The Brief

Three of the four California counties empowered to inspect federal immigration detention facilities have not done so, and the fourth has conducted only basic reviews of food this year, records obtained by CalMatters show.

If they were checking, local officials would be providing an additional layer of oversight at a time when the number of people held in detention centers has surged because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on unauthorized immigrants.

Two state laws provide state, county and local officials the authority to review health and safety conditions in privately-run immigration detention facilities.

The first, passed during the first Trump administration, allows the attorney general’s office to inspect for violations of national detention standards and health or safety issues. The AG’s office has used that power to publish annual reports on conditions inside detention centers, including one this year that alleged deficient mental health care.

The second, a 2024 law, empowers counties to inspect privately run detention facilities. In the past, counties have inspected jails and prisons, finding mold, rats, and other health violations. But county health officials have not used that power to inspect federal immigration detention facilities.

In Kern County — where three detention centers operate — the health officer, through an attorney, has said in testimony before a federal judge that he has “no intention” of exercising his new authority to inspect the facilities to ensure they comply with state and local health standards.

The companies that manage the detention centers through contracts with the federal government say they take seriously their responsibility to adhere to federal standards and uphold human rights. One unsuccessfully sued to overturn the new California inspection law, alleging it was unnecessary and an intrusion on the federal government’s authority.

More than 5,700 people are in immigration detention in California, an 84% increase since the spring. On April 16, there were 3,100 people detained in the state, according to the California Attorney General’s latest report.

Advocates for detainees are drawing attention to what they describe as unhealthy conditions, including in the state’s newest detention center. It opened in Kern County without proper permits or a business license as required by state law, according to California City’s mayor.

CoreCivic’s 2,560-bed immigration detention center there sits on 70 acres in the Mohave desert about 80 miles east of Bakersfield.

A detainee who goes by the name of Loba has been locked up in the California City facility since Aug. 28. She said some detainees have not received the medication they need for more than 20 days. She asked CalMatters not to fully identify her because she feared retaliation by CoreCivic guards for speaking with a reporter.

“There’s a lack of interest on the part of CoreCivic to care for individuals with diabetes problems and people who have heart problems or any other health conditions. They’re really not caring for detainees and not giving us the proper medical treatment in detention,” Loba said.

She said she observed five people who needed emergency care because they could not get medication. Another California City detainee described similar conditions in an interview with CalMatters.

Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, said the site has robust medical and mental health care on site, including around-the-clock access to those services. He said those services adhere to “standards set forth by our government partners.”

“There are no delays in individuals getting their prescription medications,” Gustin said.

Counties reviewing inspection law

In the four counties where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detention facilities, only one county health department conducts the kind of inspections allowed under the 2024 law. A San Bernardino County spokesperson said the county has the authority to inspect for disease control and “general health and sanitation,” but he later said the reviews are limited to the facilities’ food processing and service.

Officials from two other counties said they’ll use their new authority to respond to specific concerns, but that they had not yet done any inspections.

The Imperial County health department said it would respond to a complaint “if the facility falls within our legal authority to inspect.” The San Diego County health department said only that it “is exploring how to effectively operationalize this law in its jurisdiction.”

California has seven immigration detention centers: Adelanto ICE Processing Center and Desert View Annex in San Bernardino County; The Golden State Annex, Mesa Verde ICE Processing facility, and the California City detention facility in Kern County; The Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Imperial County; and the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County.

ICE pays the for-profit prison company GEO Group to operate four of the centers: Adelanto, Desert View Annex, Golden State Annex and Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center.

MTC manages the detention center in Imperial County, while CoreCivic manages Otay Mesa and California City.

The 2024 law gives local health officials the authority to inspect private detention facilities as they deem necessary, but it does not require them to do so unless requested by local lawmakers or law enforcement. And it does not specify exactly what county health inspectors should check, despite lawmakers and cosponsors of the bill citing “detainees facing challenges in accessing timely medical attention” as one of the reasons the new law was necessary.

As the bill moved forward, lawmakers also cited a May 2020 COVID-19 outbreak at the Otay Mesa Detention Center that resulted in more than 300 staff and detained individuals becoming infected. “Conditions in these facilities not only affect the lives of those detained, but also impact the surrounding communities,” wrote the bill’s author, state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Democrat from Los Angeles.

It passed without any recorded opposition and with unanimous votes in the Legislature.

GEO Group sued to challenge the law, arguing it was unconstitutional because it stepped on the federal government’s authority to manage detention centers. By extension, GEO claimed intergovernmental immunity as a contractor.

“This case involves the latest in a string of attempts by the State of California to ban federal immigration enforcement in the state, or so significantly burden such efforts as to drive federal agencies and contractors involved in that constitutionally-mandated national security function from California,” GEO attorneys argued in the suit, which was filed in the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of California.

In federal court this year, Kern County attorney Jeremy McNutt said county health officer Kristopher Lyon doesn’t want to use the new law to inspect the Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex facilities in his county. McNutt said Lyon would inspect the facility if the governor ordered him to, but otherwise, he “has no intention of inspecting the facility whatsoever.”

“If he’s not ordered to do it then he has no intention of doing it, doesn’t really care to have the right to do it or not,” McNutt said of Lyon. “We don’t believe he has a duty to inspect the facility … There is no commitment or desire to inspect.”

A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in May, letting the law stay in place. Lyon did not respond to a request for comment about whether his position has changed in light of an influx of new detainees and the opening of a new detention center.

Detainees gather in a common area at one of the Adelanto ICE Processing Center housing units in Adelanto on Aug. 28, 2019.

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Adelanto cleared county review

In the only county making use of its powers to access the detention centers, a San Bernardino County inspector spent about an hour on May 29 at the Adelanto center for food and service issues. The facility passed, according to inspection reports.

San Bernardino County inspector Mary Ann Glass made no notes or comments, and she found no deficiencies or violations at the facility, the paperwork shows.

“Yes, our inspections are limited to food processing and service,” confirmed San Bernardino health department spokesperson Francis Delapaz.

Adelanto is where a 39-year-old detainee was being held shortly before his death in September.

Internal emails obtained by the Los Angeles Times show that about two weeks after arriving at Adelanto in August, Ismael Ayala-Uribe reported symptoms including a cough, fever, and severe pain. Staff flagged his condition as potentially life-threatening and last week escorted him to the facility’s medical center in a wheelchair, the newspaper reported. About an hour and a half later, medical staff sent him back to his dormitory. He was not sent to a hospital until three days later, where he died.

Adelanto detainees, who spoke with CalMatters on condition that they not be named because they fear retaliation, said the sites are crowded, and it’s taking a long time to access medications and medical care.

An immigrant who was arrested in an ICE raid in Los Angeles in June and spent more than a month at Adelanto, said it took three days for him to be assigned a bed when he arrived at the facility.

During that time, he wasn’t allowed a shower or a change of clothes and wasn’t permitted to call his family. He said the dorm he ultimately slept in doubled in population, to its full capacity of about 90 people. Staff, he said, asked for volunteers to keep the walkways and windows clean, and detainees waited longer than three days to hear back about medical requests.

“Everyone was getting sick with coughs, the flu, with the air being cold all day,” he said. “Almost 50% of the people were like that.”

A Geo Group spokesperson said the company provides around-the-clock access to medical care.

“Geo strongly rejects these baseless allegations,” spokesman Christopher Ferreira said in an email to CalMatters. “Our contracts also set strict limits on a facility’s capacity. Simply put, our facilities are never overcrowded.”

California tried to ban for-profit detention

The federal government’s own inspections indicate allegations of abuse and possible lapses in suicide prevention at the Adelanto facility. In 2024, the Office of Detention Oversight found one detainee who alleged an officer inappropriately squeezed his chest and genitals during a pat-down search, and another told inspectors he had thoughts of self-harming because of the poor conditions inside the facility.

State inspectors released a report in April that documented similar issues with conditions across the state. Staffing shortages, poor coordination between medical and mental health care providers, and widespread problems with record-keeping contributed to the risks for detainees, the report stated.

Attorney General Rob Bonta acknowledged that state and local oversight over detention facilities is limited, particularly after the state in 2019 attempted to ban private for-profit facilities, a bill Bonta authored as a legislator. The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found the law unconstitutional.

Legislators "thought the conditions and practices inside these detention centers were so bad that they should be completely prohibited. And unfortunately, that was struck down,” Bonta told CalMatters.

“Because these are federal detention centers, there is a limit on what I can do, what the California legislature can do. The authority rests more with the federal government, particularly Congress,” he said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Before taking his last steps on the moon, NASA astronaut Gene Cernan made sure to scratch his young daughter's initials into the lunar dust.

He had some parting thoughts for the rest of humanity, too.

"We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind," the Apollo 17 commander said before departing for Earth.

That was December 1972. Now, more than half a century later, NASA may be about to fulfill Cernan's wishes.

Watch the launch live stream, set to start at 12:50 p.m. ET, here.

As early as Wednesday at 6:24 p.m., an Orion capsule seated atop a 322-foot rocket will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes according to plan, the capsule will carry four astronauts around the moon and back — sending humans the farthest they've ever been from our home planet.

The mission will be the first launch in the Artemis moon program to include a crew. It follows the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022, which sent an empty Orion capsule on a three-week ride around the moon before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

This time, the Artemis II astronauts will first orbit Earth to check out key systems on the spacecraft, and then trace a figure-eight path around our lunar neighbor and back. The entire journey is expected to take just under 10 days.

This mission is a crucial step toward NASA's goal of once again setting foot on lunar soil, and eventually establishing a permanent lunar presence — including a moon base — with the help of international partners.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, Mark Burger, launch weather officer with the Space Force's 45th Weather Squadron, said there was an 80% chance of favorable conditions for launch day, though they were keeping a close eye on the weather.

Jeff Spaulding, senior NASA test director, is a veteran of many launches. He said that for his part, the reality that humans would soon be flying to the moon would probably set in during the final minute before ignition.

"That's when it really starts to hit home that, you know, we really got a shot at making it today," Spaulding said at the briefing. "And I know a lot of people are thinking the same thing, because you can hear a pin drop in that firing room as you count from 10 down to T-zero."

"After that, though," he said with a smile, "it may get a little bit noisier."

Copyright 2026 NPR

President Trump is set to address the nation on the Iran war at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday night, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying he would be providing "an important update," without providing further details.

On Tuesday, Trump said he expected the conflict to be over in two to three weeks, adding, "we'll be leaving very soon," and promising gas prices would then "come tumbling down."

Trump shrugged off what would happen to the blockaded Strait of Hormuz – which has cut off one fifth of the world's oil supply – saying, "we're not going to have anything to do with it." He said that it wouldn't affect the U.S. and would be something for other countries to deal with.

"They'll be able to fend for themselves," he said, having previously told European allies who have refused to enter the war to "go get your own oil!"

The assertion to wrap up the war quickly comes just days after Trump threatened to up the ante if there was no deal and Tehran didn't reopen the strait. He said he could seize Iran's oil and blow up all of their Electric Generating Plants and desalinization plants. He also said he was considering an invasion of Iran's key oil export terminal, Kharg Island.

But on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed his boss's latest comments on the war being over in a matter of weeks, saying the main goal of preventing Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon had been achieved.

Rubio has expressed frustration in recent days over news reports accusing the administration of lacking clear objectives in Iran.

He said the objectives were: the destruction of Iran's air force, the destruction of its navy, the "severe diminishing" of its capability to launch missiles, and the destruction of its factories.

Regime change, previously touted by the administration as a goal, was not mentioned. Earlier this week Trump said he considered regime change had been achieved, despite the fact that it remains a hardline theocracy led by the son of the previous ayatollah.

Here are more updates on day 33 of the Iran war:

Fighting overnight | World leaders | Iran | American journalist kidnapped| Hegseth visits troops | Aid hold up | Peace plan

Regional Fighting overnight

The Israel Defense Forces said they hit 230 targets in Tehran while also widening an invasion into Lebanon. Meanwhile, Iran is striking back at Gulf neighbors, especially military bases used by the U.S. this week. One of those attacks injured as many as 20 U.S. service members in Saudi Arabia.

Since the war began over a month ago, 13 U.S. service members have been killed. Iran says more than 1,700 people have been killed in Iran.

People take cover in a bomb shelter as air raid sirens warn of incoming Iranian missile strikes in Bnei Brak, Israel, Wednesday, April 1, 2026.

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Also overnight Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed missile attacks on Israel, which the Israeli military intercepted. The Houthis have vowed an "escalation" in attacks.

Israel's emergency services reported Iranian missiles fired at central Israel had injured 14 people, including children.

At Kuwait's international airport, Iranian drones hit fuel depots, causing a huge fire, a day after a Kuwaiti oil tanker off Dubai was hit.

In Qatar on Wednesday, a missile launched by Iran hit an oil tanker leased to QatarEnergies, which said no one was injured and reported no environmental impact.

UK, Australia leaders speak

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer addressed the nation on Wednesday about how the rising cost of living caused by the conflict will affect British citizens and what his government is doing to try to mitigate that.

He repeated a previous vow that the U.K. will only take "defensive" action against Iranian attacks in the Middle East and would not get drawn into the war. He also announced his foreign secretary would organize an international summit on the Strait of Hormuz aimed at restoring freedom of navigation.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also gave a national address on the war on Wednesday.

Earlier this week Albanese announced his government would halve the fuel tax for three months to give Australians some respite from the rising costs.

He urged Australians to use public transport and not to hoard fuel. He also warned that "the reality is, the economic shocks caused by this war will be with us for months."

'Hospitality' is over, says Iran

Ebrahim Azizi, the head of Iranian Parliament's National Security Committee, said on X in a message to Trump that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen "but not for you."

People sift through rubble in the aftermath of a drone attack on a residential building in which one civilian was killed on March 31, 2026 in eastern Tehran, Iran.

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Referring to the period since Iran's 1979 revolution, he added: "47 years of hospitality are over forever."

Iran this week approved a bill to charge vessels for crossing the vital economic waterway.

"Trump has finally achieved his dream of 'regime change' — but in the region's maritime regime!" Azizi said.

It's not just vessels that are now trapped near the Strait of Hormuz.

An estimated twenty thousand seafarers are onboard — in an active warzone — and the U.N. is trying to extricate them.

Most seafarers are from the Philippines, Bangladesh and India and some vessels are reportedly running low on food and water.

The U.N.'s International Maritime Organization is negotiating with all sides to try to evacuate them.

American journalist kidnapped in Iraq

American freelance reporter Shelly Kittleson was kidnapped in Baghdad Tuesday, according to Al-Monitor, a Middle Eastern news site for which she has written.

Iraqi security forces said they intercepted a vehicle that crashed and arrested one of the suspected kidnappers, but are still searching for the kidnapped journalist and other suspects.

U.S. officials say they're working to get her released.

"The State Department previously fulfilled our duty to warn this individual of threats against them and we will continue to coordinate with the FBI to ensure their release as quickly as possible," Dylan Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for global public affairs, said on social media.

He said Americans, including media workers, have been advised not to travel to Iraq and should leave the country. The statement did not condemn the kidnapping or express concern.

Johnson said Iraqi authorities apprehended a suspect associated with Iran-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah, believed to be involved in the kidnapping.

Press freedom organizations expressed deep concern. The Committee to Protect Journalists called on "Iraqi authorities to do everything in their power to locate Shelley Kittleson, ensure her immediate and safe release, and hold those responsible to account."

Based in Rome, Kittleson has reported on Iraq, as well as Syria and Afghanistan, for years, according to Al-Monitor.

Reporters Without Borders said she is "very familiar with Iraq, where she stays for extended periods."

"RSF stands alongside her loved ones and colleagues during this painful wait," the organization said.

Al-Monitor said in a statement it is "deeply alarmed" by her kidnapping. "We stand by her vital reporting from the region and call for her swift return to continue her important work," it said.

U.S. defense secretary visits troops

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an undisclosed trip to the Middle East to visit troops on military bases over the weekend. He did not divulge the location for the troops' safety.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to members of the media during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, Tuesday, March 31, 2026.

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"I spoke to Air Force and Navy pilots on the flight line who every day both deliver bombs deep into Iran, but also shoot down drones defending their base. Many had just returned from the skies of Iran and Tehran," he told reporters in a briefing Tuesday.

He said he "witnessed an urgency to finish the job" and tried to draw a comparison with America's earlier drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said the U.S. is improving bunkers and layered air defenses as a priority to protect troops and aircraft.

This comes after more than a dozen U.S. service members were injured, several severely, and U.S. aircraft were damaged in Iranian strikes on a base in Saudi Arabia last Friday. The Pentagon says 13 U.S. service members have been killed and 300 wounded in what it calls Operation Epic Fury.

He repeated the administration's assertion that the U.S. is negotiating with Iran, despite Iranian officials' denial that talks are happening.

Aid hold up

The World Food Program says tens of thousands of tons of food aid are stuck in ports as a consequence of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

The WFP says there is a whole disruption in the global supply chain with carriers not able to use the Strait of Hormuz and choosing not to use the Suez Canal through Egypt out of concerns of attacks there, too.

The agency says this is adding a month to shipping time and costing more because of spikes in fuel prices from the war. It noted that as people around the world pay more for fuel, more families will struggle to put food on the table.

Some 45 million additional people will fall into acute hunger around the world if current conditions continue through June- reaching 363 million globally, the WFP said.

Pakistan, China release statement

Pakistan's and China's foreign ministers issued a joint statement on Tuesday calling for talks to the war on Iran as part of a broader peace plan. The statement called for a halt to fire, an end to attacks on civilian infrastructure, and reopening of the State of Hormuz.

For days Pakistani officials had said they hope to help mediate talks to end a war that has seized up the global economy, pushed up the price of fossil fuels, and key commodities like fertilizer — and that has killed thousands of people, mostly Iranians and Lebanese.

The joint statement with China came after high-ranking Pakistani officials led a flurry of meetings with regional powers. China is Iran's biggest customer for oil — and it's seen as sympathetic to the country.

Jane Arraf in Amman, Jordan, Diaa Hadid in Mumbai, Quil Lawrence in New York, Giles Snyder, Michele Kelemen in Washington, Emily Feng in Van, Turkey, Aya Batrawy in Dubai, and Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg contributed to reporting.
Copyright 2026 NPR

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The Supreme Court chamber will be packed on Wednesday, as the justices hear arguments in a case that almost certainly will result in a historic ruling. At issue is President Trump's challenge to a constitutional provision that has long been interpreted to guarantee American citizenship to every child born in the United States.

Listen to arguments and live NPR special coverage beginning at 10 a.m. ET:

Trump has long maintained that the Constitution does not guarantee birthright citizenship. So, on Day 1 of his second term, he issued an executive order barring automatic citizenship for any baby born in the U.S. whose parents entered the country illegally or who were here legally, but on a temporary, or even a long-term visa.

"We are the only country in the world that does this with birthright," Trump said as he signed the executive order. "And it's absolutely ridiculous."

That actually is not true. There are nearly 33 countries, mainly in North and South America, that have birthright citizenship — including, among others, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Can't see the video above? Watch it here.

D-Day for Trump's attack on birthright citizenship

But Trump has long been determined to rid this country of its longstanding protection for birthright citizenship. Wednesday is D-Day in that effort, and to understand the issues, it's worth taking a stroll through American history.

While citizenship was not defined at the nation's founding, the colonists were largely pro-immigrant, according to University of Virginia law professor Amanda Frost, author of American Birthright: How the Citizenship Clause made America American, due out in September.

The founders "wanted to populate this mostly empty continent," she observes, adding that, in fact, one of the complaints against the British king in the Declaration of Independence was that the British "were discouraging immigration."

Indeed, she notes, after the Revolutionary War, even those who had been loyal to the king but wanted to stay in America were granted U.S. citizenship.

Trump's view of the 14th Amendment

Birthright citizenship didn't make it into the Constitution, though, until after the Civil War, when the nation enacted the 14th Amendment to reverse the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision — a ruling that in 1857 declared that Black people, enslaved or free, could not be citizens of the United States.

To undo that decision, the post-Civil War Congress passed a constitutional amendment that defines citizenship in broad terms. It says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

President Trump, however, maintains that the constitutional amendment was intended to be more limited than it has been in practice. "This was meant for the slaves … for the children of slaves," Trump said last January. "I'm in favor of that. But it wasn't meant for the entire world to occupy the United States." 

But as the University of Virginia's Frost notes, the framers of the 14th Amendment had more than one explicit purpose. They wanted a clear, bright line definition of citizenship; they wanted the former slaves and their children to be citizens, and they wanted to include immigrants, many of whom were the targets of great hostility.

"I like to remind my students that between 1845 and 1855, approximately 2 million people from Ireland fled to the United States," Frost observes. They were fleeing from famine and harsh British rule. And while "there certainly was some prejudice and discrimination and xenophobia," she says, "their children soon would automatically become American citizens" when born on U.S. soil after enactment of the 14th Amendment.

Trump's interpretation of the 14th Amendment is avowedly far more restricted. What's more, it has not been embraced by the courts or the legal norms of the country for 160 years.

The counterargument

"The president's executive order is attempting a radical rewriting of that 14th Amendment guarantee to all of us," says Cecillia Wang, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Indeed, even as both Republican and Democratic administrations have sought in modern times to deport large numbers of individuals who have entered the country illegally, the notion of birthright citizenship has remained so entrenched that during World War II when Japanese citizens were held as enemy aliens in U.S. detention camps, their newborn children were automatically granted American citizenship because they were born on U.S. soil. And Congress later codified that understanding in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

At the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the justices are likely to focus on some of the key court decisions that have protected birthright citizenship during the past century and a half. Perhaps most important among these is the case of Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrants who ran a small business in the city. Back then, immigrants like Wong's parents were largely free to enter the U.S. without any documentation, but his parents eventually returned to China. And after their son visited them in 1895, officers at the port in San Francisco refused to allow him back into the United States, contending that he was not a qualified citizen.

Wong challenged the denial and, in 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. By a 6-2 vote, the justices interpreted the words "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to mean that all children born in the U.S. were automatically granted citizenship. The court noted that only three exceptions were specified in the amendment: The children of diplomats were not deemed to be U.S. citizens because their allegiance was to another country; the children of occupying armies were similarly excepted, as were the children of Native American tribes. Of these three exceptions, the only one that still applies is to the children of diplomats, as there are no invading armies, and Native Americans were granted automatic citizenship in 1924.

The Trump administration, however, argues that Wong Kim Ark's situation was very different from many of the children who become automatic American citizens today, because Wong's parents, though undocumented, were here legally, by virtue of having a permanent residence in the U.S. And the Trump administration points to language in the 1898 Supreme Court opinion that assumes the parents had legal status in the country because they had a permanent residence in San Francisco.

The Trump administration makes an even broader argument. "An individual who is naturally born in the United States is only considered a citizen if their parents have allegiance to the nation," says Daniel Epstein, vice president of America First Legal, the organization founded by the architect of Trump's immigration policies, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff. "It is a misdemeanor to come into the United States without authorization. That is a crime," he says. "That is strong evidence that you don't kind of meet the traditional notion of allegiance."

"We do not punish children for the sins of their parents"

Countering that argument, the ACLU's Wang will tell the Supreme Court that the men who wrote the 14th Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent.

"And the idea — that actually goes back to the founding — is that in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you're born in this country, we're all Americans, all the same," Wang says.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is supporting the president's position, along with 11 other GOP senators, and 16 House members, who signed on to the America First brief.

"As a policy matter, birthright citizenship is stupid," Cruz says, "because it incentivizes illegal immigration. It makes absolutely no sense that someone breaks the law and they get rewarded with a very, very, precious gift, which is American citizenship."

Can an executive order trump a constitutional amendment?

The ACLU's Wang counters that Trump is trying, by executive order, to change the meaning of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, a measure that was approved overwhelmingly by the Congress in 1866 and, after a great public debate, ratified by more than three-quarters of the states. She argues that the consequences of such a dramatic change by executive fiat would have untold consequences.

"What will immediately happen is that every month, tens of thousands of U.S.-born babies will be stripped of their citizenship. They may be stateless because their parents' country of nationality may not consider them to be citizens. And so you'll see a permanent underclass of people who have no nationality, who are living in the United States, who can't pass on their nationality to their children born in the U.S.

In a separate brief, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stresses the problems that would be created by generation after generation of children who are stateless, with no country to call home, and no citizenship to pass on to their children.

"The children … would be the ones to bear the brunt of this," says Bishop Daniel Flores, vice president of the bishops conference. "I have people asking this now in my diocese. 'Bishop, am I going to get into trouble if I give food to somebody that I'm not sure of their documentation? … Can we help these people? Because we think we need to, because they're people and they were born here."

The Trump administration counters that birthright citizenship raises two other problems: a generic potential threat to national security and the problem of so-called "birth tourism."

In fact, even birthright defenders concede that a cottage industry has long existed in which women pay money to come to the U.S. and have their children here. But the numbers are consistently very small. Even the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors limited immigration, estimates only 20,000 to 26,000 birth tourism children are born in the U.S. each year, compared to the overall birth count of 3.6 million babies born each year.

Daniel Epstein of America First Legal contends that numbers are not important. "I view just one illegal act as illegal, and birth tourism is illegal and it's against the law, and the law matters."

Population experts say that if automatic birthright citizenship were to be voided, the consequences would be profound — and counterintuitive. The Population Research Institute at Penn State, for instance, estimates that a repeal of birthright citizenship would result in 2.7 million more people living here illegally by 2045, people who previously would have been entitled to birthright citizenship, but now have no such citizenship for themselves or to pass on to their children or the generations thereafter.

Also likely to come up at today's Supreme Court argument are practical questions, like those raised by Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year in a related case. How would a hospital know that the parents of a child are illegally in the country? What would hospitals do with a newborn? What would states do? The answer from Trump's solicitor general, D. John Sauer, was "Federal officials will have to figure that out."

Copyright 2026 NPR

With the exception of a stray morning shower here and there, Southern California is in for a dry and sunny afternoon.

The afternoon sun will warm up the area a few degrees today. For the coasts, we're looking at highs around 67 degrees and up to the low 70s for the inland coast.

The valleys will see similar temperatures with highs from 68 to 74 degrees. The Inland Empire, meanwhile, will be cooler with highs around 63 degrees.

In Coachella Valley, temps will reach 81 to 86 degrees.

A wind advisory still is in effect for the San Bernardino, Riverside County mountains, including Coachella Valley, until 11 p.m. Thursday. The Antelope Valley will see some gusty winds later this afternoon as well.