u. s. supreme court

Sept. 22, 2026 3:42 PM PT

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to intervene in a custody dispute over a 5-week-old child who was born in Texas after a surrogate refused a California couple’s wishes to have an abortion.

Justice Elena Kagan denied the request from McKenna West, who was seeking conservatorship over a baby boy she gave birth to in Dallas.

The brief order did not detail the legal reasoning, as is typical in emergency appeals. The decision came from Kagan because she handles appeals of cases out of California.

West had previously been rejected by other courts in her efforts to have a say in the treatment of the child, who was born with a life-threatening heart condition. She gave birth to the boy in Dallas, where most abortions are banned, after she refused the couple’s wishes to end the pregnancy.

West had asked the Supreme Court to halt a California court order that recognizes Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar as the parents of the child whom she calls Gabriel and they call Rumi.

Lawyers for the couple had urged the court to reject the request, questioning what an intervention would do for medical decision-making at an already chaotic time. They also accused West of overstating the prognosis for children born with the heart condition.

“Such chaos would be devastating for Respondents and, most importantly, their child,” the couple told the court.

The legal battle over surrogacy and abortion has attracted the attention and support of Republican officeholders and anti-abortion groups. West has said she believes the couple will not provide life-saving care, citing their request for an abortion at 23 weeks. Gilkar and Ahmed have denied those claims.

The boy was born Aug. 12 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a life-threatening condition that prevents normal blood flow to the organ. He underwent surgery soon after he was born. The couple’s attorney said in August that the newborn had been in critical condition and appeared to be “suffering from potential complications.”

Without treatment, children affected by the heart defect can die within days or weeks. Surgical repairs are not necessarily cures, and additional surgeries or heart transplants may be needed, according to the CDC.

Wilder and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.

A federal judge again Friday blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enacting President Trump’s sweeping new mail ballot rules for the November election, finding that the Postal Service lacks such authority over elections and that neither it nor states such as California are capable of implementing the changes without causing chaos and disenfranchising voters.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani noted that election officials from across the country told the court that it is “likely impossible” to comply with the rules, which “makes disenfranchisement more than likely, if not probable” if the Postal Service were to proceed with them.

Talwani’s order — her latest of several halting the plan since this summer — came after a Postal Service whistleblower alleged the agency’s new computer systems for the project are fundamentally flawed; a top Postal Service official acknowledged a key online portal was unfinished; and the Trump administration filed an emergency petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the plans to proceed anyway.

All this unfolded this week as some of the first mail ballots of the election cycle started going out.

The new rules — which Trump required in a March executive order — would require states to submit complete voter lists to the Postal Service and to adopt new ballot envelopes with individualized voter bar codes designed by the Postal Service, and empower the Postal Service to reject any mail ballots that don’t match those lists.

Trump’s executive order also required the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own lists of eligible citizen voters, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists.

Trump has said the changes are necessary to combat widespread voter fraud, including by non-citizens, though independent election experts say there is no evidence that such fraud exists in large numbers.

Leading Democrats and elections officials in California and other states say the new rules constitute an unlawful federal overreach into state-run elections and a thinly veiled effort by the Trump administration to suppress the vote in a midterm election the GOP is poised to lose.

Talwani, an appointee of President Obama, agreed, finding that the states and voting rights groups are likely to succeed in their claims that the U.S. Constitution reserves the right to regulate elections to the states and Congress — not the executive branch.

Talwani issued her order after holding a contentious hearing in federal court in Boston on Thursday, where she questioned the Postal Service and the dozen conservative-led states supporting it on their ability to implement the changes in time for the Nov. 3 elections. She also heard from California, other liberal-led states and voting rights groups that it would be impossible.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office is helping lead the states’ challenge, hailed Talwani’s order as a crucial reprieve.

“We’ve now secured longer-term relief that will keep the USPS changes blocked while our case moves forward,” Bonta said in a statement to The Times. “We will continue to take all steps to stop the Trump Administration from trampling on voting rights and restricting mail voting.”

Bonta’s office also criticized Department of Justice attorneys for rushing to the Supreme Court before Talwani could issue her order or the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals could weigh in on an appeal the department had already filed on the matter.

Walter Garcia, a Bonta spokesman, said the Justice Department had “flouted standard procedural rules” by approaching the high court before the lower courts had weighed in, despite the fact that the Postal Service acknowledged Thursday that it was not ready to launch its new portal.

“It defies common sense that they would seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court when USPS is unprepared to implement the rule now,” Garcia said.

State law requires that all registered voters be sent a ballot in the mail, and more than 80% of California voters have used those ballots to vote in recent elections.

In its emergency petition to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration argued that an earlier temporary restraining order by Talwani to halt the new rules from taking effect was “baseless” and would cause “serious irreparable harm” to the federal government, states and voting public.

“To forestall those harms and protect the public interest, this Court should grant an immediate stay, making clear to States that they should begin efforts to comply if they have not done so already,” wrote Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer.

The swirl of litigation has created uncertainty around the Nov. 3 election. It also reflects the Trump administration’s desperate race to get the lower court orders lifted and the new rules implemented in time for that election — the rushed nature of which was a prime focus of the whistleblower.

The unidentified Postal Service employee alleged in a statement released Tuesday by congressional Democrats and submitted in court by Bonta’s office that the agency has been rushing to implement the changes — in defiance of an earlier court order — using “an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” that could cause “catastrophic problems” and disenfranchise millions of voters nationwide.

The Postal Service in a statement Friday said that while its system was developed on an “accelerated schedule,” quality and security standards “were not compromised,” and the agency stands behind “both the rigor of our process and the resulting system.”

At Thursday’s hearing, Talwani appeared frustrated when a Justice Department attorney was unable to tell her the status of the portal.

In a subsequent declaration hours later, Steven W. Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer, said officials were still making “refinements” to the portal, but anticipated being able to make it available “for voluntary use by sometime next week.”

Talwani previously issued an order blocking the Postal Service changes from being implemented in California and more than 20 other suing states in June. The Trump administration appealed that decision to the 1st Circuit, which declined to lift it, and then on an emergency basis to the U.S. Supreme Court. In early August, Talwani issued a second ruling for the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, blocking the changes nationwide.

On Aug. 24, the Supreme Court set aside Talwani’s order in the states’ case, finding that the states’ challenge was essentially premature because the Postal Service had yet to formally initiate the changes or require state compliance. However, the court explicitly noted that it was not reaching any conclusions as to the legality of the pending rules themselves. “On that score, time will tell,” it said.

The states and voting rights groups promptly filed new lawsuits challenging the legality of the rules, which the Postal Service formally issued Aug. 21. And it is in those cases that Talwani issued her ruling Friday.

She wrote that the voting rights groups had standing to challenge the Postal Service rules nationwide in part because the “chaos” created by the rules’ stiff deadlines significantly interfered with their mission to provide voters with accurate and reliable information about how to vote — and whether to use mail ballots to do so.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said in remarks prior to Talwani’s Friday order that he was “very, very confident” that the Postal Service changes will be blocked for the upcoming elections, and that “mail voting is going to go forward as conveniently and securely as it always has.”

That’s in part because election officials nationwide are “telling the courts that even if they wanted to, they could not implement it,” he said — including in a legal filing Becker helped nearly 100 local elections officials from red and blue states file in separate litigation challenging the rules.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of protesters are rallying Friday on the National Mall in support of voting rights and racial justice ahead of the midterm elections, following a wave of changes to voting laws and redistricting that civil rights groups have condemned as detrimental to Black Americans.

The 2026 “Defend the Vote” March on Washington, organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, echoes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march. The event follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark April decision in Louisiana v. Callais that reinterpreted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing Southern states to redraw their congressional maps in a way that erodes equal representation in Black communities.

“We’ve been doing these marches for years, but this is probably the most important because this is the first year we are marching that the voting rights bill has been nullified by the Supreme Court,” Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“Marches are designed to grab attention and then go into the trenches and organize around that,” he said.

The march opened with prayer and statements from Interfaith Alliance representatives. They spoke on diversity, equity and inclusion practices, voting rights and systemic racism.

“Creator of all, let us draw on each other, with love and mercy, and hold each other up as we march, wipe each other’s tears, heal each other’s wounds,” Ambereen Kahn, an Interfaith Alliance representative, said. “Most compassionate, protect our leaders who guide, instill in their hearts the values of our shared humanity.”

This year’s march, which Sharpton’s group is co-hosting with King’s Drum Major Institute, a progressive think tank and community action group, features dozens of speakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

Sharpton said thousands of civil rights activists from across the southeastern U.S. were traveling to the capital by bus for the rally.

Event echoes iconic Lincoln Memorial rally

On Thursday, Courtney Pope, 48, was marching across the King Bridge to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. But on Friday, she and other members of the National Handmaid Army were at the Washington march with plans to travel to New York and New Jersey over the next few days.

For Pope, the rally is about finding community alongside promoting voting rights.

“I know that we’ll only be successful if we band together despite our differences,” Pope said.

Friday’s event harkens back to King Jr.’s historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, when more than 200,000 people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. That march, an inflection point in the Civil Rights Movement, came at a fraught moment for the country, when economic headwinds, civil unrest, political division and the Vietnam War bitterly divided Americans.

Sharpton said the Trump administration’s immigration policy for Haitians and white South Africans, as well as cuts to social programs like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s health subsidies, are unifying policies for this year’s ideologically diverse march attendees. But the redistricting efforts by Republican-led states set to reduce the number of Black lawmakers in Congress loom large over Friday’s march.

“This march is about people who refuse to be counted out. When the courts and the legislature broke apart District 6, they did not just redraw lines,” Rep. Cleo Fields, D-La., said in a texted statement. “They told hundreds of thousands of Black families from Baton Rouge up through the Delta that their voice could be taken away at any moment.”

Fields was the central character in the Supreme Court decision that hollowed out the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court ruled that his district, created just one term ago to permit a second majority-Black district in a state where Blacks make up 33% of the population, was unconstitutional because it relied too heavily on race.

The court has held that maps can be redrawn for partisan reasons.

Louisiana’s legislature rushed to redraw the district after the high court’s decision, reshaping Fields’ district to cluster it around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area and southern Louisiana.

Fields has opted not to seek reelection to Congress and instead is pursuing a seat in the state Senate.

“The people taking part in this historic march are answering back, and history will remember that they did,” Fields said.

Embattled Black lawmakers see need for continued rights push

Rep. Shomari Figures, an Alabama Democrat whose majority-Black district was targeted by the state’s Republican-led redistricting effort, said the original voting rights fight required local movements, national figures, lots of coordination and strategy. He sees this year’s march as a continuation of that legacy.

“My district includes Montgomery, which was the birthplace of it all. It started with a bus boycott in 1955 and that, ultimately, morphed into a broader struggle for civil rights and led to a more broad Civil Rights Movement,” Figures told the AP.

“It led to a Civil Rights Act, led to the Fair Housing Act, led obviously to the Voting Rights Act, and the voting rights movement,” Figures added.

Ahead of Friday, organizations participating in the march, including the NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Black Voters Matter, filed new claims in federal court in their existing lawsuit against President Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting. The Supreme Court cleared a path Monday for possible implementation of the order, though it remains unclear how much can be put in place before the midterms.

“We will not stand idly by while the voices of the people are silenced,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement Thursday. “We must protect every eligible citizen’s right to cast their ballot.”

Brown and Junkroski write for the Associated Press. AP writers Gary Fields in Washington and Kimberly Chandler in Montgomery, Ala., contributed to this report.