Supreme Court, California Elections, The Missing in Mexico

0:01The U.S. Constitution says people born in the United States are citizens. The Supreme Court will soon tell us if that right still stands. I'm Ayesha Rascoe. I'm Ada Peralta, and this is Up First from NPR News. 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? Also, prediction markets are burning up with people claiming fraud as votes are being counted in the election for mayor of Los Angeles. They're all pro-Trump influencers. And hundreds of Mexican families whose loved ones have disappeared hope the World Cup is a chance to have their stories heard.

0:42Stay with us.

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1:39Learn more at fisherinvestments.com. Investing in securities involves the risk of loss. This message comes from Capital One with the Capital One Saver Card. Earn unlimited 3 % cash back on dining and entertainment. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Details at CapitalOne.com. 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 Kerry Johnson joins us to give us the rundown. Hey, Kerry. Hey, how are you? Good. Carrie, the Supreme Court hasn't yet ruled on birthright citizenship.

2:22What'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 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.

3:03And 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.

3:41Kerry, 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. 90 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 and make clear the president has the power to fire these kinds of federal officers.

4:21How far does that power extend? Tell us about the other case. 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.

5:02Tell 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. They say the Supreme Court is putting a hand on the scale to favor the GOP and ignore damage to minority voters. Howard University law professor Sherilyn Eiffel wrote, the High Court is marching this country's civil rights laws off a cliff.

5:39That's NPR's Kerry Johnson. Kerry, thanks for the update. Thanks for having me.

5:51Pro-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 Kaoshi and Polymarket to reinforce their claims. Some of those same influencers are also being paid by those companies for promotion and visibility. Now Kaoshi says it's asking some influencers to take their posts down. Joining us to explain all this is NPR's Ju Jaffe Block. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, good morning. So what's in these posts that Calci is asking influencers to take down?

6:33Well, 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 for a second. 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 Calci. 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 mayor's race, and he shared a Kalshi post that showed Pratt's odds of making it to the runoff election have been falling on the betting site.

7:17Freeman 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 Calci. My colleague, Bobby Allen, asked Calci about that post and others like it from other influencers they have partnerships with. Calci 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. Koushi'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.

8:00But there are a number of influencers with Polymarket partnerships who are also sowing doubt about the L.A. 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 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 it's taking to count the votes.

8:40Why 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. 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 announced that a candidate's odds have fallen to 8 percent or surged to 72 percent.

9:26And they're talking about the betting market odds of whether someone will win or lose, not what the actual ballot count says. 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 Richer, 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 L.A. election means for the rest of the year.

10:02I 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 one 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 NPR's Jude Jaffe-Block. Jude, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.

11:00drug war that's left tens of thousands 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? NPR producer Fernando Narro and I went to Guadalajara, 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 fan zone. On the other, the bells announce a mass.

11:40And in the middle of the square, the families begin their ritual. The 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 130 ,000 Mexicans who are reported missing. Alejandrina warns, paste the pictures only on the bollards. 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.

12:28Héctor Flores moves with intensity. Visibility bothers governments, he says. Five years ago, his son Dani was picked up by local authorities, and he hasn't heard from him since.

12:50The 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 19 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. We say that the disappeared families die every night to be born every day. We say the families of the disappeared die 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.

13:35What is wrong, he says, is to forget. 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.

14:03The 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, the 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.

14:48Andres Fabregas, 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. 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.

15:25People were so happy.

15:32Both the national and the local identity had won, and the local soccer team took on a greater meaning. 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 away. The Fan Fest the government built in downtown Guadalajara, 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.

16:21And 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's International Airport. Leticia 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 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. So far, she explains, they have found 60 bags full of remains, mostly extremities.

17:08This 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 10 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. Mira como ahorita están llegando los caninos. As we talk, a truck full of cadaver dogs arrives, and Leticia says goodbye.

17:51She 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. Jorge Luis Reyes sells pajaretes, a traditional breakfast drink made with raw milk and moonshine. You want to try it? Reyes asks. He pours a little agave honey, a little instant coffee, into a mug.

18:30He reaches under a goat and squeezes its milk right into the mug.

18:38I 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.

19:01Two 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.

19:19It'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.

19:37We'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 there, Ada, earlier this week with NPR producer Fernando Naro. Yep, and that's up first for Saturday, June 6, 2026. I'm Ada Peralta. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Dave Mistich produced today's podcast with help from Gabe O 'Connor. Our editor is Diana Douglas. assisted by Anna Yukonanoff, Brett Neely, and Tara Neel. In the control room today is our director, Andy Craig, and our technical director, David Greenberg, with engineering support from Zoe Vangenhoven, Jay Sizz, and Simon Laszlo Jansen.

20:18Shannon Rhodes is our senior supervising editor. Our executive producer is Evie Stone. Jim Kane is our deputy managing editor. Jim, we were so lucky It's great 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 going to miss you so much. You know, best of 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 feed. We've got so much more for you on the radio.

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