DETROIT — Maryam Bahramipanah is torn between staying with her husband, who came to Michigan from their native Iran, and returning home to see her mother, who suffered a stroke.
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday to uphold President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several mostly Muslim countries, she expects that she can’t do both.
“I’m very sad,” said Bahramipanah, who cried when she heard about the decision. “I don’t know what to do. I really don’t know. Now it’s official and I don’t know.”
Muslim individuals and groups, as well as other religious and civil rights organizations, expressed outrage and disappointment at the high court’s rejection of a challenge that claimed the policy discriminated against Muslims or exceeded the president’s authority. Protests were being planned or staged across the country.
The travel ban has been fully in place since December, when the justices put the brakes on lower court decisions that had blocked part of it from being enforced. The policy applies to travelers from five countries with overwhelmingly Muslim populations: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also affects two non-Muslim countries, blocking travelers from North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials and their families.
MILAN — On both sides of the Atlantic, migrants flooding across borders by the hundreds each day have met a hostile reception and governments unable to agree on how to cope with the arrivals. In Europe, where far-right parties have joined the governments in Italy and Austria and made gains elsewhere, even the most basic decision of which port would accept a ship filled with migrants has been fraught.
On Tuesday, yet another rescue boat loaded with migrants struggled to find safe harbor in the Mediterranean, while in Austria police cadets playing the role of desperate refugees rattled a chain-link fence demanding to be let in as part of a high-profile training exercise to test the mettle of a new border force charged with preventing an influx of migrants.
“We have had migratory crises in the past, but that is not what we are going through now. What we are living through now is a European political crisis,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after a daylong meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican during which they discussed the issue.
The European crisis mirrors the one in the United States, where a broad-ranging Republican immigration bill was set for a vote Wednesday, with little certainty that it would survive. With legislation in disarray and a global uproar over the separation of more than 2,300 migrant children from their parents, the Trump administration abruptly reversed a key element of its zero-tolerance immigration policy last week, halting the practice of separating immigrant families caught illegally crossing the border, but leaving more than 2,000 separated children in limbo in government-contracted shelters.
The standoffs in Europe involve multiple governments, all running their own immigration policies but with open borders among them.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A convicted felon, a former presidential nominee and one of Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters fought for their political lives Tuesday in primary elections across America that tested anew the Republican president’s clout within his own party.
Voters cast ballots in seven states, including Maryland where a computer problem could affect tens of thousands of potential votes. But no contest mattered more to the Trump White House than South Carolina, where one of the president’s very first high-profile supporters, Gov. Henry McMaster, faced the possibility of losing his seat to a political newcomer.
Trump publicly embraced the sitting governor during a Monday night rally in South Carolina’s capital city and followed up with a sunrise Twitter reminder from the White House: “GO OUT AND VOTE FOR HENRY TODAY, HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN,” Trump wrote.
McMaster was up against self-made millionaire John Warren in a runoff election that threatened to embarrass the White House if the governor fell short. Trump has a mixed track record when going all-in for an ally: His preferred candidates have suffered stinging losses in Alabama and western Pennsylvania in recent months.
The South Carolina gubernatorial race headlined the latest series of primary contests, which included New York, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma and Mississippi as well as Maryland. With the November general election a little more than four months away, more than half the states will have selected their candidates after the day’s final votes are counted.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Virginia rejected a bid by President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to throw out charges in the special counsel’s Russia investigation, clearing the way for a much-anticipated trial to start as scheduled next month.
The decision Tuesday by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III was a setback for Manafort in his defense against tax and bank fraud charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller.
It also hobbles a favored talking point of Trump and his legal team, who have repeatedly attacked Mueller’s investigation as overly broad and sought to undermine its legitimacy. The president had applauded Ellis for his skeptical comments and pointed questioning during a hearing in which he asked prosecutors whether they brought the case to get Manafort to testify against Trump.
Manafort, also facing separate charges in the District of Columbia, is the only one of the four Trump aides charged by Mueller to opt to stand trial instead of to cooperate with prosecutors. None of the charges relate to allegations of Russian election interference and possible coordination with Trump associates, the main thrust of Mueller’s public appointment order.
In a 31-page ruling, Ellis rejected the argument of Manafort’s attorneys that Mueller had exceeded his authority by bringing charges unrelated to Russian election interference. He said the May 2017 Justice Department order that appointed Mueller as special counsel had specifically empowered him to pursue crimes that arise out of the investigation, and that the case against Manafort fell within that authority.
From Associated Press