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Supreme Court Seems Ready to Ban Trans Kids From Playing Sports

The court’s ultraconservative majority seemed unswayed by arguments in support of two transgender teenage girls.

People protest in support of transgender kids outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.
Heather Diehl/Getty Images
A protest in support of transgender youth outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared poised Tuesday to allow states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

The court heard oral arguments for two cases from Idaho and West Virginia in which lawyers for the trans teens argued that the state laws they’d challenged relied on broad generalization about the sexes, and their supposed biological advantages, that did not apply to their specific clients, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, solicitor generals from these states insisted that biological sex matters in sports because of supposed competitive advantages.

The first case was from Idaho, involving college senior Lindsay Hecox, who has attempted to drop her case in order to proceed through the rest of school “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and related public scrutiny.”

The second case involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia high school student. Pepper-Jackson’s lawyer, Joshua Block of the ACLU, argued that his client did not hold an unfair advantage to her teammates and opponents because she had never gone through male puberty and had been taking hormone blockers.

While the conservative justices acknowledged that there was some scientific disagreement about competitive advantages between the sexes, they still seemed inclined to agree with states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Title IX did not protect transgender athletes from discrimination because it prevented discrimination based on “sex,” not gender identity.

“I hate, hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. Hate that. But we have kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teens,” he said, arguing that a transgender girl will inevitably take the spot entitled to a cisgender girl.

Of course, it’s not clear that there are that many transgender female athletes to begin with. Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, reported in 2024 that of the 510,000 total college athletes, there were fewer than 10 transgender students.

Trapped in the minority, the liberal justices suggested that the plaintiffs could seek “as applied” challenges to their states laws, meaning the cases could go back through lower courts separately to demonstrate that the two girls did not possess the unfair advantages implied by their assigned sex at birth.

ICE Violently Arrests Woman Trying to Pass Them to Get to the Doctor

Masked federal agents are swarming Minneapolis, and the stories keep getting worse.

Three federal agents carrying guns and wearing gas masks.
Octavio JONES/AFP/Getty Images

A woman in Minneapolis was dragged out of her car and arrested by ICE agents on Tuesday after informing agents the street they were blocking to conduct a raid was blocking her route to her doctor’s office.

The woman could be seen arguing with masked agents while they tell her to move her car up the street.

“This bitch just said he was gonna break my window if I don’t move my car!” the woman said from the driver’s seat, pointing directly at the ICE agent screaming in her face before throwing her hands up in frustration.

The ICE agents told the woman again to move along. Then one agent went to the passenger side window and broke it, while two others cut the woman’s seatbelt and dragged her out of her car.

“I’ve been beat up by police before, I’m disabled just trying to go to the doctor up there, that’s why I can’t move!” she says before being pushed against her car and arrested. Protesters scream in disgust, and whistles and car horns blare for the entirety of the clip.

“All you do is hurt!” one protester yelled at the agents, among a chorus of “Fuck you.” The woman was then placed in handcuffs.

“This is what living under a federal siege looks like,” Minnesota state Senator Omar Fateh wrote on X. “This isn’t about public safety—this is terrorism.”

This is just one of many awful scenes that have emerged from Minneapolis since the Department of Homeland Security responded to ICE’s killing of Renee Nicole Good by sending in even more masked, armed agents.

“I’ve been talking to people in Minneapolis, and the stories I’m hearing are traumatizing; people waking up to the smell of tear gas, wrecked cars left in the middle of roadways, businesses locked down, a state of fear,” American Immigration senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said. “This is what Stephen Miller wants to bring to every city.”

Prosecutors Quit After Order Targeting Minneapolis ICE Victim’s Widow

The Department of Justice wants to investigate the wife Renee Good left behind, instead of keeping the focus on the ICE agent who killed her.

Papers stapled to a pole read "RIP RENEE MURDERED BY ICE" and include a photo of her smiling.
Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images
Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7.

Six Minnesota prosecutors have resigned from the Justice Department over an investigation into the widow of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week.

Among those who quit Tuesday was Joseph H. Thompson, who oversaw a Minnesota fraud investigation last year that has garnered increased attention from the Trump administration in recent weeks. According to The New York Times, Thompson, a career attorney with the DOJ, objected to senior department officials pressing for a criminal investigation into Good’s wife, Becca, as well as to the department’s decision to shut out state officials from the investigation into Good’s killing.

Thompson had sought to work with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which reviews police shootings in the state, to investigate the shootings, but was shot down by his DOJ superiors. Thompson was also upset that Good’s shooting was not being investigated as a civil rights matter.

Three other senior prosecutors who resigned were Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez. Jacobs was Thompson’s deputy on the fraud investigation, while Calhoun-Lopez oversaw a violent and major crimes unit. Thompson, Jacobs, Williams, and Calhoun-Lopez declined to discuss their resignations with the Times.

Federal agents were already known to be investigating Good’s previous activism in a grotesque attempt to blame her for her own murder and exonerate the ICE agent who shot her, Jonathan Ross. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has described Good as a “domestic terrorist,” President Trump has called her and her wife “professional agitators,” and Vice President JD Vance has said she was “brainwashed.”

Now, it seems that the Trump administration’s handling of Good’s shooting, and desire to target her rather than charge any federal agents, is getting backlash from within the DOJ. While that might not dissuade the White House, it will at least expose how much the president’s immigration enforcement is violating the law.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Delivers Short and Serious Warning to Trump

Greenland’s leader has a blunt message for Trump as he seeks to take over the Arctic island.

Greenland’s Head of Government Jens-Frederik Nielsen and Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen speak at a podium
Liselotte Sabroe/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP/Getty Images
Greenland’s Head of Government Jens-Frederik Nielsen and Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen firmly rebuked Donald Trump Monday, saying that the people of the Danish territory don’t want to be part of the United States.

At a joint press conference with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in Copenhagen, Nielsen said, “If we have to choose between the USA and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the EU.”

On Wednesday, the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark will be meeting Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House, and Nielsen and Frederiksen sought to set the record straight.

“It has not been easy to stand up to completely unacceptable pressure from our closest allies for a lifetime. But there is much to suggest that the hardest part is still ahead of us,” Frederiksen said.

That probably won’t dissuade Trump, who told reporters on Sunday that the U.S. would have Greenland “one way or the other.”

“If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will, and I’m not letting that happen,” Trump said. This has been disputed by Denmark and other international observers.

Greenland’s political parties, as well as leaders from countries across NATO, have all condemned a possible U.S. seizure of the territory. But Trump claims that taking the territory is “psychologically important” for him. And we all know Trump’s ego is never satisfied.

Clintons Refuse to Testify on Epstein in Face of Contempt Charges

House Republicans are threatening to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress.

Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton stand in a crowd
Shawn Thew/Pool/Getty Images

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have refused to testify on the Epstein files before Congress after being subpoenaed by Republican House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer.

The Clintons wrote a lengthy letter addressed to Comer declaring the subpoenas “legally invalid.”

“You claim your subpoenas are inviolate when they are used against us yet were silent when the sitting president took the same position, as a former president, barely more than three years ago,” the letter reads. “You have done nothing with your Oversight capacity to force the Department of Justice to follow the law and release all its Epstein files, including any material regarding us as we have publicly called for.”

The Clintons also pointed out that Comer refused to support the bipartisan bill to release the Epstein files that Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna put forth.

Comer has responded with threats to hold both Clintons in contempt of Congress, which could carry a maximum penalty of a $100,000 fine or one year in prison. Bill Clinton has already missed his scheduled deposition Tuesday, and Hillary is scheduled on Wednesday.

While former President Clinton certainly had an alarmingly close relationship with deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, the exact same can be said about our current president, Donald Trump. But Comer has refused to pursue him at all, suggesting that this is a politically motivated attempt to deflect scrutiny of Trump’s relationship with Epstein onto the Clintons.

“Will you rule out bringing in Donald Trump for an interview?” a reporter asked Comer on Tuesday.

“Well … President Trump has answered thousands of questions about Jeffrey Epstein,” Comer said. “You all ask him questions every day, he answers questions every day about Epstein. Every day! You can’t bring in a current president of the United States, and you all know that.… To my knowledge, former President Clinton has never answered questions about Epstein.”

Trump has only avoided and attacked the questions he’s been asked about Epstein, and anyone who’s been paying attention would agree that both he and former President Clinton need to answer more—and if they really cared about transparency, they would.