Judge Blocks Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order in First Legal Blow

A federal district court judge on Thursday temporarily blocked Trump’s revocation of birthright citizenship, striking the first blow against the president’s sweeping, aggressive executive orders.

Senior U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour listened to 25 minutes of arguments before rejecting the order, halting the policy from coming into effect for 14 days. There will be an injunction for a permanent block once the initial period is up.

Coughenour agreed with Arizona, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington—the four states that sued Trump—that the executive order was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Coughenour said, according to NBC. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

Trump signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship on Monday, and has long pledged to end one of the bedrock principles of American identity. “The federal government will not recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens born in the United States,” a Trump official announced on Monday. The order would also ban birthright citizenship for children of parents temporarily in the United States, including those on student and work visas.

This was only one of six lawsuits filed against the Trump administration by Democratic attorney generals in 22 states and immigrants rights organizations across the country. More legal challenges are likely to come.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday that every international business needs to make their products in the United States, or face tariffs.

“My message to every business in the world is very simple: Come make your product in America, and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on Earth,” Trump said in a speech livestreamed from Washington, D.C. “But if you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff.”

Trump’s tariff threats have not been welcomed by world leaders, especially countries such as Canada and Mexico. The president on Thursday again floated annexing Canada as the fifty-first U.S. state by using tariffs as leverage. He has previously threatened to enact tariffs against Mexico unless the country stops sending “Crime and Drugs” across the border.

On Tuesday, Trump threatened a 10 percent tariff against China “based on the fact that they’re sending fentanyl to Mexico and Canada,” and said he was considering tariffs against the European Union over a $350 billion trade deficit. But at Davos, these threats did not go over well.

“Tariffs against friends and allies is a crazy idea,” Finland’s Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen told The Wall Street Journal. Likewise, the head of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said tariffs would hurt global growth and could result in retaliatory tariffs, with devastating results.

“If we have tit-for-tat retaliation, whether it’s 25 percent tariff (or) 60 percent, and we go to where we were in the 1930s, we’re going to see double-digit global GDP losses. That’s catastrophic. Everyone will pay,” Okonjo-Iweala said at Davos Thursday.

Trump isn’t likely to listen to criticism over his tariff plans, even as economic experts say they will hurt the country, particularly areas that engage in cross-border trade like Texas. While he might engage in specific carve-outs for his corporate friends, for the most part, Trump plans to plow ahead with tariffs regardless of their devastating effects on the U.S. economy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have successfully convinced Donald Trump that diminishing America’s nuclear weapons reserves would be a good thing.

Speaking before the World Economic Forum on Thursday, the forty-seventh president said that Putin had warmed to the idea of “denuclearization” between the two countries.

“We’d like to see denuclearization,” Trump told the conference. “I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear, and I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow.

“And China too, China liked it,” Trump added.

On Monday, Putin indicated that he was ready to discuss nuclear arms control, the war in Ukraine, and other security issues with Trump, reported Reuters.

The last and only remaining nuclear arms deal between the U.S. and Russia—the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, otherwise known as New START—is set to expire on February 5, 2026. The deal capped the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the two nations could deploy, as well as the number of land and water vehicles used to deliver them.

Legitimate international disarmament would, of course, be a good thing. But whether Putin would actually follow through on diminishing his nation’s nuclear stockpiles is unclear. For decades, Russia has spent millions working to replace and upgrade its strategic and nonstrategic nuclear systems.

As of early 2024, Russia possessed a total of 5,580 nuclear warheads, the most of any country in the world, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The nonprofit organization argued that the war in Ukraine had drastically depleted Russia’s “conventional forces,” pushing it to deepen its reliance on nuclear weapons for its national defense systems.

“Russia’s nuclear modernization programs—combined with frequent explicit nuclear threats against other countries in the context of its large conventional war in Ukraine—contribute to uncertainty about the country’s long-term intentions and have generated a growing international debate about the nature of its nuclear strategy,” read a Bulletin column.

The global security group further argued that the U.S. ballistic missile system could stand in the way of Russia’s eventual nuclear disarmament, claiming that the missile system “constitutes a real future risk to the credibility of Russia’s retaliatory capability.”

Some of Trump’s domestic decisions prior to entering the White House were reportedly “thrilling” to Russian mouthpieces. Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT, mocked American politicians in December for their stupidity while claiming that some of Trump’s more unqualified choices for his Cabinet—such as onetime DOGE co-chair nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard—are friendly faces that bring the Kremlin “lots of joy.”

Donald Trump’s decision to press pause on communications from health organizations amid an escalating bird flu breakout could take America’s soaring egg prices and make them even worse.

The consumer price index found that egg prices have increased 36.8 percent from this time last year, and experts believe the increase in price is the result of avian influenza, which is rapidly depleting the supply of chickens.

If one bird is infected, farms are required by law to cull the entire flock. Axios reported Tuesday that in the previous 30 days, the bird flu affected nearly 12 million birds, according to data from USDA. If nothing changes, egg prices will only continue to rise. Trump, who brags that he won the presidency by promising to lower the prices of groceries, is obviously acting swiftly and effectively to address the issue, right?

Not quite. On Tuesday, the acting director of the Department of Health and Human Services paused the release of “regulations, guidance documents, and other public documents and communications” from all U.S. health and science agencies.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been planning to publish an issue of their “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” which contained several items pertaining to the bird flu outbreak and dairy and poultry farms. But as all communications have been put on hold, the issue was not released, according to The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the bird flu has already infected at least 67 people, resulting in its first human death last month.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump pardoned two Washington, D.C., police officers convicted of the 2020 killing of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, a young Black man.

Officers Terrence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky were sentenced last September to 66 and 48 months in prison, respectively, for an “unauthorized police pursuit.” The two cops pursued Hylton-Brown after spotting him driving a moped without a helmet, and pursued him for 10 blocks, including going the wrong way down a one-way alley, until another vehicle hit and killed him.

Trump’s pardon came after Sutton and Zabavsky were unanimously found guilty by a federal grand jury in 2022 of conspiracy to obstruct and obstruction of justice over the incident, as well as second-degree murder in Sutton’s case. The D.C. Police Union asked for a pardon for the pair.

On Monday, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, including violent criminals and people accused of attacking police officers. That drew a (delayed) condemnation Tuesday from the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, two police unions that endorsed Trump in the 2020 election.

The pardons to Sutton and Zabavsky indicate that the Trump administration is reviving its full-throated support of law enforcement, even when crimes are committed, with the lone exception for anything that goes against the right-wing culture war. Crimes committed by MAGA will also not be considered crimes, so long as they serve President Trump.