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 Justice Department is taking direct aim at the financial lifelines of Mexico’s most violent drug cartels, targeting money brokers who prosecutors say have adapted to intensified enforcement by increasingly routing drug profits through cryptocurrency from American cities to cartel leaders in Mexico.

The cases of four defendants recently sent from Mexico to the U.S. for prosecution provide a glimpse into shadowy money laundering networks that allow the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other violent groups to continue pumping dangerous drugs into American communities. The prosecutions underscore the Justice Department’s efforts to turn up the pressure on cartels and stay ahead of their sophisticated and ever-evolving tactics to launder money across the border without detection.

By targeting alleged money brokers — rather than street-level traffickers — prosecutors say they are aiming at a choke point they believe is essential to the cartels sustaining their operations as law enforcement pressure mounts on more visible drug routes.

Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second administration, the Mexican government has turned over more than 90 high-level defendants with ties to cartels in three transfers now at the center of a legal debate in Mexico. The defendants were wanted by U.S. prosecutors for crimes including drug trafficking, human smuggling and money laundering.

Senior Justice Department officials say bringing cartel figures to the United States is designed to do more than be a deterrent message. It could also lead to indictments against other high-level leaders if defendants cooperate, allowing prosecutors to reach higher into cartel leadership. Under Trump’s Republican administration, the Justice Department has restructured the Criminal Division to integrate narcotics prosecutors with anti-money laundering experts to better target cartels and to reflect a broader shift toward targeting the financial systems that sustain their operations.

The latest transfers to the U.S. include alleged Mexico-based money brokers, who authorities say oversee the movement of drug proceeds and pocket a percentage of the money that returns to the cartels as a commission, according to court papers. The brokers arrange for cash to be picked up in cities across the U.S. and conceal the money to get it across the border, often through digital assets as law enforcement has cut off other methods.

Prosecutors “want to hear on the distribution side how it works, who is involved, and seek additional indictments, and on the money laundering side, exactly the methods that they are using to get the money out of the United States through the U.S. banks,” Duva said. “There’s bulk cash smuggling that has been going on since the beginning of time, and then also sort of the newer trend of taking the cash, buying cryptocurrency, and then trading that cryptocurrency.”

Eduardo Rigoberto Velasco Calderon, Eliomar Segura Torres, Manuel Ignacio Correa and Cesar Linares-Orozco face money laundering conspiracy charges in indictments filed in Kentucky’s federal court. An attorney for Linares-Orozco declined to comment in an email to the AP, and no attorneys were listed in court papers for the other defendants.

The January transfer of 37 defendants from Mexico to the U.S. marked the third of its kind under Trump’s second term. Observers have described the transfers as an offering by Mexican authorities to offset mounting threats by Trump to take military action against cartels.

A group of lawyers and family members of cartel figures have accused Mexico of breaking the law by sending them without an extradition order. Mexico’s government has maintained the transfers were legal, carried out in the name of national security.

Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.

The tech giant has said it plans to use generative artificial intelligence to replace corporate workers. It has also been reducing a workforce that swelled during the pandemic.

Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in a blog post Wednesday that the company has been “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”

The company did not say what business units would be impacted, or where the job cuts would occur.

The latest reductions follow a round of job cuts in October, when Amazon said it was laying off 14,000 workers. While some Amazon units completed those “organizational changes” in October, others did not finish until now, Galetti said.

She said U.S.-based staff would be given 90 days to look for a new role internally. Those who are unsuccessful or don’t want a new job will be offered severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits, she said.

“While we’re making these changes, we’ll also continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” Galetti said.

CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively cut costs since succeeding founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, said in June that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the next few years.

The layoffs announced Wednesday are Amazon’s biggest since 2023, when the company cut 27,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, Amazon and other Big Tech and retail companies have cut thousands of jobs to bring spending back in line following the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon’s workforce doubled as millions stayed home and boosted online spending.

The job cuts have not arrived with a company on shaky financial ground.

In its most recent quarter, Amazon’s profits jumped nearly 40% to about $21 billion and revenue soared to more than $180 billion.

Late last year after layoffs, Jassy said job cuts weren’t driven by company finances or AI.

“It’s culture,” he said in October. “And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”

Hiring has stagnated in the U.S. and in December, the country added a meager 50,000 jobs, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November.

Labor data points to a reluctance by businesses to add workers even as economic growth has picked up. Many companies hired aggressively after the pandemic and no longer need to fill more jobs. Others have held back due to widespread uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies, elevated inflation, and the spread of artificial intelligence, which could alter or even replace some jobs.

While economists have described the labor situation in the U.S as a “no hire-no fire” environment, some companies have said they are cutting back on jobs, even this week.

On Tuesday, UPS said it planned to cut up to 30,000 operational jobs through attrition and buyouts this year as the package delivery company reduces the number of shipments from what was its largest customer, Amazon.

That followed 34,000 job cuts in October at UPS and the closing of daily operations at 93 leased and owned buildings during the first nine months of last year.

Also on Tuesday, Pinterest said it plans to lay off under 15% of its workforce, as part of broader restructuring that arrives as the image-sharing platform pivots more of its money to artificial intelligence.

Shares of Amazon Inc., based in Seattle, rose slightly before the opening bell Wednesday.

Republican lawmakers are poised to grill former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday at a congressional hearing that’s expected to focus fresh attention on two criminal investigations that shadowed Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.

Smith testified behind closed doors last month but returns to the House Judiciary Committee for a public hearing likely to divide along starkly partisan lines between Republican lawmakers looking to undermine the former Justice Department official and Democrats hoping to elicit new and damaging testimony about Trump’s conduct.

Smith will tell lawmakers that he stands behind his decision as special counsel to bring charges against Trump in separate cases accusing the Republican of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” Smith will say, according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by The Associated Press. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did,” Smith will say.

The hearing is unfolding against the backdrop of an ongoing Trump administration retribution campaign targeting the investigators who scrutinized the Republican president. The Justice Department has fired lawyers and other employees who worked with Smith, and an independent watchdog agency responsible for enforcing a law against partisan political activity by federal employees said last summer that it had opened an investigation into him.

“In my opinion, these people are the best of public servants, our country owes them a debt of gratitude, and we are all less safe because many of these experienced and dedicated law enforcement professionals have been fired,” Smith said of the terminated members of his team.

Smith was appointed in 2022 by Biden’s Justice Department to oversee investigations into Trump. Both investigations produced indictments against Trump, but the cases were abandoned by Smith and his team after Trump won back the White House because of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot be indicted.

The hearing will be led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who told reporters on Wednesday that he regards Smith’s investigations as the “culmination of that whole effort to stop President Trump from getting to the White House.”

“Tomorrow he’ll be there in a public setting so the country can see that this was no different than all the other lawfare weaponization of government going after President Trump,” Jordan said, advancing a frequent talking point from Trump, who pleaded not guilty in both cases and denied wrongdoing.

At the private deposition last month, Smith vigorously rejected Republican suggestions that his investigation was motivated by politics or was meant to derail Trump’s presidential candidacy. He said the evidence placed Trump’s actions squarely at the heart of a criminal conspiracy to undo the election he lost to Biden as well as the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by a mob of his supporters at the U.S. Capitol.

“The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy,” Smith said. “These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit.”

Smith is also expected to face questions about his team’s analysis of phone records belonging to more than half a dozen Republican members of Congress who were in touch with the president on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021. The records contained data about the participants on the calls and how long they lasted but not their contents.

It is unlikely that Smith will share new information Thursday about his classified documents investigation. A report his team prepared on its findings remains sealed by order of a Trump-appointed judge in Florida, Aileen Cannon, and Trump’s lawyers this week asked the court to permanently block its release.