Texas can require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, a U.S. appeals court ruled Tuesday in a victory for conservatives who have long sought to incorporate more religion into classrooms.

The 9-8 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a boost to backers of similar laws in Arkansas and Louisiana. Opponents have argued that hanging the Ten Commandments in classrooms proselytizes to students and amounts to religious indoctrination by the government.

In a lengthy majority opinion, the conservative-leaning appeals court in New Orleans rejected those arguments in Texas, saying the requirement does not step on the rights of parents or students.

"No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin," the ruling says.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that challenged the Texas law on behalf of parents said in a statement that they anticipate appealing the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction. This decision tramples those rights," they said in the statement.

The mandate is one of several fronts in Texas that opponents have fought over religion in classrooms. In 2024, the state approved optional Bible-infused curriculum for elementary schools, and a proposal set for a vote in June would add Bible stories to required reading lists in Texas classrooms.

The decision over the Ten Commandments law reverses a lower federal court ruling that had blocked about a dozen Texas school districts — including some of the state's largest — from putting up the posters. The Texas law signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott took effect in September, marking the largest attempt in the nation to hang the Ten Commandments in public schools.

From the start, the law was met almost immediately by a mix of embrace and hesitation in Texas classrooms that educate the state's 5.5 million public school students.

The mandate animated school board meetings, spun up guidance about what to say when students ask questions, and led to boxes of donated posters being dropped on the doorsteps of campuses statewide. Although the law only requires schools to hang the posters if donated, one suburban Dallas school district spent nearly $1,800 to print roughly 5,000 posters.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the ruling "a major victory for Texas and our moral values."

"The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it's important that students learn from them every single day," he said.

Tuesday's ruling comes after the appeals court heard arguments in January in the Texas case and a similar case in Louisiana. In February, the court cleared the way for Louisiana to enforce its law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

Republican Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the Texas ruling "adopted our entire legal defense" of the law in her state. In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey also signed a similar law earlier this month.

"Our law clearly was always constitutional, and I am grateful that the Fifth Circuit has now definitively agreed with us," Murrill said in a statement posted to social media.

Judge Stephen A. Higginson, in a dissenting opinion joined by four others on the court, wrote that the framers of the Constitution "intended disestablishment of religion, above all to prevent large religious sects from using political power to impose their religion on others."

"Yet Texas, like Louisiana, seeks to do just that, legislating that specific, politically chosen scripture be installed in every public-school classroom," Higginson wrote.

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.

With a series of “yes” replies to a judge, a man accused of killing four Idaho college students pleaded guilty in exchange for life in prison and no death penalty. But left untold so far: What motivated Bryan Kohberger to commit the middle-of-the-night knife attacks and why those victims?

More details could emerge when Kohberger returns to court for his sentence on July 23. Some answers could also be in the hundreds of documents filed by prosecutors and defense lawyers that have been under seal and out of public view starting in 2022.

“It is important that a full record be available, as if the matter and the evidence was exposed at trial, if we’re going to have a complete understanding of what went on,” said David Leroy, former Idaho attorney general.

Kohberger’s hearing in a Boise, Idaho, courtroom was finished in less than an hour Wednesday. A trial where loads of details would have been revealed was expected to have lasted at least three months.

“We deserve to know when the beginning of the end was,” the family of victim Kaylee Goncalves said in a Facebook post.

Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen were stabbed multiple times after 4 a.m. at a rental home in Moscow, Idaho, on Nov. 13, 2022.

Kohberger first killed Mogen and Goncalves and then killed Kernodle, who was still awake at the time, and Chapin, who was asleep, said Bill Thompson, the Latah County prosecutor. Two other people in the house were not harmed.

The 30-year-old killer was pursuing an advanced degree in the criminology program at Washington State University in Pullman, 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. Thompson said there was no evidence that Kohberger had previous contact with the victims, but he noted that phone data showed him in the neighborhood nearly two dozen times.

A knife sheath left at the crime scene turned out to be crucial evidence for investigators. A search of trash at Kohberger’s parents’ home in Pennsylvania was critical, too: It produced a Q-tip that was used to match his genetic material on the sheath.

Since 2022, there have been more than 200 orders to seal court filings in the Kohberger case, typically at the request of lawyers, including at least 103 this year alone, The Associated Press found.

Those documents included trial briefs filed by each side, witness lists, jury instructions, evidence exhibits and the defense team’s “alternate perpetrators” of the murders.

Idaho court rules allow a judge to seal or redact records to “preserve the right to a fair trial.”

On a separate issue, Wendy Olson, an attorney for news organizations, including the AP, asked a judge to lift a gag order that has greatly restricted what the prosecutor and defense lawyers can say to reporters.

“There is no need to preserve Mr. Kohberger’s ‘right to a fair trial’ because he has already admitted guilt,” Olson said in a court filing.

Leroy, the former attorney general, said he believes additional information about the crimes would be important to the victims’ families, law enforcement, experts and the general public.

A week after immigrant groups filed a lawsuit, California said Tuesday it will delay the revocations of 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses until March to allow more time to ensure that truckers and bus drivers who legally qualify for the licenses can keep them.

But U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the state may lose $160 million if it doesn’t meet a Jan. 5 deadline to revoke the licenses. He already withheld $40 million in federal funding because he said California isn’t enforcing English proficiency requirements for truckers.

California only sent out notices to invalidate the licenses after Duffy pressured the state to make sure immigrants who are in the country illegally aren’t granted the licenses. An audit found problems like licenses that remained valid long after an immigrant’s authorization to be in the country expired or licenses where the state couldn’t prove it checked a driver’s immigration status.

“California does NOT have an ‘extension’ to keep breaking the law and putting Americans at risk on the roads,” Duffy posted on the social platform X.

The Transportation Department has been prioritizing the issue ever since a truck driver who was not authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people in August.

California officials said they are working to make sure the federal Transportation Department is satisfied with the reforms they have put in place. The state had planned to resume issuing commercial driver’s licenses in mid-December, but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration blocked that.

“Commercial drivers are an important part of our economy — our supply chains don’t move, and our communities don’t stay connected without them,” said DMV Director Steve Gordon.

The Sikh Coalition, a national group defending the civil rights of Sikhs, and the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the California drivers. They said immigrant truck drivers were being unfairly targeted. The driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs.
Immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. The Transportation Department also proposed new restrictions that would severely limit which noncitizens could get a license, but a court put the new rules on hold.

Mumeeth Kaur, the legal director of the Sikh Coalition, said this delay “is an important step towards alleviating the immediate threat that these drivers are facing to their lives and livelihoods.”

Duffy previously threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from California, Pennsylvania and Minnesota after audits found significant problems under the existing rules like commercial licenses being valid long after an immigrant truck driver’s work permit expired. He dropped the threat to withhold $160 million from California after the state said it would revoke the licenses because the state was complying.

Trucking trade groups have praised the effort to get unqualified drivers who shouldn’t have licenses or can’t speak English off the road. They also applauded the Transportation Department’s moves to go after questionable commercial driver’s license schools.