Monday, April 27, 2026
Elon Musk and Sam Altman face off in court over OpenAI’s founding mission
Elon Musk and Sam Altman face off in court over OpenAI’s founding mission
“Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman and OpenAI, alleging breach of contract and unjust enrichment. Musk claims Altman betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission by restructuring it as a for-profit entity, seeking damages and the removal of Altman and other executives. OpenAI denies the allegations, asserting Musk agreed to the for-profit transition and is motivated by jealousy.
Musk’s lawsuit accuses Altman of fraud, while OpenAI says that Musk is ‘motivated by jealousy’
A lawsuit between two of Silicon Valley’s biggest tycoons goes to trial Monday in California, the culmination of a years-long bitter feud. Elon Musk has accused Sam Altman of betraying the founding agreement of the non-profit they started together, OpenAI, by changing it to a for-profit enterprise.
Musk accuses Altman, OpenAI, its president Greg Brockman, and its major partner Microsoft of breach of contract and unjust enrichment in the lawsuit. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday morning at a federal courthouse in Oakland, with opening arguments from both sides expected later this week. The trial is slated to last two to three weeks. Along with internal communications from Musk and key executives at OpenAI, the trial promises a who’s who of Silicon Valley on the witness stand, including Musk, Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
OpenAI has vehemently denied Musk’s allegations, saying that he agreed in 2017 that establishing a for-profit entity would be a necessary next step for the company and that Musk is “motivated by jealousy” and “regret for walking away”. The company also contests that Musk’s funding was an investment, stating that it was instead a tax deductible donation to the non-profit and does not entitle him to ownership in OpenAI.
The case carries sizable stakes for OpenAI, which is expected to go public later this year at around a $1tn valuation. Musk is seeking a range of remedies that include the removal of Altman and Brockman and more than $134bn in damages, which the tycoon says would be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm. He also wants to reverse the company’s restructuring as a for-profit entity.
Altman, Musk and several other founders launched OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit organization, with Musk providing about $38m. Altman’s relationship with Musk turned sour around 2017, after the billionaire grew impatient with OpenAI’s progress and made a failed bid to exert more control over the company. He left OpenAI’s board in 2018 and did not offer any more funding.
During OpenAI’s post-Musk years, it launched the wildly successful ChatGPT, raised tens of billions of dollars from Microsoft and grew to be one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Altman became the face of the AI boom. As the startup sought even more investment in 2025, it gained final approval from regulators to restructure its main business into a for-profit corporation, though one technically still overseen by the original non-profit.
Musk’s suit alleges that Altman’s dealmaking and maneuvering of OpenAI break with the fundamental mission of the company as a non-profit to benefit humanity and amount to a breach of contract. The suit also claims Altman and Brockman unjustly enriched themselves through their control of the company.“
Is the Supreme Court Coming Apart at the Seams?
Is the Supreme Court Coming Apart at the Seams?
“Two recent incidents involving Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor and Thomas highlight the court’s internal divisions and declining public trust. Sotomayor criticized Kavanaugh’s stance on racial profiling, while Thomas attacked “progressivism” as a threat to the Declaration of Independence. While Sotomayor apologized, Thomas did not, underscoring the court’s ideological divide and the need for greater accountability.
By Jesse Wegman
Mr. Wegman, a contributing Opinion writer, is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.
For most of American history, Supreme Court justices have done their best to stay out of the news. But more often in recent years, as the court itself has become a political lightning rod, justices have drawn scrutiny — for questionable ethical conduct, for perceived spats among their ranks or for what were seen as overtly political remarks.
In the past few weeks, two Supreme Court justices offered comments that were greeted with outrage and condemnation.
The episodes were unrelated, but together they offer a revealing glimpse of the state of the Supreme Court, on the verge of momentous rulings in the weeks ahead. Only one justice issued a public apology — the wrong justice.
In the first instance, during an event at the University of Kansas, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberals, made critical personal remarks clearly aimed at a conservative justice, Brett Kavanaugh (though she never mentioned him by name). The remarks focused on a ruling from the emergency docket last fall in which the court voted to allow racial profiling by “roving patrols” of immigration officers in Los Angeles.
Let’s stipulate that Supreme Court justices should resist the temptation to take personal swipes at one another (or anyone else) in public. But even if Justice Sotomayor’s comments were ill advised, they were pointed and narrow.
In the other instance, Justice Clarence Thomas, another conservative, chose to use a national platform to unleash his contempt for “progressivism” — both as a historical reform movement and as a modern political identity shared by tens of millions of Americans.
His remarks, at the University of Texas, Austin, ostensibly to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and broadcast live on C-SPAN, dealt yet another blow to the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court, which is suffering nearly record-low public-approval ratings.
Justice Thomas has often seemed to take a perverse pleasure in thumbing his nose at concerns regarding his professional conduct. (At the Austin event, he made a point of acknowledging Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor who has lavished numerous, and until recently undisclosed, luxury gifts on the justice over the years.)
But even by his standards, these remarks demonstrate a shocking lack of judgment. They display the sort of ideological arrogance and intellectual incoherence that have become characteristic of the right wing of the court under Chief Justice John Roberts. This is particularly true in some of the most high-profile cases the court is currently considering, such as those concerning the administrative state.
Justice Thomas’s attack on progressivism, which he claimed “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” is the latest expression of his longstanding disdain for a movement that he blamed for, among other horrors, the rise of “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao.”
Putting aside the historical illiteracy of these claims, what his attack on “progressivism” ignored was that the Progressive Era resulted in no fewer than four amendments to the Constitution, including one that allowed Americans to vote directly for senators and another that gave women the right to vote. These reforms were, by definition, supported by supermajorities of both Congress and Americans in every part of the country. In both process and substance, they were not an attempt to replace the Declaration and its egalitarian ideals, they were a triumph of democracy and a vindication of it.
But Justice Thomas’s attack was not limited to progressives from another century. He spoke in the present tense, going after those who “can mouth the words of the Declaration and parrot its principles” but who fail to grasp the true meaning of the phrase “all men are created equal.” No one, apparently, is equal to Clarence Thomas in understanding the Declaration.
The harm of Justice Thomas’s comments becomes that much more glaring when held up against those of Justice Sotomayor.
In her Kansas talk, Justice Sotomayor took aim at a shadow-docket ruling by the court last September that temporarily allowed immigration officers to consider race and apparent ethnicity in deciding to arrest and detain people they suspected to be illegal immigrants. The court offered no explanation for its ruling, but Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately to justify what he called “brief investigative stops.” (Critics of this policy would come to refer to them as “Kavanaugh stops.”)
Justice Sotomayor emphasized the drastic real-world consequences of these “brief” stops for working-class targets, then went after Justice Kavanaugh in personal terms: “This is from a man whose parents were professionals and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour or the piece like I do.”
It was perhaps an unfair dig at a colleague. At worst, Justice Sotomayor violated the court’s informal code of silence, which restrains the justices from attacking their colleagues in public. Or so we are led to believe. You might recall Justice Antonin Scalia’s constant and withering mockery of justices he disagreed with. In his dissent from the court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Justice Scalia wrote that he would “hide my head in a bag” before signing on to such an opinion, which he described as a collection of “straining-to-be-memorable passages” filled with “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”
The point is that the justices are grown-ups, and a little intemperate criticism, even from a colleague, is a small price to pay for having one of the most powerful jobs in the world.
Still, in the aftermath of these recent episodes, Justice Sotomayor called her remarks “inappropriate” and said that she had personally apologized to Justice Kavanaugh.
Justice Thomas has apologized to no one.
We’ve come to expect diatribes against entire swaths of the country from the Trump administration, but to hear a Supreme Court justice do it is somehow more chilling.
All Supreme Court justices are at risk of huffing their own fumes. It comes along with the lifetime appointment, the endless cosseting and flattery. It’s easy for them to forget that they play a unique role in American life, and are held to a higher standard of behavior than the rest of us. In 2016, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made inappropriate and highly prejudicial public comments about Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate. (She also said she regretted those comments. Why does it always seem to be the women who have the courage to say that they made a mistake?)
These days, the Supreme Court sometimes feels as if it is slowly coming apart, the victim of both its own members’ arrogance and the hardball politics that Senate Republicans used to pack the court with right-wingers over the past decade.
Now, in these latest incidents, two justices gave us two visions of the court. One was of a court that would work for America: tough-minded, passionate and willing to admit error. The other was of the court we have: smug, unapologetic and gleefully divisive.
Meanwhile, the millions of Americans who are no less devoted than Justice Thomas to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration must wonder where they might go for an apology.
Jesse Wegman, a contributing Opinion writer, is a former member of The New York Times editorial board, a senior fellow at the Kohlberg Center at the Brennan Center for Justice and the author of the forthcoming “The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution.”
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Jesse Wegman is a member of The Times editorial board, where he writes about the Supreme Court, law and politics.“
Why Trump Wants Unqualified U.S. Attorneys
Why Trump Wants Unqualified U.S. Attorneys
“Mr. Toobin is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.”
When President Trump began his second term, he stacked the top ranks of the Justice Department — the country’s chief federal law enforcement officers — with his former private attorneys, no doubt to make sure that they would protect his own personal and political interests rather than the nation’s.
Lately, though, in a less conspicuous way, he’s playing offense as well as defense, naming United States attorneys who will pursue, and even prosecute, his enemies. The Senate will shortly decide whether to confirm three of Mr. Trump’s most astonishing — and chillingly unqualified — selections for these crucial local positions.
The president has long expressed bitterness that his first attorney general, Jefferson Sessions III, recused himself from the investigation of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election, after which Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, named Robert S. Mueller III to lead the probe. Determined in his second term to avoid any such displays of independence and integrity by his subordinates, Mr. Trump stocked the Justice Department with former courtiers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi (since fired), Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (since named acting A.G.) and Solicitor General D. John Sauer (unchanged).
Still, Mr. Trump has been frustrated that revenge-based criminal cases against his enemies — which apparently range from one against James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, for supposed perjury to another against former President Barack Obama for alleged treason — have not come successfully to fruition. That’s where the U.S. attorneys come in.
Because the Senate is still honoring the blue-slip process for U.S. attorneys, giving Democratic senators the ability to block Mr. Trump from installing his choices in their states, the president has been stymied. (For a time, he contrived ways to bypass the Senate to appoint U.S. attorneys in New York, New Jersey and Virginia, but the courts ultimately rejected those gambits.) Nevertheless, Mr. Trump has a free hand in red states, and he’s counting on an ever-compliant Republican majority in the Senate to rubber-stamp his selections.
The senators will shortly decide, for example, whether to confirm Darin Smith as the chief federal prosecutor in Wyoming. Mr. Smith, who is already the acting U.S. attorney, has acknowledged participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol to overturn President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, though he asserted that he never entered the building. He is a failed candidate for Congress and in a brief tenure as a state senator, he co-sponsored bills to eliminate gun-free zones in buildings and ban state employees from assisting in enforcement of federal firearms laws. Primarily an estate planning specialist, he has practiced law for 25 years without trying a single case in federal or state courts.
When President Trump nominated Phillip Williams, Jr. to be U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Alabama, Mr. Williams was the president of “Rightside Media,” a podcast and radio network where he hosted a daily, multi-hour talk show with the tagline, “Solid Conservative and Just Plain Right.” On his program, Mr. Williams argued that the Jan. 6 rioters were “hunted down” by federal law enforcement, whom he accused of “prosecutorial abuse, many, many times over.” He compared these prosecutions to “the Salem witch trials on a national scale.” As a lawyer, Mr. Williams has never tried a criminal case.
The Senate will also soon consider the nomination of Dan Bishop to be the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. Mr. Bishop, who is already acting leader of the office, served in Congress from 2019 to 2025 and voted in 2021 not to certify the presidential election results in two states won by Mr. Biden. As part of Mr. Bishop’s current confirmation process, he answered a question from a Democratic senator about whether “the left” orchestrated the riots on Jan. 6, by saying, in writing, “I have heard credible accounts that black-bloc/Antifa agitators were in the crowd and among the first to vandalize the Capitol building, so I think that leftists participated in and perhaps instigated the mayhem in part.” In his career in private practice, Mr. Bishop estimated that the cases he handled were 97 percent civil and 3 percent criminal.
“Trump’s nominees as U.S. attorneys have been dramatically different in his second term,” Senator Richard Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told me. “In the first term, the nominees were conservative Republicans. Now they are MAGA loyalists.”
By custom, nominees for U.S. attorney posts do not testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in confirmation hearings, and following perfunctory debates, these three candidates were approved by the Committee on party-line votes. Under new procedural rules promulgated by the Republican majority in the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, will be able to call for a single vote to approve all three nominees. There is no announced Republican opposition to these U.S. attorney candidates, and none seems likely to materialize.
It’s possible to see U.S. attorneys as just another set of midlevel political appointees with a timer on their jobs, but that understates their importance. Whereas this administration figures whoever wins confirmation in most cabinet departments must first learn to navigate the vast federal bureaucracy in order to turn their policy preferences into concrete action, U.S. attorneys have almost unlimited discretion to launch criminal investigations. At minimum, these prosecutors can upend the lives of individuals and often lead to formal charges.
The consequences of the misuse of this extraordinary power are well illustrated by what’s been happening in South Florida. There, Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney nominated by Mr. Trump last year, has been working feverishly to build some kind of criminal case against John Brennan, the Obama-era head of the C.I.A., whom President Trump has long despised for his role in raising early suspicions about the ties between Russia and Mr. Trump.
I know of no legitimate case against Mr. Brennan — as Mr. Trump’s first Justice Department already demonstrated. At that time, the president ordered up a nearly identical investigation of Mr. Brennan and the origins of the Russia probe, that one led by John Durham, and it came up empty. It appears that the current Florida investigation has also found nothing, since Maria Medetis Long, a career prosecutor in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office, recently left the investigation, reportedly over her belief there was not enough to make a case.
Mr. Trump’s Justice Department responded by doubling down on the pursuit of Mr. Brennan. The president’s enablers summoned Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old Reagan-era U.S. attorney in Washington, to replace Ms. Medetis Long and take over the investigation. It’s not clear precisely how Mr. diGenova will direct the probe, but there’s no doubt that his assignment is to produce Mr. Brennan’s scalp. Even if the investigation of Mr. Brennan ends without criminal charges, as it would in a just world, or in an acquittal, which would be a second-best result, the cost to him and his family — in legal fees, harm to his good name and stress — will be enormous.
The power to inflict this kind of hardship gave rise to the most famous description of the power of federal prosecutors, which was made in 1940 by Robert H. Jackson, who was then the attorney general and would go on to be a Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg war-crimes prosecutor.
Addressing the annual conference of U.S. attorneys in the Great Hall of the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Jackson said, “It would probably be within the range of that exaggeration permitted in Washington to say that assembled in this room is one of the most powerful peace-time forces known to our country. The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous.” In an especially resonant passage, Mr. Jackson called out “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”
True then, true now.
Jeffrey Toobin is a former assistant U.S. attorney who writes about the intersection of law and politics. He is the author of “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court,” “The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy” and other books.“
Sunday, April 26, 2026
Trump Administration Approves Firing Squad Executions for Death Penalty
Trump Administration Approves Firing Squad Executions for Death Penalty
“The Trump administration announced it will allow firing squads and reauthorize lethal injection for federal executions, reversing the Biden administration’s moratorium on capital punishment. The Justice Department’s report also suggests expanding the types of crimes eligible for the death penalty and shortening the appeals process. However, the federal government can only conduct executions in states that allow capital punishment, posing a logistical challenge.
The Justice Department also reauthorized the use of a death penalty drug, and will seek to shorten the length of some legal appeals.
The Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow firing squads and readopt lethal injection as part of a broader push to revive the death penalty.
In an accompanying report, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that decisions by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to pull back on capital punishment “inflicted untold damage on victims of crime, and, ultimately, to the rule of law itself.”
The Justice Department, he said, had reauthorized the use of pentobarbital to execute federal inmates and would also permit additional methods of execution, like the use of firing squads.
The 48-page report added that the Bureau of Prisons should follow the example of states that had expanded their execution protocols amid fights over the legality and availability of lethal injection drugs.
“The additional manners of execution that B.O.P. should consider adopting include the firing squad, electrocution and lethal gas — each of which the Supreme Court has found to be consistent with the Eighth Amendment,” the report said, referring to the part of the Bill of Rights that bars “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, called the moves “a stain on our nation’s history.”
Mr. Durbin accused the Justice Department of “turning back the clock by strengthening the barbaric practice of the federal death penalty — a cruel, immoral and often discriminatory form of punishment.”
President Trump had signaled the moves on his first day in office, signing an executive order to reinstitute capital punishment in the federal prison system. During the first Trump presidency, 13 people were executed on federal death row.
In 2021, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland issued a moratorium on executions of federal inmates and halted the use of a lethal drug protocol using pentobarbital. In his final days in office, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 convicted killers on federal death row.
The Trump administration faces one significant hurdle. Under the law, the federal government may only conduct executions in states that allow capital punishment and carry them out according to state protocols.
For years, federal executions have taken place in Indiana, which only allows for capital punishment by lethal injection.
The Justice Department, acknowledging that limitation in its report, recommends the federal government find a new location to conduct executions, in a state that allows other methods. Mississippi, the report states, allows executions by electrocution, or firing squad if lethal injection or other methods are not available.
The report called for the Bureau of Prisons to submit a report “detailing the options to relocate or expand federal death row, or to construct a second federal execution facility in a state that permits additional manners of execution.”
The firing squad has rarely been used in the United States, but has recently been authorized by several states as an alternative method if the states cannot procure lethal injection drugs. Before last year, the only firing squad executions in the country in modern times had been carried out by Utah, in 1977, 1996 and 2010, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group.
But in 2025, South Carolina, which had authorized the firing squad in 2021, executed three prisoners using the method.
In its Friday announcement, the administration said it was working on a regulation intended to cut years off the federal appeals process for state death penalty cases, though ultimately the courts have final say.
The department also said it planned to issue a regulation that would impose new limits on the ability of inmates sentenced to death to seek clemency or pardons from the federal government.
The report also suggested expanding the types of crimes, and the types of criminals, eligible for the federal death penalty in order to “correct gaps and deficiencies” in the current law. Congress would have to pass any such change into law.
The administration should consider proposing legislation, the report said, that would make eligible for the death penalty “murders of law enforcement officers; murders by aliens illegally in the United States; and murders constituted or committed in the commission of hate crimes, stalking, material support, or domestic violence.”
Much of the report centered on creating a new legal and regulatory framework to preserve the availability of the drug most often used to conduct executions.
Robin M. Maher, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the report seemed more focused on grievances with the Biden administration than a straightforward analysis of lethal injection protocol.
“It struck me as rather disingenuous in terms of reflecting the reality of the problems” with the use of pentobarbital in executions, Ms. Maher said.
Pentobarbital was first used in an execution in 2010, in Oklahoma, and soon became a common method by which to execute prisoners.
As with other drugs used in lethal injections, it faced legal challenges from prisoners and their lawyers, who said that it caused prisoners to suffer, but courts have allowed its use, and several states use it as their primary method. Still, some states have had trouble obtaining the drug because of pressure from medical and advocacy groups on drugmakers.
In January 2025, the Justice Department under Mr. Garland issued a memosaying that “there remains significant uncertainty about whether the use of pentobarbital as a single-drug lethal injection causes unnecessary pain and suffering.” The department wrote that federal authorities should not use the drug for executions until its effect was more clear.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on stories across the United States, including natural disasters, protests, unsolved mysteries, high-profile criminal cases and more.“
Trump Reposts Tirade Against Chinese and Indian Immigrants
Trump Reposts Tirade Against Chinese and Indian Immigrants
(Trump is and always has been an ignorant racist.)
“President Trump reposted a transcript from a right-wing podcast on Truth Social, in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places and criticized recent immigrants from those countries. The post sparked backlash from the Indian government, Asian American advocacy groups, and Democratic lawmakers, who condemned the xenophobic rhetoric. The incident comes amid ongoing debates about immigration, including Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship and changes to the H-1B visa program.
The president touched off a furor with his post sharing a podcast episode in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places.
By Amy Qin
Amy Qin is a national correspondent covering Asian Americans. She reported from Washington.
President Trump provoked a broad backlash this week when he posted a transcript from a right-wing podcast in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places and said recent immigrants from those countries had not “integrated” into America as “European Americans” had.
The transcript, which Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social account on Wednesday night, came from a recent episode of “The Savage Nation,” hosted by Michael Savage, a popular conservative talk radio host. Mr. Trump also posted the original video clip of Mr. Savage’s podcast.
The president did not add any commentary to his posts, but across Asia and the United States, many people saw an unwelcome message that demanded a response.
In a rare public rebuke of the White House, the Indian government took to X to criticize the comments, calling them “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste” without explicitly naming Mr. Trump.
Asian American advocacy groups and some Democratic lawmakers faulted Mr. Trump for amplifying xenophobic rhetoric at a time when the administration’s efforts to restrict even legal immigration have left many Indian Americans and Chinese Americans worried about their place in American society.
“We are deeply disturbed by @POTUS sharing this hateful, racist screed targeting Indian and Chinese Americans,” said the Hindu American Foundation, a group that has been critical of both Democrats and Republicans, in a statement on X. “Endorsing such rants as the president of the United States will further stoke hatred and endanger our communities, at a time when xenophobia and racism are already at an all time high.”
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are scheduled to meet for a summit in Beijing in mid-May.
The podcast excerpt shared by Mr. Trump was recorded shortly after the Supreme Court hearing on Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to ban birthright citizenship, which confers citizenship on nearly all children born on U.S. soil and has long been seen as a fundamental tenet of American identity and law.
In the clip, Mr. Savage claimed, without evidence, that recent immigrants had “almost no loyalty” to America; that the nation was being “overrun with Chinese coming here just to drop a baby on our shores to then bring in the entire family”; and that Indians and Chinese had set up “internal mechanisms” so that only people from their countries could get tech jobs in California.
“A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet,” Mr. Savage said.
“They’re not like the European Americans of today and their ancestors,” he added.
Mr. Trump’s post comes as the Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of his executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for babies born to undocumented people and to some temporary foreign visitors. Mr. Trump has made rolling back birthright citizenship central to his campaign to expel millions of immigrants from the United States. He even attended the oral arguments at the Supreme Court where, to his dismay, some of the conservative justices appeared skeptical of the president’s position.
Earlier on Wednesday, before he posted the podcast transcript, Mr. Trump had said in a separate Truth Social post that “certain” conservative justices on the Supreme Court had “gone weak, stupid, and bad.” He mentioned the birthright citizenship case, which the court is expected to decide this summer.
On Thursday, a spokesman for the White House, Kush Desai, defended Mr. Trump’s post of the transcript, saying that the president was “calling out the scam of unfettered birthright citizenship.”
In recent years, Asians have been the fastest-growing group in the country, and people from India and China have accounted for the bulk of that increase. In 2023, Asians made up about 7 percent of the national population. By some measures, immigrants from India and China and their descendants have been among the most successful groups in the United States, with high levels of education and income.
But as the Trump administration has sought to limit most immigration pathways, both groups have also come under increasing scrutiny. The administration’s changes to the H-1B program, a skilled worker visa that is especially popular among Indians, have fueled racist rhetoric targeting the Indian community across the country.
The president’s push to end birthright citizenship has also spurred more debate over birth tourism, a term that refers to pregnant women who travel to the United States to give birth so that their baby can have American citizenship. It is most commonly associated with a cottage industry of “maternity hotels” that has emerged over the past two decades and caters to wealthy families from countries like China.
The phenomenon of birth tourism is not believed to be widespread. In its most recent estimate in 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports restricting immigration, put the number at around 20,000 to 26,000 babies a year — less than 1 percent of the number of babies born in the country. Nonetheless, birth tourism has become a frequent talking point for conservatives seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship for all.
Some Democratic lawmakers also criticized Mr. Trump for sharing the podcast transcript.
Representative Grace Meng, a Taiwanese American Democrat from New York and chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said in a statement that she was “disgusted” by the post.
“At a time when hate incidents against South Asian communities are surging, and one in four Americans view Chinese Americans as a threat,” she said, “amplifying this kind of bigotry pours fuel on an already dangerous fire and must be unequivocally condemned.”
Representative Ami Bera, an Indian American Democrat from California, described Mr. Trump’s comments in a post on X as “offensive, ignorant, and beneath the dignity of the office he holds.”
Mr. Desai, the White House spokesman, is Indian American. He said the president’s relationship with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, was evidence of his support for people from India. “Everyone besides the failing legacy media knows that President Trump has a strong friendship with Prime Minister Modi and loves patriotic Indian Americans who were an important bloc in the historic coalition that fueled his landslide 2024 election victory,” he said.
Other prominent figures in the Trump administration of Indian or Chinese descent include Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights; Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director; Steven Cheung, the White House communications director; and Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance.
Asked at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia last week about the H-1B visa program, Mr. Vance referred to his own in-laws to argue that while naturalized citizens should prioritize American interests over those of their ancestral country, many immigrants had also brought value to America.
“Look, I am married to the daughter of immigrants from India,” Mr. Vance said. “And I love my in-laws, and they’re great people and they’ve been great contributors to the United States of America.”
Amy Qin is a national correspondent for The Times, writing primarily about Asian American communities.“
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