In a lively Supreme Court Argument On Wednesday, the justices returned to a thorny issue that was certainly on their minds three other times: When can people sue over arrests they say were motivated by retaliation for criticism of the government?

The general rule is that the existence of probable cause for the arrest is sufficient to preclude lawsuits seeking retaliation in violation of the First Amendment.

Judge Neil M. Gorsuch said this was a recipe for abuse, allowing for politically motivated arrests. “How many statutes are on the books today, many of which are virtually never enforced?” he asked. “Last I read, there were over 300,000 federal crimes, counting statutes and regulations.”

“They can all sit there unused,” he added, “except for one person who claims that I was the only person in America ever prosecuted for this because I dared to express an opinion protected by the First Amendment.”

In the court’s last encounter with the question, in Nieves vs. Bartlett in 2019, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s majority opinion recognized. a small exception, where he used the example of jaywalking. “At many intersections, jaywalking is endemic, but it rarely results in an arrest,” he wrote, adding that there may be circumstances in which someone arrested for that crime could be charged for retaliation.

“If an individual who has complained vociferously about police conduct is arrested for jaywalking,” he wrote, “it appears to be insufficient protection of First Amendment rights to dismiss the charge of retaliation to arrest the individual for on the grounds that there was undoubtedly probable cause for the arrest. .”

How do I know when this exception applies? The prosecutor must, the chief justice wrote, “present objective evidence that he was arrested when similarly situated persons who did not engage in the same types of protected speech had not been.”

Wednesday’s case, Gonzalez v. Trevino, No. 22-1025, tested the limits of that exception. It involved Sylvia Gonzalez, a 72-year-old city council member in Texas who was arrested in 2019 for losing a piece of paper after criticizing the city manager.

It happened not long after Ms. Gonzalez won a surprise victory to become the city’s first Spanish-speaking council member. Her first official act was to help gather signatures for a petition calling for the city manager’s removal.

At the end of a council meeting, Ms. Gonzalez gathered the papers in front of her and put them in a folder. The petition was among them.

A two-month investigation followed. At the end, Ms. Gonzalez was arrested for concealing a government document, a misdemeanor.

The district attorney dropped the charges, but Ms. Gonzalez, who said she found the episode traumatic, resigned from her position. She sued, saying the arrest was in retaliation for exercising her First Amendment rights.

Ms. Gonzalez, represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group, said she had the kind of objective evidence of retaliation that Chief Justice Roberts required. Her attorneys had reviewed a decade of data from her county, they wrote, and it was “clear that the tampering statute has never been used to charge someone with a common and boring offense of putting a piece of paper in the wrong stack.”

A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said that wasn’t enough. “Gonzalez provides no evidence of other similarly situated individuals who mishandled a government petition but were not prosecuted,” said Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt wrote for the majority.

Several judges seemed uncomfortable with such a strict standard. After all, it’s one thing to show that no one else has been arrested for what Ms. Gonzalez did. It is another thing to prove that others lost pieces of paper and were not arrested.

The questioning suggested that the court might make a narrow ruling for Ms. Gonzalez, sending the case back to the Fifth Circuit for reconsideration under a more relaxed standard.

“You should be able to say that they have never charged anyone with this type of crime,” Judge Elena Kagan said, “and I don’t need to look for anyone who has engaged in the same behavior.”

But Chief Justice Roberts said Nieves’ decision was limited. “The court’s opinion in that case went out of its way to emphasize the narrowness of the exception,” he said.

Anya A. Bidwell, an attorney for Ms. Gonzalez, said a narrow interpretation of the exception would lead to troubling results.

“If the mayor in this case were to appear before TV cameras and announce that he was having Ms. Gonzalez arrested because she was questioning his authority,” Ms. Bidwell said, “the existence of probable cause would make this evidence legally irrelevant to make. ”

Lisa S. Blatt, an attorney for the defendants, urged the court to maintain the status quo and warned that the alternative would trigger a flood of lawsuits.

“Throughout history,” she said, “probable cause has precluded retaliation arrests. Nieves created one small exception for warrantless arrests, in which officers typically look away or issue warnings or tickets. This court should not blow up that exception.”

German police said on Sunday they had arrested two more suspects linked to last week’s arrest of one of the Red Army Faction’s most wanted fugitives, Daniela Klette.

A spokeswoman for the police in the state of Lower Saxony, which is responsible for the case, said authorities are now investigating whether the two men arrested in Berlin are Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, who were wanted in connection with the activities of the Red Army Faction.

The Red Army Faction, originally known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, was Germany’s most notorious post-war terrorist group. Mrs Klette, who evaded the police for decadeswas wanted in connection with the bombing of a prison in 1993.

According to police, Ms. Klette, Mr. Staub and Mr. Garweg committed at least 13 violent robberies while in hiding, netting them about two million euros, or about $2.1 million.

Mrs. Klette to arrest made national headlines last week not only because of the criminal group’s sensational past, but also because it had been living virtually in plain sight. Under the name Claudia Ivone, Ms. Klette lived in an apartment in Berlin’s popular Kreuzberg district. The now 65-year-old fugitive had been active in a group practicing the Brazilian martial art capoeira and in a local Afro-Brazilian society, even participating in a popular Berlin street festival and being photographed there.

Security experts have done that questions raised on the effectiveness of the German authorities’ approach to hunting down fugitives, after it emerged that an investigative journalist assisting a German podcast was able to easily identify Ms Klette last year using publicly available facial recognition tools.

In her apartment, Ms. Klette had hidden a grenade, a rocket launcher and a machine gun, police later said.

Shots were fired by security forces during Sunday’s arrests, police said, but no one was injured.

A day earlier, authorities had published photos they believed were of Mr. Staub and Mr. Garweg and that appeared to have been taken in recent years.

Early on Sunday morning, police officers arrested four men and a woman in Berlin’s trendy Friedrichshain district, next to the Kreuzberg district where Ms Klette was found, German news agency DPA said. About 130 police officers and an armored vehicle took part in the operation, the news agency said.

In recent weeks, the prosecutor leading the search had recently launched another public appeal to find the trio, dubbed by the news media as RAF retirees. A prosecutor appeared on the German version of “America’s Most Wanted” to remind people of the search and the fact that there was a reward of 150,000 euros.

The Red Army Faction was active from 1970 to the 1990s and included separate cells whose attacks on the state continued for decades, ultimately leading to the deaths of 33 people. Its members followed a Marxist-Leninist ideology and focused on American and capitalist interests in West Germany.

Ms. Klette was 18 when several of the group’s original members died in a suicide pact in a maximum-security prison in 1977. She, Mr. Staub and Mr. Garweg were part of the third generation of the group, which is believed to have included about 25 active members and hundreds of supporters.

Police say it remains unclear whether the trio had been together until Ms Klette’s arrest. It was more likely that they only came together to commit crimes, a spokesperson for the responsible public prosecutor’s office in Lower Saxony said last week.

Ms. Klette is believed to have played a role in the bombing of a newly built section of a prison in Hesse, which resulted in no injuries or deaths but caused about 80 million German marks and subsequently about $45 million in damage.

Authorities say they believe Ms. Klette, Mr. Staub and Mr. Garweg began robbing supermarkets at gunpoint just a year later.

The Red Army Faction was disbanded in 1998.

Migration into the United States through the dangerous jungle passage known as the Darién Gap has been halted, at least temporarily, following the arrest of two boat captains who work for companies that play a vital role in transporting migrants into the jungle.

According to the mayor of Necoclí, boat companies have suspended the crossing of migrants from two towns in northern Colombia, Necoclí and Turbo, to the entrance of the Darién Forest, leaving about 3,000 migrants stranded in those communities.

Colombian law enforcement action in the region will certainly be closely watched by U.S. officials: The Biden administration has been putting pressure on Colombia for months to try harder to prevent people from using the Darién as a path to the United States.

The boat route is the main route to the Darién Gap, a strip of land connecting South and North America that was once rarely crossed, but in recent years has become one of the most important and busiest migration routes in the hemisphere.

Authorities at the end of the route in Panama say nearly a million people have crossed the Darién since 2021, helping to fuel an immigration crisis in the United States.

The Colombian navy last week seized two boats from the two companies, Katamaranes and Caribe, which transported a total of 151 migrants from Necoclí to the jungle, according to the Colombian prosecutor’s office.

Officials determined that the migrants were being transported illegally, arrested the two boat captains and took control of both boats.

The arrests mark a major change in strategy by Colombian authorities, who for months have allowed boat operators to openly ferry migrants from Necoclí across the Gulf of Urabá to the towns of Acandí and Capurganá, where people venture into the jungle.

In an interview on Wednesday, Necoclí Mayor Guillermo Cardona said the boat companies, which operate large fleets and have multiple captains, had halted their activities in recent days “as a form of protest” against the arrests.

Boat operators have become key players in a multimillion-dollar migration business that has blossomed in northern Colombia.

In September, The New York Times reported that this company was run by local politicians and economic leaders, including Katamaranes’ manager, who was a mayoral candidate in Necoclí at the time. (The manager did not win and was not among those arrested.)

U.S. officials have personally asked Colombian officials since at least October to investigate the boat operators.

In a recent interview, a leading Colombian prosecutor, Hugo Tovar, said his office was working “hand in hand” with the United States on human trafficking through Colombia and the Darien. Two U.S. agencies, Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, provided training and shared information to assist with investigations, he added.

Necoclí is a seaside resort with limited resources and infrastructure, and has been overwhelmed by migrants in recent years.

It is unclear how long the boat companies will cease operations. Hundreds of migrants have been arriving a day in recent months, and if the protest continues, the number of people stranded in tents on the city’s beaches is likely to increase rapidly, pushing water and sanitation facilities beyond their breaking points.

This could put pressure on the Colombian government to ease any future arrests of boat operators, as the government has limited capacity to provide assistance to large numbers of people who could become stuck at the northern border.

Still, Mr. Tovar said his office remained committed to investigating human trafficking, calling it “a hemisphere-wide issue.”

Mr. Cardona, the mayor, said he was appealing to the national government for help for the hundreds of migrants who now have nowhere to go. “This is an SOS,” he said.

Immigration through the Darien has proven to be a huge challenge for the Biden administration, especially ahead of the 2024 presidential race.

President Biden and his almost certain Republican rival Donald J. Trump are both scheduled to appear Thursday in different parts of Texas near the southern border.

In 2021, just over 130,000 people passed through the jungles of Darién on their way to the United States. In 2022 there were almost 250,000. More than 500,000 people crossed the Darién last year, setting a record number of arrivals at the U.S. border.

Mr. Biden has tried to deter this flow by expanding legal migration routes and stepping up deportation efforts at the border.

But these measures have had only a limited effect.

On February 28, Panama authorities said that more than 72,000 people had crossed through Darien this year – a 35 percent increase over the number of people crossing the border in the first two months of last year.

The largest number of migrants came from Venezuela, where activists’ hopes that the authoritarian government would allow democratic elections this year have faded in recent months. The second most came from Ecuador, where the poor security situation has worsened this year. The next three major countries of origin are Haiti, Colombia and China.

Police said Monday that footage from a subway surveillance camera led to the arrest of three people in connection with the fatal shooting of a 45-year-old man last week.

According to the New York Police Department, Justin Herde, 24, Alfredo Trinidad, 42, and Betty Cotto, 38, were in custody in connection with the murder of William Alvarez, 45, of the Bronx.

Mr. Alvarez was on the southbound D train around 5 a.m. Friday morning when the three suspects boarded the train at the Fordham Road station and got into an argument with him, police said. Mr. Alvarez was shot in the chest, Michael M. Kemper, chief of police for the police department, said at a news conference on Monday. Chief Kemper added that Mr. Alvarez’s attackers fled the train at the 182nd-183rd Streets station.

About 1,000 of the system approximately 6,500 cars are equipped with cameras, part of a broader effort started in 2022 by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which plans to install cameras in the rest of the cars by the end of this year.

Murders on the subway are rare, but attract intense public attention. There have been two more fatal incidents in the system this year. Earlier this month, a 35-year-old man was killed and five other people were injured during the evening rush hour at the Mount Eden Avenue station in the Bronx. And in January, a 45-year-old father of three was shot on the No. 3 train in Brooklyn after intervening in an argument.

Transit leaders are under intense pressure to return ridership to pre-pandemic levels, and making the system feel safe is critical to that mission. The number of travelers increased by about 3 percent in January and averaged around 3 million daily passengers. In 2019, the daily number of passengers was approximately 5 million.

Chief Kemper on Monday described the killings as “isolated incidents,” but crime had been declining in the metro in recent months. Total crime was more than 45 percent higher in January than in the same period last year. Most of the increase is due to theft, police said.

In response, Mayor Eric Adams this month ordered an increased police presence, deploying another 1,000 uniformed officers to transit, a show of force that mirrors a similar increase in late 2022.

Over the past two years, state and city leaders have launched several anti-crime initiatives in the metro, including additional overtime for police officers and the involuntary removal of seriously mentally ill homeless people. Officials also installed the cameras in hopes of bringing more surveillance to places where bikers were concerned about random attacks, robberies and rising numbers of homeless people. Privacy watchdogs criticized the camera plan at the time as politically motivated and expensive. The mayor and Governor Kathy Hochul have said the measures were not only intended to improve public safety, but were also intended to combat the public perception – fueled by several high-profile crimes – that the system had become far more dangerous.

An analysis of MTA and New York Times police statistics published in November 2022 found that the likelihood of becoming a victim of violent crime on the subway was low, even though the number of crimes such as murder, rape, assault and theft exceeded doubled since 2019. The analysis found that the rate — 1.2 violent crimes per million subway rides — was about the same as the chance of being injured in a car crash during a two-mile ride.

So far this year, crime is up 13 percent compared to the same period last year. But after the jump early in the year, crime in the metro is down about 17 percent in the month of February so far compared to February last year.

The new cameras have also led to arrests in other crimes, including the Mount Eden attack in January, police said. “You can’t get away with it,” Andrew Albert, an MTA board member, said Monday at the authority’s monthly board meeting. “And your picture will be everywhere.”

Russia's top security service said on Tuesday it had arrested a dual citizen of Russia and the United States on charges of committing state treason by raising money for Ukraine.

The Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, identified the detainee as a 33-year-old woman living in Los Angeles. It said inside a statement that she had raised money for a Ukrainian organization that purchased weapons and other equipment for the Ukrainian army.

Perviy Otdel, a group of Russian lawyers who specialize in cases involving treason and other politically charged accusations, said the woman was charged with treason for sending just over $50 to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based company. York-based nonprofit organization that sends aid to the country.

The Russian news channel Media Zona identified her as Ksenia Karelina. Perviy Otdel identified her as Ksenia (Karelina) Khavana, with Karelina probably being her maiden name.

The FSB said the woman was arrested in the city of Yekaterinburg in central Russia. RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, published this a video that said the woman, who wore a white hat covering her eyes, was handcuffed and escorted by masked security service officers.

If found guilty, she could face 20 years in prison.

The detention of U.S. citizens on Russian soil in recent years has raised suspicions that the Kremlin views them as valuable assets that could be traded against high-profile Russians held in custody in the United States and other Western countries.

On the same day the woman's arrest was announced, a Moscow court rejected an appeal by Evan Gershkovich, an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal, whom Russia arrested last spring on espionage charges, to have his pre-trial detention lifted. It ruled that Mr Gershkovich – who, along with his employer and the US government, has denied the charges against him – must remain in prison until at least the end of March.

The number of cases of state treason in Russia has grown steadily since the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. About 50 people were charged with the crime last year. according to Perviy Otdelranging from high-profile critics of the Kremlin to a student accused of photographing Russian army formations in his city.

A court in Yekaterinburg was expected to hear an appeal from the newly arrested woman on Tuesday. according to the court's websitewhich also stated that she was accused of treason.

According to Ms. Karelina's profile on VK, a Russian social network, she received American citizenship in 2021. Hair profilewho also identified her as a student at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, said she graduated from Urals Federal University in Yekaterinburg in 2014.

Perviy Otdel said the woman was arrested in late January and charged with treason on February 7.

A decades-old fight over the direction of one of New York’s most prominent Hasidic Jewish groups descended into chaos this week when a faction of the group clashed with police over a tunnel secretly built to its main synagogue of the movement, one of the most important synagogues of the movement. the most important religious sites in the city.

The tunnel, a passageway between the headquarters of the group, the Chabad-Lubavitcher movement, and at least one adjacent property, was first discovered late last year. according to local news reports. But Monday afternoon, after a cement truck was brought in to fill the tank, some Hasidic men tried to block the attempt.

Police were called and officers said they found a group of men breaking through a wall of the prayer room leading to the tunnel. After a subsequent confrontation, which included skirmishes with officers, nine people were arrested, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.

Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Lubavitcher, described those who built the tunnel as a group of “extremist students.”

“This is obviously deeply troubling for the Lubavitch movement and the Jewish community worldwide,” he said in a written statement.

The clash took place at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the global headquarters of the movement, which is often referred to simply as 770.

It is not yet known exactly who built the tunnel, how they did it or what they hoped to achieve. But two men who said they spoke to some who broke through the synagogue’s wall said the motive was to hasten an expansion of 770 — a move that Lubavitcher movement leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Rebbe, asked. more than three decades ago.

The desired expansion is part of a conflict over the future of the movement that goes back at least thirty years.

The Hasidic group has been dealing with an internal dispute since the death of the Rebbe in 1994. A successor was never appointed.

The mainstream Lubavitcher leadership is committed to carrying out the Rebbe’s teachings and vision. But a smaller faction within the movement claims that the Rebbe is in fact the Messiah, and some in that group believe he never actually died. Legal disputes over 770’s role — including whether a plaque on an adjacent building could refer to the rebbe as deceased — have dragged on for years.

Conversations with members of the Hasidic community and reports in the local Hasidic press indicated that a group of messianic students was likely responsible for the construction of the tunnel, which they believe is a way to destroy the Lubavitcher Rebbe, whom they talk about in the present tense. to speak, to respect.

“They did it to expand the 770 and make it bigger,” said a man who gave his name as Zalmy Grossman and said he knew some of those arrested. “They have come to fulfill the Rebbe’s wishes.”

Omri Rahamim Bahar, 22, has been studying at 770 since arriving in New York from Israel four years ago. He said fellow community members were frustrated by leaders’ inaction in expanding the building to handle crowds during worship services. So, he said, some began taking matters into their own hands, in part by creating a tunnel from an adjacent building leading to the shrine wall.

After the cement truck arrived at 7.70 am on Monday, some men decided to enter the shrine from the tunnel. Video showed at least one man emerging from the tunnel covered in dust to the cheers of supporters.

“Of course it is difficult, and it does not feel good to see the main wall of the shrine with a hole in it, but I know there is no other way,” Mr Bahar said.

Videos taken from the building on Monday showed tumultuous scenes, with mostly young Hasidic men sitting in the tunnel, apparently to prevent it from filling up.

Videos and photos also showed some Hasidic men prying wooden panels from walls, and groups of men using large benches to physically prevent police from intervening and then skirmishing with officers, before one officer appeared to use some sort of spray to break the to disperse crowds.

News of the chaos spread quickly on social media, eventually culminating in a proliferation of anti-Semitic posts on social media, especially on X.

Shmuel Spielman entered the shrine Monday evening to say his evening prayers. Shortly after he entered, he saw “a commotion,” he said, describing a scene of a handful of young men — some of whom he recognized — breaking through the wall. “This is where the Rebbe came,” Mr. Spielman said. “I find this very annoying.”

Knowing that the shrine would be closed in the morning, he gathered his prayer materials and arranged to meet at another community member’s home for the morning service on Tuesday. He came by at 7:70 am on Tuesday to see if the building had reopened yet. That wasn’t the case, so he prepared to go to a large white tent that housed those who wanted to pray outside the building.

A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Buildings said inspectors were still on site as of 770 Tuesday evening and were examining the structural integrity of the building following the damage.

Jonah Markowitz and Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.