A federal judge has ruled that the State Department cannot use President Donald Trump’s latest travel ban to deny visas to foreigners who apply for them.
The decision issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan applies only to 82 would-be immigrants and comes with a major caveat: It still allows immigration authorities to deny the foreign citizens entry to the U.S. by turning them away at a port of entry or instructing airline officials to refuse them boarding.
Sooknanan, a Biden appointee based in Washington, ruled that the federal law Trump invoked in June to limit entry to the U.S. by citizens of 19 countries does not give the State Department the power to deny visas.
Lawyers for the Trump administration asked Sooknanan to accept the “longstanding practice” of the State Department to refuse visas to people whose entry would be blocked by a presidential order.
The FBI is searching the Maryland home and Washington office of John Bolton, who served in President Donald Trump’s first administration as national security adviser but later became critical of the president, as part of an investigation into the handling of classified information, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.
Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.
Nearly two years after launching the surprise attack that sparked the war with Israel, Hamas finds itself up against a wall.
The California board of parole hearings denied the release of Erik Menendez, on Thursday who has spent nearly 30 years in prison since he was convicted with his brother in the shooting deaths of their parents.
With both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war preparing for further fighting, Ukraine was test-launching a new long-range cruise missile, Zelenskyy said. Ukraine’s president announced the huge missile, known as Flamingo, could strike targets as far as 3,000km (1,864 miles) away. “The missile has undergone successful tests. It is currently our most successful missile,” Zelenskyy told reporters. Mass production could begin by February, he added.
The Trump administration is reviewing the records of more than 55 million US visa holders for potential revocation or deportable violations of immigration rules, in a significant expansion of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
A federal judge on Thursday barred the DeSantis and Trump administrations from bringing new detainees to the detention facility called Alligator Alcatraz and ordered the state begin closing operations at the immigration detention site within 60 days.
The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Supreme Court decided Thursday.
