- On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the legal challenge to the president’s attempt to circumvent the 14th Amendment and determine for himself who is and who is not a US citizen at birth. Trump himself attended the first hour of arguments while Solicitor General D John Sauer made the government’s case before the justices, but left as Cecillia Wang, the National Legal Director for the ACLU, laid out the case for respecting the plain language of the Constitution. While the general feeling from analysts is that the Court was highly skeptical of the administration’s arguments, we will have to wait until June for the Court to release its decision.
- In an effort led by our own Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, 218 members of the House of Representatives signed onto a discharge petition to consider a bill extending TPS for Haiti. A discharge petition is a rarely used procedure in the House that forces leadership to hold a vote on an issue. Pressley’s bipartisan discharge petition requires House leadership to bring for a vote a bill that would require DHS to extend TPS for Haiti until at least August of 2028.
- State officials and advocates won a series of legal victories against the Trump Administration over the past week. On Friday, a federal judge in Minnesota rejected the administration’s bid to end in-state tuition for undocumented students. The judge found that the state’s law did not violate federal law, and that the administration incorrectly sued the Governor and Attorney General who do not have power to change the law. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Colorado threw out an administration lawsuit challenging the state’s sanctuary policies as well as similar policies in the City of Denver. Closer to home, a federal judge here in Boston ruled on Tuesday that the administration acted illegally in stripping 900,000 of lawful status. The impacted individuals had all entered the country using the CBP One app, and the court found that the administration was in violation of both laws and their own regulations by stripping these individuals of lawful presence.