FIRST ON FOX: Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., a Trump-endorsed Senate candidate in Louisiana, is saying that she will ensure diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies will be rooted out of schools in her state if she wins. 

However, Letlow’s past remarks and actions as a university faculty member, such as promises to open a DEI office if hired as a university president, and her past praise for DEI nationwide, have thrown these promises into question.

In a 2020 video from Letlow’s hiring process, when interviewing to be the president of the University of Louisiana Monroe, Letlow called the school’s record on faculty gender diversity “shameful,” praised DEI efforts around the country, said she wanted to open the school’s first DEI division and suggested that, if hired, she would want “a person around the table that is cognizant and fighting for diversity, equity and inclusion before any decision is made for the university.” 

In January, The Daily Caller first reported that, prior to serving Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District, Letlow was in a communications position at UL Monroe, where she helped push DEI initiatives aimed at “diversifying marketing and comms teams” and “establish[ing] diverse content.” She also signed a statement embracing diversity as one of UL Monroe’s “core values” shortly after the death of George Floyd. 

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“I was able to go to eight different universities and see some amazing work that other universities have already started – and you don’t even have to keep it to Louisiana, you can go nationwide to see the amazing effort people have been doing for years to address these issues,” Letlow told a panel interviewing her for the UL—Monroe presidency in 2020, in response to a question concerning the percentage of tenured female faculty. “So, one of the first things I would do – I believe we need a division on this campus, a division of diversity, equity and inclusion, with leadership that goes all the way to the top with a full staff because our issues are so great.”

During Letlow’s hiring process to potentially be the next president of UL—Monroe, she also spoke in a video meant to introduce herself to students, during which Letlow called herself a “strong and progressive leader” as the result of many years in higher ed.

The GOP primary race in Louisiana for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, between Letlow and incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., has become a battle over who is more pro-Trump – and DEI has been a major proving point.

“While Liberal Letlow was pushing DEI policies at ULM, calling herself a ‘strong and progressive leader,’ Senator Cassidy was working with President Trump and others to secure billions of dollars for the state and bring conservative policies to Louisiana,” said a spokesperson for Cassidy’s campaign. “From no boys in girls sports, to co-sponsoring the Save America Act, the HALT Fentanyl Act, and the Working Families Tax Cuts.” 

Cassidy himself has been accused of being anti-Trump, and when reached for comment on the matter, Letlow’s team argued that “any honest account of DEI in this race has to include Cassidy’s record vs Julia’s record.” 

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Letlow holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from UL Monroe. According to her LinkedIn profile, she also held multiple positions at the university, first from 2007 to 2011 and then again from 2014 to 2021. These positions include the director of marketing and communications from 2015 to 2018, executive director of external affairs and strategic communications from 2018 to 2019, and executive assistant to the president for external affairs and community outreach from 2019 to 2021 for the university.

In 2020, Letlow wanted to become UL Monroe’s president, during which she was subject to numerous interviews. One included questioning from a panel of UL Monroe officials, which was posted publicly on YouTube. 

“Study after study has shown that the more diverse an organization is in its leadership, the more successful it is, and in businesses that converts to actual financial success,” one questioner from the panel began when probing Letlow. “In academia, you know, it’s in the way — all the ways, the metrics that it’s supposed to succeed in a community, and yet we see a lot of slowness in change … so my question is, how would you go about supporting diversity and equity in the faculty ranks?” 

In response to the question, which focused specifically on the percentage of tenured female faculty at a university with a majority female student body, Letlow lamented that “we have an issue on this campus,” and promised to create a new DEI division to assist. 

“There would need to be a strategic plan put in place on how to address those concerns that you just raised, and those metrics and those numbers, because they are shameful, truly, and I believe that having that strong [DEI] division, having that leadership, if you have a person around the table that is cognizant and fighting for diversity, equity and inclusion before any decision is made for the university, then that’s how you change. That’s how you recruit more faculty,” Letlow responded. 

“There are a lot of people on this campus who have never heard of unconscious bias. They don’t know that it exists,” she continued. 

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“I was looking at the numbers – we have 8% African-American faculty women on this campus. That’s not enough,” Letlow added later. “That does not reflect our student population, and so that would be number one for me. I’m glad you asked that question.”

Letlow’s remarks, which have been publicly available on Youtube but have only 218 views as of Tuesday, add fodder for critics like Cassidy who say she is not sufficiently an opponent of DEI. However, Letlow recently told local media that Cassidy’s claims that she is “woke” are “absolutely false” and that she has spent the past five years in Congress fighting against DEI. 

“I saw [DEI] firsthand when I worked at the university,” Letlow told Louisiana First News this month. “DEI was presented to us as something that would help students achieve the American dream and when I quickly witnessed that it was hijacked by the radical left and turned into indoctrination and actually holding people down, I spent the last five years of Congress fighting against it.” 

Meanwhile, in comments to Fox News Digital, Letlow’s campaign representatives said that “President Trump endorsed [Letlow] because he knows exactly where she stands.”

“While Letlow was fighting DEI in Congress, Bill Cassidy was working with Joe Biden to pass major federal legislation that funded DEI programs, imposed equity mandates, and embedded gender-identity language into federal policy,” the spokesperson continued, referring to the bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act passed in 2021. “Cassidy authored and voted for a $1.2 trillion spending bill loaded with DEI provisions, voted for the CHIPS Act’s DEI research requirements, and negotiated a gun bill whose grant programs the Trump administration later canceled for being DEI vehicles.”

Letlow’s husband was originally elected to represent Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District but died before he could enter office. Letlow was then chosen via a special election. In 2023, she sponsored the Parental Bill of Rights Act, requiring stricter transparency in school curriculums and allowing parents to challenge classroom materials. She also voted in favor of the End Woke Higher Education Act, which bars university accrediting organizations from requiring schools to adopt DEI policies as a condition. 

Letlow’s team argued to Fox News Digital that she “has a clear record opposing DEI,” citing things like the congresswoman’s introduction of a federal Parental Bill of Rights, Letlow’s efforts to “strip DEI from the U.S. military,” and the congresswoman’s vote to reverse a Biden-era revision to Title IX regulations. Letlow’s campaign also said the congresswoman has “stood with President Trump” as he works to dismantle DEI across the federal government.

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“There is no place for woke ideology in schools,” Letlow posted on social media in 2024. “We will keep up the good fight, our children’s futures depend on it.”

But, in January, The Daily Caller also reported on records it obtained showing Letlow’s time as a university employee at UL—Monroe included promoting DEI initiatives. 

In a January 2020 email to staff from schools in the University of Louisiana system, Letlow reportedly asked officials to attend a “follow-up meeting” to an “Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Workshop” held the prior semester because they had been “charged with discussing a plan to move these initiatives forward.” These included recommendations of “diversifying marketing and comms teams” and “establish[ing] diverse content” in university publications that “lack representation of the students it serves.” 

The Letlow campaign told Fox News Digital that the email Letlow sent was standard operating procedure, and she was just doing her job as an executive assistant to the president for external affairs and community outreach by sending the follow-up email to coordinate attendance for the workshop from the prior semester.

In their report, The Daily Caller also highlighted a statement put out by UL Monroe shortly after the death of George Floyd, titled “ULM condemns racism, embraces diversity,” which was signed by Letlow and 11 other university leaders, including the interim president. The letter stated that “integrity must include condemning racism and racially motivated violence.”

Letlow’s previous membership with the National Communication Association (NCA) came under scrutiny from The Daily Caller as well. The Daily Caller reported the NCA issued a letter in 2020 which slammed statements condemning racism as “White self-reflexivity” and argued that such remarks must be paired with “strategic action” to combat things like “police brutality, Black death,” and “White normativity.” The letter went on to call the Trump administration’s use of the term “Chinese virus” to refer to COVID-19 “racist and xenophobic” and referred to White people as “privileged by Whiteness.”

The Letlow campaign contested she had anything to do with the letter, which came from the NCA’s Diversity Council, not from the NCA as an organization. A copy of the letter reviewed by Fox News Digital confirmed that Letlow was not a signatory. 

“Julia is not responsible for statements issued by a professional association because she was a member of it. She has not been a member in five years, and past membership did not mean endorsement of every position that group took,” her campaign said in a statement to Fox News Digital. 

When reached for comment about her remarks and the criticism that has resulted about Letlow’s past actions relating to DEI, the White House referred Fox News Digital to the Republican National Committee (RNC), which declined to comment on the matter.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday will weigh the legality of President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship in the U.S. — a landmark court fight that could profoundly impact the lives of millions of Americans and lawful U.S. residents.

Trump himself will also be attending the Supreme Court oral arguments in a sign of his interest in the case. His attendance marks the first time in U.S. history that a sitting president has attended oral arguments.

At issue in the case, Trump v. Barbara, is an executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office. The order in question seeks to end automatic citizenship — or “birthright citizenship” — for nearly all persons born in the U.S. to undocumented parents, or to parents with temporary non-immigrant visas in the U.S.

The stakes in the case are high, putting on a collision course more than a century of executive branch action, Supreme Court precedent, and the text of the Constitution itself — or, more specifically, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Trump administration officials view the order, and the high court’s consideration of the case, as a key component of his hard-line immigration agenda — an issue that has become a defining feature of his second White House term. 

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Opponents argue the effort is unconstitutional and unprecedented, and could impact an estimated 150,000 children born in the U.S. annually to noncitizens. 

A ruling in Trump’s favor would represent a seismic shift for immigration policy in the U.S., and would upend long-held notions of citizenship that Trump and his allies argue are misguided. It would also yield immediate, operational consequences for infants born in the U.S., putting the impetus on Congress and the Trump administration to immediately act to clarify their status. 

Here’s what to expect ahead of today’s oral arguments:

What’s at stake?

Justices will weigh Trump’s executive order 14160, or “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The order directs all U.S. government agencies to refuse to issue citizenship documents to children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants, or children born to parents who are in the U.S. legally but with temporary, non-immigrant visas.

The order would apply retroactively to all newborns born in the U.S. after Feb. 19, 2025. 

Trump’s executive order prompted a flurry of lawsuits in the days after its signing. Critics argued that, among other things, the order violated the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to “all persons born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Lawyers for the Trump administration, meanwhile, centered their case on the “subject to jurisdiction thereof” phrase, which they argue was intended at the time of its passage to narrowly “grant citizenship to newly freed slaves and their children” after the Civil War, and has been misinterpreted in the many years since.

U.S. Solicitor General D. Sauer urged the high court to take up the case last October, arguing that a pair of lower court rulings were overly broad and relied on the “mistaken view” that “birth on U.S. territory confers citizenship on anyone subject to the regulatory reach of U.S. law became pervasive, with destructive consequences.”

“Those decisions confer, without lawful justification, the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people,” he said.

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He also argued that the lower court rulings overstepped, and “invalidated a policy of prime importance to the president and his administration in a manner that undermines our border security.”

Justices on the high court will have no shortage of strings to pull on in considering the executive order or questioning lawyers during oral arguments. 

What’s changed?

The Supreme Court will use Wednesday’s arguments to weigh — to varying degrees — the text of the 14th Amendment, legal precedent, and text of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, among other issues cited by Sauer, the ACLU, and authors of the dozens of amicus briefs filed to the court since it agreed to review the case last fall. 

Legal experts told Fox News Digital that they expect Sauer could be in for an uphill battle in convincing a five-justice majority to unwind more than 125 years of precedent and text at issue in the case.

Despite their consensus, however, the court’s conservative bloc will still face thorny issues in reconciling more than a century of court precedent with the narrower reading of the 14th Amendment embraced by the Trump administration.

Justices are likely to focus closely on precedent in the Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark — a 1898 ruling in which the Supreme Court ruled that the son of two Chinese immigrants born in the U.S. was indeed a U.S. citizen. 

The case is widely considered to be the modern precedent for birthright citizenship, including related cases heard by the high court in the decades since. 

Others cited the text of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act statute passed by Congress, which essentially mirrors the text of the 14th Amendment in conferring legal status to persons born in the U.S., as yet another argument that could tip the scales in the migrants’ favor.

“I can think of at least five reasons off the top of my head why the Supreme Court should say that the citizenship clause means today what it has always meant,” Amanda Frost, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who specializes in immigration and citizenship issues, told Fox News Digital.

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“There is text. There is original public understanding, which certainly includes Wong Kim Ark, but also five or six Supreme Court cases after that,” Frost said. 

“There is executive branch practice for the last century,” she added, “which is relevant as well when you’re interpreting the Constitution, and weighing [the question of], ‘What is the longstanding understanding of a constitutional provision by every other actor?’”

“I don’t see how they could easily count to five,” Akhil Amar, a professor at Yale Law School, told Fox News Digital in an interview, speaking of the majority votes needed.

“Even if I lose on one issue, I win on [many others],” Amar said, before ticking through a list of reasons why the Supreme Court, in his view, might swing in favor of the migrant class in question, and ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang, who is arguing the case Wednesday on behalf of the migrants.

Others agreed, albeit with a bit more reservation.

“I don’t think history supports the Trump administration’s view,” John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley and former lawyer during the Bush administration, told Fox News Digital on the strength of the administration’s case.

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Stateless newborns, enforcement issues

Another question will be one of enforcement. Trump’s executive order does not codify the legal status that should be conferred to children who are born in the U.S. to holders of temporary, long-term visas — including student visas and H1B visas, legal experts told Fox News Digital.

Frost, the University of Virginia Law professor, noted that Congress has not provided a pathway to legal status for the class of children who would be born in the U.S. and not granted citizenship. This means that the government would essentially need to act at lightning speed to confer some sort of status — be it temporary or longer-term — to newborns, should the justices side with Trump.

“The parents may have applied for a green card,” Frost said of newborns born to illegal immigrants, should the court allow Trump’s order to take force. “They might get the green card the next day.”

“It would not matter,” she said. “The child would not be a citizen.”

Yoo, Amar, and others cited similar concerns voiced by justices briefly during oral arguments in another birthright citizenship case, Trump v. CASA, last year. The administration asked the court to review the case not on the merits of the order, but as a means of challenging so-called “universal,” or nationwide injunctions issued by federal court judges.

Despite the focus on the lower court powers, some justices still used their time to question Sauer about the birthright citizenship order and its implementation.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for his part, pressed Sauer for details on what documentation newborns might need at birth should Trump’s executive order take force.

“On the day after it goes into effect — it’s just a very practical question of how it’s going to work,” Kavanaugh noted, before asking Sauer: “What do hospitals do with a newborn? What do states do with a newborn?” he asked, in order to determine their citizenship on a birth certificate.

“I don’t think they do anything different,” Sauer said in response. “What the executive order says in Section Two is that federal officials do not accept documents that have the wrong designation of citizenship from people who are subject to the executive order.”

“How are they going to know that?” Kavanaugh pressed, shaking his head.  

The government’s position “makes no sense whatsoever,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said at the time, before noting that it appeared to violate “four Supreme Court precedents,” and risked leaving some children stateless.

Justices to watch

While it’s difficult to speculate how justices on the high court might position themselves in considering a case, there are some conservative justices that have signaled early skepticism about the Trump administration’s arguments. Their votes could prove to be decisive, experts said.

“In terms of oral arguments, I think what you’re going to see is a lot of attention paid to how Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh view the issue in particular,” Yoo said. “I think it will be up to them” to determine the majority ruling, he said.

Roberts, in particular, often relies heavily on Supreme Court precedent, Yoo noted, and has been wary of overturning decisions made under previous courts — pointing to the “sort of anguished dissent” he authored in Roe v. Wade. 

“I think that’s really the question: whether there’s going to be enough historical evidence to change Robert’s mind about how to treat precedent,” he said, noting the chief justice tends to view questions of institutional importance and consistency as top-of-mind.

When it comes to birthright citizenship, Yoo said, there is a much longer history and court precedent that is older and “more well-followed” than Roe ever was, he noted, which could swing the conservatives in the ACLU’s favor.

“We never know why the Supreme Court decides to hear a case,” Amar told Fox News Digital. “But I’m hoping that they heard the case because America deserves an answer.”

A decision from the high court is expected by late June. 

President Donald Trump said he is strongly considering pulling the United States out of NATO over the alliance’s refusal to join his administration’s efforts in the Iran conflict, according to a report.

“I was never swayed by NATO,” Trump told The Daily Telegraph in an interview published Wednesday.

The president, long a critic of the military alliance, which has been pivotal in maintaining global order since World War II, said reconsidering the matter was “beyond consideration.”

“I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way,” Trump told the British outlet.

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The comments come after European nations reportedly rejected Trump’s request that allies send warships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply travels. Iran has threatened or moved to restrict access to the strait in reaction to the U.S. offensive against Iranian targets, raising concerns about global energy markets and economic stability.

“Beyond not being there, it was actually hard to believe. And I didn’t do a big sale. I just said, ‘Hey,’ you know, I didn’t insist too much. I just think it should be automatic,” Trump said.

“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine. Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us.”

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The president also criticized the United Kingdom and Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not participating in the conflict.

“You don’t even have a navy. You’re too old and had aircraft carriers that didn’t work,” Trump said.

Responding to the president’s comments, Starmer said Britain is “fully committed to NATO,” calling it “the single most effective military alliance the world has ever seen.”

Starmer told reporters that “whatever the pressure on me and others, whatever the noise, I am going to act in the British national interest in all the decisions I make.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.