By MARK SHERMAN and CHRIS MEGERIAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump has gotten almost everything he has wanted from the Supreme Court that he reshaped during his first.

The justices, three of whom were appointed by Trump, have cleared the way for stripping legal protections from more than 1 million immigrants, firing thousands of federal employees, ousting transgender members of the military, removing the heads of independent government agencies and more.

The legal victories are noteworthy on their own, but how the president is achieving them is remarkable. Administration lawyers are harnessing emergency appeals, which were used sparingly under previous presidencies, to fast-track cases to the Supreme Court, where decisions are often handed down with no explanation.

Trump’s use of the emergency docket reflects his aggressive approach to governing in his second term, with fewer voices of caution within his administration and the Republican Party. He regularly seeks any possible leverage to advance his agenda, regardless of past practices or tradition.

The result is a series of green lights from the nation’s highest court without any clarity on how the law should be interpreted in the future. The latest example came Monday, when the court allowed the Trump administration to move forward on a key campaign promise to unwind the Education Department and lay off nearly 1,400 workers.

No rationale given by the majority

The six conservative justices did not provide a reason for their vote, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a dissent on behalf of the court’s three liberals.

“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Sotomayor wrote.

In an earlier case allowing migrants to be sent to countries other than their own with little or no chance to object, Sotomayor complained that “the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.”

President Donald Trump gestures from the stairs of Air Force One as he boards upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez

David Warrington, the White House’s top lawyer and Trump’s former personal attorney, said the president’s team works “around the clock to advance his agenda.”

Senior administration officials who declined to be identified while discussing legal strategy said the White House is relying on the emergency docket because political opponents have been so aggressive in seeking temporary restraining orders from lower-ranking judges to halt proposals.

Skye Perryman, who leads the Democracy Forward nonprofit that has repeatedly sued the administration, said emergency appeals have been pursued “prematurely and inappropriately.”

“There is a concern that this Supreme Court is not checking this administration’s power grab in the way the American people expect them to and the constitution would mandate,” she said.

Trump repeatedly turns to justices for help

Almost since Trump took office, the court’s emergency docket has been packed with appeals from his administration. For a while, the justices were being asked to weigh in almost once a week as Trump pushed to lift lower court orders slowing his ambitious conservative agenda.

The rulings on the court’s shadow, or emergency docket, have come in some of the more than 300 lawsuits that have challenged parts of Trump’s second-term agenda.

Administration officials have harshly criticized lower-court judges who they see as getting in Trump’s way. Top policy adviser Stephen Miller has spoken of “judicial tyranny.” Trump himself called for impeaching U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, which prompted a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Boasberg has found that members of the administration may be liable for contempt after ignoring his order to turn around planes deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The administration initially resisted court orders to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.

Yet the Supreme Court has not seemed especially skeptical of the administration’s actions, critics have said.

“District judges have recognized this is not normal. What the administration is trying to do is not normal and it has to be stopped,” Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan said on the “Original Jurisdiction” podcast. “The Supreme Court is acting as if it needs to keep its powder dry and for what, I am not clear.”

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Final decisions are yet to come

The high court has not issued final decisions in any of the cases, which are continuing in lower courts. It’s possible, if not likely, that the court eventually will hear appeals in some of these cases and issue final rulings.

But by then, even if the court finds a policy illegal, it may be too late, said Alicia Bannon, director of the Judiciary Program at New York University law school’s Brennan Center for Justice.

“In a lot of these cases, you can’t unring the bell,” Bannon said. Pointing to the Education Department order, she said, “Once those firings have moved forward, once that department has been effectively obliterated, you can’t just, you know, press a button and bring us back to the status quo.”

The liberal justices also have pointed to what they see as the damage their colleagues are doing to lower-court judges.

“Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway. But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote last month in her dissent from a decision limiting judges’ authority to issue nationwide, or universal, injunctions.

The decision to scale back nationwide injunctions came in the administration’s emergency appeal of orders blocking Trump’s effort to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the U.S. illegally or temporarily. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion said nothing about whether the birthright citizenship policy violates the Constitution.

The issue could soon return to the high court; judges are evaluating whether their earlier orders need to be changed to comply with the Supreme Court ruling.

By ROSS D. FRANKLIN, SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN and JOHN SEEWER, Associated Press

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. (AP) — Crews fighting a wildfire that destroyed the nearly century-old Grand Canyon Lodge and a visitors center were focused Tuesday on stopping the flames from consuming nearby cabins, mule stables and other structures, fire officials said.

Firefighters are dealing with a pair of wildfires along the park’s less-visited North Rim that together have burned through more than 90 square miles. That’s more than twice the size of the entire Walt Disney World complex in Florida.

Each blaze grew overnight into Tuesday, but fire officials expressed optimism that they had slowed the spread of the White Sage Fire, the larger of the two. Tourists standing along the park’s popular South Rim on Tuesday could see plumes of smoke rising above the canyon walls and a haze hanging over the sweeping vista.

“By the afternoon, it was completely socked in,” Christi Anderson said of the smoke that had filled the canyon the day before. “You couldn’t see anything, none of that. It was crazy.”

Anderson was visiting from California and considered herself lucky because she had shifted her reservation to the South Rim in the preceding days. Otherwise she would have been among those forced to evacuate.

The Dragon Bravo Fire, ignited by a lightning strike on July 4, destroyed the lodge and dozens of cabins over the weekend. That fire had been allowed to burn for days before strong winds caused it to erupt, leading to questions about the National Park Service’s decision not to aggressively attack the fire right away.

Four days into the fire, the Park Service said it was being allowed to burn to benefit the land. Then on Friday, fire officials and the Park Service warned visitors to evacuate immediately as the fire grew by nearly eight times within a day.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has called for a federal investigation into the Park Service’s handling of the fire and plans to meet with leaders from the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of the Interior, her office said.

U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego have asked Interior Secretary Doug Burgum how the administration plans to track wildfire decision-making under a recent executive order to consolidate federal firefighting forces into a single program.

The Associated Press has left phone and email messages with Park Service officials seeking comment about how the fire was managed.

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Over the years, managers at the Grand Canyon have successfully used fire to benefit the landscape, with the park having what some experts say is an exemplary fire management program that has tapped both prescribed fire and wildfires to improve forest health.

Andi Thode, a professor of fire ecology and management at Northern Arizona University and the lead at the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, said park managers have even re-burned some areas in multiple places over the years to create what she called “one of the best jigsaw puzzles” on public land. She noted that fire behavior decreased significantly when the Dragon Bravo Fire burned into the footprint of a previously burned area.

“So creating that heterogeneity across the landscape, using fire is a really critical tool moving forward to be able to help in the future with these wildfire events that are happening at the worst time in the worst weather conditions with the driest fuels,” Thode said.

Fire officials on Tuesday said the Dragon Bravo Fire had spread to nearly 13 square miles while the larger White Sage Fire had charred 81 square miles.

Neither blaze had any containment.

Park officials have closed access to the North Rim, a more isolated area that draws only about 10% of the Grand Canyon’s millions of annual visitors.

Hikers in the area were evacuated and rafters on the Colorado River, which snakes through the canyon, were told to bypass Phantom Ranch, an outpost of cabins and dormitories. Trails to the area from the canyon’s North and South rims also were closed.

The Dragon Bravo Fire flared up Saturday night, fueled by high winds. Firefighters used aerial fire retardant drops near the lodge before they had to pull back because of a chlorine gas leak at a water treatment plant, the park service said.

Montoya Bryan reported from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio. Associated Press writers Christopher Keller and Safiyah Riddle in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed to this report.

St. Paul police asked for the public’s help Tuesday to find two people missing in separate cases, each of which may be suspicious.

Brenda Holmes, 49, was last seen by family on July 5, 2025. (Courtesy of the St. Paul Police Department)

Brenda Holmes, 49, was last seen at Mounds Regional Park/Wicaḣapi Regional Park in the Dayton’s Bluff area on July 5.

Holmes, who is about 5 feet 2 inches tall with blue and black hair, was last seen wearing a black T-shirt, green camouflage leggings and black high-top boots.

Nicholas Christianson, 41, was last seen on June 3, 2025. (Courtesy of the St. Paul Police Department)

In a separate case, Nicholas Christianson, 41, was last seen June 3 in the area of Larpenteur and White Bear avenues. He is 6 feet tall with brown hair, and was last seen wearing a dark gray jacket, black shirt, blue jeans and brown boots.

Police did not release additional information on why their disappearances are potentially suspicious.

They’re asking anyone with tips on Holmes or Christianson to come forward by calling 651-291-1111 or 911.

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By REBECCA SANTANA, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Seventeen immigration court judges have been fired in recent days, according to the union that represents them, as the Trump administration pushes forward with its mass deportations of immigrants in the country.

The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents immigration court judges as well as other professionals, said in a news release that 15 judges were fired “without cause” on Friday and another two on Monday. The union said they were working in courts in 10 different states across the country — California, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Texas, Utah and Virginia.

“It’s outrageous and against the public interest that at the same time Congress has authorized 800 immigration judges, we are firing large numbers of immigration judges without cause,” said the union’s President Matt Biggs. “This is nonsensical. The answer is to stop firing and start hiring.”

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Firings come with courts at the center of administration efforts

The firings come as the courts have been increasingly at the center of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement efforts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arresting immigrants as they appear at court for proceedings.

A spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which is the part of the Justice Department that oversees the courts, said in an email that the office would not comment on the firings.

The large-scale arrests began in May and have unleashed fear among asylum-seekers and immigrants appearing in court. In what has become a familiar scene, a judge will grant a government lawyer’s request to dismiss deportation proceedings against an immigrant. Meanwhile, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are waiting in the hallway to arrest the person and put them on a fast track to deportation as soon as he or she leaves the courtroom.

Immigration court judges are also dealing with a massive backlog of roughly 3.5 million cases that ballooned in recent years. Cases can take years to weave their way to a final determination, with judges and lawyers frequently scheduling final hearings on the merits of a case over a year out. Unlike criminal courts, immigrants don’t have the right to a lawyer, and if they can’t afford one they represent themselves — often using an interpreter to make their case.

Courts are getting a cash infusion

Under recently passed legislation that will use $170 billion to supercharge immigration enforcement, the courts are set to get an infusion of $3.3 billion. That will go toward raising the number of judges to 800 and hiring more staff to support them.

But the union said that since the Trump administration took office over 103 judges have either been fired or voluntarily left after taking what was dubbed the “Fork in the Road” offers at the beginning of the administration. The union said that rather than speeding up the immigration court process, the Justice Department’s firings would actually make the backlogs worse. The union said that it can take as long as a year to recruit, hire and train new immigration court judges.

There are currently about 600 judges, according to the union figures. Immigration courts fall under the Justice Department.