WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to restart swift removals of migrants to countries other than their homelands, lifting for now a court order requiring they get a chance to challenge the deportations.

The high court majority did not detail its reasoning in the brief order, as is typical on its emergency docket. All three liberal justices dissented.

It came after immigration officials put eight people on a plane to South Sudan, though they later diverted to a U.S. naval base in Djibouti after a judge stepped in.

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The migrants from countries including Myanmar, Vietnam and Cuba had been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S. Immigration officials have said that they were unable to return them quickly to their home countries.

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

In a scathing 19-page dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s action exposes “thousands to the risk of torture or death.”

“The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard,” she wrote in the dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

READ MORE: Homeland Security official on the Trump administration’s immigration policy changes

Attorneys for the migrants sent to South Sudan said they would continue to press their case in court. “The ramifications of Supreme Court’s order will be horrifying,” said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance.

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, meanwhile, said in a social media post that the decision is a “MAJOR win for the safety and security of the American people.”

The agency did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.

The Supreme Court action halts an order from U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy in Boston, who decided in April that people must get a chance to argue deportation to a third country would put them in danger — even if they’ve otherwise exhausted their legal appeals.

READ MORE: Attorneys say U.S. immigration authorities appear to have begun deporting migrants to South Sudan

He found that the May deportations to South Sudan violated his order and told immigration authorities to allow people to raise those concerns through their lawyers. Immigration officials housed the migrants in a converted shipping container in Djibouti, where they and the officers guarding them faced rough conditions.

The administration has reached agreements with other countries, including Panama and Costa Rica, to house immigrants because some countries do not accept U.S. deportations. South Sudan, meanwhile, has endured repeated waves of violence since gaining independence in 2011.

Murphy’s order doesn’t prohibit deportations to third countries. But it says migrants must have a real chance to argue they could be in serious danger of torture if sent to another country.

The justices have confronted a similar issue in Trump’s effort to send Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador with little chance to challenge the deportations in court.

In that case, the court said migrants must get a “reasonable time” to file a court challenge before being removed, and the majority blocked the administration from resuming the deportations while lower courts worked out exactly how long they should get.

The conservative-majority court has sided with Trump in other immigration cases, however, clearing the way for his administration to end temporary legal protections affecting a total of nearly a million immigrants.

The third-country deportation case has been one of several legal flashpoints as the administration rails against judges whose rulings have slowed the president’s policies.

Another order from Murphy, who was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden, resulted in the Trump administration returning a gay Guatemalan man who had been wrongly deported to Mexico, where he says he had been raped and extorted. The man, identified in court papers as O.C.G, was the first person known to have been returned to U.S. custody after deportation since the start of Trump’s second term.

The Education Department warned schools in a letter on Friday that they risked losing federal funding if they continued to take race into account when making scholarship or hiring decisions, or so much as nodded to race in “all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.”

The announcement gave institutions 14 days to comply. It built on a major Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that found that the use of race-conscious admissions practices at colleges and universities was unlawful. But it went far beyond the scope of that decision by informing schools that considering race at all when making staffing decisions or offering services to subsets of students would be grounds for punishment.

The letter was the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to recast programs intended to level the playing field for historically underserved populations as a form of racial discrimination. It also appeared to be an extension of the broadsides President Trump has delivered to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from the federal government, which critics have assailed as veiled racism.

Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said related programs and scholarships, many of which have historically sought to help Black and Latino students attain college degrees or find community, had come at the expense of “white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court seemed closely divided Monday over a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map, which has two Black majority districts for the first time.

Several of the court’s conservative justices suggested they could vote to throw out the map and make it harder, if not impossible, to bring redistricting lawsuits under the landmark federal Voting Rights Act.

Listen to the oral arguments in the player above.

The case involves the interplay between race and politics in drawing political boundaries in front of a conservative-led court that has been skeptical of considerations of race in public life.

Just two years ago, the court by a 5-4 vote affirmed a ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case over Alabama’s congressional map. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three more liberal colleagues in the outcome.

That decision led to new districts in both states that sent two more Black Democrats to Congress.

At issue in the Louisiana case is a majority Black district that winds from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. Roberts described it as a “snake” that might violate the standard practice of drawing compact electoral districts.

The case features an unusual alliance of the Republican-led state government, which is defending the congressional map, and civil rights groups that more often find themselves fighting the state’s redistricting plans.

The United States is halfway to the next once-a-decade census, but the court is still dealing with lawsuits that grew out of the last one.

It has been a winding road. The court fight over Louisiana’s congressional districts has lasted three years. Two maps were blocked by lower courts, and the Supreme Court has intervened twice. Most recently, the court ordered the new map to be used in the 2024 election.

The state’s Republican-dominated legislature drew a new congressional map in 2022 to account for population shifts reflected in the 2020 Census. But the changes effectively maintained the status quo of five Republican-leaning majority white districts and one Democratic-leaning majority Black district.

Civil rights advocates won a lower court ruling that the districts likely discriminated against Black voters.

The Supreme Court put the ruling on hold while it took up the Alabama case. The justices allowed both states to use congressional maps in the 2022 elections even though both had been ruled likely discriminatory by federal judges.

The high court eventually affirmed the ruling from Alabama, which led to a new map and a second district that could elect a Black lawmaker. The justices returned the Louisiana case to federal court, with the expectation that new maps would be in place for the 2024 elections.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave lawmakers in Louisiana a deadline of early 2024 to draw a new map or face the possibility of a court-imposed map.

The state complied and drew a new map.

One of the questions before the court is whether race was the predominant factor driving the new map. That’s what white Louisiana voters claimed in their separate lawsuit challenging the new districts. A three-judge court agreed.

But Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, and other state officials argue that politics, not race, helped set the boundaries. The congressional map provides politically safe districts for House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, fellow Republicans.

The state acted to “protect our most high-profile incumbents,” state Solicitor General A. Benjamin Aguiñaga told the justices.

Some lawmakers have also noted that the Republican lawmaker whose district was greatly altered in the new map supported a GOP opponent of Landry in the 2023 governor’s race. Former Rep. Garret Graves chose not to seek reelection under the new map.

Louisiana argues that dueling lawsuits over redistricting make it almost impossible for states to know what to do.

In a separate case, Louisiana is arguing that the part of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional.

The court’s conservative majority already has ruled that federal courts have no role to play in partisan gerrymandering. Justice Clarence Thomas said the court also should no longer decide race-based redistricting cases. “Drawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges,” Thomas wrote last year in an opinion no other justice joined.

But the court doesn’t have to touch that issue to resolve the Louisiana case.

The reconfigured 6th Congressional District stretches across the state, linking parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas. The percentage of Black voters in the district jumped from about 25% to 55%, based on data collected by the state.

The district’s voters last year elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat. He returned to the House of Representatives, where he had served decades earlier.

The state also has changed the state’s election process so that the so-called jungle primary will be replaced by partisan primary elections in the spring, followed by a November showdown between the party nominees.

The change means candidates can start gathering signatures in September to get on the primary ballot for 2026.

A Supreme Court decision invalidating the congressional map would leave little time to draw a new one before then.

A decision is expected by late June.

Cline contributed to this report from Baton Rouge, La.

In the coming months, the Supreme Court will decide whether a Louisiana congressional district created to conform with the Voting Rights Act resulted in an unconstitutional gerrymander that discriminates based on race. The result could further weaken the landmark civil rights law and fair representation for the nation’s growing communities of color.

The story of the case, argued in late March, is a winding one that began in 2021 when lawmakers redrew the state’s six congressional districts after the 2020 census.

Although the census showed that Black Louisianans were now nearly a third of the state’s population, lawmakers chose to make only minor tweaks to the existing congressional map. That map, in both its original and revised forms, was unsatisfactory from the standpoint of Black voters because it divided their communities in a way that allowed the state’s sizable Black population to elect its preferred candidates in just one of six congressional districts.

In each of the remaining five districts, Black voters were divided in ways that made them too small of a share of the population to overcome Louisiana’s highly racially polarized voting patterns. White voters, who now vote overwhelmingly Republican in most of Louisiana, determined who won or lost in every election.

Black voters sued in federal court, contending that the division of Black communities in the congressional map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows minority voters to challenge maps that have a racially discriminatory effect. They argued that if lawmakers had reconfigured district boundaries just slightly, it would have been possible to easily create a second Black-majority district. In fact, they argued it would be possible to create such a district while better complying with Louisiana race-neutral map-drawing rules than the state’s own map.

The plaintiffs won an injunction blocking the state’s map. That ruling was put on hold for the 2022 election cycle but was ultimately affirmed in late 2023 by a unanimous panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

By that point, the 2024 election was fast approaching, putting Louisiana lawmakers in a conundrum. Carrying on with litigation would significantly increase the chance that a federal court would redraw the state’s map into one that lawmakers and other politically important stakeholders found unacceptable.

To avoid that outcome, lawmakers gave up the court fight and instead met in a special session in early 2024 to adopt a new map. During the remedial legislative session, the Black voters who brought the case proposed a map with a compact second Black majority district on the eastern side of the state along the Mississippi Delta, similar to the one they had offered during their Voting Rights Act litigation. Their proposal deliberately made minimal changes to the state’s 2021 map.

However, Republican lawmakers rejected the proposal because of its political effects, in particular the fact that the map would have made the district favored Republican congressional incumbent Rep. Julia Letlow much more heavily Democratic. They also disliked the map because it would have made the adjacent districts of other powerful Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, too competitive for comfort.

Instead, lawmakers decided to draw a Black-majority district that sprawled from Shreveport, in the northwest corner of the state next the Texas border, to Baton Rouge, more than 200 miles southeast — using the redrawing process not only to protect Letlow and other favored Republican incumbents but to dismantle the solidly red congressional district of Republican Rep. Garrett Graves, who had often found himself at odds with Republican governor Jeff Landry.

Although the new district is very different from the more compact district Black plaintiffs proposed in the Voting Rights Act litigation, the state argued it nonetheless satisfied its obligations under the law because it could demonstrate that Black voters had the ability to elect candidates in both districts and because the state’s version of the district shared about 70 percent of the same population as the one Black voters proposed.

Though state officials were happy enough with the new map, some white voters were not.

Shortly after adoption of the new map, they filed suit in a different federal district court, claiming that the new voting district was an illegal racial gerrymander because race had unconstitutionally predominated in lawmakers’ decisions about how to draw lines. (Black plaintiffs in the original Voting Rights Act suit intervened in the new lawsuit.)

Racial gerrymandering claims challenging maps for an overuse of race have been around since the 1990s and have been used over the years by both white and minority voters to challenge maps. The evidence in these cases can often be head-spinningly complicated, especially when the courts are required to examine information about raw partisanship and its intersection with race and the Voting Rights Act.

Here, however, Louisiana lawmakers and the Black plaintiffs in the original Voting Rights Act lawsuit offered very straightforward defenses.

After all, both a district court and the conservative Fifth Circuit had agreed that the Voting Rights Act required creating a second Black congressional district. Moreover, Black plaintiffs had proven in the original case that it was possible for lawmakers to easily satisfy that obligation by drawing a compact Black-majority district in the northeastern part of the state.

The fact that lawmakers opted instead to draw a far less compact Baton Rouge-to-Shreveport district was seemingly strong evidence that some factor besides race — namely politics — was the predominant driver for map drawers’ choices. And while partisan map drawing might be distasteful, well, the Supreme Court said in 2019 and again last year that configuring districts for political advantage is a perfectly permissible end.

Nonetheless, a three-judge panel ruled in favor of the white plaintiffs in a 2–1 decision, striking down the map. The Supreme Court issued a stay of the decision during appeals to the Supreme Court, allowing Black Democrat Cleo Fields to win office in 2024 under the redrawn map.

The issue now before the Court will determine whether that map remains in place for 2026 and subsequent elections. If the decision striking down the map is upheld by the Supreme Court, the outcome could weaken the Voting Rights Act both by creating a presumption of racial gerrymandering whenever map drawers create a majority-minority district or, alternatively, by sharply limiting how far states can go when addressing even court-ordered remediation of Voting Rights Act violations.

But there is reason to hope that the Supreme Court won’t do so.

Much of the March oral argument focused on whether the district court’s injunction, affirmed by the Fifth Circuit, was sufficient to give Louisiana a “reasonable basis” for drawing the second Black congressional district. While some of the conservative justices seemed willing to probe the underlying court findings of Voting Rights Act liability, most justices seemed satisfied that following a court order affirmed by the Fifth Circuit was more than sufficient reason to draw the second district.

More uncertain is whether the Court might conclude that the state went too far when it addressed Voting Rights Act violations by creating the Baton Rouge-to-Shreveport district. If it does, it could order yet another redraw of Louisiana’s congressional map — perhaps resulting in a district more like the one originally proposed by Black plaintiffs.

But even if the map survives, Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked questions that could signal trouble in the not-too-distant future.

The current framework for deciding Section 2 cases has its origins in a landmark 1986 Supreme Court case. Under the structure created by that case, if a map has a racially discriminatory effect — as determined in a fact-intensive, locality specific inquiry — a court can order that it be redrawn. When states do so, courts permit them to take race into consideration, though a separate line of court cases says that race cannot be the sole or predominate reason for line-drawing choices.

But Kavanaugh wondered whether that framework might be outdated, pointedly asking each of the arguing attorneys whether the race-conscious line-drawing permitted under the 1986 case should have an expiration date.

The Court is unlikely to reach that issue in this case because the white plaintiffs only raised the it for the first time on appeal. But the questions are an ominous sign that a showdown over the continued viability of the nearly 40-year-old judicially created framework for Section 2 cases may not be far off.

That fight could in fact come as soon as the next Supreme Court term in a pair of cases from Georgia challenging congressional and legislative maps or from a Louisiana case challenging legislative maps. Those cases are currently on appeal in the 11th and 5th Circuits and could reach the Supreme Court as early as fall.

Amy Howe:

So, back in 2022, Louisiana drew a new map after the 2020 census, and Louisiana has six congressional districts and roughly one-third of the state’s population is Black.

And so it had one-majority Black district. So this group of Black voters went to court challenging that, saying it was a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election practices that result in the denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on race.

And so this federal district court threw out the map, agreeing with the Black voters. The conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld that ruling and said, you need to draw a new map, state, or this federal court will do it for you.

And so the Louisiana legislature went back to the drawing board, drew a second map with two majority-Black districts, and then this group of non-African American voters came to court saying that this violated the Constitution because it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. It relied too heavily on race.

So the state and then the Black voters that had challenged the first map both came to the Supreme Court to appeal, and the state says, look, we’re between a rock and a hard place here. We wanted to address this violation of the Voting Rights Act, but we also — once we decided to do that, it was about politics.

We wanted to protect two powerful Republican incumbents in Congress, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and then Julia Letlow, who’s on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.