Thursday, April 02, 2026
Trump Has Discussed Firing Attorney General Pam Bondi - The New York Times
Trump Has Discussed Firing Attorney General Pam Bondi
"President Trump has not made a final decision, but he has floated the idea of replacing Ms. Bondi with Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator.
President Trump has discussed firing Attorney General Pam Bondi in recent days as he grows frustrated with her leadership at the Justice Department and her handling of the Epstein files, according to four people familiar with the conversations.
Mr. Trump has floated the idea of replacing Ms. Bondi with Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations by the president.
Mr. Trump has not made a final decision, and Ms. Bondi’s allies pointed to photos of her and the president traveling to the Supreme Court on Wednesday to dispute the notion that the president is planning to fire her.
“Attorney General Pam Bondi is a wonderful person and she is doing a good job,” Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times. A spokesman for Ms. Bondi referred to Mr. Trump’s statement.
But the president has been souring on Ms. Bondi for months. Among his top complaints is Ms. Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files, which has become a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and vented about what he sees as the department’s lack of aggressiveness in going after his foes, according to people who have spoken to him recently.
The House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Ms. Bondi last month to compel her to testify about the Justice Department’s investigation into Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who died by suicide in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019. Her deposition is scheduled for April 14, though she and Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the committee’s Republican chairman, have been working together to avoid the deposition, even though it is unclear whether it is legally possible to withdraw a subpoena.
Mr. Trump has also said the Justice Department under Ms. Bondi has not moved aggressively enough to prosecute his political enemies. In September, Mr. Trump wrote a social media post directed at Ms. Bondi in which he grumbled about the lack of indictments.
During his second term, Mr. Trump had been hesitant to oust members of his cabinet after his first term was marred by frequent firings and narratives of staff chaos. Some officials said Mr. Trump’s posture had shifted in recent weeks, buoyed by the smooth process of removing Kristi Noem from her role as secretary of homeland security and the straightforward confirmation process of Markwayne Mullin to replace her.
Mr. Trump has sent mixed signals about Ms. Bondi over the last year. He has complained about her privately, arguing that she has not been effective enough in pursuing his priorities. He has been particularly angry about the Justice Department’s failure to win cases involving his political opponents, including against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has praised her loyalty in public and speaks with her often.
If Mr. Trump does fire Ms. Bondi, officials said, he has not made a final decision about who should replace her, though he has discussed elevating Mr. Zeldin.
Mr. Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from New York who unsuccessfully ran to be his state’s governor, has been one of Mr. Trump’s most reliable foot soldiers. As the administrator of the E.P.A., charged with ensuring the protection of human health and the environment, Mr. Zeldin has made it his mission to promote Mr. Trump’s vision of “energy dominance.”
“He’s our secret weapon,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Zeldin in February at a White House event promoting the coal industry, adding, “He’s getting those approvals done in record setting time.”
Representatives for the E.P.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Glenn Thrush, Katie Rogers, Lisa Friedman and Maxine Joselow contributed reporting.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Wednesday, April 01, 2026
Trump Attends Supreme Court Oral Arguments in a Presidential First - The New York Times
Trump Attends Supreme Court Oral Arguments in a Presidential First
President Trump’s presence in the court puts him face to face with justices whom he has tried to bully and intimidate.
President Trump had seen enough.
He spent about an hour listening to the government make its case against birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the high court.
His presence, which put him face-to-face with justices whom he has tried to bully and intimidate, only raised the stakes of an already closely watched case about what it means to be an American, an issue that was key to his political rise.
But about 13 minutes into the opposing argument by the American Civil Liberties Union, Mr. Trump abruptly got up and walked out, trailed by two escorts.
Mr. Trump has made little room for dissent during his second stint in the White House, and it was no different on Wednesday at the court. In all, Mr. Trump spent about an hour in the courtroom’s public gallery, listening as the justices across the ideological spectrum questioned his efforts to strictly limit birthright citizenship.
During oral arguments, spectators are generally expected to remain seated and silent.
Mr. Trump has long attacked judges who defy him, but the president’s relationship with the Supreme Court justices became even more strained after the court’s decision in February to invalidate his tariffs plan, which like immigration is at the heart of his administration’s agenda.
A hush came over the courtroom as Mr. Trump entered the room. He arrived about 10 minutes before the oral arguments began, accompanied by his attorney general, Pam Bondi, as well as the White House counsel, David Warrington.
Wearing a red tie, Mr. Trump sat with his hands clasped in his lap as the arguments delved quickly into a history lesson about the 19th century debate surrounding the 14th Amendment. The president’s seat was at least half a dozen rows behind the lectern, where his solicitor general, D. John Sauer, stands. Mr. Sauer previously worked as Mr. Trump’s personal attorney. The justices did not appear to acknowledge Mr. Trump’s presence, instead focusing their attention on the two lawyers presenting the case.
Mr. Trump departed the Supreme Court just as Cecillia Wang, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, and the justices went back and forth on questions central to the case, including whether undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors, such as students or workers on visas, should receive automatic U.S. citizenship.
Upon his return to the White House, Mr. Trump issued a public reaction to the arguments on social media, falsely claiming the United States was “the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” The United States is among at least 30 countries that automatically grant citizenship to anyone born within its borders.
Mr. Trump, who has appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, has often talked about the justices not as independent checks on his power appointed for their expertise, but as loyalists who should support his agenda. Last month, he suggested that Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, whom he nominated during his first term, were “an embarrassment to their families” because they had joined the majority in voting against his tariffs plan.
Legal experts said that Mr. Trump’s presence at the court on Wednesday was a show of power.
“Is there any question? It’s an attempt to intimidate the justices,” said Steven Lubet, an emeritus professor at Northwestern University’s School of Law who focuses on legal ethics. “It’s a challenge to the Supreme Court’s independence.”
Mr. Trump has taken steps throughout his time in office to erode checks on his power and encroach on traditionally independent agencies. He has ousted inspectors general, installed loyalists at the Justice Department and delivered broadsides against judges defying his executive power.
Mr. Trump had mused about attending the Supreme Court’s arguments about tariffs, but ultimately did not make an appearance.
Many people outside the court expressed strong opposition to the president’s presence.
“I think it’s basically kind of a strong-arming tactic, wanting to be there, intimidate them with his presence,” said Michelle McKeithen, one of the people who gathered outside the court during the arguments. “And kind of a statement of: ‘Make a decision while I’m here, looking you dead in your eye — and don’t make the wrong decision.’”
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump continued to express displeasure with the Supreme Court — insisting the justices must prove their intelligence by siding with him on the birthright citizenship issue, which he sees as key to his administration’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration.
The president and his top advisers have long contended that so-called birth tourism is a national security threat and incentivizes foreigners to travel to the United States to have babies.
“Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!” he posted on social media earlier this week.
The president appeared to be referring to his argument that the 14th Amendment was intended only to grant citizenship to freed slaves after the Civil War and not to broadly guarantee it to everyone born in the United States, a claim with which even many conservative scholars disagree.
Many other presidents, including John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon, have made appearances in the courtroom. But they all did so as lawyers arguing cases, before or after serving in the White House, according to Clare Cushman, a historian with the Supreme Court Historical Society.
Weeks after Mr. Trump responded to the Supreme Court’s tariff decision by calling the court’s majority a “disgrace to our nation,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. appeared to warn about the increasingly harsh rhetoric aimed at justices, calling it “dangerous.”
“It’s got to stop,” he said during an appearance at Rice University.
Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it was fine “in theory” for Mr. Trump to attend the Supreme Court arguments.
But given his previous insults about the justices who voted against him, Ms. Shaw said that “this seems like a way to send the message that justices who vote against his birthright citizenship order are in for more such attacks.”
Aishvarya Kavi and Zach Montague contributed reporting.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States."
(Birthright citizenship—legally called ***jus soli*** (“right of the soil”)—means a child automatically becomes a citizen by being born in a country, regardless of the parents’ citizenship.
There are **two main types**:
* **Unrestricted jus soli** (almost anyone born there gets citizenship)
* **Restricted jus soli** (only under certain conditions, like parents’ legal status)
---
# 🌎 Countries with **Unrestricted Birthright Citizenship**
These countries grant citizenship to **nearly all people born on their soil**:
### Americas (the core region)
* United States
* Canada
* Mexico
### Caribbean & Central America
* Antigua and Barbuda
* Barbados
* Belize
* Dominica
* Grenada
* Jamaica
* Saint Kitts and Nevis
* Saint Lucia
* Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
* Trinidad and Tobago
### South America
* Argentina
* Brazil
* Chile *(with minor exceptions)*
* Peru
* Venezuela
* Uruguay
---
# ⚖️ Countries with **Restricted Birthright Citizenship**
These countries allow birthright citizenship **only if certain conditions are met** (such as a parent being a citizen or permanent resident):
### Europe
* United Kingdom
* Ireland
* France
* Germany
### Africa
* South Africa
* Lesotho
### Asia & Middle East
* Pakistan *(mostly jus soli with exceptions)*
* India *(restricted since 1987/2004 reforms)*
### Oceania
* Australia
* New Zealand
---
# ❗ Important Context
* **Most of the world does NOT have birthright citizenship.**
Countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa mainly follow ***jus sanguinis*** (“right of blood”), where citizenship depends on parents’ nationality.
* The **Americas are unique**—they have the strongest tradition of birthright citizenship). ChatGPT
Opinion | The Birthright Con - The New York Times
The Birthright Con
"On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Trump v. Barbara, the case that will decide the fate of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.
On his first day back in office, President Trump issued an executive order that tried to redefine birthright citizenship to exclude the children of undocumented immigrants, despite the clear and expansive language of the amendment.
Backing Trump as he tries to rewrite the Constitution by executive fiat is much of the Republican Party and a collection of conservative legal scholars who rushed, in the wake of his decree, to try to give substance to the president’s thin, unpersuasive argument. Against Trump is the weight of Supreme Court precedent, historical consensus and the plain words of the clause itself.
There are few lines in the Constitution that are as straightforward as the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
As the framers of the 14th understood it, this meant everyone except the children of most Native tribes, the children of ambassadors and any children produced on territory captured by an invading army. The explicit aim of the clause was to settle the question of American citizenship for good.
The Supreme Court would have its swing at the citizenship clause in 1898, after a string of cases whose results gutted much of the substance of the 14th Amendment, including Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that flipped the equal protection clause on its head to allow Jim Crow segregation.
It should not escape our attention that it was this court — the Plessy court — that then issued the majority opinion in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the case that validated the citizenship of a San Francisco-born Chinese American who had been denied re-entry to the United States on account of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and affirmed the broad language of the citizenship clause.
The 14th Amendment, wrote Justice Horace Gray for the court, was “declaratory in form, and enabling and extending in effect.” Its “opening words, ‘All persons born,’ are general, not to say universal, restricted only by place and jurisdiction, and not by color or race.” Everyone born on American soil — other than members of native tribes and “children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state” notwithstanding — was entitled to American citizenship.
Here was a court that wasn’t opposed to racial subordination. But even it could not stretch the meaning of the birthright clause to make the children of Chinese laborers stateless. The words meant, unambiguously, what they said.
Over the next century, American immigration policy would lurch toward virulent nativism in the 1920s and toward something more expansive and egalitarian in the 1960s. The meaning of the birthright clause stayed the same. There is no doubt that there were those who wished it were otherwise. But this was one of the few places where constitutional meaning was nearly incontestable. There was one effort, in the 1980s, to try to read ambiguity into the birthright clause. The book, “Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity,” was panned. As one critic wrote, “Their argument is seriously flawed, and demonstrably unfaithful to the intent of the framers.”
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This was the state of things until 2018, when Trump announced that he would end birthright citizenship by executive fiat. “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” he said in 2018, falsely asserting that “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States — with all of those benefits. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
Legal scholars left and right slammed Trump’s effort as nonsense. “The children born to illegal immigrants are ‘persons born in the U.S.,’ and unlike ambassadors and certain Native Americans, they are ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” wrote Ilan Wurman, a conservative legal historian, after Trump announced his plans. Wurman, a self-described originalist, would then write a book, “The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment,” that affirmed this view. “By the operation of this sentence,” he wrote of Section 1, “free blacks and the newly freed people (and all others born in the United States) are declared citizens of the United States.”
No matter the interpretive framework you brought to the question, the answer was the same: The birthright clause means what it says.
And so it remained until January 2025, when Trump issued his executive order redefining birthright citizenship. The clause, the president argued, was intended only for the children of enslaved Africans. It was for them and them alone. The Black Americans who fought for expansive citizenship were wrong. The men who drafted the amendment were wrong. Wong Kim Ark was wrong. The words were wrong.
In 2018, Trump seemed to be a fluke — an ultimately marginal figure who would leave politics soon enough. In 2025, he appeared to be dominant — the defining figure of modern American life. What had been met with disdain and ridicule in the previous administration was received, on this attempt, with curiosity and open arms.
Wurman, who argued previously that his originalism compelled the traditional reading of the birthright clause, said after the executive order was issued that the meaning of birthright citizenship was less settled than the consensus supposed. The president, he suggested, might be right.
Randy Barnett, a conservative scholar whose previous work on the 14th Amendment emphasized the monumental influence of abolitionists on the birthright clause, also agreed that there was more to the question than traditionally understood, despite co-writing a book that never challenged the consensus view.
Yet another conservative scholar, Kurt Lash — whose 2021 essay on the subject affirmed the traditional reading and whose edited volume on the Reconstruction amendments contains hundreds of pages of primary sources, not one of which questions it — also made an apparent about-face to insist that there was something to the president’s executive order.
In the absence of any new evidence regarding the drafting of the 14th Amendment, the intent of its framers or the public meaning as understood at ratification, these scholars have advanced a set of views that purport to exclude the children of undocumented immigrants from the citizenship clause — or at least leave the question up for debate. They say that birthright citizenship hinges on the status of the parents: Are they domiciled in the United States? Do they owe allegiance to the national government? They suggest, as well, that “subject to the jurisdiction” carries an esoteric, highly technical meaning that ought to control the meaning of the citizenship clause.
In the face of this sudden burst of revisionism, several legal scholars — once again, on both the left and the right — have stood up to defend the traditional view and bring the weight of generations of scholarship to bear on the question. Their conclusion is the same as those who came before them: The birthright citizenship clause means what it says, and it has always meant what it says.
Surveying the revisionist arguments, Keith Whittington, an originalist legal scholar working from the political right, concludes that “children born under the protection of American law are citizens by virtue of the 14th Amendment, as they are citizens by virtue of the longstanding common-law principles that the 14th Amendment recognized and declared.”
Applying an originalist methodology from the political left, the legal scholars Evan Bernick and Jed Shugerman find that “the plain meaning at the time of ratification, the Reconstruction debates and the common law history all demonstrate that children of transient aliens or unlawful entrants are citizens.”
In his brief for the court, the constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar observes that “nowhere does the text use the word ‘parent,’ ‘parents’ or ‘domicile’ ”; that “these words and concepts were no part of the Amendment’s letter or spirit”; and that revisionists have abused common law history to “twist the jurisdiction clause into a pretzel, torturing it to carry meanings that its words and history cannot bear.”
And in their contribution to the debate, the historians Martha Jones and Kate Masur — whose work describes, among other things, the efforts of antebellum Black Americans to establish birthright citizenship for themselves — show that the record supports the traditional, inclusive view of birthright citizenship. In the words of Senator John Conness of California, himself an immigrant from Ireland, spoken in 1866: “The children of all parentage whatever … should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.”
A common thread in each brief is the fact that the drafters wrote the citizenship clause to repudiate the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, a ruling that wrote Black Americans out of the national community and defined American citizenship in terms of race and nationality. For Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the majority opinion, some Americans could never belong to the American nation. No matter the place of their birth, they would never have the right to have rights.
The abolitionist vision of a national and egalitarian citizenship that the radical Republicans embedded into the Constitution was forged in direct opposition to this logic — to the notion that citizenship was a privilege bestowed by the dominant class rather than a natural right bestowed by birth.
It is not so much that revisionism is on its face outrageous, but that any alternative reading of the citizenship clause must strike at the heart of the rejection of Dred Scott. On this count, Trump and his defenders fail. Their vision of citizenship — which would plunge countless children into statelessness as a permanently subordinate class — would bring Dred Scott back from the dead. And it would do this in support of a political agenda that seeks nothing less than the reconstruction of race hierarchy and the rank domination of despised minorities.
The evidence in favor of the traditional view of the citizenship clause is overwhelming. To rule otherwise is to say, in essence, that two plus two equals five. Which is to say that if the Supreme Court decides in favor of Trump, it will have less to do with law or history than the political power of the president and his movement.
Trump v. Barbara, then, is a stark reminder that the struggle over constitutional meaning involves the entire nation. The revisionist case rests less on new evidence than it does on Trump’s claim to embody the nation and its desires. If he is ascendant, then the people must want a closed, cloistered society.
We know this isn’t true. The task ahead for the president’s opponents is to recover the egalitarian substance of the 14th Amendment and wield it against his narrow and exclusive vision of American society. This is the work of history, it is the work of law and it is the work, as always, of politics.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va."
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