The U.
The Supreme Court will soon tell us if that right still stands.
I'm Aysharasko.
“I made a prolet up and this is up first from NPR News.”
Hundreds of thousands of children are born to non-citizen parents every year, but the Supreme Court allow the President to revoke their birthright citizenship. Also, prediction markets are burning up with people claiming fraud, as votes are being counted in the election from mayor of Los Angeles. There are all pro-trap influencers.
In hundreds 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 the MPR Politics Podcast,
catch up with the week's big primary election news. How things played out with newly drawn districts in California, and an increasingly competitive Senate race in Iowa. Plus, we unpack the latest redistricting news that may benefit Republicans in the fall. Listen every afternoon to the MPR Politics Podcast.
Find us on the MPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 blackbusters. And Piers of Supreme Court correspondent Kerry Johnson joins us to give us the rundown.
Hey, Kerry. Hey, how are you?
Good. Kerry, the Supreme Court hasn't yet ruled on birthright citizenship.
What's it's safe here? In the biggest case of this term,
“in 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 14th Amendment to ensure all persons born here are Americans. At oral argument, the Trump administration had a rough go of things,
even several of the conservative justices cast doubt on the administration's position. Most notably Chief Justice John Roberts, who told the solicitor general, "It's a new world, but it's the same constitution." 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
U.S. 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 a show in efficiency,
neglect of duty or malfeasance. 90 years ago, the Supreme Court backed that approach. It stood all this time. But there's now good reason to think that conservative majority on the court is likely to throw out that president and make clear the president has the power to fire these kinds of federal officers. How far does that power extend? Tell us about the other case?
Well, President Trump, of course, also tried to fire Lisa Cook, a governor on the federal reserve board, and 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 justice is 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 cited 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. They say the Supreme Court is putting a hand on the scale to favor the GOP and ignore damage to minority voters. How are the university law professor Sheryl and Eiffel wrote The High Court is marching this country's civil rights laws off a cliff. That's NPR, Kerry Johnson. Kerry, thanks for the update. Thanks for having me.
Pro-Trump social media influencers are claiming the last Tuesday's mayoral el...
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 Kalshi”
and Poly Market to reinforce their claims. Some of those same influencers are also being paid by those companies for promotion and visibility. Now Kalshi says it's asking some influencers to take their posts down. Joining us to explain all this is NPR's Jude Jaffee Black. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, good morning. So what's in these posts that Kalshi 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. Talk about California for a study. 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 Kalshi. He boosts the company's social media posts to his audience of over
“a million followers. And those posts are basically intended to drop people to bet on the site.”
Freeman is rooting for former reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the LA Mayor's race. And he's here to Kalshi posts that showed Pratt's odds of making it to the runoff election have been falling on the betting site. Freeman added commentary that said, "Is California cheating to get Spencer Pratt out?" And that post had a paid partnership logo on it, which means he's getting paid for it by Kalshi. My colleague Bobby Allen asked Kalshi about that post and others like it from other influencers.
They have partnerships with Kalshi got back to us on Friday afternoon and told us they were asking Freeman and other influencers who have made similar posts to take them down because they violated their policies. Kalshi's rival site is Polly Market. What do we know about how they are handling
posts like these? We never heard back from Polly Market, which operates mostly offshore and is less
regulated. But there are a number of influencers with Polly Market partnerships who are also soaring doubt about the LA Mayorola election while promoting Polly Market and those posts are still up. You know, and I should say there's not been evidence of misconduct in this election, but when kind of allegation we're seeing is people pointing to changes in betting market odds on prediction sites to try and suggest those fluctuations and those graphs are some kind of evidence
of something suspicious when they just reflect betting behavior. President Trump has also made unfounded fraud allegations about California's election focused in on how long is taking the count the votes. Why is the vote count so slow in California? Well, yeah, here in California, everyone gets a mail 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 constant
person. Also historically, the ballots that get counted later in the process, few 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. You know, and there's also an extra layer of potential confusion when it comes to posts about races on prediction markets because these posts announce that a candidate's odds have fallen to
8% or surge to 72% and they're talking about the betting market odds of whether someone will win or lose not what the actual ballot counts as, but not everyone is understanding that. 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 Stephen Richard, who was the Maricopa County Recorder in Arizona in the aftermath of the 2020 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 going to 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 once
side 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 Jew, Jaffee Block. Jew, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. [Music] The city of Guadalajara in Mexico will soon host four of the World Cup games and
either you report for Mexico so tell us all about it. You know, this is a country that loves its football. So hosting the World Cup is cause for celebration but it also, it comes at a
Complicated moment.
of people disappeared. I mean, 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?”
And peer producer Fernando Narro and I went to Alhara, which is the capital of one of the most violence states to talk to them. The families of the missing gather in the shadow of the golden spires of Guadalajara's metropolitan cathedral and one side workers put the finishing touches on a massive TV screen in the middle of FIFA's Fanzo and the other the bells announce a mass and
in the middle of the square the families begin their ritual. The most important thing is that their
faces are visible, the family's shuffle hundreds of posters with pictures mostly of young men but also women and kids who are among the more than 130,000 Mexicans who are reported missing.
“Alhandrina warned, "paste the pictures only on the ballards."”
"If someone says something or is it written, then it's not written." If someone screams at you, don't pay attention. It's people without a conscience. They grab paintbrushes 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. Victor Flores moves with intensity. Visibility bothers government, he says. Five years ago his son Danny was picked up by local authorities and he hasn't heard from him since. 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. It was 19 the day he disappeared.”
Every week he puts a posters nearly every week he picks up a shovel and digs through fields trying to find him. We say the families of the disappeared died every night only to be reborn every morning. 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. What is wrong he says? It's to forget. What's wrong is to stop searching,
to stop naming the people we miss. But as he moves from ballard to ballard, papering the city with the faces of the disappeared, the world around him keeps spinning. The construction crew puts up a bright pink stage, a group of young women practice shakitas, latest dance moves and as the street musicians begin their set, the families of the missing play a pick-up game of football. For as long as anyone remembers, football in Mexico
has had mystical powers. The great Mexican soccer scribe Juan Vioto once wrote that football is a profession that authorizes the use of magic. And there is fabricas and anthropologists 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 Saapatistas at a moment when that part of the country felt left behind.
Their first game was against the Chivas of Valajara Mexico's de facto national team.
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. The people were so happy. For the national and the local identity had one, and the local soccer team took on a greater meaning, as a symbol of reunification, like others that were in Franco, a journalist,
Valajara 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 away.
"The fans of the government built in downtown Valajara," 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."
And the biggest of front, he says, is that the government has never acknowledged that there's a crisis.
I meet Laticia Ramirez at a neighborhood of stones, throw from Wadahara's international airport. Laticia is part of a collective of mothers who searches for their missing children. A few weeks ago, her group received an anonymous tip that there was a mask 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. "The band's sent a walkers, and the band's sent a carcass?"
“So far, she explains. They have found 60 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 Halisco alone. Human bodies are dismembered, and then buried in graves as deepest ten feet. This grave was in the middle of a residential neighborhood with lots of traffic, with lots of life. "This was because the people didn't know it, and because the police didn't know how to do it."
This happens because people don't say anything, and because the police don't do their job. "Me and the police are getting the cameras." As we talk, a truck full of cadaver dogs arrives, and Laticia says goodbye.
“She crosses the police line to supervise, to make sure authorities count all of the dead.”
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. Horre Luis Reyes sells Bajaretta, a traditional breakfast drink made with raw milk and moonshine. "Get out of the museum?"
"You want to try it?" Reyes asks, "He pours a little agave honey, a little instant coffee into a mug." He reaches under a goat and squeezes its milk 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?" He bought this place 15 years ago, but he would come and go, then a memory surfaces." "When I was a kid, I'd report to the police, and he'd call me."
"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." 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. In this week, there's one more. FIFA's World Cup. We've been listening to Aida Paralta's reporting from Guadalajara, the state of Mexico
that will soon host four games of the World Cup. You visited there a year earlier this week with
MPR producer Fernando Narrow. Yep, and that's up first for Saturday June 6, 2020, 26, I'm Eterpralta.
I'm Aisha Roscoe, Dave Mystich produced today's podcast with help from Gabriel Conner. Our editor is Diana Douglas assisted by Anna Yucananoff, Brittany Lee and Taraniel. In the control room today is our director Andy Craig and our technical director, David Greenberg, with engineering support from ZoVank and Hogan, J.C.S., and Simon Laslo, Jansson. Shannon Rhodes is our senior supervising editor, our executive producer is Evie Stone.
Jim Kane is our deputy and managing editor. Jim, we were so lucky to have you, we miss you already, but on to the next big adventure. Jim, you have been a steady hand for us on the weekend, and we're just gonna miss you so much. You know, best to luck to you, but it's a big loss for us. Tomorrow on the Sunday story, teams and fans hoping to attend the World Cup, are getting dragged into the geopolitics of Trump's America. Thanks for joining us in the podcast
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YouTuber and it's based on his popular web series. Why is this online phenomenon taking off at the box office? We get into it on NPR's pop culture happy hour. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you Get your podcasts.
