Supreme court allows Trump to resume deporting people to third countries for now while justices weigh policy
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.
Key events
Donald Trump has shared a copy of the document AI executives signed during a White House meeting today on Truth Social.
In a social media post, Trump attached a copy of the one-page document, called the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” a term the president favors to artificial intelligence.
Signed by Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, xAI’s Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, the agreement states “we believe every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely.”
The agreement asks AI companies to commit to four layers of internal controls and audits: 1) “implement robust internal controls”, 2) “empower an internal team” to audit those controls, 3) “partner with an independent external auditor” and 4) “designate an independent committee of the board of directors”.
It adds that “the participating companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices”.
The United States has withdrawn from a leading international anti-corruption watchdog.
The Council of Europe said today that the Trump administration has decided to leave the Group of States against Corruption, a European-led anti-corruption monitoring body established in 1999. The United States joined in 2000. Only Russia and Belarus have previously left the group.
The Associated Press reports that a US official confirmed the United States had submitted its withdrawal on Monday.
The news of the United States’ withdrawal comes a week after
“The United States has participated in GRECO since 2000 and has been a valuable contributor to its work and to the exchange of experience and good practice in preventing and combating corruption,” the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe said in a statement. “GRECO remains open to resuming cooperation with the United States in the future in support of shared efforts to prevent corruption, strengthen integrity and uphold the rule of law.”
The decision was announced a week after another European organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation, reported that the United States has declined to allow its members to observe November’s midterm elections.
Russell Brand, the English comedian who’s awaiting trial next month over multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault, joked about touching agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins while moderating a panel at the Make America Healthy Again summit in Washington today.
After Brand was late arriving to the panel, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz said Brand had been hugging Rollins.
“She initiated that contact, to be clear,” Brand said.
Brand was slated to moderate a panel on reforming the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services featuring Oz and Chris Klomp, head of the department of health and human services. Klomp, who’s undergoing Senate confirmation hearings to be deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, was replaced on short notice by Dan Brillman, director of Medicaid.
In April, Brand – who is facing charges over allegations made against him by six women – said he had “exploitative” consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl at the height of his fame during an appearance on the YouTube show of the former-Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly.
Trump says AI leaders signed ‘morally binding’ agreement
Donald Trump announced that the heads of the largest US tech and AI companies had signed onto a “morally binding” agreement to put controls on artificial intelligence. Trump did not give further details on the controls, but he suggested that the deal would allow the companies to largely “self-police” their products and technology.
“It’s almost like a Constitution in a way, and the biggest people in the world signed that and I signed it as president and it really is a form of protection,” Trump said.
Trump made the remarks after holding a luncheon with tech leaders including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other top industry executives. Earlier in the day, Trump declared that he would sign an executive order renaming artificial intelligence to “superintelligence”.
Trump has repeatedly rejected calls for stronger regulation on the AI industry amid growing public discontent and concerns over the technology as a threat to public safety. The tech industry, which has largely aligned itself with the Trump administration, has lobbied against strict regulatory oversight while arguing that it would stifle the economy.
Several reporters were denied entry to the Make America Healthy Again summit in Washington today.
In a social media post, New York Times health reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg shared a photo of herself after being “denied a press credential due to ‘limited space,’” she wrote.
Washington Post reporter Paige W. Cunningham was similarly denied entry. “I too was told there isn’t enough space. I’m outside if anyone wants to come chat,” she wrote in a social media post.
Liz Essley White, a health reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was allowed inside the summit shared on social media that, “A security guard first said he needed to escort me everywhere but now has given up I guess.”
She added, “A number of reporters denied credentials despite empty press seats.”
My colleague Melody Schreiber was allowed into the summit and her full report is here:
Donald Trump is thinking about creating a 10-person committee to oversee the AI sector. The president described his plan to reporters after meeting with tech company leaders this afternoon.
He added that tech executives had signed a “morally binding” agreement during the meeting.
“I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing. And they understand that they have to self-police,” Trump told reporters.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, told reporters tech companies agreed to establish “robust” internal controls and multiple layers of auditing during a meeting with Donald Trump today.
Zuckerberg added that Meta’s board of directors would commit to reviewing reports from auditors.
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.
Supreme court allows Trump to resume deporting people to third countries for now while justices weigh policy
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.
Melody Schreiber
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:
Trump speaks after meeting with AI company executives
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.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
