It’s been 123 days since the U.S. and Israel launched the Iran war, and the world again awaits another round of some sort of talks as President Donald Trump and Iranian officials disagree over what and even how they'll communicate. Trump’s special Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner plan meetings with Qatari mediators.
A new AP-NORC poll shows Republicans and older, white adults are especially likely to say they fly the American flag, while younger Democrats and Black adults are more likely to say they don’t fly it, reflecting deeply divided views on what patriotism means.
Click to Gallery
A mockup of President Donald Trump's proposed Triumphal Arch stands at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jen Golbeck)
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., arrives to speak to reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, June 29, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - A person holds a sign about protecting voting rights during a protest near the White House, May 11, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters as Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin listens in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
And on this final day of a Supreme Court term centering on Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power, the justices have upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, rejecting Trump's effort to deny the right to the children of noncitizen parents. Follow live updates on the rulings.
Here's the Latest:
The Court ’s ruling released Tuesday upholds a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The justices relied on a long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, and more recent federal laws in ruling that anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions, is a citizen.
▶ Read more about Tuesday’s Supreme Court rulings
May’s job openings were surprisingly strong in the data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing American labor market resilience to the war’s economic shock. Forecasters had expected employers to post just 7 million openings in May.
Rebounding from a miserable 2025, U.S. employers have added nearly 114,000 net jobs a month on average this year, up from just 9,700 in 2025, the weakest outside a recession since 2002.
Because of baby boomer retirements and Trump’s immigration crackdown, fewer people are competing for work, and the United States doesn’t need as many jobs as it used to keep the unemployment rate stable. Economists say the so-called “break-even’’ rate of hiring could be as low as zero jobs a month, down from perhaps 150,000 a year or so ago.
▶ Read more
The Court ’s conservative majority added to its repeated rulings against transgender Americans by deciding that bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
The ruling seems certain to extend to the dozens of other Republican-led states that have banned female transgender athletes. Left unresolved are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people ages 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
▶ Read more about Tuesday’s Supreme Court rulings
Trump’s special Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner plan meetings with mediators about the implementation of an initial deal to end the war in Iran, following more crossfire in the Persian Gulf.
They won’t directly negotiate with Iranian diplomats, instead using mediators as go-betweens, said Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s Foreign Ministry.
Iran was also sending a delegation to Qatar, but has no plans to meet with the American side at any level, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said. His statement left open the possibility of messages being passed through the Qataris.
▶ Read more
American views of “Old Glory” are divided by politics, age and race, according to a new survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday celebration.
Whether people see it as a unifying or divisive symbol tracks with other deep divisions among Americans, who see their country’s history and accomplishments very differently. About 7 in 10 Republicans and about 6 in 10 Americans ages 60 and older fly the flag at least during holidays. About 6 in 10 Democrats and independents, on the other hand, say they “never” fly the U.S. flag. That includes the vast majority, 75%, of Democrats under 45.
Only about 3 in 10 Black adults say they ever display the American flag, compared with about half of white and Hispanic adults.
The survey of 2,596 adults was conducted April 16-20.
▶ Read more
The Supreme Court on Monday said the Federal Reserve, unlike any other agency in Washington, has a measure of independence from the presidency and day-to-day politics. But the court didn’t define to what extent.
The case is the latest round in an unprecedented fight between the Fed and Trump. More political interference at the Fed could upend financial markets around the world, which closely follow its interest rate moves.
Trump has repeatedly demanded that the central bank cut its key interest rate to lower borrowing costs for homeowners, businesses, and even the government itself. Trump sought to fire a Fed governor, Lisa Cook, last August after accusing her of mortgage fraud — a charge she denies.
In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the president cannot fire the seven members of the Fed’s board of governors without a clear cause. The decision endorses the Fed’s independent structure even as the court eliminated such protections for leaders of other agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, whom the president can fire at-will.
▶ Read more
Trump said Monday he will nominate Keith Sonderling to be the secretary of labor, elevating him from the agency’s acting director two months after Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned amid abuse-of-power allegations.
Sonderling, a lawyer who has held a variety of acting positions and leadership roles across Trump’s government, was previously the deputy labor secretary and a Republican member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“Throughout his career, Keith has proven his dedication to delivering strong results for the Hardworking People of our Country, and I know he will do an incredible job in his new role,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post announcing Sonderling’s nomination.
Sonderling’s nomination is subject to Senate confirmation.
During Trump’s second term, in addition to his Labor Department post, Sonderling has been the acting director of U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, one of several agencies Trump targeted for closure in an executive order last year.
▶ Read more
The Supreme Court is wrapping up a term that has focused on Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power.
Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, fire the heads of most independent agencies at will and remove a sitting Federal Reserve governor are among the remaining eight cases the justices are expected to decide this week, beginning Monday.
The court also is weighing, in cases from West Virginia and Idaho, whether to uphold laws in roughly half the states that prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on their public school and college sports.
Two election-related cases remain, over state laws that allow a grace period for the receipt of mailed ballots, provided they are sent by Election Day, and limits on political party spending in support of candidates for Congress and president.
Also outstanding is a dispute over geofence warrants that collect the location history of cellphone users to find people near crime scenes. Critics say the practice is a fishing expedition that violates civil liberties.
▶ Read more
A mockup of President Donald Trump's proposed Triumphal Arch stands at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jen Golbeck)
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., arrives to speak to reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, June 29, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - A person holds a sign about protecting voting rights during a protest near the White House, May 11, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters as Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin listens in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The decision, in line with the longstanding judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment, comes on the final day of a Supreme Court term that has centered on Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power — and largely ruled in his favor.
In its other Tuesday rulings, the court upheld laws in roughly half the states that prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on their public school and college sport teams and struck down limits on party spending in federal elections.
Here's the latest:
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, citing congressional debate over the amendment. “We keep that promise today.”
Unlike much of the world, birthright citizenship is common across North, Central and South America. Many legal historians believe the roots of that geographic divide reach back more than 500 years, when European nations began sending settlers to their American colonies.
Europe’s aristocrat rulers wanted to encourage people to move to the colonies, but those colonists wanted their children — even if born overseas — to hold on to their European citizenship.
The practice remained in place as independence movements began to take shape and as independent nations began to emerge.
“By then, their legal traditions had already started to form,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. “So by and large they continued some of the key legal practices of the colonial European governments that they had just severed ties with.”
“Trump’s attempted assault on the 14th Amendment was dealt a major blow today. This decision is a powerful affirmation of the Constitution and the enduring promise of equality it represents,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. “For over 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed citizenship to everyone born in this country. Today, the court rightly rejected efforts to undermine that core protection and instead upheld a principle that is essential to our democracy.”
Many of those pages are from the dissent penned by Justice Thomas and joined by Gorsuch. The majority opinion is 26 pages long, Thomas’s dissent runs to 91 pages.
In upholding a broad conception of birthright citizenship, the court rejected President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The justices relied on a long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, and more recent federal laws in ruling that anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions, is a citizen.
The Republican president’s restrictions had been blocked by several lower courts and had not taken effect anywhere in the U.S.
During arguments in April, both conservative and liberal justices questioned the order’s legality in a momentous case that was magnified by Trump’s unprecedented attendance in the courtroom.
▶ Read more
“Today’s news has nothing to do with safety or fairness in sports,” Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a statement. “These rulings only serve to send a message to transgender and nonbinary young people that says, ‘you don’t belong.’”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday erased limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and president, striking down a federal election law that’s more than 50 years old.
Prodded by a Republican-led lawsuit that includes Vice President JD Vance, the court’s conservative justices were again in the majority of the latest decision that upended congressionally enacted limits on raising and spending money to influence elections. The court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the door to unlimited independent spending in federal elections.
The limits on party spending stem from a desire to prevent large donors from skirting caps on individual contributions to a candidate by directing unlimited sums to the party, with the understanding that the money will be spent on behalf of the candidate.
The Supreme Court had previously upheld the limits in 2001.
▶ Read more
“The Supreme Court gave cover to a campaign whose stated goal is to deny constitutional projections to trans people,” Imara Jones, CEO of TransLash Media, said in a statement. “The ultimate objective is to establish the cocktail of laws and systemic marginalization that will allow those in power to exclude larger and larger groups of Americans.”
“Sports are generally zero sum,” Kavanaugh said in the majority opinion. “Every biological male who makes the team takes a roster spot from a female athlete. Every biological male who earns playing time reduces the playing time of a female athlete. Every biological male who starts takes a starting position from a female athlete. Every biological male who wins a race takes the gold medal away from a female athlete.”
The ruling is another setback for transgender people.
The court’s conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision seems certain to extend to them as well.
Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
▶ Read more
The justices are weighing Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions, one of several courts that have blocked them.
Trump signed the birthright citizenship order on the first day of his second term, but the restrictions have not taken effect anywhere in the country.
In oral arguments, Sauer, the lawyer for Trump’s administration, said that birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration and “rewards illegal aliens who not only violate the immigration laws but also jump in front of those who follow the rules.”
The practice “demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship,” he told the court.
But the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging Trump’s order, sees it very differently.
“It’s one of the clearest statements of who we are as a country,” the ACLU said in a statement. “No matter who your parents are, if you’re born here, you belong here.”
Most Americans say they believe in birthright citizenship, though many are conflicted about exactly who it should apply to.
An April survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research of more than 2,500 U.S. adults found that about two-thirds say children born in the U.S. should get automatic citizenship. That number drops to 44% for Republicans.
But the poll also showed ambivalence when it came to specifics.
For example, 75% of U.S. adults support automatic citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents in the country on work visas. Only about half, though, believe in it for children born to parents who are illegally in the country.
The 5-4 decision rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day.
The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
In just over half of those states, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters.
During oral arguments, even many conservative justices appeared unconvinced by the government’s case.
“I can imagine it being messy in some applications,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, asking Solicitor General D. John Sauer about the issue of abandoned infants.
“What if you don’t know who the parents are?” she asked.
Sauer started to say that question was addressed in the U.S. code, but Barrett quickly interrupted him.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about the Constitution?” she asked.
Outside of the Americas, most countries follow the legal principle of jus sanguinis, or “right of blood,” with a child’s citizenship inherited from its parents, no matter the place of birth.
In the European Union, for example, no member states grant automatic, unconditional citizenship to children born to foreigners.
But American legal practice is descended in many ways from English common law, which had long provided for citizenship based on a child’s place of birth, the legal concept of jus soli, or “right of soil.”
The UK, though, abandoned jus soli with the British Nationality Act of 1981.
Under the new rules, people born in the UK get citizenship only if at least one parent is a British citizen or has “settled status” under the law.
The court will dive right into the remaining decisions when the justices take the bench at 10 a.m. ET.
The opinions are typically read in ascending order of seniority so that the most junior justice with an opinion goes first. Chief Justice John Roberts, who may well have the decision in the birthright citizenship case, would go last.
Other than at the Federal Reserve, with its role of setting interest rates, the court held that presidents have free rein to fire agency heads at will, despite federal laws that require a cause for such dismissals and a 91-year-old decision that had limited executive authority.
The justices allowed Fed governor Lisa Cook to stay in her job while she fights Trump’s effort to fire her over allegations of mortgage fraud, which she has denied.
With the six conservative justices in the majority, the nine-member court jettisoned its unanimous decision in Humphrey’s Executor that had limited when presidents can fire agencies’ board members — in part to try to ensure decision-making free of political influence.
“We hold that such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.
In separate cases, the court will also decide:
Whether states can prohibit transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s public school and college teams.
Whether to uphold a federal law more than 50 years old limiting how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and the president.
Oral arguments for the case lasted more than two hours in a crowded courtroom that included Trump, the first sitting president to attend arguments at the nation’s highest court, and, in seats reserved for the justices’ guests, actor Robert De Niro.
Trump heard his administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, face one skeptical question after another. Justices asked about the legal basis for the order and voiced more practical concerns.
“Is this happening in the delivery room?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked, drilling down into the logistics of how the government would actually figure out who is entitled to citizenship and who is not.
Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that Sauer was relying on quirky exceptions to citizenship to make a broad argument about people who are in the country illegally. “I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples,” Roberts said.
Justice Clarence Thomas sounded the most likely among the nine justices to side with Trump.
The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Monday, June 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
