The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to strip temporary legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans, potentially exposing them to being deported.

The Justice Department asked the high court to put on hold a ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco that kept in place Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans that would have otherwise expired last month.

The status allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.

A federal appeals court had earlier rejected the administration’s request.

President Donald Trump’s administration has moved aggressively to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to remain in the country, including ending TPS for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians. TPS is granted in 18-month increments.

The emergency appeal to the high court came the same day a federal judge in Texas ruled illegal the administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelans under an 18th-century wartime law. The cases are not related.

The protections had been set to expire April 7, but U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ordered a pause on those plans. He found that the expiration threatened to severely disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and could cost billions in lost economic activity.

Chen, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, found the government hadn’t shown any harm caused by keeping the program alive.

But Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration that Chen’s order impermissibly interferes with the administration’s power over immigration and foreign affairs.

In addition, Sauer told the justices, people affected by ending the protected status might have other legal options to try to remain in the country because the “decision to terminate TPS is not equivalent to a final removal order.”

Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife.

Jurors began deliberating Thursday in the case of two men charged with cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree that once stood along the ancient Hadrian’s Wall in northern England.

Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, have pleaded not guilty to two counts each of criminal damage. The former friends each testified that they were at their separate homes that night and not involved.

Justice Christina Lambert told jurors in Newcastle Crown Court to take as long as they need to reach unanimous verdicts in the trial that began April 28.

The tree was not Britain’s biggest or oldest, but it was prized for its picturesque setting along the ancient wall built by Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 122 to protect the northwest frontier of the Roman Empire.

The tree was long known to locals but achieved international fame in Kevin Costner’s 1991 film “Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.” It sat symmetrically between two hills along the historic wall and was a draw for tourists, landscape photographers and those taking selfies for social media.

Prosecutors said the tree’s value exceeded 620,000 pounds ($830,000) and damage to the wall, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was assessed at 1,100 pounds. Andrew Gurney, a lawyer for Carruthers, said Graham’s story didn’t add up and he was projecting his guilt on his former friend.

“Is that a plausible chain of events or is that the desperate story of a man caught out?” Gurney said.

Wright mocked the duo’s defense, saying common sense and a trail of evidence should lead jurors to convict them for their “moronic mission.”

Prosecutors showed grainy video from Graham’s phone of the tree being cut down — a video sent shortly afterward to Carruthers’ phone. Metadata showed it was taken at the tree’s location in Northumberland National Park. Data showed Graham’s Range Rover had traveled there.

Wright said he couldn’t say who cut the tree and who held the phone, but the two were the only people in the world who had the video on their devices.

Text and voice messages exchanged the following day between Carruthers and Graham captured their excitement as the story went viral.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill is pushing forward with her efforts to force Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson to drop a longtime policy that generally prohibits deputies from directly engaging in federal immigration enforcement within the city’s jail.

In legal filings, Murrill claims that the policy — which the state characterizes as a so-called “sanctuary city” policy — is in direct conflict with a newly passed state law that requires state and local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration agencies.

“The consent decree now sits fundamentally at odds with state law as applicable to immigration detainers,” Murrill said in court documents filed Friday.

A federal court will now determine whether to allow the state of Louisiana to join a 2011 federal suit that resulted in the policy and whether to throw out the policy altogether. A hearing has been set for April 30.

The state’s campaign against “sanctuary” policies comes as President Donald Trump is pushing local law enforcement agencies to join the federal government in his promised immigration crackdown. Since his inauguration, Trump has ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to push for more partnerships between local law enforcement units and federal immigration agencies. A few have already signed up. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a longtime immigration hardliner and Trump ally, has worked with Republican lawmakers in the state to enact laws that encourage those collaborations.

As attorney general, Landry criticized a policy adopted by the New Orleans Police Department, under a long-running federal consent decree that blocks officers from enforcing immigration laws.

Neither Murrill’s office nor representatives for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to requests for comment.

In court filings, Murrill said Hutson “does not oppose the (state’s) intervention” in the case.” But a spokesperson for Hutson said that’s not exactly true. “It’s more accurate that we take no position regarding the state intervention,” a Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.

While she has not taken a position for or against increased collaboration with ICE, in an interview with Fox 8 in December, Hutson noted that the jail’s resources were far too stretched to take on immigration enforcement.

The sheriff’s policy stems from a 2013 federal court settlement in a civil rights case involving two New Orleans construction workers picked up on minor charges in 2009 and 2010. Mario Cacho and Antonio Ocampo sued after they were allegedly illegally held in the city’s jail past the completion of their sentences. The two were held at the request of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency issues such “detainer” requests to local law enforcement agencies, asking them to hold onto arrestees who are suspected of immigration violations. Local agencies are only supposed to honor the hold requests for 48 hours, after which they should let detainees free. But in 2009 and 2010, then-Sheriff Marlin Gusman detained Cacho and Ocampo for months, according to legal filings in their case against the office.

Ocampo and Cacho settled the case with the Sheriff’s Office in 2013, and Gusman agreed to adopt a new policy on immigration investigations. The resulting policy blocks the agency from investigating immigration violations and from detaining immigrants for ICE without a court order, except in certain cases where they are facing charges for a small number of serious violent crimes.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Minnesota asking to revive the state’s ban on gun-carry permits for young adults.

The justices also left in place a ban on guns at the University of Michigan, declining to hear an appeal from a man who argued he has a right to be armed on campus. No justice noted a dissent in either case.

Taken together, the actions reflect the high court’s apparent lack of appetite for cases that further explore the constitutional right to “keep and bear arms.”

The court has repeatedly turned away gun cases since its 2022 ruling that expanded gun rights and a clarifying 2024 decision that upheld a federal gun control law that is intended to protect victims of domestic violence.

The decision not to hear the Minnesota case was somewhat surprising because both sides sought the Supreme Court’s review and courts around the country have come to different conclusions about whether states can limit the gun rights of people aged 18 to 20 without violating the Constitution.

The federal appeals court in St. Louis ruled that the Minnesota ban conflicted with the Second Amendment, which the court noted sets no age limit and generally protects ordinary, law-abiding young adults.

In January, the federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down a federal law requiring young adults to be 21 to buy handguns.

In February, a federal judge declined to block Hawaii’s ban on gun possession for people under 21.

Several international students who have had their visas revoked in recent weeks have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, arguing the government denied them due process when it suddenly took away their permission to be in the U.S.

The actions by the federal government to terminate students’ legal status have left hundreds of scholars at risk of detention and deportation. Their schools range from private universities like Harvard and Stanford to large public institutions like the University of Maryland and Ohio State University to some small liberal arts colleges.

In lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security, students have argued the government lacked justification to cancel their visa or terminate their legal status.

Visas can be canceled for a number of reasons, but colleges say some students are being singled out over infractions as minor as traffic violations, including some long in the past. In some cases, students say it’s unclear why they were targeted.

“The timing and uniformity of these terminations leave little question that DHS has adopted a nationwide policy, whether written or not, of mass termination of student (legal) status,” ACLU of Michigan attorneys wrote in a lawsuit on behalf of students at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan.

In New Hampshire, a federal judge last week issued a restraining order in the case of a Dartmouth College computer science student from China, Xiaotian Liu, who had his status terminated by the government. Attorneys have filed similar challenges in federal court in Georgia and California.

Homeland Security officials did not respond to a message seeking comment.

In some high-profile cases, including the detention of Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, President Donald Trump’s administration has argued it should be allowed to deport noncitizens over involvement in pro-Palestinian activism. But in the vast majority of visa revocations, colleges say there is no indication affected students had a role in protests.

“What you’re seeing happening with international students is really a piece of the much greater scrutiny that the Trump administration is bringing to bear on immigrants of all different categories,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, director of public affairs at the Migration Policy Institute.

Students in other countries must meet a series of requirements to obtain a student visa, usually an F-1. After gaining admission to a school in the U.S., students go through an application and interview process at a U.S. embassy or consulate abroad.

Students on an F-1 visa must show they have enough financial support for their course of study in the U.S. They have to remain in good standing with their academic program and are generally limited in their ability to work off-campus during their academic program.

Entry visas are managed by the State Department. Once they’re in the U.S., international students’ legal status is overseen by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program under the Department of Homeland Security.

In recent weeks, leaders at many colleges learned the legal residency status of some of their international students had been terminated when college staff checked a database managed by Homeland Security. In the past, college officials say, legal statuses typically were updated after colleges told the government the students were no longer studying at the school.

Historically, students who had their visas revoked were allowed to keep their legal residency status and complete their studies.

The lack of a valid entry visa only limited their ability to leave the U.S. and return, something they could reapply for with the State Department. But if a student has lost legal residency status, they risk detention by immigration authorities. Some students already have left the country, abandoning their studies to avoid being arrested.

Higher education leaders worry the arrests and visa revocations could discourage students overseas from pursuing higher education in the United States.

U.S. immigration officials are asking the public and federal agencies to comment on a proposal to collect social media handles from people applying for benefits such as green cards or citizenship, to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump.

The March 5 notice raised alarms from immigration and free speech advocates because it appears to expand the government’s reach in social media surveillance to people already vetted and in the U.S. legally, such as asylum seekers, green card and citizenship applicants -- and not just those applying to enter the country. That said, social media monitoring by immigration officials has been a practice for over a decade, since at least the second Obama administration and ramping up under Trump’s first term.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a 60-day notice asking for public commentary on its plan to comply with Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” The plan calls for “uniform vetting standards” and screening people for grounds of inadmissibility to the U.S., as well as identify verification and “national security screening.” It seeks to collect social media handles and the names of platforms, although not passwords.

The policy seeks to require people to share their social media handles when applying for U.S. citizenship, green card, asylum and other immigration benefits. The proposal is open to feedback from the public until May 5.

“The basic requirements that are in place right now is that people who are applying for immigrant and non-immigrant visas have to provide their social media handles,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, managing director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University. “Where I could see this impacting is someone who came into the country before visa-related social media handle collection started, so they wouldn’t have provided it before and now they’re being required to. Or maybe they did before, but their social media use has changed.”

“This fairly widely expanded policy to collect them for everyone applying for any kind of immigration benefit, including people who have already been vetted quite extensively,” she added.

What this points to — along with other signals the administration is sending such as detaining people and revoking student visas for participating in campus protests that the government deems antisemitic and sympathetic to the militant Palestinian group Hamas — Levinson-Waldman added, is the increased use of social media to “make these very high-stakes determinations about people.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service said the agency seeks to “strengthen fraud detection, prevent identity theft, and support the enforcement of rigorous screening and vetting measures to the fullest extent possible.”

“These efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies,” the statement continued. USCIS estimates that the proposed policy change will affect about 3.6 million people.
How are social media accounts used now?

The U.S. government began ramping up the use of social media for immigration vetting in 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In late 2015, the Department of Homeland Security began both “manual and automatic screening of the social media accounts of a limited number of individuals applying to travel to the United States, through various non-public pilot programs,” the nonpartisan law and policy institute explains on its website.

In May 2017, the U.S. Department of State issued an emergency notice to increase the screening of visa applicants. Brennan, along with other civil and human rights groups, opposed the move, arguing that it is “excessively burdensome and vague, is apt to chill speech, is discriminatory against Muslims, and has no security benefit.”

Two years later, the State Department began collecting social media handles from “nearly all foreigners” applying for visas to travel to the U.S. — about 15 million people a year.

The new Austrian government said Wednesday that family reunion procedures for migrants will be immediately halted because the country is no longer able to absorb newcomers adequately.

The measure is temporary and intended to ensure that those migrants who are already in the country can be better integrated, Chancellor Christian Stocker from the conservative Austrian People’s Party said.

“Austria’s capacities are limited, and that is why we have decided to prevent further overloading,” Stocker said.

The new measure means that migrants with so-called protected status — meaning they cannot be deported — are no longer allowed to bring family members still living in their home countries to Austria.

The new three-party coalition made up of the People’s Party, the center-left Social Democrats and the liberal Neos, has said that curbing migration is one of its top issues and vowed to implement strict new asylum rules.

Official figures show that 7,762 people arrived in Austria last year as part of family reunion procedures for migrants. In 2023 the figure was 9,254. Most new arrivals were minors.

Migrants who are still in the asylum process or have received a deportation order are not allowed in the first place to bring family members from their countries of origin.

Most recent asylum seekers came from Syria and Afghanistan, the Austrian chancellery said in a statement.

The European Union country has 9 million inhabitants.

Stocker said the measure was necessary because “the quality of the school system, integration and ultimately the security of our entire systems need to be protected — so that we do not impair their ability to function.”

The government said it had already informed the EU of its new measures. It denied to say for how long it would put family reunions on hold.

“Since last summer, we have succeeded in significantly reducing family reunification,” Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said. “Now we are creating the legal basis to ensure this stop is sustainable.”

All over the continent, governments have been trying to cut the number of migrants. The clamp-down on migrants is a harsh turnaround from ten years ago, when countries like Germany and Sweden openly welcomed more than 1 million migrants from war-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many communities and towns in other countries, such as Germany, also say they no longer have capacities to find shelter or homes for migrants.

The EU is trying to keep more migrants from entering its 27-country bloc and move faster to deport those whose asylum procedures are rejected.

On Tuesday, the EU unveiled a new migration proposal that envisions the opening of so-called “return hubs” to be set up in third countries to speed up the deportation for rejected asylum-seekers.

So far, only 20% of people with a deportation order are effectively removed from EU territory, according to the European Commission.