Supreme court allows Trump to temporarily resume deporting people to third countries – live

Reacting to the decision, attorney general Todd Blanche has just said on X:

Now for the second time, SCOTUS just granted our stay in conducting all third-country removals of illegal aliens. Again, this is entirely lawful and a critical tool for immigration enforcement. Unlike the lower court, SCOTUS waited to hear from both sides before making the decision.

To be clear, the supreme court majority has decided to allow the deportations to resume pending the final outcome of the litigation, i.e. while it hears arguments and then decides whether or not the policy is lawful.

Democrat Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, and 24 other senators have introduced a resolution demanding that the US government do a human rights assessment of the conduct of the government of Israel in the occupied West Bank, after the “absolutely outrageous” killings of nine American citizens in the last four years, “either by violent Israeli settlers or Israeli security forces”.

“We’ve seen no accountability, no justice,” Van Hollen says in a video shared on social media, where he also calls for the immediate release of the American citizens wrongfully detained there.

Accusing the Israeli government of “gross violations of human rights”, he highlights its treatment of Palestinian people:

Imagine, if we can’t get the Israeli government to ensure accountability and justice when American citizens are killed, imagine the situation for Palestinians, who do not hold an American passport. Who are killed with impunity, whose houses and cars are burned, whose places of worship are burned, and you have the government of Israel trying to push them all off their lands in what is clearly a policy of ethnic cleansing.

The supreme court has allowed the Trump administration to resume deporting people to countries other than their own without offering them the chance to show the harms they may face, bolstering a tool Donald Trump has used for rapid expulsions as part of ⁠his immigration crackdown.

The justices granted the DOJ’s request to halt ​Boston-based US district judge Brian Murphy’s ruling that the Department of Homeland Security’s policy to remove migrants to so-called third countries is unlawful, while the administration appeals the matter to the supreme court. They also agreed to hear arguments in the dispute in December, with a ⁠formal ruling on policy to follow.

Its three liberal justices dissented from the decision.

Federal attorneys said the lower-court decision forced the cancellation of a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries.

The justices previously allowed the deportation flights, a core Trump administration policy, to temporarily continue when the case came before them last year. In another win for the administration, the supreme court subsequently lifted limits the judge had imposed to protect a group of men from being sent to South Sudan.

More than 25,000 people have been deported to 29 countries under ⁠the policy implemented last year, according to a tally by human rights groups, with the vast majority going to Mexico.

The administration has also carried out third-country deportations to politically unstable South Sudan, which the US state department urges Americans to avoid due ​to the risks of crime, kidnapping and armed conflict, as well as Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, ‌Liberia, the Central African Republic, and other nations.

Robert F Kennedy Jr laid out an expansive vision for collecting, sharing and analyzing US health information at a Maha event hosted by a close ally and outspoken anti-vaccine activist.

Medical and lifestyle data, from doctor’s visits to exercise, should be connected and shared with the government and independent researchers, where it can be searched by AI – including potential links between vaccines and health outcomes including autism and mortality, suggested Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime vaccine skeptic.

“We need to use America’s health data to determine whether the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the vaccines that we’re administering, the other environmental and lifestyle exposures are contributing in one way or another to the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said at an event with the Maha Institute on Monday, with about two dozen people tuning into the live stream.

The Maha Institute is headed by Mark Gorton, who called himself “the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference” two weeks ago. The institute was co-founded by Tony Lyons, whose publishing house gave $4m to Kennedy through various Maha foundations with funding from political contributions and health-related corporations, according to reporting by the New York Times.

Kennedy has focused on pulling together data from all of the agencies he oversees, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Read the full report here:

Speaking after a meeting with several AI company executives, Donald Trump said that there “was a lot of commonality in this room”.

A reminder that some of those at today’s meeting include Open AI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

When it comes to further guardrails on development, the president said that “tremendous self-regulation” should be the path forward, compared with the calls that there should be greater congressional oversight.

On the topic of datacenters, Trump insisted that the structures – which are used to house thousands of energy-intensive servers for tech companies – “are going to be very popular”.

This, despite frequent polling which shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not approve of more datacenter construction in their communities.

“The areas with datacenters have become very rich,” Trump claimed, without citing any evidence. “People have become very rich. Their taxes have gone down, not up, and a lot of good things have happened.”

In fact, several areas that are the site of datacenter development have raised concerns about water quality, noise pollution and potential impact on their electricity bills.

• Jack Smith faced Senate lawmakers on the judiciary committee for a contentious hearing that saw a number of Republicans accuse the former special prosecutor of perjury, and conducting a political witch-hunt against Donald Trump when he secured two indictments against the president that were later dismissed when he took office. Many GOP lawmakers hurled insults and accusations, with little evidence, at Smith. The former special counsel stood by his findings, and said that his investigations found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in criminal activity. He also fended off allegations about the legality of procuring call toll records – and explained several times what these are and aren’t – outlined the persistent attacks he and former colleagues have faced from lawmakers and the president in the years since he prosecuted Trump and defended himself against the accusations that his work was politically motivated. Democrats, meanwhile, blasted their colleagues for peddling “the Big Lie” and called the hearing a “farce”.

• In Washington, Trump said the US ‘can’t stifle’ AI as he unveiled a new tool to streamline federal government information. The president made his views on any guardrails on AI development clear again, after previously branding the calls as a “hoax”. Also today, Trump met with several AI company CEOs at the White House, alongside Republican House speaker Mike Johnson.

• Trump also used the opportunity – now a little more than a month away from the midterm elections – to repeat his claim that the war with Iran will be over “very soon”. This despite another week of stalled negotiations between Washington and Tehran via mediators. “They’re failing very badly,” the president said. “They will not have a nuclear weapon. And oil prices are going to be tumbling down, just like they were before.” He again referred to the conflict as a “little excursion”. A reminder the war is now in its seventh month, and has caused a global energy crisis that has seen the average price of a gallon of gas increase by a dollar.

• A Republican senator blocked a bipartisan bill that would have prevented Donald Trump from demolishing the Kennedy Center without the approval of Congress. Mike Lee, of Utah, objected when the Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley asked the Senate to pass the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act by unanimous consent. The bill, co-written with the Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, would have banned the demolition of any presidential memorial designated by Congress, including the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, unless lawmakers explicitly approved it.

Jack Smith’s hearing before the Senate judiciary committee has now ended. We’ll bring you a recap shortly.

Smith pushed back against a number of Josh Hawley’s accusations, including the process the former special prosecutor went about to get records from the National Archives, which included text messages between White House officials and 44 members of Congress

“That was a request for White House phones,” Smith said, noting that these happened to have contacts with members of Congress in it. “It was also inaccurate to state that our indictment happened on 2 October. We indicted that case in August [2023],” Smith said, noting that he and his team and consulted with the Public Integrity Section of the justice department, who “ultimately concurred” that they had “followed the election year sensitivities policy”.

Josh Hawley – a Republican senator and fierce Trump ally – launched into his critiques of Smith from the jump.

“Your investigation, so-called, your prosecution, so-called, was nothing other than an attempt to interfere politically in a presidential election in the United States of America,” Hawley said, repeating many right-wing conspiracies about Smith’s motivations. “You twice indicted a presidential candidate.”

When Thom Tillis, the outgoing Republican senator from North Carolina, asked Smith about whether there was anything he would have changed in the way he handled his investigations into Donald Trump, the former special prosecutor said that he learned, throughout his inquiries, that if he only stuck to confining his comments to the courtoom “people can unfairly malign your team and unfairly malign you and your case”.

He added:

There are things being put out daily that are patently untrue … I’m not advocating that prosecutors in the future start going on the internet every day responding to comments … I do agree that prosecutors in the future need to learn to be able to communicate to the outside world because I believe strongly we did our investigation the right way, but I limited myself in who I talked to about that.

Republican senator Darline Graham, the sister of late senator Lindsey Graham, used her time questioning Jack Smith to accuse the former special counsel of adding “stress” to her brother’s life through subpoenas.

The South Carolina senator, appointed to replace her brother who died in July, told Smith that he should be “ashamed” of himself and that it made her “sick” to think that Smith’s subpoenas of Lindsey Graham’s phone records would have stressed him out.

“Do you really believe that Lindsey was going to destroy evidence that was not even in his possession?” Darline Graham asked.

But Smith responded, saying Lindsey Graham was “a patriot” and was not the target of his investigation.

“He likely would have been a witness in our case,” Smith added.

Back at the hearing, Democratic senator Cory Booker accused Republicans of “a farce”, levelling that they were “gaslighting” the public by “continuing to perpetuate the big lie in America that Donald Trump was somehow cheated out of the 2020 election.”

This big lie has gone on [long] enough. We have people who are serving at the highest offices in the land that repeat the big lie. We have people running for office in the Republican party that can’t even tell the truth.

And today’s farce – today’s gaslighting – cannot obscure the mountain of evidence and what Americans saw with their own eyes.

A visibly frustrated Booker lamented that this was unfair to Jack Smith and his family, but also to the American people who continue to struggle with problems including high gas prices, lack of health insurance coverage, and childcare costs.

The New Jersey senator ended, addressing Smith:

What do the Republicans in control of Congress do with their closing statement before an election? They carry out the big lie. They persecute prosecutors. They do Trump’s bidding. They choose Trump over truth, corruption and crimes over the constitution, and I’ve had enough of it.

This hearing is a farce. And I’m sorry for what you and your family are enduring as a result.

Away from the hearing for a moment, a Republican senator last night blocked a bipartisan bill that would have prevented Donald Trump from demolishing the Kennedy Center without the approval of Congress.

Mike Lee, of Utah, objected when the Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley asked the Senate to pass the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act by unanimous consent. The bill, co-written with the Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, would have banned the demolition of any presidential memorial designated by Congress, including the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, unless lawmakers explicitly approved it.

“First, he destroyed its programming, and now, he wants to destroy the building itself,” Merkley wrote in a statement. “All because the law says Trump can’t put his name on the building.” He called the president’s threats “straight out of the authoritarian playbook”.

Murkowski, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that funds the center, said last week that lawmakers had authorized and funded substantial renovation work, but “what was not authorized is a demolition of the Kennedy Center”.

Here’s Joseph’s report on the latest twist in one of the longest running legal sagas of Trump’s second term:

Republican senator Ted Cruz used his time to admonish Jack Smith for weaponizing the justice department to subpoena Republican members of Congress and conservative organizations during his investigation into Trump.

Cruz insinuated that Smith had used his power as the special counsel to target Republicans, asking Smith, “Is it a crime to be a Republican?” Smith replied: “Absolutely not.”

Cruz became increasingly angry with Smith during questioning, speaking over Smith as he tried to answer questions.

“Javert from Les Mis would look at you with astonishment,” Cruz told Smith.

Throughout Smith’s hearing, Republican senators have repeatedly brought up Timothy Thibault, a former FBI agent who was in charge of the Arctic Frost investigation and accused of political bias.

Republican senator Katie Britt asked Smith multiple times to confirm or deny whether Thibault had engaged in political bias, even though Thibault retired from the FBI months before Smith was made special counsel.

Thibault oversaw paperwork to open the election conspiracy case known as Arctic Frost, which has become an increasingly polarizing topic among lawmakers. Thibault was accused of making political statements on social media, which some Republicans have used to point to a larger accusation that the Biden administration weaponized the Justice Department.

Thibault denied accusations that political partisanship impacted his work.

Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat, asked Smith about his work with Republicans throughout his investigation into Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The former special prosecutor said he found it “very hard” to understand why his probe was considered to be partisan when the “strongest witnesses” were Republicans like Rusty Bowers, a former Arizona state representative, and former vice-president Mike Pence.

“The criminal scheme we investigated was predicated upon Donald Trump preying on party loyalty. He preyed on party loyalty and fear,” Smith said. “The reality is, one of the reasons, our democracy held up. One of the reasons he was not able to take power, even though, he was seeking to do these things is because Republicans stood up.”