Attorneys and volunteers with the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project used to go into Vermont's prisons and meet with every immigration detainee, using their phones and computers for language interpretation, according to Jill Martin Diaz, executive director of the organization.

But they say that access changed this fall after Jon Murad took over as interim commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections. Since then, attorneys with the organization said the department has made it harder to meet and work with their clients, citing language barriers and lack of meeting space.

Murad denies those claims and says he has merely enforced policies that predate his time as commissioner, cutting off practices that shouldn't have been allowed under his predecessor.

Federal immigration authorities use Vermont prisons to hold often more than a dozen immigration detainees at a time per a contract agreement with the federal government. Though detainees can be held in any Vermont prison, they're most commonly brought to two facilities: Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington and Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans Town.

As President Donald Trump has ramped up his mass deportation campaign, federal immigration authorities often swiftly shuffle people they detain around the country. And the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project has been the main organization routinely providing legal services to all immigration detainees in Vermont.

"I think it's really important to capitalize on this opportunity that Vermont can be where we disrupt this arrest-to-deportation pipeline that is happening across this country," said Hillary Rich, an attorney at the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The issue has raised the eyebrows of legislators focused on the state's prison system and prompted them to write the Corrections Department a memo directing its officials to develop a memorandum of understanding with the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project to guarantee cooperation between the organization and the department.

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.