Prince Harry went back to work Thursday, mixing with children playing rugby and offering no hint of the days of turmoil that followed his recent announcement that he wished to step back from royal duties and become financially independent.
It was a fairly standard event for Harry, who watched as children from a local school offer a rugby demonstration on the Buckingham Palace grounds. Though ordinary, it marked the first time Harry had taken on a public engagement since announcing last week that he and his wife Meghan needed a change.
He joked with the kids and shook hands — offering flashes of the beaming smile that has made him one of the most popular members of the House of Windsor. He ignored a journalist’s question about ongoing discussions on his future.
“Look after the grass though, yeah?” he said to the children before retreating into his grandmother’s house. “Otherwise I’ll get in trouble.”
Queen Elizabeth II brokered a deal on Monday that determined there would be “a period of transition” to sort out the complicated matter of how to be a part-time royal. Meghan and Harry will spend time in both Canada and the U.K. as things are sorted out.
Royal aides are working around the clock to find solutions to the crisis. He is expected to remain in the U.K. into the coming week.
Meghan is already in Canada, where she has carried out visits to charities in Vancouver including Justice For Girls, which campaigns for an end to violence, poverty and racism for teenagers.
In the meantime, Harry released two video statements on causes he has long championed: mental health and the Invictus Games.
In the first video, he introduced a new initiative to champion the importance of mental health for those who play rugby. The initiative aims to combine sport with mental health awareness at a time when suicide is the leading cause of death for men between the ages of 20 and 49 in the U.K.
In footage posted on the Sussexroyal Instagram page, he also launched the next leg of the Invictus Games for wounded service personnel and veterans. The event will be held in Duesseldorf in 2022.
As part of his duties Thursday, the prince also hosted the Rugby League World Cup 2021 draw in the palace’s grand throne room. He spoke about sport having the power to change lives.
“It’s saving lives as well,” Harry said. “So I think for me and … everybody in this room, whether it’s rugby league, or sports in general … it needs to be in everybody’s life if possible.”
Harry then pulled the first ball of the draw, which decided the opening game for England’s men’s team. The country picked was Samoa. 
 
 
 

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What role do the managers play in the impeachment trial? VOA explains the process.

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A judge in bankruptcy court has ruled in favor of a law school graduate who asked to have more than $220,000 in student debt erased.
The case is notable because student debt is commonly thought to be unforgivable in bankruptcy cases, a lament of many students who leave college saying they are too financially burdened to advance the milestones of adulthood, like buying property or having children.

Students Drowning in ‘Insane’ Debt Delay Life Goals
Mentioning the words “student debt” to millennials and younger people is like dropping a match on a trail of gasoline.”Our total debt for credit cards and student loans combined is almost $150,000,” said Matt Porter, 31, who lives in Lowell, Massachusetts, with his fiancee.
But borrower Kevin J. Rosenberg, 46, of Beacon, N.Y., asked the court to forgive his student debt because repaying the loans was impossible and created an undue hardship, the legal test of whether a debtor should be forgiven.

The average loan debt for law school graduates in 2012 was between $84,600 and $122,158, according to the American Bar Association. Almost 70% of law school graduates in 2016 left with student debt, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
ECMC — a nonprofit organization headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota — argued that Rosenberg did not meet the undue hardship standard. They cited his age (45), health, lack of dependents, two degrees, and law licenses in New York and New Jersey in their legal brief.“
Shortly after starting his first job as an associate attorney at a law firm, [Rosenberg] decided that practicing law was not for him, because he disliked working in an office and did not find the work interesting,” New Jersey attorney Kenneth Baum, who represented ECMC, wrote in his court brief. 
“Thus, after leaving that job after only 2½ months, [Rosenberg], with the exception of a brief period of working as a part-time contract attorney on a project basis – which [he] likened to working as a paralegal – has not sought any employment in the legal profession and has no intention of ever doing so, despite the fact that opportunities abound for Plaintiff to make a very respectable living in the legal profession,” Baum wrote.
Rosenberg did not return calls or email to VOA, but was quoted in Yahoo Finance on January 12, saying, “First of all, I realized the whole job is sitting in the office by yourself. You can’t be creative at all, but also that you either help people out or you make a good living — you can’t do both. And I kind of had a problem with that.” 
Judge Cecelia G. Morris, chief U.S. Bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of New York, agreed with Rosenberg. She used the student-debt test case, Brunner v N.Y. State Higher Education Services Corp., from 1987 differently than other decisions. “
Brunner has received a lot of criticism for creating too high of a burden for most bankruptcy petitioners to meet,” Morris wrote. For Brunner, who filed for bankruptcy within a year of graduation, “the test is difficult to meet,” she wrote. “
However, for a multitude of petitioners like Mr. Rosenberg, who have been out of school and struggling with student loan debt for many years, the test itself is fairly straightforward and simple,” she said.
Rosenberg was relieved of his debt.
Student-loan experts say that most students are under the impression that student debt cannot be relieved in bankruptcy court. Some get bad advice from attorneys who also believe student debt cannot be forgiven in bankruptcy court. “
You can’t discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy: That was the prevailing wisdom,” said Jason Iuliano, an expert in student debt and assistant professor of law at Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia.
But Iuliano, whose own student debt was hundreds of thousands of dollars after receiving degrees from Harvard University and Princeton University, dove into the caseload and found that wasn’t true. “
What I found when I actually went in and collected the cases was a lot of folks actually do meet the [undue hardship] test,” he said. “About 40% of the student loan debtors in bankruptcy … are successful in getting a discharge of some sort. And that struck me as really important.”
Iuliano said about 250,000 student debtors file for bankruptcy each year. But only about 500 of them take a necessary additional legal action to address college-loan specific debt. Only 1% end up going in front of a judge. 
“A lot more people should be filing and trying to prove undue hardship, because they would be successful if they actually came before a judge,” Iuliano advised.
Ashley Harrington, senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, celebrated the decision, but said student debt that impacts low-income and minority borrowers more than any others should be addressed long before debtors end up with interest-bloated loans. 
“My initial thought was, ‘This is great, good for him.’ We’ve always supported student-loan disposal of both state and federal loans,” Harrington said. “But, there still is a need for Congress to do something about it.”
Among students in the Class of 2016, 70% borrowed an average of $30,000, Harrington said.
“People are really struggling under this debt for a very long time. Your payment return is 20 to 25 years, and that’s as long as some people’s mortgages,” she said.
“Part of the conversation is changing in judicial chambers because everyone is realizing what a crisis this is, seeing how it effects students’ lives,” Harrington added. “How much help have you given them?”
Rosenberg’s case and Judge Morris’ decision have ramped up that conversation, Iuliano said. 

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Turkish airstrikes inside Iraq targeting members of an outlawed Kurdish rebel group have killed at least four minority Yazidi fighters allied with the rebels, an Iraqi army official said Thursday.
The strikes, which took place on Wednesday, hit a military pickup truck in the northern town of Sinjar in Nineveh province, said the army official, speaking on condition of anonymity under regulations.
The pickup was carrying members of the Iraqi Yazidi militia known as the Shingal Resistance Units, affiliated with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, which is fighting an insurgency in Turkey and has been outlawed by Ankara.
Kurdish television channels in northern Iraq reported that Yazidi commander Zardasht Shingali was among the dead and that another five fighters were wounded in the strikes.
In Baghdad, Iraq’s joint operations command said five people were killed in the attack in Sinjar. The different casualty tolls could not immediately be reconciled.
The Yazidi militia was formed in 2014, after the Islamic State group overran much of northern Iraq in August of that year and took over security in Sinjar after IS was pushed out of town in November 2015. It maintains strong relations with Kurdish groups such as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, in Syria, and the PKK in Turkey.
Turkey has repeatedly struck the Yazidi militia positions in Sinjar in efforts to cut supply routes of the PKK. Also, a Turkish airstrike there last year killed Zaki Shingali, a PKK commander.
Elsewhere in Iraq, a car bombing wounded at least four Iraqi solders on a highway leading to a border crossing with Saudi Arabia, according to a statement from the Iraqi joint command.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but it was suspected to have been carried out by remnants of the Islamic State group.

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Japan has confirmed its first case of a strain of a coronavirus that has killed one man and sickened 41 others in China since last month.
The Health Ministry says a man in his 30s who lives in Kanagawa prefecture was hospitalized last week suffering from a persistent cough and a fever, which developed  after visiting the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. The ministry says the man has since recovered and been released.
This is the second reported case of the virus outside of China, after a Chinese woman traveling in Thailand was diagnosed with the virus.  Neither person had visited the seafood market in Wuhan that has been identified as the center of the outbreak and that had sparked fears that the virus could spread through human-to-human transmission.
The virus is a new strain of the same family of viruses that caused the outbreak of several acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, that killed over 600 people in China and Hong Kong between 2002 and 2003.  The detection of this outbreak comes ahead of the Lunar New Year, when hundreds of millions of Chinese normally travel. 

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The Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump begins Thursday with preliminary proceedings, including House lawmakers who will act as prosecutors presenting the articles of impeachment to the Senators who will serve as the jury.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will be sworn in for his role in overseeing the process, and then will swear in the 100 members of the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the final step Thursday will be to notify the White House and “summon the president to answer the articles and send his counsel.”
The main portion of the trial will begin Tuesday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed the articles of impeachment at a ceremony Wednesday, moving the process forward after delaying for about a month as House Democrats tried to get Senate leaders to agree to allow testimony from new witnesses during the trial.
McConnell has resisted calling witnesses, saying that decision would come later in the trial.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks to Capitol Hill reporters following the weekly Senate Republican policy lunch at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Jan. 14, 2020.The Democratic-led House also voted Wednesday to formally choose the seven impeachment managers who will serve as prosecutors arguing Trump abused his power and obstructed Congress. They include House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, Administration Committee Chair Zoe Lofgren, Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, Congresswoman Val Demmings, Congressman Jason Crow and Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia.
As Pelosi announced the impeachment managers at a morning news conference, Trump tweeted the impeachment was “another Con job by the Do Nothing Democrats.”
A senior administration official told reporters the White House is ready for the trial “because the facts overwhelmingly show that the president did nothing wrong.”
White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham also reiterated Trump’s defense that he has done nothing wrong.
“He looks forward to having the due process rights in the Senate that Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats denied to him, and expects to be fully exonerated,” Grisham said.
Trump is accused of abusing his power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a gas company in Ukraine, as Trump withheld $391 million in military aid that he later released.  The president is also accused of subsequently obstructing a congressional probe into his actions.
No matter what rules are in place for the Senate trial, Trump seems to be safe from the prospect of being convicted and removed from office.
His Republican Party holds a 53-47 majority in the chamber, and conviction requires a two-thirds majority, meaning if all Democrats voted to convict, then 20 Republicans would have to also vote that way for Trump to be convicted and removed from office.
This is the third time in the country’s 244-year history a U.S. president has been impeached and targeted for removal from office.
Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 were both impeached by the House but acquitted in Senate trials. A fourth president, Richard Nixon, resigned in 1974 in the face of certain impeachment in a political corruption scandal.

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Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer who worked to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, told the New York Times and the U.S.-based cable news network MSNBC that Trump was aware of his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine.
Trump “knew exactly what was going on,” Parnas told Rachel Maddow in an interview broadcast Wednesday night.
The Times quoted him as saying, “I am betting my whole life that Trump knew exactly everything that was going on that Rudy Giuliani was doing in Ukraine.”
Previously, Trump has denied sending Giuliani to Ukraine to look for dirt on Biden, the former vice president and a rival in the 2020 presidential election.
But Parnas told Maddow that Trump “was aware of all my movements.”
“I wouldn’t do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president,” Parnas said.  “I was on the ground doing their work.”
Parnas said his function in working with Giuliani was to meet with senior Ukrainian officials in a search for evidence of corruption by Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who worked for Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. Trump allegedly withheld aid to Ukraine until President Volodymyr Zelenskiy committed to investigating the Bidens, and those allegations are at the center of his impeachment by the House of Representatives.
In a tweet later Wednesday night, Katherine Faulders, White House and Capitol Hill reporter for ABC News, said she asked Giuliani if he had any comment on the interview with Parnas. He texted, “None he’s a very sad situation.”

Asked Giuliani if he had any comment on the ongoing Parnas interview and he texted me “None he’s a very sad situation.”
— Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) January 16, 2020
“I mean they have no reason to speak to me,” Parnas told Maddow. “Why would President Zelenskiy’s inner circle or (Interior Minister Arsen) Avakov or all these people or (former) President (Petro) Poroshenko meet with me? Who am I? They were told to meet with me. And that’s the secret they’re trying to keep.”
He added that Trump’s interest in Ukraine was never about rooting out government corruption but was “all about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden.”
When Maddow asked Parnas about Trump’s claim that he does not know him, Parnas said, “He lied,” adding that he was with Giuliani four or five days a week in Ukraine during which Trump was in constant contact with Giuliani.
Parnas said he wants “to get the truth out … it’s important for our country, it’s important for me … a lot of things are being said that are not accurate.”
Parnas and another Giuliani associate, Igor Fruman, have been indicted on charges of making illegal contributions to the Trump campaign. Both have pleaded not guilty. 

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi transmitted articles of impeachment against U.S. President Donald Trump Wednesday to the Senate, following four weeks of debate over the rules of a trial that could remove the president from office. But as VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports, the Republican-majority Senate will consider the evidence and determine if Trump should be removed from office.

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The new U.S.-China trade agreement includes provisions that are aimed at curbing forced technology transfers, in which companies hand over technical know-how to foreign partners. For many high-tech businesses, the intellectual property behind their products represents the bulk of their companies’ value.  To learn more about the risks of IP theft, Elizabeth Lee recently visited the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where companies talked about the risks to their technology secrets.

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While most European countries have been reluctant to take back their citizens who joined the Islamic State (IS) terror group in Syria and Iraq, the government of Kosovo has taken a different path by repatriating dozens of its people with plans to reintegrate them into society. 
Some experts say Kosovo’s proactive approach, supported by a national action plan that addresses key components from detention to counseling to rehabilitation, is a unique example with considerable success in facing the dilemma of IS foreign fighters. 
“Kosovo is a small country with a very well-established social structure,” said David L. Phillips, director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. “So, there is a system in place for managing their returns. That’s why the government of Kosovo is better suited to accept returns than larger countries in Europe where returnees could simply become absorbed into the local population and commit crimes either in their home countries or go to other battlefields.” 
Kosovo is a predominantly Muslim nation in the central Balkan Peninsula with an estimated population of 1.9 million. Between 2012 and 2015, an estimated 355 Kosovars went to Syria to join IS and other Sunni militant groups, making up the highest per capita share of foreign fighters in Syria. 
Pristina last April brought home from Syria 110 of its citizens, consisting of 74 children, 32 women and four men. The total number of adult returnees has reportedly since reached about 250, with another 98 killed in Syria and dozens of others remaining unaccounted for. 
Leonora’s story 
Leonora is one of the IS women who was repatriated along with her four children from the Kurdish-controlled al-Hol camp in northeast Syria on April 20, 2019. 
Leonora did not want her real name used, to protect her identity and those of her children. She told VOA that the government had put her under house arrest while her court process was continuing. A court in November officially accused her of membership in a terrorist organization but has yet to indict her. 
“We didn’t think we would ever come back. For us, everything was over and we thought we were going to be there all our lives,” said Leonora, speaking of her living conditions in the overcrowded al-Hol camp. She said that when the Pristina officials decided to take them home, “it felt like we were born again.” 
Under Kosovo’s reintegration policies, Leonora is allowed to go out, with certain limitations and strict monitoring. Her children are already back in school in the hope of starting a new, normal life. 
“I am just happy that my kids are in time to go to school now and haven’t lost a year. That’s why I’m so happy,” she told VOA. 
Now 25 years old, the Kosovar woman had just finished high school and was planning to go to college when her husband arranged for them to move out of the country in mid-2014. Leonora told VOA she was unaware that her husband had Syria in mind when the couple and their children flew on one-way tickets from Adem Jashari International Airport in Pristina to Istanbul en route to the IS self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria on August 2014. 
“It was a war zone and I didn’t agree to go. But everything was complicated because he didn’t make it clear to me that we were going to Syria,” she told VOA. “From here, we actually headed for [Turkey], to which I agreed to go, but at the last moment after we arrived in Turkey, he decided we would go to Syria.” 

FILE – Kosovo police escort a suspect in a terror plot to a court in Pristina, July 12, 2015. Police had arrested five suspects linked to the Islamic State group who allegedly were planning to poison a reservoir.Husband killed 
At the beginning of their stay in Syria, when IS was still in control of large swaths of land and had resources to pay salaries to its fighters, the family enjoyed a “comfortable life,” according to her. But things changed 2½ years later when her husband was killed on the battlefield as IS started losing ground to the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. 
“Sometimes we were left homeless and sometimes two or three families lived in one house, each in a room,” she said. “Our payment was decreasing day by day. The last few months were the worst. It was terrible.” 
The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces declared IS defeated in March 2019. The forces still hold about 2,000 alleged foreign fighters and close to 14,000 foreign women and children in camps. 
Kosovo officials in the past have said they considered the women and children to be “innocent victims,” lured by their husbands to the conflict zone. Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj in May said that his government was taking full responsibility for its citizens, though “everybody who returns will be subject to the law.” 
Upon the return of its citizens, the Kosovar government allowed all the children to go home while the women were put under house arrest during their trials. 
20 indictments 
Astrit Dibra from Kosovo’s Special Prosecution Office told VOA that 20 of the women returnees have so far been indicted. Eighteen of the women were charged with “organizing and participating in a terrorist group,” with the rest charged with  “joining or participating in foreign military or police, external paramilitary or para-police formations, in group or individually, outside the territory of the Republic of Kosovo.” 
A majority of the men, about 85, have been prosecuted. 
The government last year created the Division for Prevention and Reintegration, a cross-ministry agency assigned to support the repatriated women and children. Through reintegration program, the women and children are given special educational classes and are provided with food and clothing vouchers. Those in prison are put under deradicalization programs. 
According to Kujtim Bytyqi, a Kosovo-based expert, the Kosovar government felt empowered to return its citizens from Syria because of  its relatively small and homogeneous population. 
“They are just Kosovar citizens, very well-integrated, because they were born here and their parents were born here. And it is a very small society, if I can say, so the government has very close cooperation with their families, their neighbors and their community,” Bytyqi told VOA. 
European countries 
Addressing why other European countries are less willing to take back their citizens, Bytyqi charged that “foreign fighters from EU countries are usually people who are citizens of that country, but their origin in most of the cases is some other countries. But in the case of Kosovo, they are just Kosovar Albanians who don’t have dual citizenship.” 
Based on government documents, Bytyqi has found that at least five returnees have been involved in planning domestic attacks. While the government integration effort has been largely effective, he warned that “a small number of returnees remain highly radicalized and are both willing and determined to attack at home.” 
Paul McCarthy, the Europe regional director at the International Republican Institute, told VOA that Kosovar officials need to address the fundamental issues that forced many of their citizens into radicalization. 
While some citizens joined IS for ideological reasons, many others left Kosovo because of a deep feeling of injustice and lack of economic opportunities, he argued. 
“It is extremely important, when we’re looking at the deradicalization process, also to look at strengthening Kosovo’s governmental institutions, as well to respond to their citizens and to listen to their grievances. One of the sources of radicalization is a feeling that institutions and society as a whole are not responding to an individual’s needs,” he said. 

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The United States and China agreed to a ‘Phase 1’ trade deal on Wednesday that includes the protection of intellectual property rights and agricultural policy.
Both countries say they plan to continue working on issues.  “
The parties intend to continue implementation and improvement of existing mechanisms for bilateral communication on agricultural policy,” according to the
FILE – U.S. and Chinese officials are seen meeting during the second bilateral Diplomatic and Security Dialogue, at the State Department in Washington, Nov. 9, 2018.Citing Washington’s call for a “results-oriented” relationship with Beijing, U.S. officials are reportedly not anxious to resume the DSD, which is perceived as highly symbolic.
On Jan. 3, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to Chinese Politburo member Yang Jiechi by phone after the U.S.- targeted killing of top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani.   Yang raised the resumption of DSD with Pompeo, according to a diplomatic source.
“We are not going to comment on the details of our diplomatic conversations or engagements,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA.
One of the top issues on the U.S. agenda is persuading China to halt the purchase of oil from Iran, which Washington says has fueled Tehran’s nuclear and missile ambitions. Trump has also called on China and other signatories of the so-called JCPOA Iran nuclear deal to “walk away from the 2015 deal.”
Watch related video by VOA’s Patsy Widakuswara:

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While senior administration officials say they have repeatedly emphasized to Beijing “the threat posed to regional stability by Iran’s nuclear and missile programs,” some experts are skeptical that China, a traditional ally of Iran, will cooperate with the U.S. against Tehran.
Jon Alterman, CSIS’s director of the Middle East, said he is doubtful China could use its influence over Iran to help ease tensions in the Middle East.  “
I wouldn’t expect China is able to play a useful role in de-escalating this conflict,” Alterman said. “China might wish to be included in a larger grouping of countries as it was in the JCPOA process, but even so, I’d expect its role to be quite passive.”  
Others say China welcomes a distracted U.S., which would provide Beijing with breathing space to continue to build its comprehensive national power. “
The Chinese Communist Party would welcome developments in the Middle East that siphon U.S. resources and attention away from U.S. efforts to deter Chinese aggression,” said Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
 

A federal judge agreed Wednesday to block the Trump administration from enforcing an executive order allowing state and local government officials to reject refugees from resettling in their jurisdictions.
    
U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction requested by three national refugee resettlement agencies that sued to challenge the executive order.
    
In his 31-page ruling, Messitte said the agencies are likely to succeed in showing that the executive order is unlawful because it gives state and local governments veto power over the resettlement of refugees.
    
President Donald Trump’s administration announced in November that resettlement agencies must get written consent from state and local officials in any jurisdiction where they want to help resettle refugees beyond June 2020.
    
Agency leaders say the order effectively gives governors and county leaders a veto in the resettlement process. The agencies also argue the order illegally conflicts with the 1980 Refugee Act.
    
Messitte concluded Trump’s order doesn’t appear to serve the “overall public interest.”
    
“Refugee resettlement activity should go forward as it developed for the almost 40 years before the (executive order) was announced,’”he wrote.
   
 Church World Service, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and HIAS, a Jewish nonprofit, filed the lawsuit in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Nov. 21. They are three of the nine national organizations agencies that have agreements with the federal government to provide housing and other services for refugees.
    
Texas, which took in more refugees than any other state during the 2018 fiscal year, became the first state known to reject the resettlement of new refugees. Gov. Greg Abbott said in a letter released Jan. 10 that Texas “has been left by Congress to deal with disproportionate migration issues resulting from a broken federal immigration system.”
    
The head of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, said the ruling for now puts on hold a policy that was causing “irreparable harm to refugee families and resettlement agency’s already. “ She added that it essentially re-opens the door for now to refugees being resettled in Texas.
    
“It’s a significant day in which the rule of law won,” O’Mara Vignarajah said.
    
At least 41 states have publicly agreed to accept refugees, but a governor’s decision doesn’t preclude local officials from refusing to give their consent. For instance, the Democratic mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, has refused to give written consent for refugees to be resettled in the city.
    
Trump’s order says the agencies were not working closely enough with local officials on resettling refugees and his administration acted to respect communities that believe they do not have the jobs or other resources to be able to take in refugees. Refugees have the right to move anywhere in the U.S. after their initial resettlement, but at their own expense.
    
Before Trump signed the executive order, state and local officials were given a voice but not a veto in deciding where refugees would be resettled, resettlement agency lawyers said.
    
During a Jan. 8 hearing, the judge said the president’s order essentially changed a federal law governing the resettlement of refugees.
    
Justice Department attorney Bradley Humphreys said the Refugee Act gives the president “ample authority” to make such a change.
    
“Why change it now?” Messitte asked. “Is it purely a political thing?”
    
Humphreys said the executive order is designed to enhance the involvement of state and local officials in the process of resettling refugees. But he insisted it doesn’t give them a veto over resettlement decisions.
    
The Trump administration has capped the number of refugee admissions at 18,000 for the current fiscal year. About 30,000 refugees were resettled in the U.S. during the past fiscal year; between 150,000 and 200,000 remain in the pipeline for possible U.S. resettlement while they live abroad, according to Linda Evarts, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

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