Supreme Court, California Elections, The Missing in Mexico

States are citizens.

The Supreme Court will soon tell us if that right still stands.

I'm Aisha Roscoe.

I'm Ada Pralta and this is Up First from NP.

Hundreds of thousands of children are born to non-citizen parents every year. Will the Supreme Court allow the president to revoke their birthright citizenship?

Fraud as votes are being counted in the election for mayor of Los Angeles.

Of Mexican families whose loved ones have disappeared hope the World Cup is a chance to have their stories heard.

Stay with us.

This week on Consider This, the drama at CBS News. Some of the most respected journalists in America say their corporate ownership is bowing to political pressure.

It's intimidation. They've created a climate of fear to make the news organization unwilling to tackle. The problem and report the news.

Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft this week on Consider This. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast.

The Supreme Court is entering the final weeks of this term with decisions likely before the end of the month in nearly two dozen cases, including some that may be blockbusters.

NPR Supreme Court correspondent Carrie Johnson joins us to give us the rundown. Hey Carrie.

Hey, how are you?

Good. Carrie, the Supreme Court hasn't yet ruled on birthright citizenship. What's at stake here?

The biggest case of this term and the one that's most important to President Trump involves immigration, specifically that executive order he signed on day one after he returned to the White House. That order would strip the guarantee of birthright citizenship to babies born on American soil. For more than a century, people have understood the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure all persons born here are Americans.

Hmm. And the president has another immigration policy under review at the Supreme Court. Temporary protected status for people who can't safely return to their home countries. What's happening with that case?

This dispute involves the decision to revoke that temporary protected status for thousands of people from Haiti and Syria. They'd been covered under a program designed for people from countries that have been torn apart by war or natural disasters. and they got protection from deportation and temporary work status here in the US, but the Homeland Security Department revoked that status and the question is whether federal courts can review those decisions.

Carrie, President Trump famously says he likes to fire people. Now the justices are reviewing his power to fire government officials, right?

There are two outstanding cases about the president's removal power. One involves a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission that Trump fired last year without giving a good cause. A federal law says the White House would need to show inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance. Ninety years ago the Supreme Court backed that approach. It stood all this time. But there's now good reason to think the conservative majority on the court is likely to throw out that precedent.

How far does that power extend? Uh tell us uh about the other case.

Well, President Trump, of course, also tried to fire Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board. The President cited some vague allegations related to mortgage loans before she got a job at the Fed. And during oral argument in the Lisa Cook case, several of the conservative justices seemed uneasy about whether Cook had a chance to contest those allegations, whether she had due process. And whether allowing Trump to fire her could really pierce the Fed's historic independence.

We did see one big ruling this week on some of the voting districts that are changing all over the country. Tell us what happened.

This week the conservative majority sided with Republicans in Alabama to allow the state to use a map a lower court had found to discriminate on the basis of race against black voters in that state. The decision came after voting had already begun in that midterm election, and it drew fierce criticism from civil rights groups and many election lawyers.

That's NPR's Carrie Johnson. Carrie, thanks for the update.

Thanks for having me.

Pro Trump social media influencers are claiming that last Tuesday's mayoral election in Los Angeles was riddled with fraud. There's no evidence of wrongdoing in that race, just slow vote counting. But influencers have been citing odds on prediction markets such as Calchi and Polymarket to reinforce their claims. Some of those same influencers are also being paid by those companies for promotion and visibility.

Now Cauchy says it's asking some influencers to take their post down. Joining us to explain all this is MPR's Jew Jaffee Block. Welcome to the podcast.

Hi, good morning.

So what's in these posts that Kao Shi is asking influencers to take down?

Well, one of the influencers involved in this is a prominent Trump aligned commentator named David Freeman. He posts under the handle Gunther Eagleman. And here's a recent video of his.

Let's talk about California first. You know they're cheating. I know they're cheating, you know they're cheating, we all know they're cheating.

Now the thing is Freeman also has a paid partnership with CalShi. He boosts the company's social media posts to his audience of over a million followers. And those posts are basically intended to draw people to bet on the site. Freeman is rooting for former reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the LA mayors race, and he shared a Calci post that showed Pratt's odds of making it to the runoff election have been falling on the betting site.

Cowshi's rival site is Polymarket. What do we know about how they are handling posts like these?

We never heard back from Polymarket, which operates mostly offshore and is less regulated. But there are a number of influencers with polymarket partnerships who are also sowing doubt about the LA mayoral election while promoting polymarket and those posts are still up. You know, and I should say there's not been evidence of misconduct in this election. But one kind of allegation we're seeing is people pointing to changes in betting market odds on prediction sites.

President Trump has also made unfounded fraud allegations about California's election, uh focused in on how long it's taking to count the votes. Why is the vote count so slow in California?

Well yeah, here in California, everyone gets a mailed ballot. And this election, a lot of people held on to their ballots until the last day. And the process for verifying those vote by mail ballots take longer than those cast in person. Also, historically, the ballots that get counted later in the process skew more democratic. And that's been a source for conspiracy theories for years now. But those kinds of explanations rarely get the same kind of attention online as allegations of fraud.

Obviously we have midterm elections where control of Congress is coming up in a few months. What does this tell us about how those elections might be contested?

It's not looking great. I spoke with Steven Richer, who was the Maricoba County recorder in Arizona in the aftermath of the twenty twenty election and dealt with a lot of false claims about election fraud that cycle. He's very worried about what the LA election means for the rest of the year.

I think we're gonna get punched in the face so badly on election denialism in November.

He said the election denial movement has been able to normalize itself in recent years. And one sign of that could even be that these prediction market sites are so far happy to partner with influencers whose brands have been tied to trying to delegitimize elections that were not favorable to Trump.

That's MPR's Jude Jaffe Block. Jude, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

The city of Guadalajara in Mexico will soon host four of the World Cup games. And Ader, you report from Mexico, so tell us all about

You know, this is a a country that loves its football. So hosting the World Cup is cause for celebration, but it also it comes at a complicated moment. Uh Mexico is in the middle of a vicious drug war that's left tens of thousands of people disappeared.

Mm. I mean I I'm sure that the government would probably hope that people would just focus on sports, but what about the people who are living through this drug war?

NPR producer Fernando Narrow and I went to Guadalajara, uh, which is the capital of one of the most violent states to talk to them. The families of the missing gather in the shadow of the golden spires of Guadalajara's Metropolitan Cathedral. On one side, workers put the finishing touches on a massive TV screen in the middle of FIFA's fanzone. On the other, the bells announce a mass. And in the middle of the square, the families begin their ritual.

Principalmente sabemos que las caditas tienen que quedar de frente a ahí.

Most important thing is that their faces are visible, Ruth Alejandrina says. The families shuffle hundreds of posters with pictures mostly of young men, but also women and kids who are among the more than one hundred and thirty thousand Mexicans who are reported missing. Alejandrina warns paste the pictures only on the ballards.

Si a alguien les dice algo o les grita algo, pues no hacer caso, la verdad.

If someone screams at you, don't pay attention. It's people without a conscience. They grab paint brushes and buckets full of glue and they fan out onto the street. They do this every week because the government removes the posters, sometimes the day after they put them up. Hector Flores moves with intensity.

La visibilidad les molesta a los gobiernos.

Visibility bothers governments, he says. Five years ago, his son Danny was picked up by local authorities, and he hasn't heard from him since.

No quieren que los turistas o que la gente que va a hacer sus compras... Pero vea la realidad del Estado.

The government doesn't want tourists or people out shopping to see the reality. The reality is that Flores never stops thinking about his son, who was nineteen the day he disappeared. Every week he puts up posters, nearly every week he picks up a shovel and digs through fields trying to find him.

Nosotros decimos que las familias de los desaparecidos... Morimos cada noche para renacer cada día.

We say the families of the disappeared die every night only to be reborn every morning.

e sofremos a peor tortura que é a esperanza.

And we suffer the worst kind of torture.

Which is hope.

It's not wrong to celebrate the World Cup, he says. It's not wrong to cheer on your national team.

Lo que está mal es el olvido.

What is wrong he says is to forget that the right thing is that the right thing

Lo que está mal es dejar de buscar, dejar de nombrar a las personas que les hacen falta.

What's wrong is to stop searching, to stop naming the people we miss. But as he moves from Bollard to Bollard, papering the city with the faces of the disappeared, the world around him keeps spinning.

¡Cuida bien su portería!¡Dice, por aquí no pasa!

The construction crew puts up a bright pink stage. A group of young women practice Shakira's latest dance moves, and as the street musicians begin their set, Families of the missing play a pickup game of football.

For as long as anyone remembers, football in Mexico has had mystical powers. The great Mexican soccer scribe Juan Villoro once wrote that football is a profession that authorizes the use of magic.

Andres Favregas, an anthropologist who studies football, says football can do great things. He remembers when the southern state of Chiapas got a football team, it came after an armed rebellion by the Zapatistas, at a moment when that part of the country felt left behind. Their first game was against the Chivas of Guadalajara, Mexico's de facto national team.

Y toda la gente se vio en una disyuntiva.

People faced a major dilemma and they solved it by cheering for both teams. As soccer gods would have it, the match ended up tied. People were so happy.

había ganado la identidad nacional y la identidad local.

Both the national and the local identity had one and the local soccer team took on a greater meaning.

como símbolo de reunificar otra vez a la

As a symbol of reunification. Like others, Darwin Franco, a journalist in Guadalajara, says he also believes in the magic of football. But things have changed. With prices so high, FIFA has made tickets to the stadium unaffordable. A tight security perimeter keeps most people awake.

All the structure that is in the Center of the University of the FanFest

The fanfest the government built in downtown Wallahara, he says, has used up nine times more money than what they spend yearly looking for the disappeared. The government, he says, has bet on a lie instead of reality.

Y yo creo que la clave ha estado en que ningún gobierno ha aceptado que hay una crisis.

And the biggest affront, he says, is that the government has never acknowledged there's a crisis. I meet Leticia Ramirez at a neighborhood a stone's throw from Guadalajara International Airport. Leticia is part of a collective of mothers who searches for their missing children.

fue por una denuncia anónima.

A few weeks ago her group received an anonymous tip that there was a mass grave in the patio of an abandoned house. Less than two miles from the airport where most soccer fans will fly into. They dug and found human remains, and that's when they turned the scene over to authorities.

Van sesenta bolsas, no es que sean sesenta cuerpos.

So far, she explains, they have found sixty bags full of remains, mostly extremities. This is remarkably common in Mexico. By the government's own accounting, in the past eight years, there have been 242 clandestine graves found in the state of Jalisco alone. Human bodies are dismembered and then buried in graves as deep as ten feet. This grave was in the middle of a residential neighborhood with lots of traffic, with lots of life.

Esto fue porque la gente no denuncia. Y porque también la policía no hace sus rondines como debiera.

This happens because people don't say anything and because the police don't do their job.

Miren como ahorita están llegando los caminos.

As we talk, a truck full of cadaver dogs arrives and Leticia says goodbye. She crosses the police line to supervise, to make sure authorities count all of the day. We walk down a hill across a ravine to a little farm just below the mass grave. From there, we can see investigators working the scene. But here, things feel oddly normal. Jorge Luis Reyes sells pajaretes, a traditional breakfast drink made with raw milk and moonshine.

¿Quiere tomarse uno?

You want to try it? He pours a little agave honey, a little instant coffee into a mug. Right into the mug. I take a drink, it's warm and sweet and a little bitter. I ask him, Did you know about the mass grave?

Yo fui compré hace 15 años, pero estaba...

He bought this place fifteen years ago, but he would come and go. Then a memory surfaces.

Hace como unos dos años... Una cabeza ahí la reportamos.

Two and a half years ago, he said, they found a head. They reported it, but that was that. Sometimes he says, you think about what's happening and you can't explain why or how.

Porque tiene una cortina en la cara, que no te das cuenta de nada.

It's like we have a veil over our eyes, he says. And we don't realize what's right in front of us. We're full of distractions, he says. And this week there's one more FIFA's World Cup.

We've been listening to Ada Peralta's reporting from Guadalajara, the state of Mexico that will soon host four games of the World Cup. You visited

And that's up first for Saturday, June sixth, twenty twenty six. I'm Mater Prawl.

I'm Aisha Roscoe. Dave Mistich produced today's

Our editor is Diana Douglas, assisted by Anna Yukonanoff, Brett Neely and Tara Neal.

In the control room today is our director Andy Craig and our technical director David. Engineering support from Zo Vangenhoven, Jay Ciz, and Simon Laslow Jansen.

Shannon Rhodes is our senior supervising editor, our executive producer is E. V. Stone. Jim Kane,

Yeah.

You we were so lucky to have you. We miss you already, but on to the next big adventure.

Jim, you have been a steady

And

You know, best of luck to you, but it's a big loss for you. Tomorrow on the Sunday story, teams and fans hoping to attend the World Cup. America.

Thanks for joining us in the podcast feed. We've got so much

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This week on NPR's Newsmakers, former First Lady James. She reveals Joe Biden's 2024 debate performance was so alarming. Doctors checked him after he got off the stage.

I was terrified. I thought, oh my god, what's happening? Is this a stroke? What is this?

Inside the dramatic month that followed leading to one of the This week on Newsmakers, you can listen or watch wherever you get your