The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Monday that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship to virtually all children born on American soil, striking down the executive order President Trump signed on the first day of his second term in January 2025. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined Roberts along with the three Democratic-appointed justices. Justice Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment separately. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented. CNBC reported the decision in Trump v. Barbara.
Trump’s order sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who were in the country unlawfully or on temporary visas. Roberts returned to the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark, in which the court ruled that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents was a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment, even though his parents could not be naturalized under the laws of the time. NPR reported that Roberts observed the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment chose their language deliberately broad, citing both the colonists’ claims to the “rights of Englishmen” and the abolitionists who called citizenship by birth an “ancient and universal” rule. The order is invalid.
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 to settle a question the founders had left open: who belongs. It was written in response to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which had held that Black Americans, enslaved or free, could never be citizens. The framers used sweeping language because they expected the clause to be tested by courts unfriendly to broad readings. They were right. Monday’s ruling is the most direct test in 128 years, and the clause held.
The court’s closing session Monday produced two additional significant decisions. In the campaign finance case, the justices voted 6-3 to strike down the federal limits on how much money political parties may spend directly in coordination with their candidates, according to NPR. Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the 1974 restrictions, passed by Congress in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, violate the First Amendment. Under those limits, coordinated party spending for Senate races had been capped at between $130,600 and $4 million depending on state population. Those caps are now gone. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. The fall midterms are four months out.
In West Virginia v. B.P.J., the court ruled 6-3 that states may require student-athletes to compete on teams corresponding to their biological sex. The case centered on laws passed by Idaho in 2020 and West Virginia in 2022. Justice Kavanaugh wrote that Title IX regulations “expressly permit schools to maintain separate teams for members of each sex,” and that when those regulations were written in the 1970s, “sex” meant biological sex. The ruling validates similar laws on the books in more than two dozen other states. The same justices who dissented in the campaign finance case dissented here.
President Vladimir Putin acknowledged publicly this week what fuel lines in at least 55 of Russia’s 83 federal regions have made difficult to deny: Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian oil refineries are producing significant shortages in the country’s domestic fuel supply. Putin described the situation as “certain shortages.” Al Jazeera reported on the scope of disruptions spreading from European Russia into Siberia and the Far East.
More than 20 Ukrainian strikes have hit Russian refineries since January. RFE/RL reported that the International Energy Agency called the current disruption level “unprecedented in the history of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.” Roughly a quarter of Russia’s refining capacity is offline or operating below normal levels. The Moscow refinery in Kapotnya, struck twice in June, isn’t expected to resume operations for at least six months. Videos from gas stations across Russia have shown physical confrontations over fuel. Russia’s military draws from the same domestic supply chain.
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization on May 17, has now produced more than 1,155 confirmed cases and at least 360 deaths in the DRC, according to the CDC. Uganda has recorded two deaths. By case count, the outbreak is the third-largest in recorded history. The strain is Bundibugyo, a variant distinct from the Zaire strain that drove the 2014 West Africa outbreak.
This is only the second known Bundibugyo outbreak. The first occurred in Uganda in 2007 and 2008, infected 149 people, and killed 37. It was contained within months. The current outbreak began in northeastern DRC, crossed into Uganda, and has since spread into North Kivu and South Kivu provinces. There is no approved vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain deployed at scale. What closed the 2007 outbreak was rapid case identification and contact tracing. Both are considerably harder in an active conflict zone with limited infrastructure, which describes the part of DRC where this one started.
The Associated Press called Colorado’s 1st Congressional District Democratic primary just after 10 p.m. Monday for Melat Kiros, 29, a first-time candidate who has never held public office. She defeated Representative Diana DeGette, first elected to that Denver seat in 1996 and returning for what would have been a sixteenth term. Colorado Public Radio reported that Kiros led 49 percent to 44 percent when the race was called.
The trajectory of the race was set in March, when Kiros took 67 percent of Denver Democratic assembly delegate votes to DeGette’s 33 percent, which handed her the top ballot position. She carried endorsements from the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats, the same organization that supported Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her 2018 primary defeat of 10-term Representative Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th District. The Colorado district is safe for Democrats in November. Whoever wins the general election will serve. Melat Kiros is twenty-nine years old. DeGette is sixty-nine. The seat turns over.
A team at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California has published a method for generating a renewable supply of immune cells that can be engineered to fight cancer, in a paper reported by ScienceDaily and published in the journal Cell. Led by Dr. Qi-Long Ying, the researchers worked with a class of precursor cells called granulocyte-monocyte progenitors, which give rise to macrophages and other components of the immune system. Previous immunotherapy approaches have relied on mature T-cells, which are hard to produce in quantity and lose effectiveness over time. Progenitor cells of this type can be expanded and replenished in ways that mature cells cannot.
The cells can be modified to recognize specific cancer markers and to help stimulate broader immune responses. This is early research, and the distance between a paper in Cell and a therapy available to patients runs through years of additional trials. What the USC team showed is that the mechanism they proposed is real, that these progenitor cells can be expanded and engineered without losing their function, and that they work in laboratory models. That’s the kind of result that sends other researchers back to their own labs to run the next set of experiments. The ground under cancer immunotherapy is moving.
Carol Gifford published a piece Monday in the Health section that belongs in the category of things worth reading before you need them. It’s called What to Expect After Open Heart Surgery, and it starts with a woman named Diane, whose husband came home four days after a coronary artery bypass, textbook surgery with no complications, carrying a folder of printed discharge instructions and a two-week follow-up appointment scheduled. Diane called Gifford the morning after he got home. She wanted to know if what was happening in their living room was normal. He couldn’t find a comfortable position to sleep. Walking to the kitchen and back exhausted him. He’d cried that morning, unprompted, which had frightened her, because in thirty-five years of marriage she’d seen him cry exactly twice. He kept touching his chest. Not from pain. Checking.
Gifford spent fourteen years as a registered nurse in internal medicine and hospital case management. What she wrote isn’t a summary of the surgery. It’s the piece the discharge folder doesn’t contain. The sternal restrictions and why they exist. The clicking sound a healing breastbone makes and what it means. The cognitive fog that affects somewhere between 30 and 80 percent of bypass patients in the weeks after surgery, and why it’s temporary. The depression that arrives in an estimated 20 to 40 percent of cardiac patients, and why it needs to be treated rather than waited out. The cardiac rehabilitation program that the clinical evidence says changes outcomes, and that too many patients treat as optional when it isn’t. She covers what to watch for, when to call, and how long full recovery actually takes. She answers Diane’s question in the third sentence: “Yes. This is exactly what it’s supposed to look like.” Everything that follows earns that answer. The piece is in the Health section.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
