The Supreme Court on Tuesday (September 29, 2026) let President Donald Trump’s administration continue deporting people to countries other than their own for now, while the justices consider whether the policy is legal.

The high court said it will hear arguments in December on the policy. Lower courts found migrants must have a meaningful chance to object before being sent to countries where they have no ties.

The apparent 6-3 order halts an appeals court ruling for now.

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.

Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported some 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries, including Liberia and Guyana. The vast majority have been sent to Mexico.

Mr. Trump’s Republican administration has said that it sends people with final deportation orders to third countries when they can’t be returned to their homelands or their native countries won’t accept them, including those who have criminal convictions. Those governments provide assurances that people won’t be persecuted or tortured, federal attorneys said.

But some migrants have nevertheless found themselves imprisoned in countries they’d never heard of before their arrivals. Some also face serious safety risks and are left with little choice except to return to the home countries they were fleeing. Many have no criminal convictions and have been found to be at risk of torture or persecution, attorneys for the immigrants said.

The case comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally.

A federal judge on Friday (August 28, 2026) ruled that laws that President Donald ‌Trump’s administration used to cancel visas and initiate deportation proceedings against noncitizen college students ​based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy and criticism of Israel are unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge ⁠Noel Wise in San Jose, California, in a blistering ruling, chastised the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for how they had deployed provisions of federal immigration law to target non-citizens for deportation ‌for expressing views they wanted to suppress.

The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, said that in the United States, free speech, including the freedom to ‌criticise the government and its leaders, was evidence of the strength of the country’s ‌democracy.

“That ⁠strength is diminished when members of our society – citizens and noncitizens alike – ⁠must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she said.

The State Department and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Wise’s ruling focused on how the Trump administration, from March 2025, began revoking visas and detaining non-citizens who engaged ​in pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus, starting ‌with the arrest of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who is fighting separately to avoid being deported.

Those arrests formed the basis of a lawsuit that was filed in August 2025 by Stanford University’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, which alleged that some of its writers ‌with student visas had refrained from covering pro-Palestinian student protests and topics related to the ​Middle East conflict as a result of the administration’s policies.

The newspaper’s lawyers argued that two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that the administration ⁠relied upon to cancel student visas and initiate deportation proceedings violated the U.S. Constitution’s First and Fifth Amendments as applied to constitutionally protected speech.

Those laws allowed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to render noncitizens ‌deportable if he personally determined someone’s action “compromises a compelling foreign policy interest” and allowed him to revoke someone’s visa at his discretion.

Ms. Wise agreed with the newspaper, saying that when a noncitizen’s speech is the reason behind a visa revocation and deportation determination, “the government is singling out that speech for disfavored treatment based on its viewpoint or content.”

Conor Fitzpatrick, whose group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression represented the student newspaper, in a statement said the ruling “proves that free speech isn’t ‌a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.”

The ruling was similar to a decision last ​year by Boston-based U.S. District Judge William Young, who similarly found the administration had acted unconstitutionally by adopting a policy of revoking visas, arresting, detaining and deporting foreign ⁠students and faculty engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Ms. Wise, in her ruling, expressed concern that the administration had moved on ⁠to target people for expressing other types of views it disfavored, saying eventually the “targets may include anyone in the United States who exercises their freedom of speech to simply ‌express opinions the government does not like.”

“This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognises our right to speak freely,” she wrote. “Here you can simultaneously hate the content ​of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”

President ‌Donald Trump’s administration has issued a pause on visa ​appointments for applicants around the world during an ongoing ⁠immigration crackdown by the U.S. government in the Republican leader’s second term in the White House.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said on Tuesday (August 25, 2026) ‌that it launched a global training initiative at all U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide and that appointments for ‌visa services will be adjusted to accommodate the training.

Mr. Trump ‌has ⁠pursued an aggressive deportation drive and immigration crackdown that ⁠includes revocations of visas and green cards and rejection of applications over a range of reasons like political opinions and pro-Palestinian protests against U.S. ally Israel’s ​assault on Gaza.

He says the ‌crackdown aims to improve domestic security.

The crackdown has faced some legal setbacks. A U.S. judge on Friday (August 21) struck down a Trump administration policy suspending the issuance of immigrant visas ‌to applicants from 75 countries, saying that the policy ​exceeded Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statutory authority.

The State Department did not specify details on the ⁠training and its timeline, beyond saying the training aimed to help consular officers screen out applicants deemed likely to become dependent on U.S. ‌public benefits and to ensure evaluation of visa applicants “comprehensively and consistently.”

The pause on visa appointments was reported earlier by the Financial Times, which said immigrant visa applicants with scheduled interviews at U.S. embassies and consulates have received emails that their appointments were being rescheduled and that they would receive future notice ‌of a new date.

Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown has been widely condemned by ​human rights groups as being discriminatory and in violation of free speech and due process rights.

Rights groups ⁠also say the crackdown has created an unsafe environment in the ⁠U.S., especially for ethnic minorities who have raised concerns about racial profiling. While Trump campaigned in 2024 on a platform ‌of stopping illegal immigration, his administration has also made legal immigration more difficult – or example, by imposing new and expensive ​fees for applicants of certain work visas.

President Donald Trump’s administration has detained dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops as it rolls back immigration protections for military families to pursue its mass deportation agenda, an Associated Press investigation found.

More than 50 parents and spouses of active-duty service members have been detained since Trump took office for a second term, and at least six have been deported, the AP found in the first accounting of such detentions, which the government does not track.

At least eight immediate family members of U.S. service members remain in federal immigration custody.

Parents and spouses of people in the military have generally been shielded from deportation under bipartisan consensus for decades. But the AP found they’re now routinely being detained for months as they try to adjust their legal status through the policies available to service members’ close relatives and even as the military continues to recruit by advertising immigration benefits for enlistees’ families.

A Judge on Saturday ordered the U.S. to release a 5-year-old boy and his father from a Texas detention center where they were taken after being detained in a Minneapolis suburb last month.

Images of Liam Conejo Ramos, with a bunny hat and Spiderman backpack being surrounded by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers, sparked even more outcry about U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. It also led to a protest at the family detention center and a visit by two Texas Democratic members of Congress.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who was appointed by former Democratic President Bill Clinton, said in his ruling “the case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatising children.” A Judge had previously ruled that the boy and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, could not be removed from the U.S., at least for now.

Neighbours and school officials say that federal immigration officers in Minnesota used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has called that description of events an “abject lie.” It said the father fled on foot and left the boy in a running vehicle in their driveway.

During the January 28 visit with Representatives Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett, the boy slept in the arms of his father, who said Liam was frequently tired and not eating well at the detention facility housing about 1,100 people, according to Castro.

Detained families report poor conditions like worms in food, fighting for clean water and poor medical care at the detention center since its reopening last year. In December, a report filed by ICE acknowledged they held about 400 children longer than the recommended limit of 20 days.