Supreme

April 29 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Louisiana’s newly drawn congressional map Wednesday, saying it relied too heavily on race.

The 6-3 decision eliminates one of the two predominantly Black congressional districts established by redistricting from the 2020 census.

Supporters of the redrawn map said it abided by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents lawmakers from packing racial minorities in a limited number of districts or spreading them across too many to diminish their voting power.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, described Louisiana’s map as “unconstitutional gerrymander.”

“When §2 of the Act is properly interpreted, it imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred,” he wrote.

The ruling weakens the landmark Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 to limit racial discrimination in voting. The Supreme Court dealt the act a blow in 2013 when it struck a core provision providing oversight to states with a history of voting discrimination.

With the new ruling by the high court, Republican lawmakers will have an easier time redrawing state maps to more closely align with their party.

Justice Elena Kagan, one of the three dissenters, said such intentional discrimination is hard to prove and that Wednesday’s decision serves to “eviscerate the law.”

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” she wrote.

It’s unlikely the Supreme Court’s ruling will have an impact on midterm elections later this year as early voting in congressional primaries begin May 16.

WASHINGTON, April 28 (UPI) — Supreme Court justices appeared divided Tuesday morning about whether a U.S. tech company can be held liable for aiding the Chinese government’s alleged torture of a spiritual minority.

The case is centers on whether practitioners in China of the Falun Gong religion — also called Falun Dafa — can sue California-based tech company Cisco Systems for aiding and abetting violations of the 18th-century Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act, which was enacted in 1992.

Cisco attorney Kannon Shanmugam called for barring aiding and abetting liability. He argued that allowing liability to be implied would harm the government’s separation of power.

Much of Tuesday’s debate hinged on whether the statute’s 200-year-old “law of nations” wording was applicable to the relatively more modern concept of human rights abuses, as well as whether the first Congress meant for the victim protection act to include second liability for aiding and abetting torture.

The case marks the latest attempt to define the scope of the statue, which for over two centuries has allowed foreigners to bring lawsuits in U.S. courts for serious violations of international law.

More than 20 years ago, Cisco developed and sold to the Chinese government a surveillance system, which the government used to find, interrogate and allegedly torture Falun Gong practitioners.

During arguments for Cisco Systems Inc. vs. Doe I, some justices emphasized Cisco’s awareness of their technology’s role in persecution, while others said that including liability for aiding torture in the alien tort statue contradicted with historical precedent and had foreign policy risks.

But no clear majority converged around either position in the conservative majority court.

“We’ve maybe misled Congress into thinking, ‘Oh, we don’t need to do anything about these human rights things, the courts are taking care of it,'” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.

“I’m concerned at a separation of powers level that we’re not really allowing suits to go forward, but Congress thinks we are because of a lack of clarity in our case law.”

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sotomayor appeared more supportive of those who brought forward the original lawsuit — several Chinese nationals and one U.S. citizen.

Addressing the wording of the Torture Victim Protection Act, Sotomayor told Shanmugam: “I’m not sure how you get to your position that ‘subjects to’ can’t mean aiding and abetting because command liability doesn’t necessarily require subjecting someone to the torture.”

“It makes someone who’s in a command position who knows of the torture and permits it to happen … aiding and abetting. We’ve defined aiding and abetting as an active step in permitting and encouraging the substantive act.”

The Alien Tort Statute grants federal district courts original jurisdiction over any civil action in which an alien sues for a tort “committed in violation of the law of nations or of a treaty of the United States.”

“What’s the point of previous [Supreme Court] decisions that determined U.S. corporations could be defendants?” said Sophia Cope, senior staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, who helped write an amicus brief in support of the Falun Gong members.

“Excluding second liability from the ATS would be a huge loophole for companies to sell services which are used for human rights violations.”

By rejecting judicially created aiding and abetting liability, the court would close the last major loophole that the plaintiffs’ lawyers have “exploited” to keep cases with such claims under the ATS and TVPA alive, said Cory Andrews, vice-president of litigation at the Washington Legal Foundation. The foundation submitted a brief in support of Cisco in February.

“It would reaffirm that the ATS is a narrow 1789 statute, not a modern vehicle for global human-rights enforcement,” Andrews said.

The case had its origins 15 years ago. In 2011, the plaintiffs — 13 Chinese nationals and one U.S. citizen — filed the original suit in the District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming they were targeted using Cisco’s technology and then detained and tortured.

The district court dismissed the claims, but it was brought to the Supreme Court after a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed in 2023 that the plaintiffs had met a legal threshold to continue with the lawsuit.

A decision is expected by the end of June.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week over whether the Trump administration may revoke temporary protected status for about 350,000 Haitian and 6,100 Syrian immigrants.

TPS allows people who are already in the United States to legally reside and work here if they are unable to safely return to their home country because of a sudden emergency such as war or a natural disaster. The humanitarian program, enacted by Congress in 1990, has since been used by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Since President Trump returned to office last year, his administration has terminated such protections for immigrants from 13 countries. Court challenges on behalf of Haitians and Syrians have been consolidated into a single case, Mullin vs. Doe, which the justices will hear Wednesday.

The high court’s ruling could eventually have sweeping repercussions for all 1.3 million immigrants from the 17 countries that were designated for TPS at the start of this administration. That’s because the federal government is arguing that decisions regarding the program are almost entirely immune from review by courts.

“Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from activist judges legislating from the bench,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, who did not provide their name, wrote in response to a request for comment.

Lower courts have repeatedly deemed the administration’s actions improper.

“We’re seeing clear gamesmanship from government to insulate all TPS decision-making from any oversight,” said Emi MacLean, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who is counsel in the case for Syrians and in other cases challenging five of the terminations. “They’ve created a farce of a process to justify the ends that they sought, which was to strip humanitarian protections from over a million people.”

In the Trump administration’s appeal, Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer argued that Congress gave the Homeland Security secretary the power to grant or end the temporary protected status for troubled countries and barred judges from intervening.

He pointed to a provision that says: “There is no judicial review of any determination of the [secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.”

Citing this hands-off provision, Trump’s lawyers won brief emergency orders last year that allowed the administration to strip legal protections from about 600,000 Venezuelans. In that case, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had quickly reversed an extension granted by the Biden administration three days before Trump was sworn in.

The circumstances surrounding the Syria and Haiti cases are different. Advocates for the immigrants argue that the administration failed to conduct the required process to properly evaluate each country’s conditions.

They point to emails in July from a Homeland Security official to a State Department official. The Homeland Security official listed TPS designations coming up for review — Syria, South Sudan, Myanmar and Ethiopia. In response, the State Department official wrote: “I confirm that State has no foreign policy concerns with ending these TPS designations.”

State Department travel advisories for both countries warn people against traveling to either because of the risk of terrorism, kidnapping and widespread violence. U.S. citizens are advised to prepare a will.

For Syria, the advisory cites active armed conflict since 2011. For Haiti, it says the country has been under a national state of emergency since March 2024.

But Federal Register notices announcing the terminations said country conditions had sufficiently improved. The notice for Syria, for example, says “the Secretary has determined that, while some sporadic and episodic violence occurs in Syria, the situation no longer meets the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Syrian nationals.”

If the government loses, Homeland Security officials would have to reevaluate the TPS decisions in consultation with the State Department and make a decision based entirely on the country conditions themselves.

The government could start over, in that case, and still find that TPS is no longer warranted — if the process bears that out.

In a friend-of-the-court brief led by immigration law scholars at Georgetown and Temple universities, they explained that before TPS existed, similar forms of humanitarian relief were determined by the executive branch “without reference to any statutory criteria or constraints, and with little if any explanation for why nationals of certain countries received protection while others did not.”

With TPS in 1990, Congress sought to end that “unfettered discretion,” they wrote. Instead, the statute requires the Homeland Security secretary to terminate TPS if the review finds that conditions justifying the designation no longer exist. Otherwise, the law states, it “is extended.”

“The point of the TPS statute was to depoliticize humanitarian decisions,” said MacLean, the ACLU attorney. “Secretary Noem in all of her TPS decisions has completely undermined that fundamental goal.”

Ahilan Arulanantham, who is arguing for the Syria case on Wednesday, added that if the government wins, “it also means they could probably grant TPS to countries that don’t deserve it.” Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, has represented the National TPS Alliance in separate litigation during this administration and Trump’s first.

Top Homeland Security and State Department officials from the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations filed a brief arguing that the Trump administration’s terminations of TPS for Syria and Haiti were “not based on evidence and sharply departed from past inter-agency practices.”

Haiti was originally designated for TPS in 2010 after a massive earthquake devastated the country and redesignated because of subsequent natural disasters and gang violence. In November, Noem announced that she would terminate TPS for Haiti, effective Feb. 3. She wrote in the Federal Register that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti” that prevent Haitians from safely returning.

But even if there were, she continued, “termination of Temporary Protected Status of Haiti is still required because it is contrary to the national interest of the United States.”

The Homeland Security spokesperson said TPS for Haiti “was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades.”

Syria, meanwhile, “has been a hotbed of terrorism and extremism for nearly two decades,” the spokesperson wrote, “and it is contrary to our national interest to allow Syrians to remain in our country.”

In the Federal Register notice for Syria, Noem added that maintaining its TPS designation would “complicate the administration’s broader diplomatic engagement with Syria’s transitional government” by undermining peace-building efforts.

The Supreme Court will take up the question of whether the Homeland Security secretary can use national interest as a reason to revoke TPS. Attorneys for the TPS holders believe any decision to revoke TPS must come down to the country conditions alone.

Syria and Haiti are among the countries for which the Trump administration has also paused processing all immigration benefits. If their TPS protections expire, those immigrants would become vulnerable to detention and deportation even if they are eligible for other forms of relief.

U.S. Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer argued that Congress gave the Homeland Security secretary the power to grant or end the temporary protected status for troubled countries and barred judges from intervening.

(Aaron Schwartz / Getty Images)

Attorneys for the TPS holders say the terminations were also driven by racial animus. They point to various statements by Trump over the years, including his false claim that Haitians were eating the pets of people in Springfield, Ohio, that they “probably have AIDS” and that Haiti is among the “shithole countries” from which he would permanently pause migration.

Among those affected is a 35-year-old Haitian woman who has lived in the U.S. since 2000 and is raising her four U.S. citizen children in a Southern state. The woman requested to be identified by her middle and last initials, B.B., out of concern for her immigration case.

After graduating high school, B.B. got into nursing school but couldn’t attend because she didn’t qualify for financial aid. She said later getting TPS allowed her to become a certified nursing assistant, and she now works as a medical coordinator while owning a nail salon and three real estate properties.

Though B.B.’s TPS remains active because of the court proceedings, her driver’s license expired Feb. 3 and she has since had to rely on friends and rideshares to get around while repeatedly requesting a renewal.

She said she worries most about her children. If she were deported back to Haiti, she said, she would leave them in the U.S. for their own safety.

“It’s like planning your death,” she said. “I’m 35 and I already have a will — not because I’m going to die but because of the situation.”

On a call with reporters, attorneys and advocates, a Syrian man said he earned his master’s degree in the U.S. and now works in the healthcare industry. The man, who was identified by a pseudonym, said he and his wife are afraid of what their future will look like.

“TPS gave us something we had not had in years: a place to settle and a moment to grieve,” he said, later adding that “telling Syrians to go back right now is not a policy — it’s abandonment.”

Among the public, there is broad support for TPS and other humanitarian programs. According to a poll conducted last month by the firm Equis Research, 68% of Latino and 65% of non-Latino voters support fighting to give back legal protection to those who have lost their temporary protected status or asylum protections as a result of the current administration’s actions.

Earlier this month, the House voted in favor of a bill that would require new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to redesignate Haiti for TPS. Among those who crossed the political aisle to support it were 10 Republicans and Rep. Kevin Kiley, an independent from Rocklin, Calif., who caucuses with Republicans. The measure faces an uphill battle in the Senate.

In an interview with The Times, Kiley said his vote was about common sense and being humane.

“It’s particularly dangerous for people that would be returning where the gangs that are ravaging the country are just lying in wait outside the airport in Port-au-Prince,” he said, referring to the Haitian capital.

And because most won’t return willingly, Kiley added, “really all you’d be doing is removing work authorization from 350,000-some people who are going to mostly remain in the country, who will not be able to work anymore and may end up being more reliant on public assistance in states where they’re eligible.”

At the same time, Kiley said, the TPS system hasn’t worked as intended because most so-called temporary designations drag on.

“The system needs to be reformed,” he said. “But that’s all separate and apart from what we do with the folks who were already given this designation.”

Times staff writer David G. Savage in Washington contributed to this report.

RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia Supreme Court justices on Monday questioned whether the state’s Democrat-led legislature complied with constitutional requirements when it sent a congressional redistricting plan to voters, in a case that could help decide the balance of power in the U.S. House.

The new districts, which could net Democrats four additional seats, won narrow voter approval last week. But a Republican legal challenge contends the General Assembly violated procedural rules by placing the constitutional amendment before voters to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. If the court agrees that lawmakers broke the rules, it could invalidate the amendment and render last week’s statewide vote meaningless.

The Virginia court proceedings mark the latest twist in a national redistricting battle between Republicans and Democrats seeking an advantage in a November midterm election that will determine whether Republicans maintain their narrow majority in the U.S. House.

President Trump kicked off a tit-for-tat round of gerrymandering last summer when he urged Texas Republicans to redraw districts to their favor in an attempt to win several additional House seats. That set off a chain reaction of similar moves in other states, leading to the voter approval last week of Virginia’s new map.

Next up is Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has included congressional redistricting on the agenda for a special session of the GOP-controlled Legislature beginning Tuesday.

Virginia arguments focus on what counts as an `election’

During Monday’s arguments, the Virginia Supreme Court focused on whether the new congressional districts should be invalidated because of the process used by lawmakers. The justices issued no immediate ruling.

Because the state’s redistricting commission was established by a voter-approved constitutional amendment, lawmakers had to propose an amendment to redraw the districts. That required approval of a resolution in separate legislative sessions, with a state election sandwiched in between, to place the amendment on the ballot.

The legislature’s first vote occurred in October — while early voting was underway but before it concluded on the day of the general election. Judicial questioning focused on whether that was too late, because early voting already had begun.

Attorney Matthew Seligman, who defended the legislature, argued that the “election” should be defined narrowly to mean the Tuesday of the general election. In that case, the legislature’s first vote on the redistricting amendment occurred before the election and was constitutional, he told judges.

But an attorney arguing for the plaintiffs, Thomas McCarthy, said “election” means the entire period during which people can cast ballots, which lasts several weeks in Virginia. If that’s the case, then the legislature’s initial endorsement of the redistricting amendment came too late to comply with the state constitution, he said.

Attorneys argue over the rights of voters

The purpose of Virginia’s two-step amendment process, with an intervening election, is so voters can know whether legislative candidates support or oppose a proposed constitutional amendment, McCarthy said.

He pointed to the case of Democratic voter Camilla Simon, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit alongside Republican state lawmakers, who cast an early vote last fall for Democratic Del. Rodney Willett. After she voted, Willett sponsored the Democratic redistricting amendment, and Simon wished she could have undone her vote, McCarthy said.

“None of these voters had any idea this was coming, and that’s not how this process is supposed to work,” McCarthy told the justices.

Those defending the Democratic redistricting plan also contend that the voters’ will should be respected.

The people voted to ratify the constitutional amendment, “and the challengers are asking to overturn that democratic result,” Seligman told reporters after the arguments.

Nationwide redistricting battle has no clear winner so far

So far, the two major parties have battled to a near draw in the states that have redrawn their congressional maps for this year’s midterms.

Republicans think they could win up to nine more seats under revised districts in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Democrats think they could win as many as 10 additional seats under new districts in California, Utah and Virginia. But legal challenges remain in both Virginia and Missouri.

Virginia currently is represented in the U.S. House by six Democrats and five Republicans who were elected from districts imposed by a court after a bipartisan redistricting commission failed to agree on a map after the 2020 census. The new districts, which narrowly won voter approval on April 21, could give Democrats an improved chance to win 10 districts.

Some candidates already have begun campaigning based on the new districts in advance of the state’s Aug. 4 primary election.

More court battles could remain in Virginia

In January, a judge in rural Tazewell County, in southwestern Virginia, ruled that lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session last fall. Circuit Judge Jack Hurley Jr. also ruled that lawmakers failed to initially approve the amendment before the public began voting in last year’s general election and that the state had failed to publish the amendment three months before the election, as required by law. As a result, he said, the amendment is invalid and void.

The Virginia Supreme Court placed Hurley’s order on hold and allowed the redistricting vote to proceed before hearing arguments on the case.

During Monday’s arguments, justices also raised questions about the ability of lawmakers to expand the agenda for their special session and whether the three-month public notice requirement was important enough to thwart a voter-approved amendment.

Republicans have filed at least two additional legal challenges, which also are winding their way through the courts.

Robertson and Lieb write for the Associated Press. Lieb reported from Jefferson City, Mo. AP writers Allen G. Breed in Richmond and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.

The reinstated map, backed by President Donald Trump, could flip key districts to Republicans.

The US Supreme Court has formally reinstated a redrawn Texas electoral map expected to boost Republican representation in the US House of Representatives, as President Donald Trump’s party seeks to maintain control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.

The ruling, issued on Monday, split along ideological lines, with the court’s six conservative justices in the majority and the three liberal justices dissenting.

The map – sought by Trump, approved by the Republican-led state legislature in August 2025, and signed by Governor Greg Abbott – could flip up to five Democratic Party-held House seats to Republicans.

The Supreme Court’s ruling overturned a lower court decision that had blocked the map’s use after finding it was likely racially discriminatory and in violation of constitutional protections.

Trump had urged Republican lawmakers last year to redraw congressional maps to strengthen the party’s position ahead of the November midterms, a push that has since evolved into a broader nationwide battle over redistricting.

Civil rights advocates sharply criticised the decision, arguing that the redistricting weakens the political influence of racial minorities.

“This was an intentional effort to limit the power of Black people and other people of colour,” Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said on Monday.

“This ruling does not erase the facts. Texas dismantled majority-minority congressional districts after the Trump administration urged the state to do exactly that.

“The result is a rigged map that limits the power of voters of colour in a state with a long record of voter suppression,” he added.

Florida proposal escalates redistricting battle

The fight over electoral maps is playing out beyond Texas.

In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday proposed a new congressional map aimed at flipping four Democratic-held House seats in the midterm elections.

It remains unclear whether the proposal has enough support in the Republican-controlled legislature to pass. DeSantis has called a special session starting Tuesday to consider the plan.

The map, which DeSantis first shared with Fox News, would likely give Republicans 24 of the state’s 28 US House seats, up from its current 20-8 majority.

Republicans can afford to lose only two House seats in November’s election to retain a majority. A Democratic-controlled House could launch investigations into Trump’s administration while blocking parts of his legislative agenda.

In Virginia, voters last week narrowly approved a Democratic-backed map targeting four Republican incumbents. Republicans have filed multiple lawsuits challenging the measure, and the state’s Supreme Court heard arguments in one such case on Monday.

Any overhaul in Florida would likely face legal challenges. In 2010, voters approved a constitutional amendment barring lawmakers from drawing districts for political gain, a practice known as gerrymandering.

Some Florida Republicans have also raised concerns that an aggressive redraw could leave incumbents exposed in a potential Democratic wave year, as Democrats have outperformed their 2024 margins in dozens of elections since Trump returned to office in January 2025.

Virginia and Florida represent what are likely the final battlegrounds in the redistricting war that Trump initiated last year with Texas.

WASHINGTON  — A divided Supreme Court heard arguments Monday on whether the police use of phone tracking data violates the Constitution’s protection against “unreasonable searches.”

Most of the justices sounded wary of barring investigators from obtaining precise location history from Google or cellphone providers if it helps find a murderer or a bank robber.

“I’m trying to figure out why this was bad police work,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh told an attorney representing the defendant, Odell Chatrie.

He said a police detective in Virginia was seeking clues to find a bank robber and sought a “geofence warrant” from a judge that told Google to turn over data from phones that were near the bank during the hour of the robbery.

“In the end, he got three names,” Kavanaugh said, including Chatrie, who pleaded guilty. He said these searches have proved to be practical for finding criminals.

But other justices said the court should not rule broadly to endorse digital searches of vast data bases held by private companies.

What about emails or Google photos, asked Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

All three said this information deserves more privacy protection than location data.

In the past, the court has said the 4th Amendment protects against government searches that intrude upon a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The two sides in this case differ on whether a digital search of location data violates privacy rights.

Gorsuch said he was generally skeptical of broad searches if the government had no particular suspect.

Is it OK to search “all the rooms in a hotel for a gun or all the storage units or all bank deposit boxes for the pearl necklace that has been stolen?” he asked.

Eric Feigin, a deputy solicitor general, said the government probably could not obtain a search warrant for all storage units or hotel rooms, but a Google search is different because it is a software filter.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. proposed a narrow ruling.

Perhaps unwittingly, Chatrie had agreed to have Google store his location history data. Roberts said he could have turned off the public location data, and for that reason, he may have lost his right to appeal.

“If you don’t want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off,” he said.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed. Chatrie “voluntarily disclosed to Google the information about where he was going to be,” he said.

Eight years ago, Roberts wrote an opinion for a 5-4 majority that said investigators needed a search warrant before they could obtain 127 days of cell tower records that helped convict a Michigan man of several store robberies.

Four of the court’s liberal justices joined that majority, but only two of them — Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — remain on the court.

Since then, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have joined the court.

The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers and other civil liberties groups backed Chatrie’s challenge to the government’s use of geofence warrants.

Chatrie had “a reasonable expectation of privacy in his location history given both its sensitive and revealing nature and the fact that it was stored in his password-protected account,” Washington attorney Adam Unikowski told the court. “There was not probable cause to search the virtual private papers of every single person within the geofence merely because of their proximity to the crime.”

Feigin, the Justice Department attorney, said a ruling for Chatrie “would impede the investigation of kidnappings, robberies, shootings and other crimes.”

He agreed, however, that email should be protected because it involves personal communication.

The justices will hand down a ruling in Chatrie vs. U.S. by the end of June.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that U.S. troops may sue military contractors for their injuries, siding with a soldier who was badly injured when a Taliban operative working at the Bagram Airfield detonated a suicide bomb.

Five soldiers were killed and 17 were wounded, including 20-year-old Winston Henceley, who suffered a fractured skull and brain injuries and is permanently disabled.

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that neither federal law nor the Constitution shields military contractors if their mistakes or negligence result in solders being injured in a combat zone.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the court’s opinion for an unusual majority that included Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil M. Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In the past, Thomas has objected to court precedents that prevented troops from suing the U.S. government for their injuries, including from medical practice.

And he said that rule should not be expanded to shield military contractors.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented, along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“Because the Constitution gives the federal government exclusive authority over foreign affairs and the conduct of wars, federal law preempts all state law that substantially interferes with the Government’s exercise of those powers,” Alito wrote.

Hencely had tried to stop and question Ahmad Nayeb, an Afghan employee, as he walked toward soldiers who had gathered for a Veteran’s Day 5K race in 2016.

The Army concluded that Hencely’s intervention “likely prevented a far greater tragedy,” and its investigation concluded that the Fluor Corporation that had a contract to run operations at the base was primarily responsible for the attack.

The report said Fluor was negligent in hiring an Afghan who had been a Taliban operative, and it failed to closely supervise him.

But Henceley sued Fluor for his injuries; a federal judge in South Carolina and the 4th Circuit threw out his suit.

“During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor’s engagement in such activities shall be preempted,” the 4th Circuit said.

The court agreed to hear his appeal and overturn the 4th Circuit, clearing his suit to proceed.

WASHINGTON  — A man carrying a gun and a cellphone entered a federal credit union in a small town in central Virginia in May 2019 and demanded cash.

He left with $195,000 in a bag and no clue to his identity. But his smartphone was keeping track of him.

What happened next could yield a landmark ruling from the Supreme Court on the 4th Amendment and its restrictions against “unreasonable searches.”

Typically, police use tips or leads to find suspects, then seek a search warrant from a judge to enter a house or other private area to seize the evidence that can prove a crime.

Civil libertarians say the new “digital dragnets” work in reverse.

“It’s grab the data and search first. Suspicion later. That’s opposite of how our system has worked, and it’s really dangerous,” said Jake Laperruque, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.

But these new data scans can be effective in finding criminals.

Lacking leads in the Virginia bank robbery, a police detective turned to what one judge in the case called a “groundbreaking investigative tool … enabling the relentless collection of eerily precise location data.”

Cellphones can be tracked through towers, and Google stored this location history data for hundreds of millions of users. The detective sent Google a demand for information known as a “geofence warrant,” referring to a virtual fence around a particular geographic area at a specific time.

The officer sought phones that were within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery. He used that data to locate Okello Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant of his home where the cash and the holdup notes were found.

Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea, but the Supreme Court will hear his appeal on April 27.

The justices agreed to decide whether geofence warrants violate the 4th Amendment.

The outcome may go beyond location tracking. At issue more broadly is the legal status of the vast amount of privately stored data that can be easily scanned.

This may include words or phrases found in Google searches or in emails. For example, investigators may want to know who searched for a particular address in the weeks before an arson or a murder took place there or who searched for information on making a particular type of bomb.

Judges are deeply divided on how this fits with the 4th Amendment.

Two years ago, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled “geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the 4th Amendment.”

Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals in a 4th Amendment privacy case in 2018.

(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Historians of the 4th Amendment say the constitutional ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” arose from the anger in the American colonies over British officers using general warrants to search homes and stores even when they had no reason to suspect any particular person of wrongdoing.

The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers relies on that contention in opposing geofence warrants.

Its lawyers argued the government obtained Chatrie’s “private location information … with an unconstitutional general warrant that compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence.”

Meanwhile, the more liberal 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie’s appeal. Several judges explained the law was not clear, and the police officer had done nothing wrong.

“There was no search here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that defended the use of this tracking data.

He pointed to Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank or dialing records held by a phone company were not private and could be searched by investigators without a warrant.

Chatrie had agreed to having his location records held by Google. If financial records for several months are not private, the judge wrote, “surely this request for a two-hour snapshot of one’s public movements” is not private either.

Google changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores location history data for all of its users. But cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants that seek tracking data.

Wilkinson, a prominent conservative from the Reagan era, also argued it would be a mistake for the courts to “frustrate law enforcement’s ability to keep pace with tech-savvy criminals” or cause “more cold cases to go unsolved. Think of a murder where the culprit leaves behind his encrypted phone and nothing else. No fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. But because the killer allowed Google to track his location, a geofence warrant can crack the case,” he wrote.

Judges in Los Angeles upheld the use of a geofence warrant to find and convict two men for a robbery and murder in a bank parking lot in Paramount.

The victim, Adbadalla Thabet, collected cash from gas stations in Downey, Bellflower, Compton and Lynwood early in the morning before driving to the bank.

After he was robbed and shot, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective found video surveillance that showed he had been followed by two cars whose license plates could not be seen.

The detective then sought a geofence warrant from a Superior Court judge that asked Google for location data for six designated spots on the morning of the murder.

That led to the identification of Daniel Meza and Walter Meneses, who pleaded guilty to the crimes. A California Court of Appeal rejected their 4th Amendment claim in 2023, even though the judges said they had legal doubts about the “novelty of the particular surveillance technique at issue.”

The Supreme Court has also been split on how to apply the 4th Amendment to new types of surveillance.

By a 5-4 vote, the court in 2018 ruled the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before it required a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan.

The data confirmed Carpenter was nearby when four of the stores were robbed.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, joined by four liberal justices, said this lengthy surveillance violated privacy rights protected by the 4th Amendment.

The “seismic shifts in technology” could permit total surveillance of the public, Roberts wrote, and “we decline to grant the state unrestricted access” to these databases.

But he described the Carpenter decision as “narrow” because it turned on the many weeks of surveillance data.

In dissent, four conservatives questioned how tracking someone’s driving violates their privacy. Surveillance cameras and license plate readers are commonly used by investigators and have rarely been challenged.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer relies on that argument in his defense of Chatrie’s conviction. “An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see,” he wrote.

The justices will issue a decision by the end of June.

April 17 (UPI) — The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Chevron in a case related to damage to wetlands in Louisiana that dates to World War II.

The case was brought more than a decade ago and relates to damage allegedly done when Chevron’s corporate predecessors were refining aviation gas on behalf of the federal government during the war, Scotusblog and The Washington Post reported.

The 8-0 ruling sent the federal lawsuit back to a lower court in a move that could jeopardize a $745 million ruling against the company to restore the wetlands, as well as other similar cases with fossil fuel companies before courts in the United States.

Parishes in Louisiana filed the case with the help of state officials against oil and gas companies refining crude oil along the coast during the war, claiming that proper permits were never obtained for their work and that they had not followed “prudent industry practices.”

The previous decision on the $745 million ruling was made by a state court, which Chevron contended does not have the jurisdiction to rule because it was working under the auspices of the federal government.

After the state court judgement was handed down, the company’s lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to move the case to a federal court, where it may be able to have the ruling thrown out.