The administration asks the Supreme Court to control mail ballots before the midterms
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to let it seize control of who receives a mail ballot, weeks before that question could shape how the November midterms are run.[1] The request landed after two lower courts blocked a presidential order that would compile federal citizenship lists of eligible voters and cut off mail ballots to anyone not on them, and it asks the justices to lift those blocks while the case proceeds.[1] Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia are fighting the order; twelve states have lined up behind it.[2]
01 What the order would do
The order, signed on March 31 and titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” directs federal agencies to assemble state-by-state lists of citizens eligible to vote and instructs the Postal Service to stop delivering mail ballots to people who do not appear on them.[3] A coalition of states led by California sued, and in June a federal judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, blocked the mail-ballot and citizenship-list provisions for the November 3 election, holding that the order exceeded the president’s authority.[3] Over the weekend of July 25 and 26 a divided federal appeals panel in Boston refused to lift that block, keeping the order on hold for the November election.[3]
02 Why it is at the Supreme Court now
On July 27 the administration filed an emergency application asking the justices to stay the lower-court blocks, the procedural fast lane sometimes called the shadow docket, where the Court rules on urgent requests without full briefing or argument.[1] The government argues the lawsuit is premature because agencies have not finished writing the rules, and that leaving the block in place would cause irreparable harm to election-integrity efforts that could not be undone once the midterms pass.[4] The challengers rest on the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which assigns the power to set the times, places and manner of federal elections to the states and to Congress, not to the president.[2] The justices set a deadline of the afternoon of August 3 for the states to respond, which keeps the matter live and undecided across this week.[1]
Whatever the Court does will register twice. A stay would let the citizenship-list and mail-ballot rules bind in up to twenty-three states and the District of Columbia for the November vote, while a denial would leave the block standing into the election.[5] Either way, an order issued on the emergency docket would signal how far the current Court is willing to let a president reach into the machinery of an election, a marker other litigants and states will read closely.[2]
- Trump administration, states urge justices to allow full implementation of executive order on mail-in voting — SCOTUSblog
- Trump anti-mail-voting executive order: Justice Department files emergency Supreme Court appeal — Democracy Docket
- US appeals court upholds block on Trump's order to create a federal list of eligible voters — Fortune
- Trump administration urges Supreme Court to allow order targeting mail-in voting before midterms — PBS NewsHour
- Trump asks Supreme Court to let him curtail mail voting — CNN Politics
Deportation protections lapse for Haiti, Syria and Yemen as terminations take effect
Legal protection from deportation is lapsing for several hundred thousand people who have lived and worked in the United States for years, as the government winds down a humanitarian immigration status for nationals of Haiti, Syria and Yemen.[1] The terminations follow a June Supreme Court ruling that cleared the administration to end the protections, and they take effect on a rolling schedule through early August.[2] Homeland Security has said it will step up enforcement as the protections lapse.[1]
01 The status that is ending
Temporary Protected Status lets the government shield people from deportation and grant them work permits when their home countries are judged too dangerous to return to, a designation the Secretary of Homeland Security can grant or revoke under the Immigration and Nationality Act.[4] Secretary Kristi Noem moved to terminate the designations, and work authorization has been lapsing on a staggered timetable: for Yemen around July 20, for Haiti and Syria during the week of July 27, and for Somalia and Burma on August 3, with South Sudan and Ethiopia to follow on August 6.[5] Roughly three hundred thousand or more Haitians and about six thousand Syrians lose their permits in this round,[7] part of a national Temporary Protected Status population of about 1.3 million people from seventeen countries.[6]
02 Why the courts stepped aside
The statute that authorizes the status also says that decisions to grant or end it are not subject to judicial review, and that clause is what the Supreme Court leaned on.[2] On June 25 the justices ruled 6 to 3, with Justice Samuel Alito writing for the majority, that the bar on review is clear and broad, which dissolved the injunctions lower courts had used to keep the protections in place.[2] The administration then issued the termination notices that make the work permits invalid on the scheduled dates, so the operative step now is administrative rather than judicial.[3] One country, Somalia, won a short reprieve from a separate district-court order that pushed its cutoff to August 3.[3]
The immediate effect is that employers must re-verify or let go of workers whose permits have expired, and that the people losing status become removable at a moment when Homeland Security has said enforcement will ramp up.[1] The larger stake is the precedent. If ending the status is effectively unreviewable, the same logic reaches the far larger group of holders from the other fourteen countries, whose designations now rest on the same discretion.[5]
- DHS says it has terminated TPS for people from Haiti, Syria, Yemen — NPR
- Court allows Trump administration to end removal protections for Syrian and Haitian nationals — SCOTUSblog
- USCIS announces TPS terminations for Syria, Haiti and Yemen; Somalia receives a short extension — Erickson Immigration Group
- Update on Termination of Temporary Protected Status for Yemen (release July 29, 2026) — U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
- Beltway Buzz, July 31, 2026 (rolling TPS expiration dates) — Ogletree Deakins
- Recent changes to Temporary Protected Status designations: potential impacts on the TPS population — KFF
- What's next for immigrants with TPS status after the Supreme Court ruling — PBS NewsHour
Mamdani orders city agencies to find fresh savings against a widening gap
One month after signing the largest budget in New York City’s history, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has told every city agency to go find more savings.[1] The order asks agencies to identify an additional 2.5 percent in each of the next two fiscal years, and it is a response to deficits that have re-emerged even after a record spending plan.[2] City Hall and the comptroller disagree on how large the coming gap really is, which sets up the fall’s budget fight.[3]
01 The order and the hole it addresses
On July 28, less than a month after the city adopted a $125.8 billion budget for the 2027 fiscal year,[2] Mamdani directed agencies to find 2.5 percent in savings in 2027 and again in 2028, and City Hall expects the exercise to yield more than a billion dollars.[1] It is his second savings round; the first, issued in his opening month, identified $1.77 billion, and the administration says layoffs are not on the table.[1] The gap it is chasing is contested. City Hall projects a shortfall of about $6.4 billion for 2027, while Comptroller Mark Levine’s office puts it above $9 billion.[2]
02 How the savings are meant to be found
Rather than a traditional top-down cut, the administration is running what it calls a workforce savings and efficiency survey, soliciting cost-cutting ideas from employees, with a designated chief savings officer at each agency to vet them.[1] Whatever is accepted gets folded into the November financial-plan update, the mid-year revision that must keep the current year balanced under state law.[2] Watchdogs largely endorsed the timing. The comptroller called launching a savings program early in the fiscal year the right thing to do, and the Citizens Budget Commission warned that the gaps are big and growing and that more savings will be needed.[3]
Part of what drives the shortfall is that the record budget leans on money that does not repeat, including state aid, revenue from a tax on high-value home sales, and deferred pension payments, so recurring savings are meant to replace one-time patches before they run out.[2] The distance between the city’s $6.4 billion estimate and the comptroller’s figure above $9 billion is not a rounding difference. It previews an argument this autumn over how deep the cuts must go, and whether an efficiency drive can close a hole that the city’s own monitors think is larger than City Hall admits.[3]
SUNY’s largest union ratifies a five-year contract for 42,000 employees
The union that represents most of the people who teach and run the State University of New York has locked in five years of raises and a set of new workplace rules for more than forty-two thousand employees.[1] Members of United University Professions ratified the contract by a lopsided margin, approving annual salary increases along with stipends, retention pay and stronger job protections.[1] The deal also writes in an unusual clause requiring that a person stay accountable whenever automated tools are used in coursework.[2]
01 What members approved
United University Professions announced on July 27 that its members had ratified a successor to the contract that expired at the start of the month, by a vote of 13,445 to 305, or 97.7 percent in favor.[1] The agreement runs from July 2, 2026 through July 1, 2031 and carries across-the-board raises of 4.5 percent in the first year, then 4 percent, 3.5 percent, and 3 percent in each of the last two years.[1] It adds a $600 annual payment for full-time members holding a master’s degree or higher, a new retention award at seventeen years of service, higher minimum rates for part-time and per-course instructors, and expanded location pay that reaches the Mid-Hudson region, including SUNY New Paltz, for the first time.[2]
02 Beyond the paycheck
The contract lowers the share of health-insurance premiums for roughly sixty-five hundred members, strengthens due-process protections, reduces the weight given to student surveys in faculty evaluations, and expands the ability to work remotely.[2] It also requires human direction, responsibility and ultimate accountability whenever automated tools are used in SUNY coursework, a provision the union describes as among the first of its kind in a higher-education contract.[3] The union’s president, Frederick Kowal, said one of its biggest concerns going into bargaining was the threat automation posed both to members and to the quality of a SUNY education.[3]
A tentative deal like this one becomes binding only when members vote to accept it, and the terms are then paid for through the state and university budgets across the life of the contract.[1] Because the prior contract lapsed on July 1 and the new one begins the next day, the raises run forward from the start of the term rather than making up for a gap. For a workforce that keeps the state’s largest public university system running, the near-unanimous vote settles five years of pay and working conditions and removes a source of labor uncertainty from its campuses.[2]