Federal immigration judges fired by the Trump administration are filing appeals, pursuing legal action and speaking out in an unusually public campaign to fight back.

More than 50 immigration judges — from senior leaders to new appointees — have been fired since Donald Trump assumed the presidency for the second time. Normally bound by courtroom decorum, many are now unrestrained in describing terminations they consider unlawful and why they believe they were targeted.

Their suspected reasons include gender discrimination, decisions on immigration cases played up by the Trump administration and a courthouse tour with the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat.

“I cared about my job and was really good at it,” Jennifer Peyton, a former supervising judge told The Associated Press this week. “That letter that I received, the three sentences, explained no reason why I was fired.”

Peyton, who received the notice while on a July Fourth family vacation, was appointed judge in 2016. She considered it her dream job. Peyton was later named assistant chief immigration judge in Chicago, helping to train, mentor and oversee judges. She was a visible presence in the busy downtown court, greeting outside observers.

She cited top-notch performance reviews and said she faced no disciplinary action. Peyton said she’ll appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent government agency Trump has also targeted.

Peyton’s theories about why she was fired include appearing on a “bureaucrat watchdog list” of people accused by a right-wing organization of working against the Trump agenda. She also questions a courthouse tour she gave to Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois in June.

Durbin blasted Peyton’s termination as an “abuse of power,” saying he’s visited before as part of his duties as a publicly-elected official.

The nation’s immigration courts — with a backlog of about 3.5 million cases — have become a key focus of Trump’s hard-line immigration enforcement efforts. The firings are on top of resignations, early retirements and transfers, adding up to 106 judges gone since January, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents judges. There are currently about 600 immigration judges.

Several of those fired, including Peyton, have recently done a slew of interviews on local Chicago television stations and with national outlets, saying they now have a platform for their colleagues who remain on the bench.

“The ones that are left are feeling threatened and very uncertain about their future,” said Matt Biggs, the union’s president.

Carla Espinoza, a Chicago immigration judge since 2023, was fired as she was delivering a verdict this month. Her notice said she’d be dismissed at the end of her two-year probationary period with the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

A Georgia appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that said county election officials in the state must vote to certify results according to deadlines set in law.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney had ruled in October that “no election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance.” The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Republican Fulton County election board member Julie Adams, who abstained from certifying primary election results last year.

A three-judge panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals last week upheld McBurney’s ruling, saying “Adams’ contention that the trial court erred by declaring she had a mandatory duty to certify election results is without merit.”

Certification, an administrative task that involves certifying the number of votes, became a political flashpoint when President Donald Trump tried to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 general election. Republicans in several swing states refused to certify results during primary elections last year, and some sued to try to keep from being forced to sign off on election results.

In the run-up to last year’s presidential election, Democrats and some voting rights groups worried that Trump-allied election officials could refuse to certify election results if he were to lose to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump ended up beating Harris.

Georgia law says county election superintendents, which are generally multimember boards, shall certify election results by 5 p.m. on the Monday after an election, or the Tuesday after if Monday is a holiday.

McBurney had written in his order that Georgia law allows county election officials to examine whether fraud has occurred and what should be done about it. They should share any concerns with the appropriate authorities for criminal prosecution or use them to file an election challenge in court, but cannot use their concerns to justify not certifying results, the judge wrote.

The Court of Appeals opinion echoed McBurney’s ruling.

The appeals court also noted that state law limits county election officials’ review of documents to instances when the total number of votes exceeds the total number of voters or ballots and also limits the review to documents related to the relevant precinct. To the extent that McBurney’s ruling allows a more expansive review, the judges sent it back to him for reconsideration.

Getty Images is facing off against artificial intelligence company Stability AI in a London courtroom for the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry.

Opening arguments before a judge at the British High Court began on Monday. The trial could last for three weeks.

Stability, based in London, owns a widely used AI image-making tool that sparked enthusiasm for the instant creation of AI artwork and photorealistic images upon its release in August 2022. OpenAI introduced its surprise hit chatbot ChatGPT three months later.

Seattle-based Getty has argued that the development of the AI image maker, called Stable Diffusion, involved “brazen infringement” of Getty’s photography collection “on a staggering scale.”

Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images. Getty was among the first to challenge those practices when it filed copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States and the United Kingdom in early 2023.

“What Stability did was inappropriate,” Getty CEO Craig Peters told The Associated Press in 2023. He said creators of intellectual property should be asked for permission before their works are fed into AI systems rather than having to participate in an “opt-out regime.”

Getty’s legal team told the court Monday that its position is that the case isn’t a battle between the creative and technology industries and that the two can still work together in “synergistic harmony” because licensing creative works is critical to AI’s success.

“The problem is when AI companies such as Stability AI want to use those works without payment,” Getty’s trial lawyer, Lindsay Lane, said.

She said the case was about “straightforward enforcement of intellectual property rights,” including copyright, trademark and database rights.

Getty Images “recognizes that the AI industry is a force for good but that doesn’t justify those developing AI models to ride roughshod over intellectual property rights,” Lane said.

Stability AI had a “voracious appetite” for images to train its AI model, but the company was “completely indifferent to the nature of those works,” Lane said.

Stability didn’t care if images were protected by copyright, had watermarks, were not safe for work or were pornographic and just wanted to get its model to the market as soon as possible, Lane said.

“This trial is the day of reckoning for that approach,” she said.

Stability has argued that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the training of the AI model technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon.

The judge’s decision is unlikely to give the AI industry what it most wants, which is expanded copyright exemptions for AI training, said Ben Milloy, a senior associate at UK law firm Fladgate, which is not involved in the case.

But it could “strengthen the hand of either party – rights holders or AI developers – in the context of the commercial negotiations for content licensing deals that are currently playing out worldwide,” Milloy said.
In the years after introducing its open-source technology, Stability confronted challenges in capitalizing on the popularity of the tool, battling lawsuits, misuse and other business problems.

Stable Diffusion’s roots trace back to Germany, where computer scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich worked with the New York-based tech company Runway to develop the original algorithms. The university researchers credited Stability AI for providing the servers that trained the models, which require large amounts of computing power.

Stability later blamed Runway for releasing an early version of Stable Diffusion that was used to produce abusive sexual images, but also said it would have exclusive control of more recent versions of the AI model.

Stability last year announced what it described as a “significant” infusion of money from new investors including Facebook’s former president Sean Parker, who is now chair of Stability’s board. Parker also has experience in intellectual property disputes as the co-founder of online music company Napster, which temporarily shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and popular rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations.

Immigration officials said Tomás Hernández worked in high-level posts for Cuba’s foreign intelligence agency for decades before migrating to the United States to pursue the American dream.

The 71-year-old was detained by federal agents outside his Miami-area home in March and accused of hiding his ties to Cuba’s Communist Party when he obtained permanent residency.

Cuban-Americans in South Florida have long clamored for a firmer hand with Havana and the recent apprehensions of Hernández and several other former Cuban officials for deportation have been extremely popular among the politically powerful exile community.

“It’s a political gift to Cuban-American hardliners,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a Latin American expert at Florida International University. But many Cubans fear they could be next on Trump’s list, he said, and “some in the community see it as a betrayal.”

While President Donald Trump’s mass deportation pledge has frightened migrants from many nations, it has come as something of a shock to the 2.4 million Cuban-Americans, who strongly backed the Republican twice and have long enjoyed a place of privilege in the U.S. immigration system.

Amid record arrivals of migrants from the Caribbean island, Trump in March revoked temporary humanitarian parole for about 300,000 Cubans. Many have been detained ahead of possible deportation.

Among those facing deportation is a pro-Trump Cuban rapper behind a hit song “Patria y Vida” — “Homeland and Life” — that became the unofficial anthem of anti-communist protests on the island in 2021 and drew praise from the likes of then Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State. Eliéxer Márquez, who raps under the name El Funky, said he received notice this month that he had 30 days to leave the U.S.

Thanks to Cold War laws aimed at removing Fidel Castro, Cuban migrants for many decades enjoyed almost automatic refugee status in the U.S. and could obtain green cards a year after entry, unlike migrants from virtually every other country.

Support for Trump among likely Cuban-American voters in Miami was at an all-time high on the eve of last year’s election, according to a poll by Florida International University, which has been tracking the Cuban-American community since 1991. Trump rarely mentions Cubans in his attacks on migrant targets including Venezuelans and Haitians. That has given many Cubans hope that they will remain immune to immigration enforcement actions.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been trying to turn the immigration crackdown to their advantage. In April, grassroots groups erected two giant billboards on Miami highways calling Rubio and Republican Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez “traitors” to the Cuban-American community for failing to protect tens of thousands of migrants from Trump’s immigration policies.

In March, Giménez sent Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a letter with the names of 108 people he said were former Cuban state agents or Communist Party officials living unlawfully in the U.S.

“It is imperative that the Department of Homeland Security enforce existing U.S. laws to identify, deport and repatriate these individuals who pose a direct threat to our national security, the integrity of our immigration system and the safety of Cuban exiles and American citizens alike,” Giménez wrote, adding that the U.S. remains a “beacon of hope and freedom for those escaping tyranny.”

Giménez’s target list was compiled by Luis Dominguez, who left Cuba in 1971 and has made it his mission to topple Cuba’s government. In 2009, when the internet was still a novelty in Cuba, Dominguez said he posed as a 27-year-old female sports journalist from Colombia to lure Castro’s son Antonio into an online romance.

With support from the right-wing Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, he started combing social media and relying on a well-oiled network of anti-socialist sources, inside Cuba and outside the country, to dox officials allegedly behind human rights abuses and violations of democratic norms. To date, his website, Represores Cubanos — Cuban Repressors — has identified more than 1,200 such state agents, some 150 in the United States.

“They’re chasing the American dream, but previously they condemned it while pursuing the Cuban dream,” Dominguez said. “It’s the typical double life of any Communist regime. When they were in power they criticized anything about the U.S. But now that they’re here, they love it.”

Dominguez, 62, said he regularly shares his findings with federal law enforcement but a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t comment on the agency’s relationship with the activist.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments Thursday in its first case stemming from the blitz of actions that have marked the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.

Before the court are the Trump administration’s emergency appeals of lower court orders putting nationwide holds on the Republican president’s push to deny citizenship to children born to people who are in the United States illegally.

Birthright citizenship is among several issues, many related to immigration, that the administration has asked the court to address on an emergency basis, after lower courts acted to slow the president’s agenda.

The justices are also considering the administration’s pleas to end humanitarian parole for more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and to strip other temporary legal protections from another 350,000 Venezuelans. The administration remains locked in legal battles over its efforts to swiftly deport people accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.

In Thursday’s arguments, the justices will be weighing whether judges have the authority to issue what are called nationwide, or universal, injunctions. The Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, has complained that judges are overreaching by issuing orders that apply to everyone instead of just the parties before the court.

Yet in discussing the limits of a judge’s power, the court almost certainly will have to take up the change to citizenship that Trump wants to make, which would upset the settled understanding of birthright citizenship that has existed for more than 125 years.

The first sentence of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The Citizenship Clause, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, was included to ensure that formerly enslaved people would be citizens. It effectively overturned the notorious Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court held that Black people, no matter their status, were not citizens.

Since at least 1898 and the Supreme Court case of Wong Kim Ark, the provision has been widely interpreted to make citizens of everyone born on U.S. soil except for the children of diplomats, who have allegiance to another government; enemies present in the U.S. during hostile occupation; and, until a federal law changed things in 1924, sovereign Native American tribes.

Trump’s executive order would deny citizenship to children if neither parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Those categories include people who are in the country illegally or temporarily because, the administration contends, they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

Almost immediately, states, immigrants and rights groups sued to block the executive order, accusing the Republican administration of trying to unsettle the understanding of birthright citizenship. Every court to consider the issue has sided with the challengers.

The administration is asking for the court orders to be reined in, not overturned entirely, and spends little time defending the executive order. The Justice Department argues that there has been an “explosion” in the number of nationwide injunctions issued since Trump retook the White House. The far-reaching court orders violate the law as well as long-standing views on a judge’s authority, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration.

Courts typically deal only with the parties before them. Even class actions reach only the people who are part of a class certified by a judge, though those can affect millions of people, Sauer wrote.

Nationwide injunctions, by contrast, have no limits and can even include parties who oppose what the court orders are designed to protect, he wrote. As an example, Sauer pointed to Republican-led states that favor the administration’s position but are subject to the nationwide injunctions.

But the justices may well ask about Trump’s executive order and perhaps even tip their hand.

Lawyers for the states and immigrants argue that this is an odd issue for the court to use to limit judges’ authority because courts have uniformly found that Trump’s order likely violates the Constitution. Limiting the number of people who are protected by the rulings would create a confusing patchwork of rules in which new restrictions on citizenship could temporarily take effect in 27 states. That means a child born in a state that is challenging Trump’s order would be a citizen, but a child born at the same time elsewhere would not, the lawyers said.

A budget airline that serves mostly small U.S. cities began federal deportation flights Monday out of Arizona, a move that’s inspired an online boycott petition and sharp criticism from the union representing the carrier’s flight attendants.

Avelo Airlines announced in April it had signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to make charter deportation flights from Mesa Gateway Airport outside Phoenix. It said it will use three Boeing 737-800 planes for the flights.

The Houston-based airline is among a host of companies seeking to cash in on President Donald Trump’s campaign for mass deportations.

Congressional deliberations began last month on a tax bill with a goal of funding, in part, the removal of 1 million immigrants annually and housing 100,000 people in U.S. detention centers. The GOP plan calls for hiring 10,000 more U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and investigators.

Avelo was launched in 2021 as COVID-19 still raged and billions of taxpayer dollars were propping up big airlines. It saves money mainly by flying older Boeing 737 jets that can be bought at relatively low prices. And it operates out of less-crowded and less-costly secondary airports, flying routes that are ignored by the big airlines. It said it had its first profitable quarter in late 2023.

Andrew Levy, Avelo’s founder and chief executive, said in announcing the agreement last month that the airline’s work for ICE would help the company expand and protect jobs.

“We realize this is a sensitive and complicated topic,” said Levy, an airline industry veteran with previous stints as a senior executive at United and Allegiant airlines.

Financial and other details of the Avelo agreement — including destinations of the deportation flights — haven’t publicly surfaced. The AP asked Avelo and ICE for a copy of the agreement, but neither provided the document. The airline said it wasn’t authorized to release the contract.

Several consumer brands have shunned being associated with deportations, a highly volatile issue that could drive away customers. During Trump’s first term, authorities housed migrant children in hotels, prompting some hotel chains to say that they wouldn’t participate.

Avelo was launched in 2021 as COVID-19 still raged and billions of taxpayer dollars were propping up big airlines. It saves money mainly by flying older Boeing 737 jets that can be bought at relatively low prices. And it operates out of less-crowded and less-costly secondary airports, flying routes that are ignored by the big airlines. It said it had its first profitable quarter in late 2023.

Andrew Levy, Avelo’s founder and chief executive, said in announcing the agreement last month that the airline’s work for ICE would help the company expand and protect jobs.