US supreme court rules against Biden in key immigration case

Justices decline to freeze lower court order that blocked officials from changing deportation guidance from Trump era

The supreme court will not allow the Biden administration to implement an immigration policy that prioritizes deportation of people arriving in the US illegally who pose the greatest public safety risk.

The court’s order late on Thursday leaves the policy frozen nationwide for now. The vote was 5-4, with conservative Amy Coney Barrett joining liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and newcomer to the bench Ketanji Brown Jackson in saying they would have allowed the Biden administration to put in place the guidance.

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What the liberal justices’ scorching dissent reveals about the US supreme court

Opinions from Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor send stark warning about increasingly radical court abandoning long-held principles

The US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, ending nearly 50 years of federal protections for abortion access, was “catastrophic”. The ruling amounted to a “curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens”. The drastic decision “undermines the court’s legitimacy”, and the consequences of it will set off an “upheaval in … society”.

Those are voices from the supreme court itself: the words of its three liberal justices – Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – in their scorching and thorough joint dissenting opinion on a decision by their body which has fundamentally altered the lives of millions of Americans.

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Biden signs executive order to protect US abortion access and urges Americans to ‘vote, vote, vote’ – as it happened

It’s official; Biden has formally signed an executive order protecting access to abortion and other reproductive healthcare services.

Here is a previous post detailing what is in the executive order.

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Global dismay as supreme court ruling leaves Biden’s climate policy in tatters

Biden’s election was billed as heralding a ‘climate presidency’ but congressional and judicial roadblocks mean he has little to show

Joe Biden’s election triggered a global surge in optimism that the climate crisis would, finally, be decisively confronted. But the US supreme court’s decision last week to curtail America’s ability to cut planet-heating emissions has proved the latest blow to a faltering effort by Biden on climate that is now in danger of becoming largely moribund.

The supreme court’s ruling that the US government could not use its existing powers to phase out coal-fired power generation without “clear congressional authorization” quickly ricocheted around the world among those now accustomed to looking on in dismay at America’s seemingly endless stumbles in addressing global heating.

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Next up: voting rights, as US supreme court set to tear up more protections

The ideologically driven conservative majority is likely to further weaken key civil rights legislation after a term of radical rulings

The final days of the US supreme court’s term offered a clear look at the way its new 6-3 conservative majority is bluntly using its power to reshape American life, but its next term is also set to hear cases that could prove equally, or even more, consequential.

“This really is the ‘Yolo’ [you only live once] court,” said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan who closely follows the court. “I don’t think people fathom just how much more they will do.”

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Biden calls court’s Roe ruling ‘tragic reversal’ during meeting with Democratic governors – as it happened

Speaking first, New York governor Kathy Hochul, said her state is acting quickly to shore up women’s reproductive rights in its constitution and protect access to contraception and other rights.

“This is frightening time for women all across our nation, a lot of fear and anxiety out there,” she said.

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US supreme court hobbles government power to limit harmful emissions

Court sides with Republican states as ruling represents landmark moment in rightwing effort to dismantle ‘regulatory state’

The US supreme court has sided with Republican-led states to in effect hobble the federal government’s ability to tackle the climate crisis, in a ruling that will have profound implications for the government’s overall regulatory power.

In a 6-3 decision that will seriously hinder America’s ability to stave off disastrous global heating, the supreme court, which became dominated by rightwing justices under the Trump administration, has opted to support a case brought by West Virginia that demands the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be limited in how it regulates planet-heating gases from the energy sector.

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Supreme court decisions: court deals blow on climate but Biden wins immigration case – live

In its second and final decision of the day, the Supreme Court on Thursday said Biden can terminate a controversial Trump-era immigration policy, known as Remain in Mexico. The ruling affirms a president’s broad power to set the nation’s immigration policy.

The ruling concludes the most consequential supreme court term in recent memory.

The case, which was backed by a host of other Republican-led states including Texas and Kentucky, was highly unusual in that it was based upon the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era strategy to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants that never came into effect. The Biden administration sought to have the case dismissed as baseless given the plan was dropped and has not been resurrected.

Not only was this case about a regulation that does not exist, that never took effect, and which would have imposed obligations on the energy sector that it would have met regardless. It also involves two legal doctrines that are not mentioned in the constitution, and that most scholars agree have no basis in any federal statute.

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Biden can end Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ program, supreme court rules

Ruling by 5-4 allows administration to terminate policy that forced asylum seekers to return to Mexico while claims are considered

The supreme court has issued a ruling that will allow the Biden administration to end a Trump-era immigration program forcing asylum seekers attempting to enter the US at the southern border to return to Mexico while their claims are considered.

Soon after taking office, Biden had sought to completely end the program known informally as “Remain in Mexico” and formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols.

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Giuliani associate Lev Parnas handed 20 months in prison for campaign finance fraud – as it happened

• It was a mixed Tuesday for Donald Trump-backed candidates in Republican primary elections around the country. Colorado voters largely rejected most Trump-supporting candidates in Tuesday’s GOP primaries, although Lauren Boebert, the extremist Colorado Republican congresswoman, won her bid for relection.

• In Illinois, Mary Miller, who had been criticized after she declared the Supreme Court’s abortion decision as a “victory for white life” – a spokesman said she had mixed up her words – won in after she was backed by Trump. Darren Bailey, who was also endorsed by Trump, won the Republican gubernatorial primary in the state.

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Facebook and Instagram removing posts with mentions of abortion pills

In light of the supreme court’s verdict, memes and status updates on social media on how to access the medicines have exploded

Facebook and Instagram have begun removing posts related to abortion pills, as posts about such medication spiked following the supreme court’s ruling stripping away constitutional protections for abortions.

Memes and status updates explaining how people can obtain abortion pills in the mail have exploded across social platforms in recent days.

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Why US women are deleting their period tracking apps

Even before the supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the trend to ditch the apps began amid fears of prosecution

Many American women in recent days have deleted period tracking apps from their cellphones, amid fears the data collected by the apps could be used against them in future criminal cases in states where abortion has become illegal.

The trend already started last month when a draft supreme court opinion that suggested the court was set to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked, and has only intensified since the court on Friday revoked the federal right to abortion

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Louisiana judge blocks abortion ban amid uproar after Roe v Wade ruling

State temporarily blocked from enforcing ban as other US states pass ‘trigger laws’ designed to severely curtail access to abortion

A Louisiana judge on Monday temporarily stopped the state from enforcing Republican-backed laws banning abortion, set to take effect after the US supreme court ended the constitutional right to the procedure last week.

Louisiana is one of 13 states which passed “trigger laws”, to ban or severely restrict abortions once the supreme court overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that recognized a right to the procedure. It did so on Friday, stoking uproar among progressives and protests and counter-protests on the streets of major cities.

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US supreme court rules in favor of high school football coach over on-field prayers – as it happened

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that football coach Joseph Kennedy had a right to publicly pray after games because he was not requiring others to participate in the practice.

“Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks,” Gorsuch wrote.

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‘They set a torch to it’: Warren says court lost legitimacy with Roe reversal

Top Democrats again call for appointing additional justices to blunt conservative super-majority which made ruling possible

Leading Democrats on Sunday continued calling the supreme court’s legitimacy into question after it took away the nationwide right to abortion last week, and some again lobbied for appointing additional justices to the panel so as to blunt the conservative super-majority which made the controversial ruling possible.

The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren suggested to ABC’s This Week that there was urgency to do that because supreme court justice Clarence Thomas indicated within Friday’s decision to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade ruling that he’s open to reconsidering precedents guaranteeing contraception, same-sex marriage rights and consensual gay sex.

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Roe v Wade: legal experts see limited opportunities to challenge court ruling

Legal scholar Lawrence Tribe: ‘We’re in for a long, tangled, chaotic and, in terms of human suffering, horribly costly struggle’

Joe Biden on Saturday renewed his criticism of the supreme court, a day after justices handed down a historic ruling that overturned a ruling that had guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion for almost half a century.

“The supreme court has made some terrible decisions,” Biden said at an event where he signed last week’s bipartisan gun control bill into law. The president said he and the first lady, Jill Biden, knew “how painful and devastating the decision is for so many Americans” and vowed that his administration would focus on how states implement the decision.

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Roe v Wade: senators say Trump supreme court nominees misled them

Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh said they would not overturn landmark abortion ruling, Susan Collins and Joe Manchin say

When the supreme court decided on Friday to overturn Roe v Wade, several senators who recently approved justices responsible for this decision said they felt deceived. These politicians pointed to prior statements from Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch; both male judges had claimed they would not overturn Roe.

“I feel misled,” the Maine senator Susan Collins told the New York Times. In a lengthy meeting on 21 August 2018, the Republican reportedly grilled Kavanaugh to explain why he could be trusted not to overturn Roe.

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Biden administration signals fight to stop states banning abortion pill

With Roe v Wade overturned, government could go to court over how mifepristone is approved for use

Joe Biden’s administration has indicated it will seek to prevent states from banning a pill used for medical abortion in light of the supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade, signalling a major new legal fight.

The administration could argue in court that the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of mifepristone, one of the pills used for medical abortions, preempts state restrictions, meaning federal authority outweighs any state action.

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Tech firms under pressure to safeguard user data as abortion prosecutions loom

Private information collected and retained by companies could be weaponized to prosecute abortion seekers and providers

After the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on Friday, calls increased for tech companies to take a stand about the use of online data to incriminate individuals seeking or providing abortion services.

Abortion and civil rights advocates have warned that there are few federal regulations on what information is collected and retained by tech firms, making it easy for law enforcement officials to access incriminating data on location, internet searches and communication history.

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Protests sweep across nation as supreme court overturns Roe v Wade – follow live

Former president Barack Obama has condemned the supreme court’s ruling overturning Roe v Wade, calling it an attack on “the essential freedoms of millions of Americans”:

President Joe Biden is expected to address the nation:

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