All posts tagged "immigration"

CNN anchor shuts down MAGA columnist's head-scratching warning about 'Chinese babies'

A fiery debate broke out between a CNN anchor and a MAGA-defending correspondent who warned about "Chinese babies."

CNN anchor Abby Phillip hosted a panel discussion about calls from MAGA to stop immigrants from having children in the United States. The MAGA line comes after the Supreme Court blocked Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship.

She had the panel react to a line from Trump legal adviser Mike Davis, where he called on the administration to shift its focus from mass deportations to "going to get these pregnant women the hell out of our country, women and women who could be pregnant."

Phillip called suggestions of changing birthright citizenship via an executive order "bad politics, bad optics, maybe both," when New York Post correspondent Lydia Moynihan stepped in to defend the MAGA point of view.

"We already know that foreign adversaries are exploiting this," Moynihan said. "There's been 1.5 million Chinese CCP babies who have been born on U.S. soil."

"I've never seen the number be that high," Phillip said. "Are you talking about Chinese nationals who have come here?"

"Yes," Moynihan said. "That's an issue that we know our foreign adversaries are exploiting."

"Do you realize that not all of them are here to give birth?" Phillip responded.

Moynihan continued on about how Chinese immigrants "exploit" birth tourism, and talked over Phillip, whom she accused of trying to "argue the numbers."

"You're saying all of the 1.5 million people of Chinese heritage are coming for the sole purpose of utilizing our social services?" Phillip asked, having to talk over Moynihan as she demanded, "Do you want people whose parents are CCP citizens, who grew up in China, to come here and vote?"

"There are plenty of people who have parents of foreign citizenship, who are American citizens and do in fact have the right to vote," Phillip responded. "They might be from China, they might be from Russia, they might be from England, they might be from anywhere in the world. That is not illegal, to have parents from another country."

Onlookers astonished by JD Vance's latest attempt to dunk on Pope Leo: 'Excommunicate him'

Vice President JD Vance's most recent jab at the pope backfired as onlookers shot back at him.

During an appearance on Fox News, Vance questioned decisions by the American Pope Leo, who has emerged as a vocal advocate for immigrants and directly challenged the Trump administration's sweeping immigration crackdowns.

"I don't see Pope Leo as an anti-capitalist. I do think some of the things that have come out of the Vatican on the immigration issue, in particular, have been troubling," Vance said. "What I would hope the Catholic leadership has learned from some of the things that me and Marco [Rubio] and the president have said about immigration is, it's not just about the dignity of the immigrant, it's about the dignity of the native born."

Vance has criticized Pope Leo's comments about immigration before, but this time, online critics were ready to respond and share their unhappiness with Vance's comments.

"You have to have some deep, unregistered pretentiousness to try to dunk on the pope," wrote political commentator Juan Escalante on Bluesky.

"Come on, Pope Leo," pleaded journalist Thor Benson. "Excommunicate him. Do it for me."

"I hope the scholars at the large hadron collider have learned from my many assorted thoughts on particles," joked political scientist Anjali Dayal, summing up Vance's argument.

"More Catholic than the Pope, eh?" asked progressive political commentator Wajahat Ali.

Journalist Patrick A. Reed wrote that Vance gave off the "same energy as all those dudes who think they could win a point against Serena," referring to tennis champ Serena Williams.

You have to have some deep, unregistered pretentiousness to try to dunk on the pope

[image or embed]
— Juan Escalante (@juanescalante.com) June 30, 2026 at 6:05 PM

Federal judge torches 'Schrödinger-esque' immigration policy in Trump admin setback

The Trump administration was dealt a major setback in its immigration plans after an appeals court torched it as Schrödinger-esque.

A Denver-based federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration's push to jail immigrants in the U.S. without a bond hearing. In his opinion, Judge Richard Federico likened the Trump administration's reasoning to a famous quantum physics paradox.

The case centered around the question of whether an immigrant living in the country's interior can be detained without a bond hearing while fighting their removal.

Under previous administrations, the government detained people without bond only if they were stopped at the border seeking entry. Last year, the Trump administration broadened its reading of the law to detain immigrants who crossed years ago and have lived here ever since.

The Trump administration leaned on narrow jargon applying to an "applicant for admission," which is someone never formally let in. But the same provision also requires that the person be "seeking admission," which means they're actively asking to come in, and only applies to people at the border.

In arguing that they meant the same thing, the Trump administration made what Federico described as an "interpretive quantum leap." He also noted that the Trump administration "glosses" over the complications in its interpretation and failed to provide "an exceedingly persuasive argument" to justify it.

"Like Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously dead and alive, 'applicant for admission' simultaneously takes on both its ordinary and statutory meanings in the government's hands," Federico wrote. "As far as we are aware, no other phrase in the United States Code has this Schrödinger-esque property."

'Get the hell out of here!' Lawmakers explode in screaming match during hearing

A Republican and a Democratic lawmaker started screaming at each other during a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

The heated clash between Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) happened during a hearing on sanctuary policies before a House Judiciary subcommittee. Raskin attempted to get Lawler to condemn the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were gunned down by Trump's immigration agents during a protest in Minneapolis in January. However, Lawler was only interested in talking about family members of victims killed by undocumented immigrants.

The back-and-forth soon escalated into a full-blown shouting match.

"While some of my colleagues may not want to hear the truth, the same outrage you feel about Renee Good and Alex Pretti —," Lawler said, as he was asked to end his statement.

"I do feel that outrage," Raskin said.

"You do not!" Lawler yelled back.

"Do you feel the outrage about Alex Pretti and Renee Good?" Raskin yelled back at Lawler.

"You should be ashamed of yourself!" Lawler said, calling the Democrat "a disgrace."

"You don't belong in this committee; you should get the hell out of here!" Raskin yelled back, pointing at the GOP lawmaker.

"You don't understand the rules of the committee, you don't understand the Constitution, you're full of it. You're absolutely full of it. Say one word about Alex Pretti and Renee Good," Raskin demanded.

Wow Raskin and Lawler are really yelling at each other pic.twitter.com/6Pkgh45ZpC
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2026

'It's abhorrent!' CNN pundit snaps at ex-Trump official during fiery immigration debate

A CNN pundit snapped at a right-wing panelist during a debate on immigration that turned into a shouting match.

During an appearance on CNN on Thursday night, Keith Boykin, a former Clinton White House aide, lost his cool while poking holes in an argument by Caroline Sunshine, a former Trump White House staffer.

Sunshine argued in favor of a Supreme Court decision that threatens temporary protected status for Haitians, and asked the panel around her, "Does anybody at this table, have you heard the name Aiden Clark?" referring to an 11-year-old boy who died in an Ohio bus crash in 2023. Clark's death has become a right-wing talking point because a Haitian immigrant collided with the bus.

"Here we go again," Boykin said after Sunshine asked her question. "I love how they cherry-pick isolated cases and forget the fact that people who are immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than people who are residents in this country."

The argument didn't stop there, however. Sunshine brought Clark up again when pundit Amanda Litman said that immigrants are "the people who make America great, who make this country what it is."

"Was the Haitian migrant who killed 11-year-old Aiden Clark making America better?" Sunshine asked.

That's when Boykin snapped and began shouting at Sunshine, asking her, "You're going to kick out 350,000 people because of one case? One case?"

He was referring to Haitians in the U.S. who have TPS and could be deported from the country because of the Supreme Court decision.

Meanwhile, Sunshine kept yelling back, "They killed a child! They killed a child!"

"What about all the white people in this country who commit crimes in this country? Are you going to kick them out, too?" Boykin yelled over her. "That as a justification for a racist foreign policy is disgusting. It's abhorrent! Disgusting!"

'Maybe that's a sign!' Expert catches stunning irony behind dubious Supreme Court opinion

A legal expert called out the irony in the majority opinion of a Supreme Court decision upending immigration protections for thousands.

Leah Litman, a veteran legal analyst, spoke about the Supreme Court decision in Mullin v. Doe during an appearance on MS NOW. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in a decision that sided with the Trump administration and will take temporary protected status away from Haitians and Syrians.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion and shot down the defense's argument that the Trump administration was motivated by racial animus to take away TPS from Haitians and Syrians, a decision that will take away their immigration protections.

According to Litman, the majority opinion ruled that comments made by Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign that accused Haitians of eating cats and dogs "did not count as overtly racial." However, Litman asked, "Given that, what would it take to be considered overtly racial?"

Justice Alito "did not even have the strength to reprint the comments that the president made," Litman said. "In the opinion that excused those comments as not racist, and if you are unwilling to reprint, recite the comments from the person you say isn't racist, maybe that is a sign that it is racist."

She also pointed to a decision in Louisiana v. Callais two months ago. In the majority opinion for that case, Justice Alito wrote that "when Congress attempted to get states to draw districts that were actually representative of a multiracial democracy, namely complying with the Voting Rights Act, that, Sam Alito said, was racism," Litman said.

Stephen Miller ridiculed after 'pompous' rant about immigrants on Fox News

Trump White House aide Stephen Miller went on a rant about immigrants that's drawing scorn from online critics.

Miller claimed during an interview with Fox News anchor Will Cain that immigrants in cities like New York City come from countries that "would have never developed the combustion engine or airplanes" if it weren't for contact with "the West."

His comments were part of a rant about democratic socialists who are running for congressional seats and recently won Democratic primaries. Fox News displayed "Is Socialism the Future of the Dem Party?" under Miller while he spoke. Although Cain told Miller his comments were "very well said," the response from online critics struck a different tone.

"Stephen Miller talks like America was built by pure-blood geniuses instead of generations of immigrants doing the work MAGA now looks down on," wrote progressive news personality Alex Cole on X.

"When Stephen Miller's own family came here, his intellectual predecessors saw them as backward [and] shifty Jews who were unable to ever assimilate to this country, and who would never be real Americans," immigration policy analyst Aaron Reichlin-Melnick reacted.

Former pro tennis player turned political commentator Martina Navratilova attacked Miller, writing, "He really is such a pompous, ignorant f—"

Progressive blogger Matthew Shochat simply pointed out, "the combustion engine was not developed in the US."

Sharp dissents from Supreme Court Justices read like 'primal scream' for help: analyst

MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace likened Supreme Court dissents to a "primal scream" after a spate of decisions.

Wallace was highlighting parts of Justice Elena Kagan's dissenting opinion in immigration cases that end legal protections for recipients of temporary protected status.

"The justices to put so much storytelling in a dissent does feel like a real primal scream for people to wake up and see what the human toll is of today's decisions," Wallace said.

She read excerpts of Kagan's dissent that recounted the stories of Syrian and Haitian nationals and "put human beings at the center of today's stories," Wallace said.

"Consider Laila Doe, who fled Syria with her daughter in 2013 after her neighborhood was bombed," Kagan's dissent read. "Without TPS, she will have to leave her mother and return to a still ravaged, violent, and dangerous country."

Wallace also looked at a part of Kagan's dissent that talked about Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, "a Haitian national who has held TPS for fifteen years," according to Kagan. "Miot suffers from Type 1 diabetes, which is easily treated in the United States, but in Haiti, the same disease can be a death sentence."

"He lives in California, where he works in a laboratory researching Alzheimer's, a job he can hold only because of his TPS work authorization," Kagan wrote.

Dahlia Lithwick, a legal analyst, described the opinions from Justice Samuel Alito and others who voted to pull back TPS protections as "crabbed." She added that Justice Alito was "angry" at Justice Sonia Sotomayor being "upset" like Kagan.

Lithwick also called Justice Alito and others in the majority opinion "vulcans" who saw it as their job to take on a "hyper-textual approach," as opposed to the human-oriented approach that she and Wallace saw in the reactions of Kagan and Sotomayor.

"What they end up doing is ignoring the explicit intent of Congress," Lithwick said about the justices in the majority opinion. "They end up absolutely circumscribing judicial power of review."

'People will die': Justice pens dire dissent as Supreme Court backs Trump on asylum

The Supreme Court's conservative super majority on Thursday sided with the Trump administration in a 6-3 ruling, and in a sharp dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor described the consequences of turning away asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Following the ruling in Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of Homeland Security v. Al Otro Lado, Sotomayor spoke from the bench and reminded the high court of a historical moment in 1939 when more than 900 Jewish refugees who were attempting to flee persecution in Nazi Germany boarded the M.S. St. Louis in Hamburg, Germany, and were turned away from Cuba and the United States during the Holocaust. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson also joined the dissent.

"The ship docked in the Havana harbor for days, but the Cuban Government refused to allow the fleeing passengers offboard," Sotomayor wrote. "The ship then sailed near the Miami coastline, but the U.S. Government also turned them away in part because the immigration laws at the time had strict country quotas and the relevant quota was already filled for that year. The ship sailed to Canada and was again turned away. It eventually returned to Europe. Tragically, over 500 of the refugees that had attempted to flee were trapped in Western Europe under German control, and over 250 of them died during the Holocaust. Most of them were 'murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór' and 'the rest died in internment camps, in hiding, or attempting to evade the Nazis.'"

Sotomayor argued that the majority's decision would have serious repercussions.

"The majority ignores the statutory context and history, not to mention the longstanding position of the Executive Branch, all of which show that any noncitizen arriving at our doorstep and seeking admission must be inspected and allowed to apply for asylum, regardless of whether her foot has crossed the threshold," Sotomayor wrote. "Because the Court today blesses the Executive Branch’s decision to slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution, despite the detailed inspection and asylum system that Congress enacted and commands, I respectfully dissent."

Sotomayor also issued a warning.

"The consequences of today’s decision are predictable," she wrote. "More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not. More people will be forced to walk along the U. S.-Mexico border in dangerous conditions, trying to find a port that will inspect them. More people will turn back and be subjected to violence because of something they cannot or should not have to change about themselves, such as their race, religion, nationality, or political opinion. Because this is neither what Congress said nor what its words permit, I respectfully dissent."

Trump DHS accused of retaliating against ICE observers by stripping travel rights

A new lawsuit is accusing the Department of Homeland Security of punishing protesters by taking away certain travel rights.

The Intercept, an online news agency, filed the lawsuit against DHS after the agency failed to respond to a records request made under the Freedom of Information Act. The records related to reports that immigration agents have retaliated by taking away passports, TSA PreCheck, and Global Entry access.

The filing detailed how "a civilian observing ICE submitted a declaration stating that her TSA PreCheck and Global Entry were revoked three days after an encounter with immigration enforcement officials."

TSA PreCheck provides quicker airport security screening, while Global Entry allows expedited entry into the U.S. The cases mentioned in the Intercept filing mostly relate to left-wing activists and protesters.

"At least one prominent supporter of transgender rights has reportedly had her Global Entry and U.S. passport cancelled in the past few months," the filing added. "To shed light on the federal government's actions that may impact the travel and privacy rights of civilian protesters, Plaintiff filed several FOIA requests."

The filing also brings up how federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a component agency of DHS, confronted people recording or protesting agents deployed by the Trump administration to Minnesota in January.

One video mentioned in the filing shows "federal agents recording a protester, saying that they were recording her 'because we have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist.'" The Intercept's FOIA request seeks records about the creation of that database.

Another recording cited in the filing depicts a federal agent saying, "Well, this person is gonna have a hard time traveling from now on" after taking a photo of an ICE observer's license plate.