Summary of today’s supreme court rulings
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The supreme court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s bid to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, who were legally in the US and protected from deportation. In another boost to Donald Trump’s unprecedented hardline crackdown on immigrants, including many who have lived legally in the US for years, the court issued a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative-leaning majority. The decision leaves Haitians and Syrians in the US on TPS vulnerable to deportation even if they have applications for other forms of immigration status in progress.
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New York’s attorney general Letitia James called the decision “a betrayal of our values”, and New York representative Mike Lawler argued that “the situation on the ground in Haiti is a humanitarian and political disaster and continues to warrant an extension.” Indeed, the state department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping. Here’s José Olivares’s report.
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In another major immigration ruling, the high court gave the Trump administration a green light to turn back asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a decision that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system. The Trump administration has sought for years to block migrants from setting foot on US soil, where federal law guarantees them the right to claim asylum and protection from persecution. The court’s 6-3 ruling will allow that practice to resume, concluding a battle that has spanned three administrations. Maanvi Singh reports.
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The supreme court also struck down a restrictive gun law in the state of Hawaii that bans people from carrying guns in certain public spaces and on private property without the permission of the property’s owner. The court’s 6-3 decision means that people can carry guns onto privately owned property like shopping malls and gas stations, unless the owners specifically say guns are banned at their establishments. Abené Clayton has the story.
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And finally, the court found in favor of the former Monsanto company in a ruling that is expected to block thousands of lawsuits filed by people alleging the key ingredient in the weed killer Roundup causes cancer. The chemical – glyphosate – has been scientifically linked to cancer in multiple studies, and was classified a probable human carcinogen by an arm of the World Health Organization in 2015.
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Kentucky Republican representative Thomas Massie called the decision a “blatant travesty of justice”. Democratic senator Cory Booker said the ruling was “a devastating blow” and allowed big corporations “to poison us with impunity”. Carey Gillam and Dharna Noor have this report.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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The supreme court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s bid to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, who were legally in the US and protected from deportation.
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The White House has requested Congress approve $87.6bn in new funding, much of which would go towards the costs of Donald Trump’s war against Iran, but a top Democrat has signaled the party will not support paying for an unpopular conflict that lawmakers never authorized.
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The White House claims video shot 10 days after the alleged vandalism of reflecting pool vindicates Trump – it does not.
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New evidence has emerged that Robert F Kennedy Jr was on a vaccine-related “mission” when he visited Samoa ahead of a deadly measles outbreak in 2019, raising further questions about whether the US health secretary lied to the Senate when he said the trip had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
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“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story,” vice-president JD Vance said during a discussion of his new book at the Richard Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, California. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” Vance also praised Nixon during the discussion, not mentioning that he had called the late president “a cynical asshole” in 2016.
California senators ask why Trump has not requested overdue disaster relief funding for areas devastated by wildfires
California’s two Democratic senators, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, asked in a joint statement on Thursday why the Trump administration is requesting $87m in supplemental funding for its war ion Iran, but has still not provided disaster relief funding to communities impacted by the Eaton and Palisades fires, more than 18 months later.
The senators write:
“Most of the Administration’s $87 billion supplement spending request would defray costs incurred as a result of the President’s decision to go to war with Iran, a war not authorized by Congress or supported by the American people. That military funding does nothing to address the rising costs of living of the public.
“Nor does the bill provide any relief to Southern Californians still needing assistance to recover and rebuild after the devastating fires that took place eighteen months ago. Donald Trump’s desire to punish Los Angeles and the state of California for not voting for him, means once again that thousands of Angelinos are left watching this administration fight for anything but them, their businesses, and their communities.
“These fires did not discriminate based on party or political preference. Neither should this administration.”
Nick Robins-Early
California voters will get to decide in November whether billionaires should pay a one-time 5% tax, after a deadline passed on Thursday for its backers to withdraw the measure.
The so-called billionaire tax is among the highest-profile ballot efforts in the US this year taking aim at rising wealth disparities, and is set to be one of the state’s most contentious ballot initiatives. It has already spurred tech moguls to pour millions of dollars into attempts to stop the proposal.
State officials announced last week that the California Billionaire Tax Act had reached enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, but the elections process allowed the coalition backing the tax until 5pm on Thursday to decide whether to move forward with it.
Negotiations this week between the unions behind the effort and Governor Gavin Newsom failed to reach a deal by the cutoff, with California’s secretary of state subsequently confirming the tax proposal would go to voters. To get on the November ballot, backers of a measure must first gain a certain threshold of signatures from California residents in support of the initiative.
The ballot proposal was put forward by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), which has argued it would fund the state’s healthcare, education and food assistance programs. Newsom and billionaire-backed groups opposing the tax allege that it would drive business out of California and harm the economy.
The billionaire tax has grown in prominence throughout the year as proponents gained over 1.55m signatures by April alone, more than double the requirement for getting on the ballot – something organizers say is testament to its popularity.
Trump repeats false claim ‘We caught some people vandalizing our beautiful reflecting pool’
In 20 minutes of remarks at a Rose Garden dinner on Thursday, Donald Trump repeated his false claim that “We caught some people vandalizing our beautiful reflecting pool”.
“They took a cutter, a box cutter or something very sharp- can you imagine?” the president said. “And they threw a little fertilizer in the water, which is not good … But they caught them, they actually caught them.”
“They cut the bottom with a knife and pulled it and tried to do as much damage as possible.
In fact, the government has not arrested anyone for cutting the newly applied polyurea liner on the floor of the pool with a knife or a box-cutter, as the president says, and has produced no evidence that such a crime took place. There is also no evidence that the algae blooms were caused by fertilizer.
Instead, the US Park Police released a wanted poster for an unidentified woman who was caught on surveillance-camera video reaching into the pool and apparently removing a small piece of the polyurea liner last week, one day after reporters first documented the fact that chunks of the expensively applied liner had peeled away from the floor of the pool and floated to the surface.
The area around the reflecting pool was fenced-off and closed on Thursday, video recorded by the independent journalist Amanda Moore showed. Police officers and national guard troops sealed off the area as a second round of renovations began to repair the peeling liner and remove the algae blooms that appeared within a week of the project’s supposed completion earlier this month.
‘This used to be grass, beautiful grass, but it was useless’, Trump tells dinner guests in the paved-over Rose Garden
Donald Trump began his remarks on Thursday evening to dinner guests assembled on the new patio he created in the Rose Garden by praising his own decision to pave-over the lawn.
“This used to be grass, beautiful grass, but it was useless”, the president told a group of cabinet officials, farmer and ranchers. “You couldn’t stand. It was always wet. You know, this used to be a wetland and the grass was wet. If it rained seven days before, the grass was soaking wet, and we’d have reporters there, female reporters would be holding their shoes… destroyed, ruined; men too.”
The president went on to describe his decision to start a war with Iran, which created a global economic crisis, not as an “excursion” but “a U-turn”.
He then repeated his claim that Iran would soon be using some of its unfrozen assets to buy American agricultural products. “We’re going to be taking some of their money, and we’ll spend it, and we’re going to be buying wheat, soybeans and corn, a lot of it” the president said.
Despite spending a good deal of time on social media, Trump appeared to have missed the message, posted on X earlier on Thursday, in which Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said that is not going to happen.
“America falsely claims our unfrozen assets will buy their agriculture”, Ghalibaf wrote. ”Interesting. The only crop we’re harvesting is what you planted: decades of mistrust. It’s organic, abundant, and homegrown. But apparently the US only exports GMO soybeans, broken promises and trash talks.”
Trump nominates Chris Klomp for deputy health secretary post
Donald Trump said in a social media post on Thursday that he is nominating Chris Klomp, a former health-care technology entrepreneur, to serve as deputy health secretary.
Klomp currently serves as both the head of Medicare, the federal health program for older Americans and people with disabilities, and reportedly impressed Trump so much by leading the government’s negotiations with drug companies to cut their prices that he calls him his “favorite Mormon” or just “my Mormon”.
Klomp’s biography on the Medicare website refers to his “extensive experience in healthcare payment reform and data sharing”.
Klomp began his career at the private equity firm Bain Capital. During the first Trump administration, Stat News reported, Klomp “contributed to early discussions, in 2020, about how to use data to monitor the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Vance praises Nixon, a decade after reportedly calling him ‘a cynical asshole’ like Trump
During his appearance at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California on Thursday, JD Vance told the crowd, “I’ve always liked Richard Nixon”.
That is not, strictly speaking, true, given that Vance wrote in a text message to a former roommate at Yale law school in February 2016: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Those comments were revealed in 2022, when Vance was running for the Senate and his former roommate, Josh McLaurin, who is now a state lawmaker in Georgia, produced a screenshot of the text message from Vance.
At the time, Vance’s campaign manager did not contest the authenticity of the text, saying instead that Vance “not liking Trump six years ago” was hardly news, and insisting that he was “a genuine convert” to Trump
On Thursday, Vance, now Trump’s vice-president, went on to call Nixon, who was forced to resign in disgrace in 1974, “a political genius”.
“Nixon’s coalition in ‘72”, Vance said, “closely resembles the Trump coalition of 2024”.
Lauren Gambino
Near the end of a discussion of his new book at the Richard Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, California on Thursday, vice-president JD Vance scoffed at protesters “waving the Palestinian flag outside and hollering at us in Spanish”.
“By the way, the vice president can’t understand what you’re protesting about if you don’t speak the language of everybody else here”, Vance said as the crowd erupted in applause.
“Note to protesters”, he added, chuckling, “if you want the vice president to hear what you’re protesting about you’ve got to use a language I actually understand.”
White House claims video shot 10 days after alleged vandalism of reflecting pool vindicates Trump – it does not
The White House claimed on Thursday that a brief video clip of a woman pulling what looked like a small piece of the lining of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool out of the water on 19 June, 10 days after damage to the pool was reported to US Park Police, somehow vindicates Donald Trump’s very different account of a 350-ft long “slit” having been cut in the newly applied lining by vandals.
On social media, and in an email sent to reporters, the White House pointed to 22 seconds of surveillance video, which the park police said was recorded on the afternoon of 19 June, that showed a young woman reaching into the pool and removing what appeared to be a small piece of the new polyurea liner.
A slightly longer version of the clip, provided to Fox News and posted on social media by the White House, showed that the woman dipped her hand into the water in full view of workers in the pool and gave no indiction that she, or a man with her, had any sort of knife.
The date of the video, confirmed by the government, matters, because that means the incident took place one day after journalists, including Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Jen Bendery of HuffPost and the photojournalist Andrew Leyden first reported that chucks of the liner had peeled off and were floating on the surface of the pool, just a week after the renovation was called complete.
As Bendery also reported that day, pieces of the floating liner had already become attractive as souvenirs to people who were tearing off small chunks to commemorate the failure of Trump’s $14.2m renovation.
Importantly, the date of the video presented by the White House as proof that “Trump was right” also contradicts the timeline for the alleged vandalism offered to a federal court on Wednesday in a sworn statement from a National Park Service official.
In that court filing, the park service’s deputy operations director, Frank Lands, wrote:
On June 9, 2026, after the rehabilitation project was substantially complete, the U.S. Park Police responded to an NPS report of damage to the reflecting pool, including a caulk over the foam sealant that was cut with a sharp knife or razor and destruction of delaminating surface material.
Clearly, the woman seen in the video recorded on 19 June could not have been, as a Fox News report blasted out by the White House on Thursday claimed, caught “in the act” of causing damage to the pool liner that was first noticed on 9 June.
There are other problems with the White House timeline too.
First, the video shows the woman removing and holding up just a small piece of material, not much bigger than her hand, while Trump told reporters that there were “pictures” of vandals cutting a 350-ft gash in the lining. Visitors to the pool had been photographed tearing off similarly small strips of the peeling liner the day before, but there is no evidence that anyone cut the polyurea sealant loose in the first place.
Second, the woman in the video grabbed this apparent souvenir in broad daylight, one day after multiple pieces of debris had been spotted by reporters, at a time when multiple workers were in the pool, attempting to clean it of debris and algae, and the area was being guarded by federal officers, park police and national guard troops.
There is also evidence, from news photographs taken on 19 June, that at least one critic of the 47th president stuck their hand in the pool that day for another reason: to use the algae covered pool liner as a slate to express their desire for his presidency to end.
Third, on 9 June, when the park service first reported damage to the reflecting pool to the US Park Police, the renovated reflecting pool had not yet been opened to the public, and was still fenced off as workers power-washed the walkways around the pool.
On 8 June, the day before damage to the pool was noticed by the park service, no one from the public was allowed near the pool, but workers were photographed in it, near the area where the woman would be recorded 11 days later, vigorously cleaning the newly applied liner as the pool was refilled with water.
The final question raised by the video of the woman is why, if the pool area is covered by surveillance-cameras, the Trump administration has not released any video of any alleged vandalism being carried out before the damage was reported on 9 June.
Lauren Gambino
JD Vance doesn’t think the era-defining Watergate scandal would have lasted more than a single news cycle in today’s fragmented, hyperpartisan political environment – and certainly wouldn’t have led to a president’s downfall.
“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story,” the vice president said during a discussion of his new book at the Richard Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, California. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Watergate, the biggest political scandal of the 20th century, and the only one to cause a presidential resignation, began in 1972 with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC, by operatives connected to Nixon’s re-election campaign.
Vance continued: “If you look at the story of how the deep-state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first administration. There is a parallel.”
Donald Trump was twice impeached during his first term: once for allegedly abusing his power to pressure Ukraininan president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his then-political rival Joe Biden under the threat of withholding military aid and a second time for inflaming the mob of supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6 after an unsuccessful campaign to overturn his election defeat.
Despite the longstanding view that Watergate was a triumph of the American system of government–accountability for abuse of power at the highest level – Trump and his allies have sought to rewrite the public understanding of the scandal. Trump, the 45th and 47th president, has previously claimed that Nixon only “may” have been guilty.
In Yorba Linda on Thursday, Vance called Nixon a “political genius” and drew a parallel between himself and the 37th president.
“Young senator. Vice president. Writes some bestselling books. Is hated by the media,” Vance said. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance.”
Vance, widely viewed as a 2028 White House hopeful, omitted, of course, the role Nixon is most famous for: president.
Jeffries calls on Senate to pass bipartisan bill to restore TPS to Haitians after ‘cruel’ court decision
The House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries responded on Thursday to the “reckless” and “cruel” supreme court decision to allow the Trump administration to strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who fled violence at home by calling on the Republican-led Senate to immediately pass a bill to restore TPS to Haitians which passed the House in April with bipartisan support.
“TPS holders from Haiti and Syria are our hardworking neighbors actively contributing to our communities, supporting our small businesses and filling critical labor needs,” Jeffries said in a statement. “This decision harms them, their families and the communities all across America that rely on their participation in the healthcare workforce and beyond.”
“Over the objection of Donald Trump and Mike Johnson, House Democrats passed legislation in April to extend TPS for Haitians and protect our communities from the inhumane and unacceptable policies of this out-of-control administration”, Jeffries added. “The Senate should immediately move Rep Laura Gillen’s bipartisan bill in response to today’s reckless supreme court decision.”
Jeffries was referring to a bill directing “the secretary of homeland security to “designate Haiti for temporary protected status until” three months after a new president is sworn in 2029. That measure, introduced by a Democratic congresswoman from a part of Long Island, New York where there are over 30,000 Haitian residents, was put to a vote over the objections of Republican House leaders after a successful discharge petition. It passed with bipartisan support, 224-204, more than two months ago, but has not been put to a vote in the Republican-led Senate.
Gillen echoed the Democratic leader’s call in a statement of her own on Thursday.
“The supreme court’s cruel and harmful decision to end Temporary Protected Status for hardworking, law-abiding Haitians in this country now puts our friends and neighbors’ lives at risk, as they could be forced to face the horrific violence and chaos in Haiti,” the lawmaker wrote.
“Removing our neighbors would not just be a humanitarian catastrophe; it would hurt our economy. Haitian TPS recipients are a part of the fabric of our daily lives and pillars of our economy and faith communities. They are a fundamental part of our vibrant identity on Long Island,” she added.
White House seeks extra funds for Iran war as part of $87.6bn request
Chris Stein
The White House has requested Congress approve $87.6bn in new funding, much of which would go towards the costs of Donald Trump’s war against Iran, but a top Democrat has signaled the party will not support paying for an unpopular conflict that lawmakers never authorized.
The Trump administration’s supplemental funding request released yesterday comes amid a logjam in US Congress sparked by the president’s demand that the Senate pass a measure to impose sweeping new restrictions on voting nationwide.
The standoff intensified this week, when Trump refused to sign a major housing bill approved with bipartisan majorities until the voting bill advances, after previously linking its passage to renewal of a key foreign surveillance law.
In a letter outlining the Iran war funding request, the White House office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, wrote that $67.1bn of the funds would be used to cover costs related to the conflict with Iran, and would include $21bn for munitions procurement and the defense industrial base.
The request also contains $1.4bn to respond to the outbreak of Ebola in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and $11.1bn for US farmers, who have been struggling with economic shocks related to the Trump administration’s tariff regime, as well as prices for fertilizer and diesel driven higher by the conflict with Iran.
The White House also wants Congress to codify in the proposal year-round sales of E15, a gasoline blend with higher ethanol content that can be cheaper but also cause more air pollution in warmer months.
The latest funding request comes on top of Trump’s proposed $1.5tn budget for the Pentagon, its largest in decades. While appropriators in the Senate and House of Representatives have advanced legislation to authorize $1.15tn of those funds, the White House’s request that the remaining $350bn be approved in a party-line measure has been met with skepticism from senior Republicans.
Democratic lawmakers have also scorned the idea of paying for the war with Iran, which Trump initiated in February alongside Israel without first requesting Congress’s permission. Surveys have shown the conflict is unpopular with the public, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week finding that just a quarter of Americans believe the United States has emerged stronger from the conflict.
DeSantis boasts of deporting 21,000 as ‘politically toxic’ Alligator Alcatraz jail closes
Richard Luscombe
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, boasted today of deporting 21,000 people from Alligator Alcatraz, as he confirmed the closure of the notorious immigration jail hastily erected in the Everglades that became a byword for cruelty and human rights abuses and environmental damage.
Standing beside Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s so-called border czar, at a press conference at the now dismantled site in Ochopee in the environmentally sensitive region in south Florida, DeSantis presented its year-long operation as a victory for the president’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda.
“Alligator Alcatraz fulfilled the role it was designed to serve,” he said, adding that all of the detainees held there until last week had been transferred into federal immigration custody elsewhere.
“When you start talking about 21,000 folks, that without question has made our state safer, and it’s made the country safer as well,” DeSantis added.
Critics, however, said the jail run by the Florida state, on which the governor was reportedly spending $1.2m a day of Florida taxpayers’ money, was a political liability for DeSantis.
There was a groundswell that publicity over the multiplying reports of “inhumane” treatment of undocumented detainees, including physical abuse and isolation from legal representation, was becoming untenable.
“Alligator Alcatraz is now shut down due to the relentless action of thousands of people who refused to stand idly by,” said Noelle Damico, director of social justice at the Workers Circle, an advocacy group that held a 47th and final weekly “freedom vigil” outside the remote jail on Sunday.
“We denounced the brutality, lawlessness, chaos and corruption that was Alligator Alcatraz. We, the people, made it politically toxic. We brought it to an end here, and we will bring it to an end everywhere.”
Read the rest of Richard’s report here:
In another fiery exchange with DeLauro, Mullin talked over her multiple times as she tried to ask him questions about Fema. Things got so heated that the Republican chair had to interrupt Mullin mid-ramble to remind him, “Mr Secretary … Mr Secretary, the floor is hers.”
Amodei added: “Actually, I gave it to her. You know there’s a chairman of a committee? That’s me, I gave it back to her. She’s got it.”
Here’s the clip.
A reminder that Mullin was grilled over his temper during his confirmation hearing back in March. Senate homeland security chair Rand Paul said he was a “man with anger issues” after Mullin previously called him a “freaking snake” and said he understood why a neighbor attacked Paul in 2017. Mullin did not apologize.
Here’s Mullin clutching his stress ball at today’s hearing (with decidedly mixed results).
This morning, Trump’s DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin got into some heated exchanges with Democratic lawmakers at his hearing before the House appropriations subcommittee on homeland security.
In one instance, he scolded ranking member Rosa DeLauro after the Connecticut Democrat criticized the administration’s efforts to reunite children separated from their families by its immigration policies.
DeLauro began to tell him that “3,900 children were separated from their families” at the US-Mexico border before Mullin interrupted her to claim: “450,000 kids were lost during the Biden administration and you didn’t say a word about it.”
“Mr Secretary! Do not interrupt,” said DeLauro, raising her voice. “Don’t you point your finger at me,” he retorted. “I will point my finger at you,” DeLauro replied. Mullin went on to call her a “hypocrite”.
“You should be as upset about the 450,000 kids that were lost. You didn’t say a word about it. For four years you never said a word,” Mullin yelled.
DeLauro then appealed to subcommittee chair, Republican Mark Amodei, “Could you put him in his place first?”
“You should be put in your place,” Mullin quipped, before he was shut down by Amodei, who allowed DeLauro to claim back her time.
“We are going to have something resembling order here. The time is the ranking member’s,” Amodei said, referring to DeLauro. To Mullin, he added: “If you would like to respond later on, there are methods to do that. but it’s not a who can respond louder into the mic.”
“Do not accuse me of lying,” DeLauro added. “Then don’t,” Mullin said.
Here’s the clip.
