President Trump flew into town on the new Air Force One and spent time touring the library dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, whom he called “a great he-man.”

The agency pointed to crumbling infrastructure, chronic staffing shortages and budget shortfalls as it moved to cut costs.

The scorer of the opening American goal against Bosnia, Folarin Balogun, is eligible to play for the United States only because airline employees in New York kept his pregnant mother from returning to London until her son was born.

As our Riya Misra wrote recently, it makes Balogun not only the leader of a reinvigorated U.S. attack but a poster child for a cause validated yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court: that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees citizenship to anyone born within its borders.

Read Riya's story about Balogun and the debate over birthright citizenship here.

The agency has doubled its daily arrest numbers without the fanfare of last year’s large urban operations, sowing fear in immigrant communities.

On social media, he said the Village People’s lead singer, Victor Willis, was with him “right from the beginning.” But the president has a more complicated history with the group.

American presidents have generally tried to avoid appearing to profit from the office. President Trump has chosen a different path.

While Republicans celebrated the ruling, many Democrats stayed quiet on an issue that had proved divisive in the last election.

In moving to ban a potent synthetic version of kratom, the president’s team paved the way for more sales for makers of rival botanic supplements, who had aggressively lobbied for the change.

Spotted at World Cup matches so far: King Felipe VI from Spain, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima from the Netherlands, and Norway’s Princess Ingrid Alexandra and Prince Sverre Magnus. The European royals have been out in force supporting their national teams.

Hardly spotted yet: Europe’s elected leaders.

European heads of government only tend to make appearances at matches in person during later stages of the tournament. For example, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, attended the 2018 final in Moscow and traveled to Qatar in 2022 for the semifinals and finals.

This is perhaps because a monarch attending the national team's match is viewed as apolitical, whereas a prime minister making the same trip can invite criticism over priorities and use of public funds.

Indeed, this year, Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney had to reject opposition claims that his trip to Massachusetts to watch his country play Haiti was a taxpayer-funded “World Cup jolly." Portuguese President António José Seguro also attended the Colombia vs. Portugal game in Miami last Saturday evening.

As the tournament heads toward the quarterfinals and beyond, expect more European politicians, whose countries remain in contention, to start appearing in the stands. So no Friedrich Merz or Rob Jetten...

President Trump’s business holdings, which garnered him more than $2 billion last year, create potential conflicts of interest surpassing any predecessor.

No matter the result on Wednesday night, the roughly 60,000 Bosnian Americans who call St. Louis home — reportedly the largest population of Bosnians outside Bosnia and Herzegovina — will have something to celebrate. Many, however, are unapologetically cheering for their homeland when it takes on the country they now call home.

“They are like dressing up in the jerseys, singing the anthem,” said Ibro Tucakovic, a Bosnian immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 1998 and became the first Bosnian immigrant to seek elected office in Missouri. “Looking at my daughter, when we won against Qatar, she was crying. And so basically they, they can see the happiness in their parents' eyes, because it means so much to us. So the kids are basically just going nuts over it.”

Mirhad Hasanovic, a Bosnian immigrant who came to the U.S. in July 2001 and is now a legislative staffer running to represent parts of St. Louis’s South County in the Missouri statehouse, said it was “unfortunate” that his two favorite countries are playing against one another so early on in the tournament.

“For Bosnians, this is huge,” he said. “We're a very small country, so just to be able to be at the World Cup and compete is an achievement in itself. “Kids grow up at the age of three or four, they start playing, they start watching, they start going to all the leagues, so the excitement level is out the roof.”

For refugees whose memories of Bosnia revolve around war and genocide, its first-ever appearance in the knockout rounds has become a way to reconnect with the country they fled.

“It's not very often that you get, like, really great news from Bosnia,” said Adna Karamehic-Oates, director of the Center for Bosnian Studies at Saint Louis University. “People want good stories that come out of Bosnia, and that's why they're so happy.”

After the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, the president called on Congress to end it through legislation, saying a “long and unwieldy” constitutional amendment was not necessary. But constitutional and immigration law experts disagree.

These experts say the majority opinion from the Supreme Court — which interpreted the 14th Amendment as providing citizenship to anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions — indicated that a constitutional amendment would be needed.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling on June 30, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process. No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”

Trump is right about the significant hurdle constitutional amendments present. They must be supported by a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate, and then need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

But constitutional scholars, and even some Republican supporters of ending birthright citizenship, say that’s now the path to end it.

According to the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.”

On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order to deny birthright citizenship to children born to parents in the country unlawfully or who are in the country lawfully but only on temporary visas. It never went into effect, though, because lower federal courts blocked it.

People demonstrate on April 1 outside the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara to determine if President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship is constitutional. Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images.

The case Trump v. Barbara made its way to the Supreme Court and in the majority opinion on the case, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights— to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ … We keep that promise today.”

That includes “children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States,” Roberts wrote for the majority. “Under the Constitution,” he said, “they are citizens at birth.”

According to constitutional scholars we interviewed, that leaves no wiggle room for doing away with birthright citizenship through normal legislation. Legislators have been trying for years to end birthright citizenship for children of people in the country illegally, though no bill has ever passed. Now, many experts say, it is clear that any such legislation would be struck down by the courts.

“Trump is grasping at straws,” Garrett Epps, a professor of practice at the University of Oregon School of Law and a constitutional expert, told us via email. “There is no language in the majority opinion in Barbara that suggests Congress could change the birthright citizenship rule of the Fourteenth Amendment by statute.”

While the court’s 6-3 decision struck down Trump’s executive order, Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the majority only in part. He wrote in a separate opinion that he disagreed that Trump’s order violated the 14th Amendment. He said Congress alone has the authority to “enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”

Although three justices voted against the majority opinion, Kavanaugh’s was “the only voice of the nine that raises that possibility” of reversing birthright citizenship through legislative action, Epps said.

“Nothing—nothing—in the majority opinion suggests that Congress has the power to limit or abolish” birthright citizenship, Epps said. “Maybe—maybe—the three other dissenters would agree; but they do not say so in writing. Meanwhile, there’s no indication from any of the five in the majority that they are basing their decision on statutory grounds. As of today, there are five votes on this court to hold that the Citizenship Clause establishes a clear constitutional rule that cannot be overturned by act of Congress, any more than the Equal Protection or Due Process Clauses could be.”

Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer and senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email that Trump is “wrong” to say birthright citizenship could be reversed by legislation.

“He lost this one plain and simple!” Chishti, director of the MPI office at the New York University School of Law, said.

“Unfortunately for the President, the majority of Justices (5-4) did not support his position,” Chishti said on the day of the ruling. “The majority, in an extraordinarily strong opinion by the Chief Justice, ruled that only a constitutional amendment can reinterpret the current understanding of the 14th amendment: that every child (with the minor exceptions of children born to diplomats and enemy aliens) are citizens at birth. So, the only way that can now be changed after today’s decision is either a constitutional amendment or by the Supreme Court overruling today’s decision.”

Jorge Loweree of the American Immigration Council agreed.

“The Supreme Court did not say Congress can end birthright citizenship through legislation,” Loweree told us via email. “The majority held that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects citizenship for nearly everyone born in the United States, relying on more than a century of precedent. While several dissenting Justices argued that the Clause should be interpreted more narrowly, those views did not prevail.”

“If Congress enacted a statute that conflicted with the Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, it would face immediate constitutional challenges,” Loweree added. “Unless the Supreme Court changes its interpretation in a future case, Congress cannot override the Constitution by statute.”

At least two prominent Republicans, both lawyers who oppose birthright citizenship, also agree it would now take a constitutional amendent.

“This was not a decision on procedural grounds (ie, POTUS can’t do this through executive order but Congress could legislate it); it is a substantive decision that says the 14th amendment requires citizenship for those born to, among others, birth tourists or those unlawfully present in the country,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote on X. “Will need either a constitutional amendment or a future court to overrule this.”

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah also saw the decision as a call to pursue “the long fight” for a constitutional amendment.

“Neither the Founding Fathers, nor the authors of the 14th Amendment, nor the millions of Americans who fought and died for their country through the ages intended to establish a nation whose citizenship could so easily be purchased, whether through birth tourism of China’s communist party members or a vast border invasion enabled by faithless presidents,” Lee wrote on X. “This is the cheap and cheated citizenship the Supreme Court upholds today. The long fight for a constitutional amendment begins now. We must explicitly exclude foreign nationals who break our laws, violate our borders, or exploit loopholes to make their families American citizens.”

Birth tourism refers to pregnant women coming to the U.S. on tourism visas in order to obtain birthright U.S. citizenship for their newborn children.

Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that favors low immigration, told us there are “any number of actions that Congress could take that would address the issues that the president is raising.”

For example, he said, the government could restrict the nonimmigrant entry of pregnant women, crack down on birth tourism, or limit the ability of birthright citizens to petition for family members to be admitted to the U.S.

“Not to say that any of those are good or bad ideas (except for cracking down on birthright tourism, which most agree with)– but they are steps Congress could take,” Arthur said.

As we have written, there is no direct government data on the scope of birth tourism in the U.S., though the Center for Immigration Studies estimates it could be over 20,000 births per year. And it is against the law for those who purposely enable it. There have been some high-profile arrests of people accused of running birth tourism operations.

“There are means, short of tampering with the Constitution, to tackle what is without doubt immigration fraud and a misuse of the immigration system,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, told us, referring to cracking down on birth tourism. In fact, she said, the Trump administration has already taken some steps.

Arthur, of the Center for Immigration Studies, also believes it may still be possible for Congress to narrow the definition of who would be eligible for birthright citizenship.

But Samuel Breidbart, counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said any such narrowing of who would qualify for birthright citizenship would not stand unless a future Supreme Court reversed its opinion.

“There are five votes that said firmly, unequivocally that birthright citizenship is part of the Constitution, and that’s the law,” Breidbart said. “Now, is it true that a 5-4 outcome might be an invitation to the conservative legal movement to keep trying? I’m sure that’s how they’re thinking about this. I’m sure that they’re thinking that they can pursue future litigation. … But right now the law is as it has always been, that there’s birthright citizenship for all who are born here, and we require a constitutional amendment to change that. What the court did yesterday did not open the door to Congress legislating.”

Evelyn Cruz, a professor and director of the immigration clinic at Arizona State University’s law school, told us via email that Kavanaugh’s suggestion that Congress could amend who is eligible for birthright citizenship “stands on thin ice.”

But there may be political gain to such an effort, she said.

“Whether Justice Kavanaugh’s suggestion is legally sound or not, the fact that he has opened the door to a potential way for Congress to delineate access to birthright citizenship, even if the legislation is later ruled unconstitutional, leaves the birthright citizenship issue viable for political purposes,” despite the court’s unequivocal decision, Cruz said.

Lori Robertson and Justine Weng contributed to this article.

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The post Trump’s Dubious Claim that Birthright Citizenship Could Still Be Overturned with Legislation appeared first on FactCheck.org.

BELGRADE, Serbia — The nearly four-year Bosnian war in the 1990s set off a massive wave of displacement, with a third of Bosnia and Herzegovina's pre-war population permanently leaving the country as refugees.

Team captain Edin Džeko, a 40-year-old striker who left his native Sarajevo soon after the war, has recalled playing soccer in the lulls between the daily barrage of sniper fire that defined the siege of the Bosnian capital and says he could never have imagined becoming a world-class player after watching the football pitches in his neighborhood reduced to "fields of scorched earth."

Bosnia’s squad reflects that postwar diaspora. Left back Sead Kolašinac was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1993 to a family that left after Bosnia descended into war. Right back Amar Dedić was born in Austria after his parents left northern Bosnia during the war, and midfielder Benjamin Tahirović in Sweden to refugees from besieged Sarajevo.

And then there is the so-called Milwaukee Messi: young forward Esmir Bajraktarević, who was born in a Wisconsin to parents born in the eastern town that gave its name to the Srebrenica genocide.

The ruling, based on agreements the service made in a 2021 legal settlement, was the second time a judge has blocked new curbs by President Trump on voting by mail.

How does a deeply polarized country come together to have a birthday party?

Republicans are growing frustrated with Mr. Johnson’s approach to governing with a razor-thin majority, saying that he promises more than he can achieve, frustrating the disparate groups in his caucus.

BRUSSELS — The Matongé area of Brussels was filled with drums and flags on Wednesday evening as every bar and barber shop showed the DR Congo vs. England game — the biggest Congolese match since 1974, when it won the African Cup of Nations and competed in the World Cup under the name Zaire.

Belgium's relationship with DR Congo is rooted in its colonial rule, a legacy that continues to shape political, cultural and diplomatic ties today. Up to 50,000 members of the Congolese diaspora live in Brussels, with the vibrant Matongé as the epicenter.

English fans in Matongé were few and far between — and mainly silent — throughout most of the match as their team trailed for a long period before turning the game around.

Despite Congo’s eventual narrow defeat, supporters were stoked by the team’s performance. "At the end of the day Congo was better than England because they overperformed and England underperformed,” said Darshan Pham, whose family hails from DR Congo. “That’s the beauty of the games, it’s a victory for them anyway because they made it so far.”

Sydney Jadot, who worked for five years in DR Congo where his family is from, also admired the team’s fight: “What can I say? I think Congo fought well — they put all their hearts [into it] and England is more thorough.”

When two teams take to the World Cup pitch, their national histories and politics take the field with them. Seldom is that weight as present as in Wednesday’s knockout stage game between the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The U.S. played a decisive role in ending Bosnia's nearly four-year war in the 1990s, a conflict that claimed more than 100,000 lives and produced the single worst crime on European soil since World War II — the Srebrenica Genocide, in which more than 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys, were summarily executed in early July 1995.

“The United States is an indispensable ally,” said Reuf Bajrović, the vice president of the US-Europe Alliance, a nonprofit group that works on mobilizing Americans around key European issues.

Bajrović, as many in Bosnia would, highlights that the existence of an “independent, free and sovereign Bosnia” is the direct result of U.S. involvement in ending the war and brokering a peace deal, widely known as the Dayton Peace Accords — signed in Dayton, Ohio.

Thirty years later, the country faces internal disputes and struggles with a political system that is deeply vulnerable to nationalist manipulation. But reaching this stage and competing against their erstwhile liberator has unleashed a rare moment of collective elation across the Balkan nation.

“A nation which was supposed to be erased from history is competing with the most powerful and influential nation in the world,” Bajrović continued. “The euphoria is absolute,” he continued.

Even the country’s most famous footballing son, former AC Milan star Zlatan Ibrahimović, said he felt “goosebumps” watching Bosnia's fairytale run to the round of 32. Ibrahimović, who was born in Sweden but embraces his father’s Bosnian heritage, had earlier trolled his fellow Fox Sports co-anchors by playing pop-folk songs by Bosnian singer Lepa Brena as an homage to his roots.

Yet back home, some worry that America’s more recent role in Bosnia's brittle political order has been anything but benign.

“Until Trump entered the scene, there was bipartisan support for Bosnia ... after all, Americans are the founding fathers of the peace deal that became the Bosnian constitution,” said prominent author and political analyst Dragan Bursać, who is based in Banjaluka.

Two Trump administrations have steadily hollowed out that commitment, and some of the most destabilizing figures in Bosnia right now are Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani and Rod Blagojevich.

Blagojevich, the disgraced former governor of Illinois, has promoted far-right talking points about a “persecuted Serbian Christian minority” — his own background is ethnically Serbian — by a “radicalized Muslim leadership” in the country.

Giuliani promotes the same kind of "Christian victimization" narratives as Blagojevich, and also often draws comparisons between Trump and Milorad Dodik, an ultranationalist pro-Putin Bosnian Serb leader, saying they're victims of the same "lawfare" movement led by liberal or woke judges. Dodik was stripped of the presidency last year after directly violating the Bosnian constitution and encouraging separatist activity.

The “Christian victimization” rhetoric employs the same divisive logic that produced the war itself. In the 1990s, political and military leaders turned a country praised for its diversity against itself, pitting its nominally Orthodox Christian, Catholic and Muslim populations against one another as neighboring Serbia and Croatia backed forces across the border.

Giuliani’s and Blagojevich’s narratives have particular populist purchase with figures like Dodik, who was, until recently, on a U.S. sanctions and travel ban list. Giuliani is thought to have played a key role in getting the sanctions against Dodik lifted last year.

“Dodik is one of those European leaders who wholeheartedly supports Trump’s beliefs and sees himself as a mini-Trump in Bosnia,” Bursać continued.

Bosnia's political system rests on intense ethnic power-sharing, which has now turned into one of its key weaknesses. In Banjaluka, the administrative seat of the Serb-majority entity of Republika Srpska, pro-Trump chants now ring out at rallies, including during a visit by Donald Trump Jr. in April.

“Now we’re facing a situation where many people would prefer the current U.S. administration ignore Bosnia as much as possible and not get involved, since they fear that there would be no positive effect,” Bursać explained.

Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, is a registered foreign agent for Dodik. His brother Joseph, along with Jesse Binnall — a former Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election — runs a company chasing a $1.8 billion investment in Bosnian airports, gas power plants and a pipeline.

The country that saved Bosnia is now, according to some accounts, actively engaged in undermining it.

“The U.S. policy in the 2020s is not something that Bosnians experienced in the past, and the U.S. never previously openly sided with nationalist Serb and Croats at the expense of the Bosniak-majority of the country,” Bajrović said.

BRUSSELS — Forty-four members of the European Parliament are urging FIFA President Gianni Infantino to reverse his decision to allow Russian athletes to play at this year’s inaugural U-15 World Cup in Azerbaijan.

They argue that Russia should not be readmitted to FIFA competitions until it enters peace negotiations with Ukraine, ceases fire and agrees to return children kidnapped from Ukrainian territories.

In a letter obtained by POLITICO, the lawmakers criticize global football body FIFA for ignoring what they described as “around 20,000 Ukrainian children … forcibly kidnapped and separated from their families by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s regime.”

“We urge FIFA to stand on the side of peace and not appease the aggressor – Russia,” the letter reads.

After Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, FIFA banned Russia from participating in all of its football competitions. FIFA lifted the blanket ban for youth competitions in 2023, but Russian teams have not played in its U-17 World Cups since.

FIFA announced last week its first U-15 World Cup, in which boys and girls will compete this October in Azerbaijan. At the time, the organization announced that the competition would be open to “all FIFA member associations,” opening the door to Russia’s participation.

Infantino said in February that FIFA should lift its ban on Russia, saying that bans “create more hatred.”

The European lawmakers argue that allowing Russia to participate could lead other member countries to boycott the competition, a stance they call “very understandable.” They argue that this would “distort FIFA sporting events, where the principle that the best team wins will no longer prevail.” Ukraine’s football federation has previously said it would not participate in competitions with Russia.

In March of 2022, Russia appealed the FIFA ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The body dismissed Russia's claim. Russia’s gradual return to other sports has triggered outrage in Ukraine and been denounced by the EU.