executive order

CONCORD, N.H. — A federal judge in New Hampshire said Thursday he will certify a class action lawsuit including all children who will be affected by President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship and issue a preliminary injunction blocking it.

Judge Joseph LaPlante announced his decision after an hour-long hearing and said a written order will follow. The order will include a seven-day stay to allow for appeal, he said.

The class is slightly narrower than that sought by the plaintiffs, who originally included parents as plaintiffs.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a pregnant woman, two parents and their infants. It’s among numerous cases challenging Trump’s January order denying citizenship to those born to parents living in the U.S. illegally or temporarily. The plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and others.

At issue is the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The Trump administration says the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means the U.S. can deny citizenship to babies born to women in the country illegally, ending what has been seen as an intrinsic part of U.S. law for more than a century.

“Prior misimpressions of the citizenship clause have created a perverse incentive for illegal immigration that has negatively impacted this country’s sovereignty, national security, and economic stability,” government lawyers wrote in the New Hampshire case.

LaPlante, who had issued a narrow injunction in a similar case, said while he didn’t consider the government’s arguments frivolous, he found them unpersuasive. He said his decision to issue an injunction was “not a close call” and that deprivation of U.S. citizenship clearly amounted to irreparable harm.

Cody Wofsy, an attorney for the plaintiffs, and his team have been inundated by families who are confused and fearful about the executive order, he said. Thursday’s ruling “is going to protect every single child around the country from this lawless, unconstitutional and cruel executive order,” he said.

Several federal judges had issued nationwide injunctions stopping Trump’s order from taking effect, but the U.S. Supreme Court limited those injunctions in a June 27 ruling that gave lower courts 30 days to act. With that time frame in mind, opponents of the change quickly returned to court to try to block it.

In a Washington state case before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges have asked the parties to write briefs explaining the effect of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Washington and the other states in that lawsuit have asked the appeals court to return the case to the lower court judge.

As in New Hampshire, a plaintiff in Maryland seeks to organize a class-action lawsuit that includes every person who would be affected by the order. The judge set a Wednesday deadline for written legal arguments as she considers the request for another nationwide injunction from CASA, a nonprofit immigrant rights organization.

Ama Frimpong, legal director at CASA, said the group has been stressing to its members and clients that it is not time to panic.

“No one has to move states right this instant,” she said. “There’s different avenues through which we are all fighting, again, to make sure that this executive order never actually sees the light of day.”

The New Hampshire plaintiffs, referred to only by pseudonyms, include a woman from Honduras who has a pending asylum application and is due to give birth to her fourth child in October. She told the court the family came to the U.S. after being targeted by gangs.

“I do not want my child to live in fear and hiding. I do not want my child to be a target for immigration enforcement,” she wrote. “I fear our family could be at risk of separation.”

Another plaintiff, a man from Brazil, has lived with his wife in Florida for five years. Their first child was born in March, and they are in the process of applying for lawful permanent status based on family ties — his wife’s father is a U.S. citizen.

“My baby has the right to citizenship and a future in the United States,” he wrote.

Ramer and Catalini write for the Associated Press. Catalini reported from Trenton, N.J.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is revoking the terrorism designation of a group led by Syria’s new president as part of a broader U.S. engagement with the transitional government since the ouster of former leader Bashar Assad late last year.

In a statement released on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the move, which will take effect on Tuesday, “recognizes the positive actions taken by the new Syrian government” under President Ahmad al-Sharaa.

Earlier Monday, the Federal Register published an advance notice, which said Rubio made the decision on June 23 in consultation with the attorney general and Treasury secretary.

The decision had not been previously announced, although it was made as the Trump administration has been moving to ease or end many U.S. sanctions that had been imposed during Assad’s rule.

The step looks to further end Syria’s isolation since a lightning rebel offensive ousted the Assad family from decades of rule and gives the new government a boost as it tries to rebuild a country shattered by 13 years of civil war.

The brief notice offered no details about the revocation of the foreign terrorist organization designation for the al-Nusrah Front, also known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Al-Nusrah was originally designated a foreign terrorist organization for its previous affiliation with Al Qaeda. In 2017, it split and changed its name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which the first Trump administration added to the initial designation.

Syria has been improving relations with the United States and other Western countries following the fall of Assad in December in an offensive led by Al-Sharaa ’s group.

On June 30, seven days after Rubio signed the revocation, President Trump signed an executive order ending many U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, following through on a promise he made to Al-Sharaa when the two met in Saudi Arabia in May.

“This FTO revocation is an important step in fulfilling President Trump’s vision of a stable, unified, and peaceful Syria,” Rubio said in his statement.

Trump’s executive order did not rescind sanctions imposed on Assad, his top aides, family members and officials who had been determined to have committed human rights abuses or been involved in drug trafficking or part of Syria’s chemical weapons program.

It also leaves intact a major set of sanctions passed by Congress targeting anyone doing business with or offering support to Syria’s military, intelligence or other suspect institutions.

While the Trump administration has passed temporary waivers on those sanctions, known as the Caesar Act, they can only be permanently repealed by law.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

ATLANTA — President Trump and other Republicans have long criticized states that take weeks to count their ballots after election day. This year has seen a flurry of activity to address it.

Part of Trump’s executive order on elections, signed in March but held up by lawsuits, takes aim at one of the main reasons for late vote counts: Many states allow mailed ballots to be counted even if they arrive after election day.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month said it would consider whether a challenge in Illinois can proceed in a case that is among several Republican-backed lawsuits seeking to impose an election day deadline for mail ballots.

At least three states — Kansas, North Dakota and Utah — passed legislation this year that eliminated a grace period for receiving mailed ballots, saying they now need to be in by election day.

Even in California, where weekslong vote counting is a frequent source of frustration and a target of Republican criticism, a bill attempting to speed up the process is moving through the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

Order asserts federal law prohibits counting late ballots

The ballot deadline section of Trump’s wide-ranging executive order relies on an interpretation of federal law that establishes election day for federal elections. He argues this means all ballots must be received by that date.

“This is like allowing persons who arrive 3 days after Election Day, perhaps after a winner has been declared, to vote in person at a former voting precinct, which would be absurd,” the executive order states.

It follows a pattern for the president, who has repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of such ballots even though there is no evidence they are the source of widespread fraud. The issue is tied closely to his complaints about how long it takes to count ballots, his desire for results on election night and his false claims that overnight “dumps” of vote counts point to a rigged election in 2020, when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

But ballots received after election day, in addition to being signed and dated by the voter, must be postmarked by the U.S. Postal Service indicating they were completed and dropped off on or before the final day of voting.

Accepting late-arriving ballots has not been a partisan issue historically. States as different as California and Mississippi allow them, while Colorado and Indiana do not.

“There is nothing unreliable or insecure about a ballot that comes back after election day,” said Steve Simon, the chief election official in Minnesota, which has an election day deadline.

In his executive order, most of which is paused by the courts, Trump directs the attorney general to “take all necessary action” to enforce federal law against states that include late-arriving ballots in their final counts for federal elections. He also directs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to condition federal funding on compliance.

Trump’s rhetoric motivates Republican states

Republicans in five states have passed legislation since the 2020 election moving the mail ballot deadline to election day, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks election legislation.

Earlier this year, GOP lawmakers in Kansas ended the state’s practice of accepting mail ballots up to three days after election day, a change that will take effect for next year’s midterms. Problems with mail delivery had prompted Kansas to add the grace period in 2017.

Kansas state Sen. Mike Thompson, a Republican who chairs the committee that handles election legislation, compared the grace period to giving a football team extra chances to score after the game clock expires.

“We need this uniform end to the election just so that we know that all voters are operating on the same time frame,” he said.

A history of complaints in California

California has long been a source of complaints about the amount of time it takes for ballots to be counted and winners declared.

“The rest of the country shouldn’t have to wait on California to know the results of the elections,” U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the Committee on House Administration, said during an April hearing.

He said California’s “lax election laws” were to blame for the delays.

The nation’s most populous state has the largest number of registered voters in the country, some 22.9 million, which is roughly equivalent to the number of voters in Florida and Georgia combined.

California also has embraced universal mail voting, which means every registered voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail for each election. The deadline for election offices to receive completed ballots is seven days after election day as long as they are postmarked by election day.

A survey of some 35,000 Los Angeles County voters during last fall’s election found that 40% waited until election day to return their ballot.

Election officials say the exhaustive process for reviewing and counting mail ballots combined with a large percentage of voters waiting until the last minute makes it impossible for all results to be available on election night.

California Democrats consider changes to speed the count

Under state law, election officials in California have 30 days to count ballots, conduct a post-election review and certify the results.

Dean Logan, Los Angeles County’s chief election official, told Congress in May that his team counted nearly 97% of the 3.8 million ballots cast within a week of election day in 2024. Jesse Salinas, president of the state clerks’ association, said his staff in Yolo County, near Sacramento, already works 16-hour days, seven days a week before and after an election.

Assemblyman Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) introduced legislation that would keep the state’s 30-day certification period but require county election officials to finish counting most ballots within 13 days after the election. They would be required to notify the state if they weren’t going to meet that deadline and give a reason.

“I don’t think that we can stick our heads in the sand and pretend like these conspiracies aren’t out there and that this lack of confidence doesn’t exist, in particular among Republican voters in California,” said Berman. “There are certain good government things that we can do to strengthen our election system.”

He acknowledged that many counties already meet the 13-day deadline in his bill, which awaits consideration in the state Senate.

“My hope is that this will strengthen people’s confidence in their election system and their democracy by having some of those benchmarks and just making it very clear for folks when different results will be available,” Berman said.

Cassidy writes for the Associated Press. AP writer John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The legal battle over President Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship is far from over despite his major Supreme Court victory Friday limiting nationwide injunctions.

Immigrant advocates are vowing to fight to ensure birthright citizenship remains the law as the Republican president tries to do away with a more than century-old constitutional precedent.

The high court’s ruling sends cases challenging the president’s birthright citizenship executive order back to the lower courts. But the ultimate fate of Trump’s policy remains uncertain.

Here’s what to know about birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court’s ruling and what happens next.

What does birthright citizenship mean?

Birthright citizenship makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally.

The practice goes back to soon after the Civil War, when Congress ratified the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, in part to ensure that Black people, including formerly enslaved Americans, had citizenship.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” the amendment states.

Thirty years later, Wong Kim Ark, a man born in the U.S. to Chinese parents, was refused reentry into the U.S. after traveling overseas. His suit led to the Supreme Court explicitly ruling that the amendment gives citizenship to anyone born in the United States, no matter their parents’ legal status.

It has been seen since then as an intrinsic part of U.S. law, with only a few exceptions, such as for children born in the U.S. to foreign diplomats.

Trump’s longtime goal

Trump signed an executive order upon assuming office in January that seeks to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are living in the U.S. illegally or temporarily. The order is part of the president’s hard-line anti-immigration agenda, and he has called birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration.”

Trump and his supporters focus on one phrase in the amendment — “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — which they contend means the U.S. can deny citizenship to babies born to women in the country illegally.

A series of federal judges have said that’s not true and issued nationwide injunctions stopping his order from taking effect.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” U.S. District Judge John Coughenour said at a hearing this year in his Seattle courtroom.

In Greenbelt, Md., a Washington suburb, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote that “the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed” Trump’s interpretation of birthright citizenship.

Is Trump’s order constitutional?

The high court’s ruling was a major victory for the Trump administration in that it limited an individual judge’s authority in granting nationwide injunctions. The administration hailed the ruling as a monumental check on the powers of individual district court judges, whom Trump supporters have argued are usurping the president’s authority with rulings blocking his priorities on immigration and other matters.

But the Supreme Court did not address the merits of Trump’s bid to enforce his birthright citizenship executive order.

“The Trump administration made a strategic decision, which I think quite clearly paid off, that they were going to challenge not the judges’ decisions on the merits, but on the scope of relief,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor.

Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the administration is “very confident” that the high court will ultimately side with the administration on the merits of the case.

Uncertainty ahead

The justices kicked the cases challenging the birthright citizenship policy back down to the lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the new ruling. The executive order remains blocked for at least 30 days, giving lower courts and the parties time to sort out the next steps.

The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves open the possibility that groups challenging the policy could still get nationwide relief through class-action lawsuits and seek certification as a nationwide class. Within hours after the ruling, two class-action suits had been filed in Maryland and New Hampshire seeking to block Trump’s order.

But obtaining nationwide relief through a class action is difficult as courts have put up hurdles to doing so over the years, said Suzette Malveaux, a Washington and Lee University law school professor.

“It’s not the case that a class action is a sort of easy, breezy way of getting around this problem of not having nationwide relief,” said Malveaux, who had urged the high court not to eliminate the nationwide injunctions.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned the court’s dissenting opinion, urged the lower courts to “act swiftly on such requests for relief and to adjudicate the cases as quickly as they can so as to enable this Court’s prompt review” in cases “challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order.”

Opponents of Trump’s order warned there would be a patchwork of policies across the states, leading to chaos and confusion without nationwide relief.

“Birthright citizenship has been settled constitutional law for more than a century,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and chief executive of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that supports refugees and migrants. “By denying lower courts the ability to enforce that right uniformly, the Court has invited chaos, inequality, and fear.”

Sullivan and Richer write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington and Mike Catalini in Trenton, N.J., contributed to this report.

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order giving TikTok a 90-day extension to work out a deal with the U.S. government that addresses security concerns over the app’s ties to China.

Significant pressure has been placed on TikTok, known for its popular social video app, after a law was signed in 2024 that required TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations of TikTok or the app would be banned in the U.S.

The new order signed by Trump will give TikTok an extension until Sept. 17. During that period, the Justice Department will not enforce the 2024 law that would have banned TikTok in the country or impose penalties on companies that distribute TikTok, the order said.

“We are grateful for President Trump’s leadership and support in ensuring that TikTok continues to be available for more than 170 million American users and 7.5 million U.S. businesses that rely on the platform as we continue to work with Vice President Vance’s Office,” TikTok said in a statement.

TikTok has a large presence in Southern California, with offices in Culver City that serve as the company’s U.S. headquarters, and many video creators in the L.A. area produce content for TikTok.

The app has interested buyers, including Amazon and an investment group led by Frank McCourt, a former Dodgers owner, whose bid includes “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary. San Francisco artificial intelligence company Perplexity said in March it wants to “rebuild the TikTok algorithm.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump has fired a Democratic commissioner for the federal agency that oversees nuclear safety as he continues to assert more control over independent regulatory agencies.

Christopher Hanson, a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in a statement Monday that Trump terminated his position as NRC commissioner without cause, “contrary to existing law and longstanding precedent regarding removal of independent agency appointees.”

The firing of Hanson comes as Trump seeks to take authority away from the independent safety agency, which has regulated the U.S. nuclear industry for five decades. Trump signed executive orders in May intended to quadruple domestic production of nuclear power within the next 25 years, a goal experts say the United States is highly unlikely to reach. To speed up the development of nuclear power, the orders grant the U.S. Energy secretary authority to approve some advanced reactor designs and projects.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement that “all organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction” and that the Republican president reserves the right to “remove employees within his own executive branch.”

Trump fired two of the three Democratic commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent federal agency responsible for enforcing federal laws that prohibit discrimination in the workplace. In a similar move, two National Labor Relations Board members were fired. Willie Phillips, a Democratic member and former chairman of the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, stepped down in April, telling reporters that the White House asked him to do so.

Trump also signed an executive order to give the White House direct control of independent federal regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, called Hanson’s firing illegal and another attempt by Trump to undermine independent agencies and consolidate power in the White House.

“Congress explicitly created the NRC as an independent agency, insulated from the whims of any president, knowing that was the only way to ensure the health, safety and welfare of the American people,” Pallone said in a statement.

Senate Democrats also said Trump overstepped his authority. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, Patty Murray and Martin Heinrich said in a joint statement that “Trump’s lawlessness” threatens the commission’s ability to ensure that nuclear power plants and nuclear materials are safe and free from political interference.

Hanson was nominated to the commission by Trump in 2020. He was appointed chair by former President Biden in January 2021 and served in that role until Trump’s inauguration to a second term as president. Trump selected David Wright, a Republican member of the commission, to serve as chair. Hanson continued to serve on the NRC as a commissioner. His term was due to end in 2029.

Wright’s term expires on June 30. The White House has not said if he will be reappointed.

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called Hanson a dedicated public servant and a strong supporter of the NRC’s public health and safety mission. Firing Hanson is Trump’s “latest outrageous move to undermine the independence and integrity” of the agency that protects the U.S. homeland from nuclear power plant disasters, Lyman said in a statement.

The NRC confirmed Hanson’s service ended on Friday, bringing the panel to two Democrats and two Republicans. The commission has functioned in the past with fewer than the required five commissioners and will continue to do so, the statement said.

McDermott and Daly write for the Associated Press. McDermott reported from Providence, R.I.