The former leader of a Minnesota nonprofit who was convicted for her role in a staggering $250 million fraud case that helped ignite a federal immigration crackdown should spend 50 years in prison, prosecutors argued in a court filing.

Aimee Bock, who ran the organization Feeding Our Future, which claimed it helped provide millions of meals to children in need during the pandemic, is set to be sentenced Thursday in federal court in Minneapolis. President Donald Trump used the fraud cases to initially justify a massive surge of federal officers to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area last winter, leading to a pushback by residents and the deaths of two people.

"Feeding Our Future operated like a cash pipeline, open to anyone willing to submit fraudulent claims and pay kickbacks," prosecutors said in the Monday filing. "The ripple effects of her actions are profound, immeasurable, and will have lasting consequences for both Minnesota and the nation."

Bock was convicted last year of multiple counts involving conspiracy, wire fraud and bribery. She has long insisted she is innocent.

Her lawyer, Kenneth Udoibok, argued in a separate filing that she shouldn't have to serve for more than 37 months in prison, saying she had provided information to investigators. He argued that Bock had been unfairly painted as the mastermind and insisted that two co-defendants were responsible for running the scams.

The nonprofit sat atop a fraud network that included a web of partner organizations, phony distribution sites, kickbacks and fake lists of children supposedly being fed, prosecutors say. Dozens of people, many from the state's large Somali community, have been convicted for their roles in a series of overlapping food fraud cases that have spent years in the courts.

Trump, who has long derided Somalis, last year blasted the state as "a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity." He also criticized the leadership of Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats' vice presidential nominee in the 2024 election.

"Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from," Trump wrote on social media.

Bock is white and the U.S. Attorney's Office says the overwhelming majority of defendants in the cases are of Somali descent. Most are U.S. citizens.

The immigration surge led to repeated protests and confrontations between residents and federal officers and resulted in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The Supreme Court is leaving women's access to a widely used abortion pill untouched until at least Thursday, while the justices consider whether to allow restrictions on the drug, mifepristone, to take effect.

Justice Samuel Alito's order Monday allows women seeking abortions to continue obtaining the pill at pharmacies or through the mail, without an in-person visit to a doctor. It prevents restrictions on mifepristone imposed by a federal appeals court from taking effect for the time being.

The court is dealing with its latest abortion controversy four years after its conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.

The case before the court stems from a lawsuit Louisiana filed to roll back the Food and Drug Administration's rules on how mifepristone can be prescribed. The state claims the policy undermines the ban there, and it questions the safety of the drug, which was first approved in 2000 and has repeatedly been deemed safe and effective by FDA scientists.

Lower courts concluded that Louisiana is likely to prevail, and a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mail access and telehealth visits should be suspended while the case plays out.

The drug is most often used for abortion in combination with another drug, misoprostol. Medication abortions accounted for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. in 2023, the last year for which statistics are available.

The current dispute is similar to one that reached the court three years ago.

Lower courts then also sought to restrict access to mifepristone, in a case brought by physicians who oppose abortion. They filed suit in the months after the court overturned Roe.

The Supreme Court blocked the 5th Circuit ruling from taking effect over the dissenting votes of Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas. Then, in 2024, the high court unanimously dismissed the doctors' suit, reasoning they did not have the legal right, or standing, to sue.

In the current dispute, mainstream medical groups, the pharmaceutical industry and Democratic members of Congress have weighed in cautioning the court against limiting access to the drug. Pharmaceutical companies said a ruling for abortion opponents would upend the drug approval process.

The FDA has eased a number of restrictions initially placed on the drug, including who can prescribe it, how it is dispensed and what kinds of safety complications must be reported.

Despite those determinations, abortion opponents have been challenging the safety of mifepristone for more than 25 years. They have filed a series of petitions and lawsuits against the agency, generally alleging that it violated federal law by overlooking safety issues with the pill.

President Donald Trump's administration has been unusually quiet at the Supreme Court. It declined to file a written brief recommending what the court should do, even though federal regulations are at issue.

The case puts Trump's Republican administration in a difficult place. Trump has relied on the political support of anti-abortion groups but has also seen ballot question and poll results that show Americans generally support abortion rights.

Both sides took the silence as an implicit endorsement of the appellate ruling. Alito is both the justice in charge of handling emergency appeals from Louisiana and the author of the 2022 decision that declared abortion is not a constitutional right and returned the issue to the states.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority on Monday sounded skeptical of state laws that allow the counting of late-arriving mail ballots, a persistent target of President Donald Trump.

A ruling, likely to come by late June, that bars counting ballots arriving after Election Day would send officials scrambling in 14 states and the District of Columbia, just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections to change their ballot rules.

An additional 15 states that have more forgiving deadlines for ballots from military and overseas voters also could be affected.

The legal challenge is part of Trump's broader attack on most mail balloting, which he has said breeds fraud despite strong evidence to the contrary and years of experience in numerous states. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 resulted from fraud even though more than 60 court decisions and his own attorney general said that argument had no merit.

While there was no explicit reference to the 2020 election, several conservative justices gave voice to some of Trump's complaints. Justice Samuel Alito wondered about the appearance of fraud in situations where "a big stash of ballots" that arrive late "radically flipped" an election.

Defending the state law, Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart pointed out that the Trump administration and its allies in the case have yet to submit a single case of fraud due to late-arriving mail ballots.

The court's liberal justices indicated they would uphold state laws with post-Election Day deadlines. "The people who should decide this issue are not the courts, but Congress, the states and Congress," Justice Sonia Sotomayor said.

Forcing states to change their practices just a few months before the election risks "confusion and disenfranchisement," especially in places that have had relaxed deadlines for years, state and big-city election officials told the court in a written filing.

California, Texas, New York and Illinois are among the states with post-Election Day deadlines. Alaska, with its vast distances and often unpredictable weather, also counts late-arriving ballots.

Alaska elections officials said Monday they are preparing for the fall elections under existing law. "If a ruling requires operational changes, we will work through those in coordination with the appropriate state entities to ensure compliance and to provide clear information to voters," the Alaska Division of Elections said in a statement.

Lawyers for the Republican and Libertarian parties, as well as Trump's administration, are asking the justices to affirm an appellate ruling that struck down a Mississippi law allowing ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of the election and are postmarked by Election Day.

Wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande. Razor wire strung across private property without permission. Bulldozers changing the very terrain of America’s southern border.

For more than two years, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has escalated measures to keep migrants from entering the U.S., pushing legal boundaries with a go-it-alone bravado along the state’s 1,200-mile (1,930-kilometer) border with Mexico. Now blowback over the tactics is widening, including from within Texas.

A state trooper’s account of officers denying migrants water in 100-degree Fahrenheit (37.7 Celsius) temperatures and razor wire leaving asylum-seekers bloodied has prompted renewed criticism. The Mexican government, some Texas residents along the border and the Biden administration are pushing back. On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department sued Abbott over the buoy barrier that it says raises humanitarian and environmental concerns, asking a federal court to require Texas to dismantle it.

bbott, who cruised to a third term in November while promising tougher border crackdowns, has used disaster declarations as the legal bedrock for some measures.

Critics call that a warped view. “There are so many ways that what Texas is doing right now is just flagrantly illegal,” said David Donatti, an attorney for the Texas American Civil Liberties Union.

Abbott did not respond to requests for comment. He has repeatedly attacked President Joe Biden’s border policies, tweeting Friday that they “encourage migrants to risk their lives crossing illegally through the Rio Grande, instead of safely and legally over a bridge.”

The Biden administration has said illegal border crossings have declined significantly since new immigration rules took effect in May.

Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that a group of families slated for eviction from a flashpoint east Jerusalem neighborhood can remain in their homes for the time being.

The ruling could work to ease tensions in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which helped ignite the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza last year.

The court ruled that the families can stay in their homes for now until Israel carries out a land arrangement, a process that could take years or may not be carried out at all, according to Ir Amim, an advocacy group that was not involved in the court case.

For the time being, the four families residing in the homes will be recognized as protected tenants. Each will deposit a largely symbolic rent amounting to $62 a month to a trust, until the property’s ownership is settled.

Sami Arsheid, a lawyer representing the families’ case before the court, said the decision was “something huge” that ran counter to the previous 63 rulings by Israeli courts on the issue of Palestinian properties in Sheikh Jarrah.

A federal judge is refusing landlords’ request to put the Biden administration’s new eviction moratorium on hold, though she made clear she thinks it’s illegal.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich on Friday said her “hands are tied” by an appellate ruling the last time courts considered the evictions moratorium in the spring.

Alabama landlords who are challenging the moratorium are likely to appeal.

Friedrich wrote that the new temporary ban on evictions the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed last week is substantially similar to the version she ruled was illegal in May. At the time, Freidrich put her ruling on hold to allow the administration to appeal.

This time, she said, she is bound to follow a ruling from the appeals court that sits above her, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

If the D.C. Circuit doesn’t give the landlords what they want, they are expected to seek Supreme Court involvement.

In late June, the high court refused by a 5-4 vote to allow evictions to resume. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, part of the slim majority, said he agreed with Friedrich, but was voting to keep the moratorium in place because it was set to expire at the end of July.

Kavanaugh said then that he would reject any additional extension without clear authorization from Congress, which has not been able to take action.

In discussing the new moratorium last week, President Joe Biden acknowledged there were questions about its legality, but said a court fight over the new CDC order would buy time for the distribution of some of the $45 billion in rental assistance that has been approved but not yet used.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday put on hold a lower court order that would have permitted curbside voting in Alabama in November.

The justices' vote was 5-3, with the court's three liberals dissenting. As is typical when the Supreme Court acts on an emergency basis, the justices in the majority did not explain their decision. It was not clear how many counties might have offered curbside voting, allowing people to vote from their car by handing their ballot to a poll worker.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan, described the lower court's order allowing curbside voting in November as “modest,” and she said she would not have put it on hold.

“It does not require all counties to adopt curbside voting; it simply gives prepared counties the option to do so. This remedy respects both the right of voters with disabilities to vote safely and the State’s interest in orderly elections,” she said, noting that 28 states permit curbside voting.

The decision stemmed from a lawsuit the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program filed on behalf of voters with health issues who were concerned about the risk of COVID-19 at the polls.

The state’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state sought to block a lower court's ruling in the case that would have let counties offer curbside voting. Lawyers for the state argued that since Alabama does not have a law expressly permitting curbside voting, that it should not be allowed.

“I am very enthusiastic that the Supreme Court of the United States has seen fit to secure Alabama’s election integrity by ruling as to the letter and the spirit of the law," Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said in a telephone interview.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall argued Alabama has “taken extraordinary measures to ensure that all voters can vote safely," and that it would be potentially chaotic to rapidly implement curbside voting days ahead of the election.