Good morning. Sam’s traveling and will be back on Monday. Iran struck a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz, undermining efforts to restore shipping there. And we have a report below from journalists on the ground in Venezuela. But we will start in Washington.
Protected no more
The Supreme Court sided with President Trump in two big tests of his immigration crackdown, granting his administration the power to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants and to turn away others at the southern border. The justices allowed the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections that permit people from Haiti and Syria to live and work legally in the United States. The migrants had been shielded by a program, known as Temporary Protected Status, that Congress had created in 1990 to provide temporary legal status to people fleeing war, natural disasters or other crises. The ruling clears a path for the potential deportation of 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians. And it’s likely to have implications for T.P.S. holders from about a dozen other countries. In the other case, the justices said the Trump administration could turn away migrants seeking asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border by physically preventing them from crossing into the United States, where federal law would have entitled them to try to claim asylum. Both rulings were split along ideological lines, 6 to 3. Our Supreme Court reporter Ann Marimow explains their significance: Taken together, the opinions from the court’s conservative majority signaled deference to the president’s ability to set the nation’s immigration policy, as the justices prepare in the coming days to issue more rulings that will decide how much power to give Mr. Trump across his boundary-pushing agenda. The race factorThe matter of race was central to the T.P.S. case, Adam Liptak writes. Trump has a history of derogatory statements against Haitians: He has accused them of “poisoning the blood” of the nation, accused them of “eating the pets” of their neighbors, and described their home country as a “shithole” that is “filthy, dirty, disgusting.” If discrimination was “a motivating factor” in Trump’s determination, the leading precedent said, it would violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. But Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, concluded that Trump’s comments had not cleared that bar. The president’s statements, he wrote, were not “overtly racial.” Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, was incredulous. “The references — of filth, disease and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” she wrote. For more
Isayen Herrera, a freelance reporter for The Times, reported yesterday from La Guaira, a port city near Caracas, Venezuela, that is one of the areas hit hardest by a pair of devastating earthquakes. At one collapsed building, she reported, no emergency crews came. No firefighters. No medical workers. So the residents, in flimsy helmets, were attempting rescues themselves. They could hear their loved ones trapped inside the rubble: Tap. Tap. Tap. “They’ve pulled out a lot of dead people,” said Yorliana Colmenares, who believed her boyfriend was among those under the crushed walls and knotted wire. “Injured people, children, animals.” The Venezuelan government put the official death toll at 235 with more than 4,300 injured, but those numbers were expected to rise significantly. Hundreds of people are trapped in the rubble or missing. There is growing fear about the toll in shantytowns, where many people live in precarious hillside homes. International rescue teams were arriving early this morning to help with the desperate search for survivors. The quakes slammed a country struggling to emerge from a decade-long depression that prompted millions to emigrate and wiped out infrastructure, including for health care. The disaster is an unexpected test for the new, forced alliance with the United States months after the Trump administration arrested and removed Venezuela’s longtime president, Nicolás Maduro. Among the missing is a 35-year-old man who was deported this year from Florida, where he worked remodeling homes, under the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. In videos posted on social media, one woman likened the experience of living through the quakes to being inside a horror movie. A man who was in a Caracas shopping mall told The Times, “Everyone was just kind of waiting for the building to fall on top of them.” Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, a photographer who lives in Venezuela, witnessed horrific scenes of collapsed buildings and spoke to survivors trying to cope with the aftermath. She describes the experience in the video below. Click to watch.
And now back to Tom, our resident sports fanatic, for an update about the action on the field. Every four years, I and millions of my fellow Americans cosplay as hard-core soccer fans. We relearn the offside rule and Google what “V.A.R.” stands for. We set aside our aversion to ties. We’re all in — until the U.S. team inevitably flames out and we lose interest. This time, though, the U.S. is not flaming out, and we’re not losing interest. It helps that we’re hosting most of the matches. How can you not love seeing Scottish fans depleting Boston’s beer supply? Or Brazilians dancing in the sands of Miami Beach? Or thousands of the real hard-core American soccer lovers disrupting traffic in Seattle with a raucous march to the stadium?
And yes, it helps that the U.S. is outperforming expectations. Our guys won their first two matches — a feat not achieved since the inaugural 1930 World Cup — before dropping their final match of the group stage last night, 3-2, against Turkey (or was it Türkiye?) after having already clinched the top spot. Next up is the round of 32, otherwise known as the knockout round, in which the U.S. will face Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1 in Santa Clara, Calif. If we win there, there’s a good chance it’ll be Egypt or South Korea a few days later. A deep run in the World Cup. What better way to celebrate our 250th birthday? More from yesterday’s matches:
The knockout rounds are starting to take shape. But the rules deciding who plays whom are, frankly, too confusing to figure out on your own. This handy page from The Athletic does the math for you.
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Louise Perry thinks the sexual revolution helped men more than it helped women. She chatted with Ross Douthat about how to fix that. Play the video above to watch their conversation. Trump’s reflecting pool fiasco is the perfect symbol for his clownish presidency, Michelle Cottle writes. (This link is free.) Subscribers always win. Here’s why. You can now save 75% on your first year of a New York Times Games subscription. Discover all of our word and logic games (and play past puzzles), earn badges for your achievements, plus more. Time is running out though, so subscribe today.
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