The Times of Israel is liveblogging Tuesday’s events as they unfold.
US Supreme Court lets Trump pursue deportations under 1798 law, with limits
The US Supreme Court allows Donald Trump to pursue deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members using a 1798 law that historically has been employed only in wartime, as part of the Republican president’s hardline approach to immigration, but with certain limits.
The court, in an unsigned 5-4 ruling powered by conservative justices, grants the administration’s request to lift Washington-based US Judge James Boasberg’s March 15 order that had temporarily blocked the summary deportations under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act while litigation in the case continues.
Despite siding with the administration, the court’s majority places limits on how deportations may occur, emphasizing that judicial review is required.
Detainees “must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the majority write.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the court’s three liberal justices dissented.
Trump’s administration has argued that Boasberg encroached on presidential authority to make national security decisions.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act on March 15 to swiftly deport the alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang, attempting to speed up removals with a law best known for its use to intern Japanese, Italian and German immigrants during World War Two.
High Court to hear high-stakes challenge to government’s firing of Shin Bet chief
The High Court of Justice is set to hear petitions this morning against the government’s highly contentious move to fire Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar.
The high-stakes session is set to begin at 9 a.m., and will be livestreamed here.
The case is about far more than Bar himself, and is seen as part of the government’s clash with judicial authorities and its efforts to remove checks on its power.
Critics accuse Netanyahu of seeking to scapegoat Bar for the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, while shirking responsibility himself. The premier maintains he has every right by law to remove the head of the internal security agency, and doubly so following the failures that enabled the Gaza onslaught.
The petitioners argue that the prime minister had a clear conflict of interest in removing Bar from office since the Shin Bet is involved in the Qatargate investigation, in which close aides to Netanyahu are alleged to have conducted work promoting Qatar’s image in Israel while working for the prime minister. Netanyahu has claimed, without offering evidence, that the investigation is part of efforts by the so-called “deep state” to harm his leadership.
Read Jeremy Sharon’s analysis of the case here.
Germany’s likely last Holocaust convict Irmgard Furchner dies at 99
A 99-year-old former Nazi camp secretary, who may be the last ever person to be convicted in Germany for crimes committed during the Holocaust, has died, a court said today.
Irmgard Furchner was handed a two-year suspended sentence in 2022 for complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp in what was occupied Poland.
A spokeswoman for a court in the northern town of Itzehoe, where she stood trial, confirmed the death of Furchner, the first woman in decades to be prosecuted in Germany for Nazi-era crimes.
Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, time is running out to bring to justice criminals linked to the Holocaust. In recent years, several cases have been abandoned as the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial.
Between June 1943 and April 1945, Furchner took the dictation and handled the correspondence of camp commander Paul Werner Hoppe while her husband was a fellow SS officer at the camp.
An estimated 65,000 people died at the camp near today’s Gdansk, including Jewish prisoners.
Delivering the verdict in 2022, presiding judge Dominik Gross said that “nothing that happened at Stutthof was kept from her” and that the defendant was aware of the “extremely bad conditions for the prisoners.”