someone acting out of fear rather than strength.

Robin stopped short of full confidence in the outcome, voicing concern that the court’s conservative majority had been unduly shaped by wealthy interests. It’s a worry, she said, that cuts to the heart of what kind of nation America is meant to be.

“Unfortunately, our supreme court has kind of been bought and paid for by the super rich,” She said. “And so that’s really concerning, because our nation is not supposed to be a nation of just only rich.”

If you’re listening along to the oral arguments at the supreme court today, you’ll have heard a particular case mentioned frequently – US v Wong Kim Ark.

This is the landmark decision on birthright citizenship, which made clear that a child born to parents of Chinese descent who had permanent “domicile” in the US would be a US citizen at the time of birth under the fourteenth amendment.

The Trump administration is arguing that “domicile”, meaning a permanent residence, is a critical part of the interpretation, despite the word not appearing in the citizenship clause itself.

Justice Elena Kagan said that the rationale of the Wong Kim Ark decision was clear.

“Everybody got citizenship by birth, except for a few discrete categories,” she said. “What the fourteenth amendment did was accept that tradition and not attempt to place any limitations on it. And so that was the clear rationale, a clear rationale that is diametrically different from [the administration’s] rationale.”

Kagan ultimately said that the administration’s “revisionist theory” requires the court to change what “people have thought the rule was for more than a century”.

Ahead of the oral arguments at the supreme court today on the Trump administration’s attempts to restrict birthright citizenship, it’s worth noting a how the concept of children born on US soil being considered American citizens came to be.

In this particular case – Trump v Barbara – the challengers also argue that the president’s efforts run afoul of the citizenship clause of the fourteenth amendment, which was ratified after the Civil war, to overturn the supreme court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857. This ruling that stated enslaved people were not citizens of the US, and therefore were not entitled to protection from the federal government.

The Trump administration argues that it’s not trying to gut birthright citizenship at large, but rather return to the original meaning of the citizenship clause, instead of applying to “the children of aliens who are temporarily present in the United States”.

A reminder that my colleagues are covering the latest developments out of the Middle East, particularly Donald Trump’s comments to The Telegraph that he is considering pulling the US out of Nato.

“I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration,” Trump said in an interview. “I was never swayed by Nato. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”

The president has been levelling insults at allies in recent weeks for not helping to reopen the strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively shut down by Iran as the Middle East war rages on.

As we noted earlier, Donald Trump will be in Washington today. After he attends oral arguments in the blockbuster birthright citizenship case at the supreme court, he’ll be back at the White House for closed door meetings.

We won’t hear from the president again until 9pm ET, when he addresses the nation with “an important update” on the war on Iran.

A former video editor and field producer for Alex Jones’s Infowars has said his work for the notorious conspiracy theorist was “nonsense” and “lies”, but he kept at it for four years in his 20s because the far-right media company’s founder was a magnetic presence and it earned him good money.

Josh Owens made those revealing remarks in an NPR interview published on Tuesday promoting his new memoir about once having been an employee of Jones and Infowars – a conversation that also detailed the hand he said he had in fabricating a video of an operative of the Islamic State (IS) terror group sneaking into the US from Mexico immediately after a beheading.

“In Jones’s world, it was all about making things look cinematic,” Owens, who left Infowars in 2017, said to NPR. Likening the aesthetic to that seen in pieces by Vice News, he continued: “We would go out there, we would shoot videos … like we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on.

“But it was nonsense. It was lies.”

To illustrate the point to the outlet, Owens recounted how Infowars deployed him to El Paso, Texas, after a conservative website alleged that IS had erected a training base right on the other side of the US-Mexico border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.

President Trump cannot unilaterally overturn a constitutional amendment; that requires congressional action.

But the administration is arguing not that they’re overturning the amendment, but rather interpreting it according to its intended meaning.

The Trump administration wants the supreme court to reinterpret the amendment and allow the order to be enforced, overriding more than 125 years of legal precedent.

The landmark decision on birthright citizenship, United States v Wong Kim Ark, made clear that a child born to parents of Chinese descent who had permanent “domicile” in the US would be a US citizen at the time of birth under the 14th amendment.

The Trump administration argues “domicile”, meaning a permanent residence, is a critical part of the interpretation, despite the word not appearing in the amendment itself.

“Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the ‘SUCKERS’ that we are!” the president wrote on Truth Social last year.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule by the end of June.

The court last year gave Trump an initial victory in the birthright citizenship context in a ruling restricting the power of federal judges to curb presidential policies nationwide.

Though arising from early-stage judicial rulings declaring Trump’s directive unconstitutional, the court’s ruling did not resolve its legality.

The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has backed Trump on other major immigration-related policies since he returned to the presidency.

It let Trump expand mass deportation measures on an interim basis while legal challenges play out, such as ending humanitarian protections for migrants or allowing them to be deported to countries where they have no ties.

The administration has said that granting citizenship to virtually anyone born on US soil has created incentives for illegal immigration and led to “birth tourism,” by which foreigners travel to the United States to give birth and secure citizenship for their children.

An eventual ruling by the supreme court endorsing the administration’s view could affect the legal status of as many as 250,000 babies born each year, according to some estimates, and require the families of millions more to prove the citizenship status of their newborns, Reuters reported.

The 14th amendment was ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War of 1861-1865 that ended slavery in the United States, and overturned a notorious 1857 supreme court decision that had declared that people of African descent could never be US citizens. Concord, New Hampshire-based US district judge Joseph Laplante last July let the challenge to Trump’s order by these plaintiffs proceed as a class, allowing the policy to be blocked nationwide.

The challengers have said the supreme court already settled the question of birthright citizenship in an 1898 case called United States v Wong Kim Ark, which recognized that the 14th amendment grants citizenship by birth on US soil, including to the children of foreign nationals.

The administration contends that the 1898 precedent supports Trump’s order because, according to the court’s ruling in that case, at the time of his birth, Wong Kim Ark’s parents had permanent domicile and residence in the United States.