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Alabama Can’t Prosecute Those Who Help With Out-of-State Abortions, Judge Rules

Alabama cannot prosecute doctors and reproductive health organizations for helping patients travel out of the state to obtain abortions, a federal judge ruled on Monday.
Alabama has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, and in 2022 its attorney general, Steve Marshall, a Republican, raised the possibility of charging doctors with criminal conspiracy for recommending abortion care out of state.
Multiple clinics and doctors challenged Mr. Marshall’s comments in court, accusing him of threatening their First Amendment rights, as well as the constitutional right to travel. The Justice Department under the Biden administration had also weighed in with support for the clinics, arguing that “threatened criminal prosecutions violate a bedrock principle of American constitutional law.”
On Monday, the judge, Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama, in Montgomery, ruled that Mr. Marshall would be violating both the First Amendment and the right to travel if he sought prosecution.
“It is one thing for Alabama to outlaw by statute what happens in its own backyard,” Judge Thompson, who was named to the court by President Jimmy Carter, wrote in his 131-page opinion.
“It is another thing,” he added, “for the state to enforce its values and laws, as chosen by the attorney general, outside its boundaries by punishing its citizens and others who help individuals travel to another state to engage in conduct that is lawful there but the attorney general finds to be contrary to Alabama’s values and laws.”
Judge Thompson described a hypothetical scenario in which a bachelor party from Alabama could be prosecuted for casino-style gambling in Las Vegas, which is illegal in Alabama.
“As the adage goes, be careful what you pray for,” he wrote.
Travel to other states to obtain an abortion, or abortion pills, has significantly increased since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. More than 171,000 patients traveled for an abortion in 2023, compared with 73,100 in 2019, according to the research organization Guttmacher Institute.
Mr. Marshall repeatedly defended his position in court, arguing that he retained the ability to prosecute a conspiracy that took place in Alabama and that the legality of abortion laws in other states did not matter. (He does not appear to have charged anyone in such a case.)
“The right to travel, to the extent that it is even implicated, does not grant plaintiffs the right to carry out a criminal conspiracy simply because they propose to do so by purchasing bus passes or driving cars,” Mr. Marshall wrote in one filing.
Republican-led states, like Alabama, generally have the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. Some of those states are now taking legal steps to stop out-of-state efforts to help residents obtain abortions.
Louisiana, which passed a law last year designating abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances, has charged both a Louisiana mother and a New York doctor with violating the state’s abortion ban. (New York has declined to extradite the doctor.)
And this month, a New York county clerk blocked Texas from filing legal action against the same doctor. New York has an abortion shield law that prevents penalties against abortion providers who use telemedicine to send medications to other states.
The Alabama ruling could be appealed, as the judicial system continues to grapple with the fallout from Roe. In June, the Supreme Court temporarily allowed for emergency abortions in Idaho, though it did not weigh in directly on the state’s abortion ban.
Alabama, where voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 aimed at protecting the rights of unborn children, has been at the center of the debate over reproductive medicine and abortion access. It has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, with an exception only if the life of a pregnant woman is at risk. It also allows for doctors to be charged with felonies that carry sentences of up to 99 years in prison.
And its anti-abortion amendment was at the heart of a State Supreme Court decision last year that found that embryos could be considered children, a decision that briefly paralyzed fertility treatments in the state and thrust the issue of in vitro fertilization into the national spotlight.
The clinics that first challenged Mr. Marshall’s comments, in 2023, included the Yellowhammer Fund, an organization founded in Tuscaloosa that helps fund and support abortion access in the Deep South, and the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, now known as WAWC Healthcare. The plaintiffs also included Dr. Yashica Robinson, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Huntsville.
In court filings, they said they either had stopped operating an abortion fund or had begun declining to answer questions about how patients could seek care out of state. Collectively, the plaintiffs still receive several calls a week asking for help; the court ruling on Monday put the figure at as many as 95 a week.
“Every day was agonizing,” said Kelsea McLain, the health care access director for the Yellowhammer Fund. The ruling, she said, brought “just an overwhelming sense of relief.”
“We are free to do exactly what we feel called to do, in ways that we are experts in,” she added. “People won’t be alone.”
Mr. Marshall’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Notably, in a 2022 opinion concurring with the decision to overturn Roe, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that he did not believe a state could constitutionally bar a resident from traveling for an abortion. Judge Thompson noted this in his ruling on Monday.
Abbie VanSickle contributed reporting.

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Video: Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm

new video loaded: Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm
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Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm
Federal agents fired crowd control munitions at protesters who blocked a road outside of the farm. Some demonstrators threw objects at the agents’ vehicles.
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Please make a path for emergency vehicles or chemical munitions will be deployed.
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Trump heads to Texas as recovery efforts from deadly flood continue

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump will travel to Texas on Friday to meet with first responders and grieving families in the aftermath of last week’s catastrophic flooding that has left more than 100 people dead.
During his visit, Trump is expected to receive a briefing from local elected officials and meet with victims’ relatives. He will be joined by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn told reporters this week that they planned to travel with Trump to tour the flood damage. It is unclear whether state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a staunch ally of the administration who is challenging Cornyn in next year’s GOP primary, will join them.
Authorities continue to search miles of the Guadalupe River for more than 150 people who remain missing as hopes of finding more survivors dwindle. Among those confirmed or feared dead are 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp in Hunt.
Trump on Sunday signed a major disaster declaration for Texas to make federal funding available for hard-hit Kerr County, where nearly 77% of voters backed him in the 2024 election.
The trip to Texas will be Trump’s second to the site of a natural disaster since he was inaugurated for his second term; he visited Los Angeles in January after a wildfire devastated large swaths of Southern California. During his first term, he made multiple trips to Texas in 2017 in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and its deadly floods. The same year, he traveled to Puerto Rico to survey damage caused by Hurricane Maria.
The Trump administration has faced criticism from officials and lawmakers at various levels of government who have argued that recent job cuts at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, alongside plans to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prevented accurate forecasting and worsened the effects of the floods. Administration officials have repeatedly rejected those assertions.
Trump has pledged to “get rid” of FEMA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and his administration has overseen a largely voluntary exodus of experienced personnel at the agency, fueling concerns about its ability to promptly respond to disasters. The concerns were heightened by a new policy from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem mandating her approval for any agency spending in excess of $100,000.
Asked by NBC News on Thursday whether the new policy delayed FEMA’s response to the tragedy in Texas, Trump defended Noem.
“We were right on time. We were there — in fact, she was the first one I saw on television,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone call. “She was there right from the beginning.”
Criticism of the disaster response has also focused on Kerr County’s emergency management system after reports indicated local officials did not use warnings from FEMA to send text alerts when the severity and speed of the flooding heightened, catching hundreds of people in a region known as “flash flood alley” by surprise. In addition, Kerr County, which has a population of more than 50,000 people, had no siren system to alert residents, in part because some local officials felt it was too expensive to install.
Trump called for additional flood alarms in Texas on Thursday, though he argued that the storm was unprecedented and that “nobody ever saw a thing like this coming.”
“After having seen this horrible event, I would imagine you’d put alarms up in some form, where alarms would go up if they see any large amounts of water or whatever it is,” he told NBC News.
Joe Herring, the mayor of Kerrville, told MSNBC’s Katy Tur this week that the state rejected an effort to install a siren system nearly a decade ago.
“The county government looked into that in 2017, and from what I heard, their grant application was denied,” Herring said. “I wasn’t in government at that time, but it sounds like we talked about it, we asked for help, and we were denied before.”
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Video: Trump Compliments President of Liberia on His ‘Beautiful English’

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Trump Compliments President of Liberia on His ‘Beautiful English’
During a lunch at the State Dining Room with five leaders of African nations, President Trump complimented the president of Liberia, where English is the official language, for his command of the language.
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— involvement in the investment in Liberia. “Yeah“. I would like to see that happen. We want to work with the United States in peace and security within the region, because we are committed to that. And we just want to thank you so much for this opportunity. “Well, thank you. It’s such good English, such beautiful — Where did you, where did you learn to speak so beautifully? Where — were you educated? Where?” Yes, sir. “In Liberia?” Yes, sir. “Well, that’s very interesting. That’s beautiful English. I have people at this table can’t speak nearly as well. They come from —”
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