The Supreme Court on Tuesday let President Donald Trump's administration continue swiftly deporting people to countries other than their own for now, while the justices consider whether the policy is legal.

The apparent 6-3 order temporarily lifts lower court requirements for migrants to get a chance to object before being sent to countries to which they have no ties.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have kept the lower court order in place.

The Trump administration said last week the lower court order forced the cancellation of a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries.

The conservative majority has sided with the administration before on the core Trump administration policy, allowing deportation flights to temporarily continue last year.

The court said it will consider several questions: whether the policy is lawful, whether lower courts had the authority to consider the case and issue a sweeping block, as well as other questions the government deems appropriate.

The order "has now allowed the administration to resume sending people to third countries where they may face persecution, torture, imprisonment, or other grave danger," said Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and one of the lawyers representing immigrants in the case.

"But today's order does not decide that the government's policy is lawful," she said in a statement. "The Court will hear that question on an expedited schedule."

Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported some 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries, from Liberia to Guyana. The vast majority have been sent to Mexico.

Trump's Republican administration has said that it sends people with final deportation orders to third countries when they can't be returned to their homelands or their native countries won't accept them, including those who have criminal convictions. Those governments provide assurances that people won't be persecuted or tortured, federal attorneys said.

Attorney General Todd Blanche called the policy "an entirely lawful and critical tool for immigration enforcement" in a social media post.

Some migrants, though, have found themselves imprisoned in countries they'd never heard of before their arrivals. Others also face serious safety risks and are left with little choice except to return to the home countries they were fleeing. Many have no criminal convictions and have been found to be at risk of torture or persecution, attorneys for the immigrants said.

The case comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally.

A close ally of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro long described by U.S. officials as the ousted leader’s frontman pleaded guilty Tuesday to a single count of money laundering tied to an alleged bribery conspiracy to win lucrative government contracts in the South American country.

As part of the plea deal, Alex Saab agreed to cooperate in continuing federal investigations, paving the way for his eventual cooperation against his former protector. He also agreed to forfeit $195 million in criminal proceeds from the corruption scheme.

Saab, 54, was deported in May by Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodriguez to the U.S., which has been targeting the Colombian-born businessman for more than a decade.

The money laundering offense carries a maximum 20-year penalty but prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence at the low end of the recommended range and seek additional reductions should his cooperation prove substantial. Saab was previously charged during the first Trump administration in 2019 and then arrested during a refueling stop in Cape Verde on what the Venezuelan government described as a high-level humanitarian mission to Iran.

But President Joe Biden pardoned Saab in 2023 in exchange for the release of several imprisoned Americans in Venezuela. The deal, part of a failed effort by the Biden White House to lure Maduro into holding a free presidential election, was harshly criticized by Republicans and federal law enforcement officials, who immediately began investigating Saab for other alleged crimes not covered by the narrowly tailored pardon.

“This case sends a clear message: Political connections, wealth and proximity to a corrupt regime will not put anyone beyond the reach of American justice,” said Jason A. Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who attended Tuesday’s proceedings along with more than a dozen federal agents.

The new indictment centers on contracts for the so-called CLAP program set up by Maduro to provide staples — rice, corn flour, cooking oil — to poor Venezuelans at a time of rampant hyperinflation and a crumbling currency. Saab amassed a fortune through Venezuelan government contracts but became even more valuable to Maduro as U.S. sanctions forced Venezuela to conduct much of its oil sales and foreign trade outside of Western financial institutions.

A jury on Monday convicted a Vermont man of attempted murder in the shootings of three Palestinian college students who were walking near his home, rejecting an insanity defense rooted in his claims that he was acting on orders from U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies.

Jason Eaton faces up to life in prison in the November 2023 attack in Burlington, which paralyzed Hisham Awartani from the waist down and wounded his friends, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid.

The men, all 20 at the time, had been visiting Awartani’s grandmother for Thanksgiving. They were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic as they walked near the University of Vermont campus after dusk. Two of them were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs.

The jury deliberated for several hours before reaching its verdict after a weeklong trial that saw testimony from the three men, who recounted how their stroll ended in bloodshed, and defense and prosecution psychiatric experts who offered differing views of Eaton’s mental health and criminal culpability.

Eaton, 51, stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read, standing alongside his lawyers — public defenders whom he tried to fire last week over his concerns that his defense hadn’t been “adequately presented.” Judge John Pacht, who blocked Eaton’s midtrial bid to act as his own lawyer, ordered him jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled.

Awartani and Aliahmad watched from the front row of the courtroom gallery, smiling and hugging people around them.

“The verdict cannot undo what happened or erase the trauma our families still carry, but it affirms something fundamental: Jason Eaton is responsible for what he did,” Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, told reporters afterward.

Eaton had pleaded not guilty but did not dispute that he was the shooter. He claimed that the CIA and Mossad transmitted their orders via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbors. His lawyers had urged jurors to find him not guilty by reason of insanity, an outcome that would’ve spared him from prison but could have required that he undergo mental health treatment.

Eaton’s lawyers, Margaret Jansch and Joshua O’Hara, said he had struggled with mental health issues his whole life, including diagnoses of attention deficit, post-traumatic stress, bipolar, depression and borderline personality disorders, culminating in a psychotic break after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting.

Prosecutor Sarah George countered that Eaton was a narcissist but not legally insane. He had a grandiose sense of self-importance and lacked empathy but was fully aware of the criminality of his conduct, George said in a closing argument. He appeared nervous when police arrived at his door, repeatedly asked for a lawyer and hasn’t claimed to have received any other messages directing his actions, she said.

Eaton told officers that he had a shotgun in his apartment, but didn’t disclose that he had other weapons, including a Ruger .380-caliber handgun that was found in a bedroom dresser and that crime lab testing concluded was used in the shooting, said George, the Chittenden County state’s attorney.

Days after the shooting, George said in her closing argument, Eaton had told his lawyers that he wished Awartani’s grandmother had warned him that the men were “going to dress up like terrorists” and trek through his neighborhood.

The shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, shook Burlington, and reverberated in the West Bank, where the three wounded men grew up and became friends as schoolmates in Ramallah before moving to the U.S. for college. It spawned calls for a hate crime investigation.

But no hate crime charges were filed as questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had compelled Eaton to open fire. After the verdict, Awartani’s mother said Eaton’s hateful rhetoric, aired at the trial, had made it clear why he targeted her son.