A judge has rejected a request for a new trial for a Venezuelan man convicted of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, a case that became a flashpoint in the national debate over immigration.

Lawyers for Jose Ibarra argued his constitutional rights were violated when the judge declined two defense motions before trial. One was a request to delay the trial to give an expert witness time to review and analyze DNA data. The other would have excluded some cellphone evidence.

Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard, who presided over the trial, wrote in an order Monday that the evidence of Ibarra's guilt presented by the state was "overwhelming and powerful." After Ibarra waived his right to a jury trial, Haggard found him guilty of murder and other charges during the November 2024 trial and sentenced him to life in prison. A spokesperson for Ibarra's attorneys said they plan to file an appeal.

Ibarra, 28, had entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and was allowed to stay while he pursued his immigration case.

Prosecutors said Ibarra encountered Riley while she was running on the University of Georgia campus in Athens on Feb. 22, 2024, and killed her during a struggle. Riley was a student at Augusta University College of Nursing, which also has a campus in Athens, about 70 miles (115 kilometers) east of Atlanta.

Ibarra's trial attorneys had asked the judge to delay the trial after a DNA expert said she would need six weeks to review evidence analyzed using TrueAllele Casework, software used to interpret DNA and assist the defense. The judge wrote in his order Monday that Ibarra's lawyers "effectively challenged the TrueAllele DNA evidence at trial" and concluded that Ibarra was not harmed by the denial of a delay.

The DNA expert testified during a January hearing on the motion for a new trial, and the judge wrote that he did not find her opinion to be persuasive or credible and that it would not have changed the trial outcome.

Ibarra's attorneys also had challenged the seizure of two cellphones from his apartment, saying they were not listed on the search warrant, and sought to exclude evidence pulled from them. Haggard wrote that there were "exigent circumstances authorizing the seizure of the cellphones" and that the phones were not searched until after warrants were issued authorizing the search of the contents of the phones.

As U.S. and Israeli forces pounded Iran, and Tehran and its affiliates retaliated by firing missiles at targets across the Mideast on Monday, the international legal order was caught in the crossfire.

At the heart of the post-World War II global order — United Nations headquarters in New York — Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council on Saturday that U.S. and Israeli airstrikes violated international law, including the U.N. Charter. He also condemned Iran's retaliatory attacks for violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations in the Mideast.

Officials in the Trump administration insist that the military campaign is a lawful measure to ensure Tehran does not build nuclear weapons. "It's a matter of global security. And to that end, the United States is taking lawful actions," Trump's U.N. ambassador, Mike Waltz, said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a letter to the U.N. on Sunday that the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "constitutes a grave and unprecedented breach of the most fundamental norms governing relations among States."

On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bullishly defended the U.S. military campaign. "No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don't waste time or lives," he said at the Pentagon.

The war with Iran comes less than two months after U.S. forces swooped into Caracas to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and fly him to New York to face justice.

David Crane, an American expert on international law and founding prosecutor of a United Nations court that prosecuted crimes in Sierra Leone, wrote in an analysis that U.S. attacks in Iran and Venezuela "highlight a dangerous trend: the normalization of unilateral force as a tool of foreign policy. Even when the outcome is positive, the violation of international law and constitutional limits sets a precedent that threatens global stability and undermines America's own legal foundations."

In Washington, many Democrats have called the strikes illegal. They argue that under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. They say the Trump administration failed to lay out its rationale or plan for the military strikes, and the aftermath.

Congress hurriedly scheduled a war powers debate for Monday over Trump's authority to bomb Iran.

The Trump administration's latest policy of deporting immigrants to "third countries" to which they have no ties is unlawful and must be set aside, a federal judge ruled Wednesday in a case that already reached the nation's highest court.

U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy in Massachusetts agreed to suspend his decision for 15 days, giving the government time to appeal his latest ruling in the case. Murphy noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the administration's favor last year, pausing Murphy's previous decision and clearing the way for a flight carrying several migrants to complete its trip to war-torn South Sudan, where they had no ties.

Murphy said migrants challenging the Department of Homeland Security's policy have the right to "meaningful notice" and an opportunity to object before they are removed to a third country. The policy "extinguishes valid challenges to third-country removal by effecting removal before those challenges can be raised," the judge concluded.

"These are our laws, and it is with profound gratitude for the unbelievable luck of being born in the United States of America that this Court affirms these and our nation's bedrock principle: that no 'person' in this country may be 'deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,'" Murphy wrote.

In June, the Supreme Court's conservative majority found that immigration officials can quickly deport people to third countries. Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the ruling gives the government special treatment.

Murphy said President Donald Trump's administration has repeatedly violated — or tried to violate — his orders. Last March, he noted, the Defense Department deported at least six class members to El Salvador and Mexico without providing the process required under a temporary restraining order that Murphy issued. DHS issued its new policy guidance for third-country removals on March 30, two days after Murphy's order.

"The simple reality is that nobody knows the merits of any individual class member's claim because (administration officials) are withholding the predicate fact: the country of removal," wrote Murphy, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Joe Biden.

Murphy said the DHS third-country removal policy has targeted immigrants who were granted protection from being sent back to their home countries, where they feared being tortured or persecuted in other ways.

Eight men who were sent to South Sudan in May had been convicted of crimes in the U.S. and had final orders of removal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said.

The House is preparing to vote Thursday on a war powers resolution to halt President Donald Trump's attack on Iran, a sign of unease in Congress over the rapidly widening conflict that is reordering U.S. priorities at home and abroad.

It's the second vote in as many days, after the Senate defeated a similar measure along party lines. Lawmakers are confronting the sudden reality of representing the American people in wartime and all that entails — with lives lost, dollars spent and alliances tested by a president's unilateral decision to go to war with Iran.

The tally in the House is expected to be tight, but the outcome will provide an early snapshot of the political support, or opposition, to the U.S.-Israel military operation and Trump's rationale for bypassing Congress, which alone has the power to declare war.

"Donald Trump is not a king, and if he believes the war with Iran is in our national interest, then he must come to Congress and make the case," said Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Meeks said in his nearly three decades in Congress, the hardest votes he has taken have been deciding whether to send U.S. troops to war.

The roll calls are a clarifying moment for the president and the parties just days into the overseas conflict that has quickly carried echoes of the long U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many veterans of those wars have since run for office and now serve in Congress.

Trump's Republican Party, which narrowly controls the House and Senate, largely sees the conflict with Iran not as the start of a new war, but the end of a regime that for decades has long menaced the West. The operation has killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which some view as an opportunity for regime change, though others warn of a chaotic power vacuum.

Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, the GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, publicly thanked Trump for taking action against Iran, saying the president is using his own constitutional authority to defend the U.S. against the "imminent threat" the country posed.

Mast, an Army veteran who worked as a bomb disposal expert in Afghanistan, said the war powers resolution was effectively asking "that the president do nothing."

For Democrats, Trump's war with Iran, influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is a war of choice that is testing the balance of powers in the U.S. Constitution.

"The framers weren't fooling around," said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., arguing that the Constitution is clear that only Congress can decide matters of war.

He said whether lawmakers support or oppose the Trump administration's military action, they should have the debate. "It's up to us, we've got to vote on it."

While views in Congress are largely falling along party lines, there are crossover coalitions. Both the House and Senate resolutions were bipartisan, and are drawing bipartisan support and opposition. The House is also voting on a separate resolution affirming that Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism.

The war powers resolution, if signed into law, would immediately halt Trump's ability to conduct the war unless Congress approved the military action. The president would likely veto the measure.

As an alternative, a small group of Democrats has proposed a separate war powers resolution that would allow the president to continue the war for 30 days before he must seek congressional approval. It is not expected to come yet for a vote.

After launching a surprise attack against Iran on Saturday, Trump has scrambled to win support for a conflict that Americans of all political persuasions were already wary of entering. Trump administration officials spent hours behind closed doors on Capitol Hill this week trying to reassure lawmakers that they have the situation under control.

Six U.S. military members were killed over the weekend in a drone strike in Kuwait, and Trump has said more Americans could die. Thousands of Americans abroad have scrambled for flights, many lighting up the phone lines at congressional offices as they sought help trying to flee the Middle East.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the war could extend eight weeks, twice as long as the president first estimated. Trump has left open the possibility of sending U.S. troops into what has largely been a bombing campaign by air. Hundreds of people in the region have died.

The administration said the goal is to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles that it believes are shielding its nuclear program. It has also said Israel was ready to act against Iran, and American bases would face retaliation if the U.S. did not strike first. On Wednesday, the U.S. said it torpedoed an Iranian warship near Sri Lanka.