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Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court didn’t give Donald Trump everything he asked for this term. But it gave the Republican president and his party a lot, ranging from presidential power (more of it) to immigration (less of it) to voting rights (less of them) to campaign finance rules (less of them, too) and more.

In the handful of big cases Trump lost — including tariffs (by a 6-3 vote), mail-in ballot deadlines (by a 5-4 vote) and birthright citizenship (by a 5-4 or 6-3 vote; more on the difference below) — the results said more about the extreme nature of his asks and the dissenting justices who were eager to answer them.

The birthright citizenship case is Exhibit A. It was expected that Chief Justice John Roberts would lead the court in striking down Trump’s executive order that sought to override the Constitution, federal law and precedent dating back to 1898.

The unexpected part was that Roberts spoke for only five justices when he confirmed that Trump’s order violated the constitutional guarantee of citizenship for virtually all babies born in this country.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” the chief justice wrote, as he recalled that the framers of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment extended that promise to “every free-born person in this land.” He concluded his opinion by saying, “We keep that promise today.”

But the “we” was only a bare majority of the court: Roberts, the three Democratic appointees and Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh was in the middle, refusing to fully join Roberts or the dissenters. Kavanaugh said Trump’s order was illegal under federal law but not under the Constitution; meaning, had Kavanaugh’s view prevailed, Congress would be free to pass a new law restricting birthright citizenship.

Under the Roberts-led view that prevailed, a constitutional amendment or new court ruling is needed to undo Tuesday’s decision in Trump v. Barbara. Until then, the promise holds. But a pledge that hinges on a one-vote margin is shaky indeed.

In the meantime, let’s be clear about what happened here. By keeping the Constitution’s citizenship promise, Roberts and Barrett didn’t turn liberal or turn against Trump or anything like that. They kept the status quo. The radical departure would have been going the route of the dissenters.

Plus, Roberts and Barrett were with their fellow GOP appointees that same day in two other big rulings: striking down campaign finance limits and upholding transgender sports bans.

The day before that, Roberts led that same 6-3 majority in the Slaughter case that overturned nearly a century of precedent in handing Trump even more power over (what were previously) independent federal agencies.

A few days before that, Roberts and Barrett joined Alito’s 6-3 rulings backing the president’s restrictionist immigration agenda, giving the government more power to end humanitarian protections and block migrants from making asylum claims.

These recent rulings followed April’s “demolition” of the Voting Rights Act, as Justice Elena Kagan put it in her dissent from Alito’s 6-3 opinion in Louisiana v. Callais. The majority went on to apply Callais in a way that further helps Republicans in November’s midterm elections, by letting Alabama use a congressional map that a lower court panel said intentionally discriminated against Black people. That lower court panel had two Trump appointees on it.

All in all, the term was a win for Trump and the GOP. To the extent that the president’s big losses repudiated him or his party, they weren’t unified pronouncements from the court, like one might have imagined the birthright citizenship ruling, especially, could have been. They were fractured rulings, over dissents from Republican-appointed justices who effectively told the country that the administration’s most far-out claims not only weren’t crazy but were, in fact, correct.

On that note, it’s worth recalling that the court sets its own agenda, so these are the cases that the court wanted to hear. The justices reject most of the thousands of petitions they receive each term. Notwithstanding the intra-GOP splits we’ve seen play out in some cases, the six-justice supermajority creates an environment for Republicans to bring appeals that previous iterations of the court wouldn’t have even considered. It takes four justices to grant review, so the three-justice minority can’t set the agenda on its own, much less control the ultimate outcomes.

A clear example of the changing court’s impact came in this week’s campaign finance case, where the majority overturned a 2001 precedent that had approved spending limits on political parties. That previous case was decided 5-4, and the only justice from that ruling still serving today is Thomas. He dissented in 2001 but was in the majority this week. His prior dissent “was persuasive in 2001 and has since been amply vindicated by this Court’s subsequent precedents,” Kavanaugh wrote for the 6-3 majority.

Of course, it wasn’t only the power of persuasion but the increased voting power of the court’s GOP-appointed majority that made this week’s ruling possible, giving Republicans yet another edge in the midterms. “Almost to flaunt the point,” Kagan wrote in her dissent, Kavanaugh’s opinion “gives pride of place to JUSTICE THOMAS’s dissent in that [2001] case; if only the rest of the majority had been there to join him!”

The justices are off the bench for the summer, but we’ll still be hearing from them before the next term starts in October. They were busy were last summer in cases backing Trump on the shadow docket. Whether this year repeats that phenomenon remains to be seen.

The court also took up new cases this week for next term. Among them are an appeal from the Republican National Committee to enforce voting restrictions in swing-state Arizona, and another one seeking a Second Amendment right to possess AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles. The court backed gun rights in multiple cases this term, so next term could continue that trend.

The court agreed to consider the AR-15 issue over the objection of state officials in Illinois and Connecticut, the latter of whom argued that “the public interest in avoiding mass shootings dramatically outweighs a single Petitioner’s interest in owning one more gun that he or she is unlikely to ever use for any legitimate self-defense purpose.”

The newsletter will be on hiatus until the court kicks off the next term in October, but you may hear from us over the summer. In the meantime, catch the latest on MS.NOW and the Deadline: Legal Blog, and keep your “Ask Jordan” questions coming.

Have any questions or comments for me? Please submit them through this form for a chance to be featured in the Deadline: Legal Blog and newsletter.

The post On birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court shockingly failed to meet the moment appeared first on MS NOW.

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LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — Juan Carlos Villegas called his family in Venezuela before every immigration appointment in the United States.

With the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign underway, he feared that any hearing could be the one that ended with him in detention.

“He always called us,” his sister, María José Villegas, told MS NOW. “We were always on alert in case something happened to him.”

The call his family had dreaded finally came in late May: Immigration agents detained the 37-year-old in Blue Island, Illinois, while he was working as a construction worker in the Chicago area.

Juan Carlos Villegas was deported last week on a plane with 145 other Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children.

Longtime Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro resisted accepting U.S. deportees until shortly before the U.S. military removed him in a commando operation in January. Under Maduro’s second-in-command and successor, Delcy Rodríguez, the pace of those flights has picked up.

A video posted by Mervin Maldonado, head of Gran Misión Vuelta a la Patria (“Mission Return to the Homeland”), the Venezuelan government program that receives returning migrants, shows Villegas’ group arriving on June 24.

“WELCOME,” Maldonado wrote. “Today we received Flight No. 164 of the Gran Misión Vuelta a la Patria with 146 Venezuelans arriving from the United States.”

Around 4 p.m., Villegas borrowed a phone and called his mother.

“He asked my mom to remind him of her address in Maracay,” a 90-minute drive west of Caracas, his sister said. “He said Venezuelan officials will take him there.”

Before hanging up, Juan Carlos left one last promise: “Mom, I’ll be home tomorrow at 1 p.m.”

About two hours later, the ground began to shake.

Twin earthquakes, measuring 7.1 and 7.5, struck northern Venezuela, including La Guaira state, where the flight carrying Villegas and the others had landed. The disaster has claimed more than 2,000 lives so far, including at least 29 of those who were on that flight, according to relatives who spoke to MS NOW.

The government’s response has exposed the devastating legacy of years of economic collapse, which had already crippled Venezuela’s hospitals, power grid, emergency services and ability to import even the most basic supplies due to U.S. sanctions.

Countless survivors have condemned the response of the interim government led by Rodriguez — a government backed up by the U.S.

—

By dawn on the morning after the quakes, Villegas was on her way.

Passengers in her brother’s group were being housed at the Santuario La Llanada Hotel, a government-run building perched on a steep hillside. Since the Trump administration and the Venezuelan government reached a deportation agreement, the hotel had served as an arrival point for deported migrants.

Photos and videos posted on social media showed the hotel reduced to rubble, its terracotta roof pancaked onto the ground. Dozens of deportees from the same flight remain missing and are feared dead — many, if not all, of them in the Santuario La Llanada collapse.

An MS NOW crew reporting from the site this week was ordered to leave and prohibited from using cameras. Reporting has been allowed essentially everywhere else in the quake zone.

With roads and highways damaged by the quakes, Villegas boarded a boat from the coastal town of Choroní to La Guaira, hoping to find her brother alive.

“Several of us from Choroní went to look for him, just regular people from our town,” Villegas told MS NOW. “We didn’t bring anything. No tools, no ropes. We were going to dig him out with our bare hands if we had to.”

When she finally reached the hotel, authorities refused to let her through.

Instead, she said, they gave her contradictory information.

“They told me he was being treated at a local hospital. Then they told me he was dead, that they had pulled him from the rubble,” she said. “We searched hospitals and morgues, but we couldn’t find him.”

Her experience mirrors those of many families interviewed by MS NOW, all of whom said locating their loved ones became the greatest challenge after the disaster.

“Who’s in charge?” one mother asked while searching the rubble for her 20-year-old son.

“No one has come to help us. We’re completely alone. Where is the United States? Where are Delcy and Jorge?” she asked MS NOW, referring to Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly.

Gran Misión Vuelta a la Patria gave MS NOW a one-sentence response to questions about those aboard Flight No. 164: “We have already contacted most of [the families] directly.”

The U.S. said Wednesday that it is providing $300 million in aid and has brought in more than 300 disaster recovery specialists to assist.

“There’s decades of poor investment in the people of Venezuela that made this even more challenging for the current government,” Gen. Francis Donovan, head of U.S. Southern Command — the group that ran the operation to remove Maduro — said when MS NOW asked about criticism of the Rodríguez government.

Several families of those aboard Juan Carlos Villegas’ plane said their loved ones were among those confirmed dead. After MS NOW shared their names with the Department of Homeland Security and requested comment and the full passenger manifest, a DHS spokesperson replied: “This flight safely reached Venezuela and all illegal aliens on board were returned home. When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them.”

Hours after the quakes hit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began transferring people held at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas in preparation for another flight to Venezuela, according to Rep. Julian Castro, D-Texas, who has made the treatment of detainees at the facility a priority.

“It is unthinkable to send children and families, who have committed no crimes, into a country plunged into chaos by natural disaster,” Castro said, adding that ICE apparently sent that group back to Texas. 

—

Across social media, videos have shown relatives digging through rubble with their bare hands and screaming for help as they search. A volunteer rescuer told MS NOW that the few government crews that have arrived have virtually no equipment.

“They had nothing,” he said. “We had to lend them drills, flashlights, shovels because they came empty-handed.”

Even more than manpower and equipment, the thing relatives want most for authorities to provide is information.

Arturo Morales, desperate to find his 25-year-old son, Arturo Alejandro Morales, said he messaged a hotline number provided by the Vuelta a la Patria program on social media. 

“I texted them Friday afternoon. They replied the next day saying they didn’t know where my son was,” he told MS NOW. “It looked like an automated message.”

Morales said his family was able to locate his son’s body, still at the hotel, under rubble. 

“I have already found my son. I have already buried him. I’m mourning him, yet the government still hasn’t given me any information,” he said.

—

On Thursday, the rescue of a man pulled from a destroyed shopping center sparked hope that some of the thousands who are missing might also make it.

For most, however, reality has long since set in.

“We finally found him on Saturday, after three days of searching, at an old cargo port where they were taking the bodies,” Villegas said. “He was inside a white body bag, lying on the ground. He was dead, decomposing under the sun. I recognized him by his tattoos, by his hands, because the number they gave me — a wristband number they are assigning to the victims — didn’t match. But it was my brother. It was him.”

Not every family was able to identify their relatives so quickly.

“There were families arguing, saying, ‘This is my brother.’ ‘No, this is my brother.’ They were deported without identification documents or cellphones, and after being treated like criminals in the United States, they arrive here and are treated like criminals again,” Villegas said while waiting outside a Caracas morgue for her brother’s ashes.

Today, Juan Carlos Villegas’ ashes rest inside a small wooden box in his mother’s home.

An American flag sits over the box.

Beside it, an inscription recounting the journey that took him from Venezuela to the U.S.

“He crossed the Darién Gap, he rode the train, and he achieved the American dream. … When he arrived back in his homeland, he sighed, thinking the ordeal of being detained by immigration authorities was finally over. Instead, he was met with this tragedy,” Villegas said.

Anderson Daniel Salcedo also was on Juan Carlos Villegas’ plane. Salcedo, 22, had entered the U.S. in 2023 through CBP One, the Biden administration’s appointment system that allowed migrants to present themselves legally at ports of entry to begin the asylum process.

“That was a legal entry,” said Salcedo’s partner, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “He had a work permit and a Social Security number. They deported him because they want to get rid of hard-working people.”

After the quakes, his mom got a call saying her son had been found alive, his grandmother, Marlene Lozano, told MS NOW from Nueva Bolivia, in Mérida state.

But doctors told the family that after nearly 40 hours trapped beneath the rubble, Salcedo would need both of his legs amputated.

“He is on a ventilator. We don’t know how he will react when he wakes up and realizes he no longer has his legs,” his grandmother said.

“My grandson only wanted a better life in the United States. He was building a house for his mother here in Mérida,” she said. “All that was left was the roof and the floor.”

Salcedo had been living in Atlanta when he was arrested on April 10 for driving without a license before being transferred to immigration authorities.

“Even though he requested voluntary departure, the process took a very long time. They kept changing his departure date every week,” his partner said.

When the process to remove him got underway, “I finally felt some relief,” she said. “I thought, ‘At least now he’ll be reunited with his family in Venezuela.’ Then, they put him on that ill-fated flight.”

Now she is raising their 9-month-old, American-born baby alone.

She believes what happened cannot be separated into two tragedies.

“First, he was a victim of Donald Trump’s policies,” she said. “Then, in Venezuela, he became a victim of the twin earthquakes and of those incompetent people who failed to get them out in time.”

—
Guerrero reported from New York. Julia Jester contributed to this report.

The post Twin earthquakes, 2 governments and a double disaster for U.S. deportees appeared first on MS NOW.

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