Trump versus the Courts on Immigration

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The immigration issue remains near the top of voters’ priorities as the midterm elections rapidly approach. Liberal judges appointed by Obama and Biden continue to thwart President Trump at nearly every turn on this all-important issue.

On Friday another federal judge ruled against Trump, this time blocking his order to suspend visas from 75 mostly Third World countries. On January 14, 2026, nearly a year after Trump took office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the pausing of visas to nationals from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and many other similar nations that most Americans could not find on a map of the world.

The reason for Trump's policy was sensible: admitting future immigrants from those countries is likely to impose a financial burden on American taxpayers. He ordered the State Department to undertake “a full review of all policies, regulations, and guidance to ensure that immigrants from these high-risk countries do not utilize welfare in the United States or become a public charge.”

Data from the Council of Economic Advisers show that more than 30% of immigrant households from these 75 countries depend on public assistance programs. Those who do not are taking jobs from Americans on employment-related visas, and that causes indirect harm to American citizens.

Yet Biden-appointed Judge Jeannette Vargas, who was confirmed to the bench just seven weeks before the 2024 election, decided that Secretary Rubio had exceeded his statutory authority by declining to issue visas to persons from these countries. The federal judge held instead that remote consular officers overseas have the exclusive authority to approve or deny individual visa applications, and her ruling tells them to continue to do so without regard to Trump’s policy.

Ordinarily a judge making a decision like this would remand the matter back to the agency, in this case the State Department, to develop a new policy based on the judicial ruling. But this arrogant judge took the extraordinary step of declaring her ruling final without giving the Trump Administration an opportunity to address what the court held.

This lawsuit was filed by two nonprofit organizations, five citizens of other countries who sought employment-based visas, and six other family members. Employment-based visas take jobs away from Americans who are struggling to find good-paying work.

Many might be surprised to learn that the lead plaintiff in this case is the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), which encompasses a network of 400 Catholic and community-based immigration legal-service providers in nearly every state and 3,000 employees. Although initially started by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), CLINIC is an independent nonprofit that has long been dependent on millions of dollars in federal funds.

The Left objects to any government funds flowing to Catholic schools, but is just fine with CLINIC receiving taxpayer money as it litigates against President Trump’s America First policies. CLINIC filed its lawsuit in the Southern District of New York along with another pro-immigration group called African Communities Together.

Anna Gallagher, the executive director of CLINIC, praised the ruling by saying that it helps keep families together. But families can just as easily be reunited in their native countries rather than in the United States.

CLINIC applauded the disastrous Supreme Court decision in June granting birthright citizenship to nearly anyone born here with foreign-born parents. “In our amicus brief, we explained how the values of Catholic social teaching, the particular realities of undocumented immigration in the United States, and our nation’s legal history make upholding the tradition of birthright citizenship the most just outcome of this case,” CLINIC cheered back then.

But none of the Catholic countries of Europe – Poland, Italy, Spain, and Ireland – accepts or allows birthright citizenship. Catholic Spain is currently struggling to ship back the recent influx of thousands of African migrants into Ceuta, who were incited to swim into that territory by a judicially activist ruling by Spain’s supreme court.

On Saturday the State Department responded to the latest court ruling against Trump by pointing out that his administration is “protecting the American people by upholding the highest standards of screening and vetting of visa applicants.” It will surely appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which also presides in New York City, and if necessary to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Federal courts have ruled against or temporarily blocked Trump more than 200 times during his second administration. In June a federal court invalidated his temporary $100,000 fee to discourage use of H-1B visas by employers to bring in cheap labor from other countries, and the Democrat-dominated First Circuit rebuffed Trump’s motion for a speedy reversal of that decision.

Trump recently responded with a new regulation to make this fee permanent at $103,265, which could generate $8.8 billion to help fund the costs of immigration enforcement. The flood of migrants is harming Americans by taking jobs and soaking up government benefits.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Back to Empty Classrooms

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The annual back-to-school ritual this year is happening amid a rash of school closures due to empty classrooms. In California, 79 public schools closed in 2025, and so far this year 73 public schools have already closed.

This same pattern is occurring in other Democrat-controlled states. In Illinois, for example, 72 Illinois public schools have closed in the past five years, despite a moratorium on school closures in Chicago; among the 397 Illinois districts having at least 1,000 students, there was an enrollment decline in 345 of them between 2019 and 2025.

Led by the potential Democrat presidential candidate Gov. JB Pritzker, Illinois public schools lost 136,000 students during that six-year period. Charter schools, which the Democrats limit mostly to their constituents in Chicago, have also seen an enrollment decline as many families have moved away from the state and its liberal policies.

California’s San Jose Unified public school district has lost 22% of its enrollment since 2015-16, and has closed 5 schools entirely. Enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified has fallen by 17,000 kids in just one year, while closing or consolidating 14 public schools due to the declining number of students.

The Democrat-controlled states of New York, California, and Illinois comprise a total of 44% of the total decline in public-school enrollment nationwide since 2019. Only ten states – nine of them conservative including Idaho, Alabama, Texas, and Florida – had an increase or no change in public-school enrollment between 2019 and 2025.

Meanwhile, many states have begun limiting or prohibiting the use of cell phones by kids who remain in public school. Both liberal and conservative states have enacted “bell-to-bell” bans on students using cell phones while in school.

When students are glued all day to their handheld digital devices, they are not interacting with fellow students or paying attention to instruction. High-school boys are using their phones to gamble on sporting events, which is not a pathway to success.

New York, Virginia, Georgia (K-8), and Oklahoma have all enacted bell-to-bell bans on cell phone use by students at public school. Rhode Island has gone even further by prohibiting any physical access by students to personal electronic devices, with some exceptions.

The growing concern by parents about the amount of “screen time” spent by kids on electronic devices is supported by studies showing the harm. Iowa HF 2451 (which became HF 2685), proposed limiting the amount of instruction using computer screens to a maximum of 60 minutes per day through the 5th grade, but has not yet passed while other legislators in other states including New Mexico have raised similar concerns about too much screen time.

This is a sea change in public education, which embraced donations of computers such as Chromebooks as a way to supposedly make learning more efficient. Many conservatives opposed the high-tech invasion of computers into the classroom, and they were right.

Despite these growing bans, as of last year 88% of public schools were providing a computer to every student, as discovered by a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. In one anecdote retold by CNN, a middle school social studies teacher did not teach a single lesson the entire year, and instead had students merely doing computer-based exercises.

Chronic, substantial absenteeism has been a known problem in public schools since the pandemic, and it is hardly surprising that many students fail to show up today in schools relying on screen time. Absenteeism increases in public school by grade level, rising from 14% in fifth grade to 32% by the twelfth grade.

Private school enrollment is increasing only where funded by school-choice programs, as in Texas where that state’s new initiative begins this month. More than 274,000 students applied for this special funding there, many of whom remain on the waiting list due to a cap in this program.

Students attending a participating private school in Texas can receive $10,500 per student annually. A homeschooled student can receive $2,000 each year in Texas, while an average of $8,000 is made available for qualified expenses to homeschoolers in Florida.

Early data indicate that roughly 36,000 of the applicants in Texas were public school students seeking to switch over to private schools through use of these new Texas Education Freedom Accounts. They can attend religiously affiliated private schools with this funding, including Muslim schools to which some Texans have objected.

Texas initially appropriated $1 billion to fund this initiative, which could be increased in its next legislative session that opens in January. Texas has a large budgetary surplus available to expand this program, if deemed successful.

Conservative North Dakota is another oil-rich state that has plenty of funds to allocate toward a school-choice program, but so far has declined to do so. The Texas experiment that starts this month could decide whether North Dakota and other wealthy states adopt a similar approach.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Trump’s Generosity to Haitians

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Lost in the media coverage of the proposed return of Haitians back to their homeland is how generous Trump is being to them. Each Haitian has an offer of $2,600 to return voluntarily, and yet Trump is being falsely portrayed as somehow being unfair.

The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 340,000 Haitians has been terminated, and it is time for them to return home. Likewise, Trump has sought to return foreigners allowed to remain in the U.S. under the TPS program from Afghanistan, Somalia, Cameroon, Nepal, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Syria, South Sudan, Myanmar (Burma), Yemen, and Ethiopia.

There are nearly 1.3 million TPS foreigners living in the U.S., as of last year. There is no legal procedure by which they can become permanent residents or citizens, and they were never supposed to stay here for more than a limited period of time.

Trump has already been very charitable to these foreigners, and can return them immediately without offering them a dime. Haitians and others who have had their TPS status revoked are staying here illegally at this point, and should accept the generous offer of payment with the free plane ride back home where many have relatives awaiting their return.

In June the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump has virtually unlimited power to terminate foreigners’ permission to stay in the U.S. under the TPS program, in a case involving Haitians and Syrians. Yet an Obama judge in Boston subsequently blocked Trump’s attempt to return 1,100 Somalis for whom their TPS status has also been terminated, even though the Supreme Court decision allows Trump to take this action.

Somalia is located on the equator on the eastern African coast, and is completely unlike the U.S. in culture, language, and weather; it never made sense to bring them here. One study found that 81% of Somali households relocated to Minnesota are on welfare, compared with only 21% of native-born American households.

Images flood the internet of Haitians having to wear ankle bracelets for tracking until they leave, but that is more generous than detention or deporting them immediately as Trump could do. Conservative podcaster Steve Bannon questions whether the new Department of Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin is getting the job done, and suggests Bill Pulte as a replacement.

Meanwhile, one of the two large private contractors that handle 90% of the detentions of illegal aliens has announced the reopening of its 1,600-bed facility in Appleton, Minnesota. That private prison had previously housed inmates from nearly a half-dozen states, and even Puerto Rico.

These private detention centers, against which Democrats have protested, are typically more accommodating to religious needs of detainees than state prisons are. In addition, private detention centers offer job opportunities to detainees at wages that are often higher than in state prisons.

Haitians, Syrians, and others have been allowed to stay in the U.S. on a temporary basis while there was supposedly a humanitarian crisis in their homelands. So many Haitians were resettled in Springfield, Ohio, where they could not possibly assimilate, that it became an issue in the 2024 election that Trump won by campaigning against it.

Dozens of Haitians found jobs with the New York City government, which fired them in July as their temporary status in our country concluded. Yet very few Haitians have actually departed, and as of the end of the month 30,000 were still living in central Ohio, half of them in Springfield, while the Department of Homeland Security told Ohio Gov. DeWine that there are no immediate plans to send them home.

Gov. DeWine opposes sending the Haitians home because he says Haiti is “hell.” But there are 12 million people in Haiti and we are not making it a better place by relocating 3% of its population, many of whom do not speak English, here where they cannot easily assimilate.

Trump has expressed frustration at DHS Secretary Mullin for not moving faster on this and related issues, such as his suspension of traffic stops and arrests of illegal aliens because of isolated violence. Trump has taken to Truth Social to rebuke Mullin and restart DHS enforcement efforts after learning that Mullin had stopped them.

Meanwhile, thousands of illegal aliens being detained have flooded the court systems with demands to be released on bond. But they all lack a citizen’s right to post bond and be released, a right that is often denied to Americans who are detained while awaiting trial.

Activist judges are ruling that illegal aliens have a right to be set free by posting a bond, which is often a small amount. With that, many individuals who are in our country illegally are roaming our streets again.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Campaign to put Trans Rights in Constitution

Sarah Holliday writes:

Today, voters in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District head to the polls for the Democratic primary. On the ballot is former Rep. Cori Bush, seeking a return to Congress after losing her seat in 2024. If voters give her another chance, she has made clear what her top priority would be: enshrining abortion and transgender “rights” into the U.S. Constitution.

Bush said she wants to advance the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) so that it becomes the 28th Amendment to the Constitution—which, in her view, could permanently lock abortion access and trans agendas into the nation’s foundational document. ...

Even in the early 1970s, critics foresaw serious problems. The STOP ERA movement, led by Phyllis Schlafly, warned that the amendment would likely trigger “government-financed abortion, the legal dissolution of biological differences between men and women, and restrictions on women’s legal rights in matters of divorce.” Those concerns never fully faded.

Migrant Invasion in Spain Sparked by Court Ruling

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

A total of 60,000 tough young men from Morocco suddenly arrived in a small town of Spain in northern Africa, many carrying their cell phones in plastic bags to protect them from the water they crossed by inner tubes and swimming. This migration is greater than the population of 95% of American cities and towns.

A recent pro-immigration ruling by the Tribunal Supremo, the Supreme Court of Spain, sparked this invasion, creating a lesson for our crisis of illegal aliens in the United States. A week after our own Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in favor of illegals getting birthright citizenship, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants captured at sea cannot be immediately returned to their native country, known as a “pushback.”

Spanish Territorial Policy Minister Ángel Víctor Torres specifically referred to the ruling as a factor contributing to unlawful invasion. He also said that legal experts think the decision will allow eventual deportation of these illegal aliens, but only after time-consuming due process is provided to each of the invading migrants.

The language of Morocco is Arabic. But Spanish is the language of the two Spanish territories in northern Africa, named Ceuta and Melilla, such that many of the migrants cannot communicate with local officials.

Ceuta is located on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea, and residents receive their food as transported by trucks carried by the 30-60 minute hourly ferry ride from Spain. Melilla is located 250 miles eastward on the Mediterranean coast.

These migrants have overwhelmed the local facilities, and are sleeping on beaches with limited access to food or drinking water. Due to the court ruling, they must be admitted for processing in compliance with Spanish immigration rules, which takes time.

If released during this process, as many illegal aliens in America have been, they may not show up for court hearings or appointments with immigration authorities. They can roam about for years, and have rights to migrate further into any European Union country once they are lawfully in Spain.

Social media are being blamed for spreading the word that if migrants swam or boated to Ceuta or Melilla, they would then have a right to stay. This has been criticized as a misinterpretation of the court ruling, but the court did grant special due process rights to those who came by sea rather than by land.

This fiasco gives new meaning to the famous Longfellow poem which exclaimed about the signal to be sent by one or two lanterns in the belfry of Boston’s Old North Church: “One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm.” Spread the alarm, indeed.

The most common water route is a 3-mile swim or to hang on to an inner tube while paddling through treacherous waters. Only some young men are fit enough to do that, and reportedly more than 50 have died during this invasion with many dead bodies seen floating in the water now.

CBS News interviewed migrants after arriving in Ceuta, and they explained that they spontaneously jumped in the water and swam the three miles. Crossing the Rio Grande River at our southern border is much easier than that, and President Trump pointed out that it will happen here if Democrats take control again.

No jobs awaited these rugged men upon their arrival, and it is inevitable that local laws will be violated as they look desperately for food, clothing, entertainment, and shelter. Thousands of these men roam the streets, and frightened residents sheltered inside while shops closed up, afraid of vandalism and looting.

One Ceuta resident, Rocío Gil, said on Spanish television that “as a woman, you have to live this to understand what it’s like. It’s an invasion … and there is no law.”

Sound familiar? Judicial rulings in the United States against sovereignty and border security here have caused similar travesties, including the admission of at least a million illegal migrants during each year of the Biden Administration.

President Trump has been trying hard to return migrants who have been here on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as brought in primarily by Democrat presidents. But repeatedly lower federal judges have been blocking President Trump’s orders to deport illegal aliens, and to detain them for deportation without releasing them on bond.

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a victory for Trump in late June by authorizing him to deport Haitians and others on TPS status without interference by lower court judges. The High Court said that these presidential decisions to deport are largely unreviewable and yet, not long after this decision was rendered, another federal district court judge blocked Trump again on this issue concerning Somalis.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.