The defense secretary gave a “State of the Force” address to hundreds of officers and enlisted servicemembers at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth used his "State of the Force" speech to air his long-held grievances with the military’s culture.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments early next year in cases involving the enforcement of zoning ordinances against religious institutions, the Trump administration’s policy of detaining undocumented immigrants apprehended within the United States without a hearing, and the effect of a federal law intended to protect the former spouses of U.S. servicemembers. The announcement that the court had added three new cases to its oral argument docket came on a list of orders released from the justices’ Sept. 28 conference – the first regularly scheduled conference since the Supreme Court began its summer recess at the end of June. Additional orders from that conference are expected on Monday, Oct. 5, at 9:30 a.m. EDT, shortly before the justices return to the courtroom for the first oral arguments of the 2026-27 term. The justices granted the Trump administration’s petition for review in an important immigration case, Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha. The case centers on the administration’s policy of detaining noncitizens who have been apprehended within the United States (as opposed to at the border) without the opportunity for a bond hearing while their deportation proceedings move forward. The policy follows guidelines that the Trump administration issued last year, relying on a provision of federal immigration law indicating that noncitizens “shall be detained” for a removal proceeding “if the examining immigration officer determines that” they are “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted” to the United States. Until last year, the government had not applied that provision to noncitizens who already had entered the U.S. and spent years or even decades here. Instead, those noncitizens were held under a separate detention provision, which gives the attorney general the power to release noncitizens awaiting deportation proceedings. According to a Politico analysis, federal district judges across the country have “delivered more than 9,300 rulings against the administration’s” mandatory detention guidelines since they took effect last year. However, federal appeals courts have divided on the propriety of the Trump administration’s guidelines – a key factor that the Supreme Court considers in deciding whether to grant review. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit (among others) sided against the Trump administration, it asked the justices to weigh in but urged the court to grant a different petition for review, Putra v. Lopez-Campos, on the same issue, describing that case as a better one in which to consider the legality “of the government’s mandatory detention” policy. On Thursday, the court took up the issue, but not the administration’s preferred case. In Missionaries of St. John the Baptist v. Frederic, the Supreme Court will return to the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a law that Congress enacted in 2000 to expand religious freedom protections for prisoners and for religious organizations or individuals seeking to challenge zoning laws. The petition for review was filed by the Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist, a nonprofit group that hopes to build a shrine to the Virgin Mary – as well as a surrounding plaza, walking path, and retaining wall – next to Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in northern Kentucky. Because the neighborhood where it planned to build the shrine is zoned for residential buildings, and the construction of other types of buildings is tightly regulated, the group applied for a permit and variances. The local zoning board approved its application the following month. Joel and Elizabeth Frederic, who live across the street from the church and had raised concerns that the shrine would create additional traffic, challenged that decision in state court. They contended that the zoning board misapplied local ordinances and that the shrine project could not move forward under current zoning regulations. The Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist countered that denying the permit would have violated RLUIPA, which prohibits government officials from imposing or implementing rules for land use that substantially interfere with religious practice unless they have a compelling reason to do so. The law also bars officials from treating religious individuals or organizations less favorably than nonreligious individuals or organizations. A state trial court sided with the church and the board, clearing the way for the shrine project to proceed. However, an intermediate appeals court reversed that decision, determining that the board exceeded its authority when it approved the project and that denying permission would not violate RLUIPA. On appeal, the Supreme Court of Kentucky affirmed the appeals court’s decision. It held that blocking the shrine would not violate RLUIPA because the rules for religious projects are not different than the rules for nonreligious projects and because the rules would allow the Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist to build a smaller shrine on a different part of the church’s property. In March, the Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, arguing that the ruling from the Supreme Court of Kentucky stems from persistent confusion over how to apply RLUIPA. The Frederics countered that although there may be “minor variations” in how lower courts interpret and apply RLUIPA, there is no reason to believe that these variations would have led to a different result in a different court. And in Marschner v. Marschner, the court agreed to take up a question relating to the authority of divorce courts to enforce provisions in divorce settlements involving military benefits. A federal law, the Uniformed Services Former Spouses’ Protection Act, provides that retirement pay based on a servicemember’s time in the military can be divided in a divorce, but that retirement pay based on disability, as well as retirement pay that a servicemember waives to receive disability pay, cannot be divided. Nine years ago, in Howell v. Howell, the Supreme Court held that when a former spouse was entitled to half of a veteran’s retirement pay, but the veteran later waived some of that pay to receive disability benefits, the USFSPA barred a state court from requiring him to compensate her for half of the retirement pay that she would have received had he not waived it. The case that the court agreed on Thursday to decide involves slightly different facts, because the former spouses agreed in their divorce settlement that the veteran would compensate his ex-wife if he began receiving disability payments (and, as a result, less retirement pay) after their divorce. The North Dakota Supreme Court, however, ruled that the provision in their divorce agreement was unenforceable, prompting the ex-wife to come to the Supreme Court, which agreed on Thursday to weigh in.

The defense secretary gave a “State of the Force” address to hundreds of officers and enlisted servicemembers at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

Hegseth’s explicitly Christian defense of a new Pentagon religious office leaves non-religious service members on dangerous ground

The defense secretary gave a “State of the Force” address to hundreds of officers and enlisted servicemembers at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

The defense secretary gave a “State of the Force” address to hundreds of officers and enlisted servicemembers at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

The defense secretary gave a “State of the Force” address to hundreds of officers and enlisted servicemembers at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

As reporting emerged in August that the servicemembers on the USS Abraham Lincoln faced poor conditions and declining mental health — evidenced by at least one servicemember overboard incident — right...

The defense secretary gave a “State of the Force” address to hundreds of officers and enlisted servicemembers at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

The defense secretary gave a “State of the Force” address to hundreds of officers and enlisted servicemembers at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.