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Follow major cases facing the Supreme Court in 2025. The Supreme Court is set to weigh in on cases related to ghost guns, the death penalty, medical care for transgender minors, public funding for religious schools and more.
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A federal judge has ordered Rümeysa Öztürk to be transferred to Vermont as she seeks to challenge what her lawyers call her "unconstitutional detention" in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. Öztürk is a Turkish national and a Tufts University Ph.D. student whose abduction off the streets by plainclothes U.S. agents was caught on camera, one of the most controversial examples of the Trump administration's crackdown on pro-Palestinian international students. She was targeted after co-authoring an opinion piece for the Tufts student newspaper critical of the school's response to Gaza protests. Last week, an immigration judge denied bond for Öztürk, declaring her to be a potential "danger to the community." Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports the State Department found no evidence linking Rümeysa Öztürk to antisemitic activities or public statements in support of terrorism, as the administration has claimed.
For more, we speak with Mudassar Toppa, part of Öztürk's legal team and a staff attorney at CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic at CUNY School of Law. "In this case, the government was clear it was intending to abduct Ms. Öztürk. They didn't want her to know that her visa was revoked, and four days later, they did exactly what they planned and abducted her in broad daylight," says Toppa.
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The Supreme Court has paused a lower court order that instructed the Trump administration to immediately bring back a U.S. legal resident who was "mistakenly" sent to El Salvador, giving the court more time to deliberate on the case. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was expelled from the U.S. on March 15 despite holding protected status, will continue to languish under dangerous conditions in a Salvadoran maximum-security prison. The Trump administration claims it's powerless to bring him back to his family in Maryland. "They have dug in their heels at every step of the way," says Abrego Garcia's lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, about the government's defense. "It's ridiculous that this case is at the Supreme Court at all."
Behind Abrego Garcia's ICE arrest and removal is Trump's invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last deployed during World War II. In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court has approved of the Trump administration's removals of Venezuelan immigrants, but said that those targeted must be given an opportunity to challenge their removal. So far, immigrants expelled to El Salvador have been largely denied their legal rights and detained without clear evidence. They are then incarcerated in the country's "mega-prisons," where rights abuses have flourished under El Salvador's "state of exception." "These conditions constitute, under international law, forced disappearances," says Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, a human rights organization in Central America.
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