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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Friday.

1. With President Biden’s climate agenda stalled, cities and states will play a critical role in combating climate change.

A patchwork approach is no substitute for a coordinated national strategy. But in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling limiting the E.P.A.’s authority to restrict power plant emissions, experts said the U.S. needs local action to have a chance at meeting its climate goals. Colorado, historically a coal state, has passed more than 50 climate-related laws since 2019. And voters in Athens, Ohio, imposed a carbon fee on themselves.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is trying persuade other countries to quickly move away from fossil fuels, despite a notable lack of success back home. John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, “goes around the world saying all the right things, but he can’t make the U.S. deliver them,” said one international climate activist. “He loses credibility when he comes and preaches to everyone else.”

2. After the fall of Roe v. Wade, states are figuring out what’s next.

New York’s State Senate passed a measure that, if fully enacted, would enshrine in the state’s constitution the right to abortion and contraception — placing New York at the forefront of legal efforts to protect reproductive rights. The legislation would need voter approval via referendum before it would take effect.

In Texas, where conservative leadership has spent decades narrowing abortion access, even some anti-abortion adherents say their state is woefully unprepared for a likely surge in births among poor women. Texas is already one of the most dangerous states in the nation to have a baby, and it has more uninsured women of childbearing age than any other state.

Within the anti-abortion movement, there is disagreement about further restrictions. Some of the most extreme activists want to pursue “abortion abolition,” which would criminalize abortion from conception as homicide and hold pregnant women responsible. The more mainstream members of the movement oppose prosecuting pregnant women and instead want to focus on penalizing abortion providers.

3. The Supreme Court was more conservative this term than it has been in nearly a century.

In its first full term with a six-justice conservative majority, the court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, expanded Americans’ right to carry guns outside the home, made it harder to address climate change and enlarged the role of religion in public life.

Those blockbusters underscored the court’s relentless shift to the political right in the term that ended this week. By one standard measurement, its rulings were more conservative than any year since 1931. About 74 percent of cases were decided with a conservative ruling.

Previously under Chief Justice John Roberts, the final days of a term had tended to end with a mix of decisions pointing in different ideological directions. But over the past year, the difference was the addition of a third justice appointed by Donald Trump, Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, tilting the court’s ideological balance further to the right.

4. Donald Trump and his allies have offered to pay the legal fees of more than a dozen witnesses called by the Jan. 6 committee, raising questions about whether Trump may be influencing their testimony.

The arrangement drew new scrutiny after testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who agreed to testify publicly only after firing a lawyer paid for by Trump’s political organization.

Hutchinson’s testimony revealed a little-acknowledged truth about how Washington works: The capital is led largely by the geriatric set, but much of the work is performed by recent college graduates. Younger staff members’ proximity to power gives them disproportionate influence, as well as a front-row seat to critical moments that can define the country.

Dozens more were injured after a nine-story residential tower and a recreational center were hit early Friday. The Kremlin’s spokesman denied that Russia was targeting any civilian infrastructure.

Also, Brittney Griner, the American W.N.B.A. star, went on trial on drug charges in Russia. Legal experts said her trial — which was adjourned to next Thursday — was all but certain to end in a conviction, which could carry a sentence of up to 10 years at a penal colony. Griner, who was detained days before Russia invaded Ukraine, is the latest American to get caught up in “hostage diplomacy.”

6. Xi Jinping’s first visit to Hong Kong since a sweeping crackdown was a declaration of victory over the opposition in Hong Kong, an assertion of his power to viewers at home and a warning to critics abroad.

At the event, for the 25th anniversary of the end of British rule in Hong Kong, the police showed off new armored vehicles and goose-stepped in the city’s streets, which were empty of the protesters who traditionally gather by the thousands each July 1. Xi, China’s leader, delivered a stern admonition that the open dissent and pro-democracy activism that defined the city in recent years were things of the past.

The West increasingly sees Xi’s actions as overly aggressive. NATO, for the first time, declared China a “challenge,” adding that the country’s policies were “coercive,” its cyberoperations “malicious” and its rhetoric “confrontational.”

7. Traveling this weekend? Be prepared to wait.

As the Fourth of July weekend approaches, more people are expected to travel to, from and within the U.S. than at any other time this year. For many, the increased traffic is likely to lead to traffic and delays. (On the Friday before Juneteenth, nearly a third of flights arrived late.)

For those driving, it might not be much better. Inflated prices for fuel, food and lodging have led some to rethink their summer plans. Hotel industry executives said that many people who drove on vacation were choosing destinations closer to home to save on gas.

8. Juggling private jets at the “summer camp for billionaires” is a logistical nightmare. It’s also Chris Pomeroy’s job.

Each year at the Sun Valley conference, an annual shoulder-rubbing bonanza organized by a secretive investment bank that begins next week, scores of private jets fly into a small resort town in Idaho. Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, flies in a Gulfstream G650. So do Jeff Bezos and Dan Schulman, PayPal’s chief executive.

Pomeroy is tasked with a high-stakes, three-dimensionsional game of Tetris with multimillion-dollar private jets. With everyone arriving around the same time, a lack of proper organization — which happened his first year, 2016 — could cause delays and diversions while pilots burn precious fuel.

9. Ants can be a paleontologist’s best friend.

At a recent dig, scientists discovered evidence of 10 species of previously unknown ancient mammals, including an ancestor of the kangaroo rat. They had help from thousands of tiny harvester ants.

The ants live in subterranean burrows that sit beneath mounds of dirt, which they fortify with bits of rock and other tough materials — including fossilized mammal teeth that paleontologists can then harvest.

“They’re not fantastic when they’re biting you,” Samantha Hopkins, a researcher from the University of Oregon, said. “But I’ve got to appreciate them, because they make my job a whole lot easier.”

10. And, finally, India’s “mango man” finds power in a tree.

Kaleem Ullah Khan, 82, has spent a lifetime caring for — and experimenting with — a mango tree in a field in northern India. He has grafted hundreds of kinds of mango onto the mother tree, achieving domestic and international acclaim for his efforts.

Khan is philosophical about the fruit but also obsessive — an expert nearing the end of a lifetime of discovery, still resigned to what remains beyond his reach. He tells anyone and everyone of his faith in the mango’s infinite potential, including its ability to cure sickness.

Khan now spends most of his time around the tree. About two months ago, he moved from the house where his wife, sons and grandchildren live to another house on the edge of the nursery, with a balcony overlooking his life’s work.

Have a juicy evening.

Brent Lewis compiled photos for this briefing.

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WASHINGTON — When an alarmed Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, called the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, demanding to know why the president of the United States had suggested he was coming to the Capitol while Congress met to certify his election defeat, the person on the other end of the line had just turned 25 years old.

“I said, ‘I’ll run the traps on this,’” Cassidy Hutchinson, now 26, testified this week before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, recalling what she had told Mr. McCarthy, Republican of California. “I can assure you, we’re not coming to the Capitol.”

Ms. Hutchinson’s two hours of testimony provided a riveting account of President Donald J. Trump’s mind-set and actions the day of the mob attack and situated the young aide — an assistant by title, but a gatekeeper in practice — at the very center of some of the most sensitive conversations and events of that day.

It also pulled back the curtain on a little-acknowledged truth about how Washington works: The capital’s power centers may be helmed largely by the geriatric set, but they are fueled by recent college graduates, often with little to no previous job experience beyond an internship. And while many of those young players rank low on the official food chain, their proximity to the pinnacle of power gives them disproportionate influence, and a front-row seat to critical moments that can define the country.

Sometimes, the interns themselves appear to be running the show.

After the House investigative committee accused Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, of attempting to hand-deliver to Vice President Mike Pence a slate of false electoral votes for Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson, 67, blamed the incident on a young underling. He claimed that an unidentified “House intern” had instructed his staff to give the list of fake electors to Mr. Pence.

Other former Trump aides who have appeared in video testimony during the Jan. 6 hearings include Nick Luna, now 35, Mr. Trump’s former body man; Sarah Matthews, now 27, a former deputy White House press secretary; and Ben Williamson, now 29, like Ms. Hutchinson a former aide to Mark Meadows, the final Trump White House chief of staff.

The committee has also featured some of its own young-looking investigators in videos laying out its work.

The relative youth of critical players wielding sway in the government is not a new phenomenon.

Lawrence Higby, who served as a top aide to H.R. Haldeman, President Richard M. Nixon’s chief of staff, was 25 years old when he testified as a key witness during the Watergate hearings.

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s final chief of staff, James R. Jones, was 28 years old when he was appointed to the top job in the White House.

In an interview, Mr. Jones said he was able to rise so high so quickly by following the advice he had received from his boss, W. Marvin Watson, when he joined the White House staff at the ripe old age of 25.

“What I was doing was passing his notes to the president, and he said, ‘You’ll be noticed at the right time. Just do your work now and stay out of the president’s view.’”

Mr. Jones added, “You just had to be at the right place at the right time. I played very low key, I tried to give the credit of successes to others, I didn’t talk to reporters — that’s how I think I made it. I probably would have made a number of key decisions differently with more years on me.”

For the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault, relying on junior aides like Ms. Hutchinson — who held internships with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and then at the White House before joining Mr. Trump’s staff — has been a crucial part of its strategy. With many of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers refusing to cooperate, investigators moved down the organizational chart and quietly turned to at least half a dozen lower-level former staff members who provided critical information about their bosses’ activities.

“We are definitely taking advantage of the fact that most senior-level people in Washington depend on a lot of young associates and subordinates to get anything done,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, told Politico last month, claiming that the young people “still have their ethics intact.”

Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, compared Ms. Hutchinson favorably to the more seasoned officials who have stonewalled the panel.

“Her superiors — men many years older — a number of them are hiding behind executive privilege, anonymity and intimidation,” Ms. Cheney said in a speech this week. (Her father, the former vice president Dick Cheney, became deputy chief of staff in President Gerald R. Ford’s White House at the age of 33.)

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said it has always been the case that in the White House, “there are a lot of people in their late 20s and early 30s” coming from campaigns or from Capitol Hill for jobs with considerable responsibilities.

“They’re expected to perform with fealty to the institution and the Constitution,” Mr. Podesta said. “In this case, it seems like the younger people did a better job than the older people on that front.”

They also have longer careers ahead of them, perhaps making them less willing to tie themselves forever to Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

For ambitious young people, government jobs in Washington have long offered a jet-fueled rise to power that the private sector, however lucrative, can’t compete with.

“You can get a better job as a 24-year-old in Washington in government than you can in a big company,” said Steve Elmendorf, a well-connected Washington lobbyist who early in his career worked as a senior adviser to Representative Richard Gephardt, the Democratic leader. “The West Wing is physically so small, the person who is the 24-year-old is sitting right on top of the principals. Young people end up getting a lot of responsibility, because the principals are so busy and so hard to get to.”

That makes the assistants into gatekeepers who become players in their own right.

“If you can’t figure out how to get Ron Klain on the phone,” he said, referring to President Biden’s chief of staff, “figure out the three people who sit outside his office.”

Adding to the post-collegiate feel of Capitol Hill and the West Wing is the issue of who can afford to work in government, and for how long.

The average age of a House staffer is 31, according to the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to transparency in government, which noted in a report that the wage gap between the private and public sector “may encourage staff to seek greener pastures while depriving Congress of experience and expertise.”

A chief of staff on average would earn 40 percent more in the private sector than on Capitol Hill, according to the report, and “ex-staffers who become lobbyists can increase their earnings by many multiples.”

During her time in the Trump administration, Ms. Hutchinson, whose title was special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, earned $72,700, according to White House records. The most senior officials earned up to $180,000.

Still, she was there in the West Wing to witness the ketchup-dripping aftermath when Mr. Trump is said to have thrown his lunch against the wall in a rage that William P. Barr, the attorney general, had said publicly that there had been no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

It was Ms. Hutchinson to whom the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, turned with a dire warning about what would happen if Mr. Trump followed through with his plan to follow his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6. “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Ms. Hutchinson said Mr. Cipollone told her.

And Mr. Meadows, who was said to have brought Ms. Hutchinson to virtually every meeting he attended, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, addressed her familiarly as “Cass” as they spoke freely to her about what they were anticipating on Jan. 6.

As she leaned against the doorway to his office a few days before, she testified, Mr. Meadows confided to Ms. Hutchinson, “Things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6.”

ARGYLE, Texas — Two days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 27-year-old woman delivered her fourth child, a boy she named Cason. Born after his mother fled from domestic abuse and was denied an abortion, he is among the first of many post-Roe babies expected in Texas.

“I love my kids and I feel like I’m a really good mom,” said Cason’s mother, who asked to be identified by her first initial, T. “But due to this pregnancy, I couldn’t provide for them.”

One in 10 people of reproductive age in America lives in Texas, which will soon join half of all the states in outlawing almost all abortions. Texas’ conservative leadership has spent decades narrowing abortion access while cutting social spending and publicly funded health care. Now, even some anti-abortion adherents say their state is woefully unprepared for a likely surge in births among poor women.

The overturning of Roe “creates the sense of urgency that now will create, hopefully, the resources. But unfortunately, there’s that gap,” said Aubrey Schlackman, founder of Blue Haven Ranch, an anti-abortion nonprofit that is providing housing and other assistance for T.’s family.

“We do want to limit abortions,” Ms. Schlackman continued. “But we personally weren’t ready to handle an influx, and I know so many of the other nonprofits that we work with aren’t ready for that, either.”

Texas is one of the most dangerous states in the nation to have a baby. The state’s maternal mortality rate is one of the worst in the country, with Black women making up a disproportionate share of deaths. The state’s infant mortality rate, at more than five deaths per thousand births in 2020, translates into nearly 2,000 infant deaths annually.

Texas opted not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which helped lead to hospital closures and the formation of rural health care “deserts,” where obstetricians are scarce and prenatal care scarcer still. More than a quarter of women of childbearing age are uninsured, the highest rate in the nation. Medicaid covers low-income women through pregnancy and for two months postpartum, compared with 12 months in most states.

A proposal in the Texas House to expand postpartum coverage to 12 months was cut to six months by the State Senate. Tens of thousands of children born to low-income parents languish on the waiting list for subsidized child care.

In September of last year Texas passed Senate Bill 8, banning abortions for patients with detectable embryonic cardiac activity, which generally begins at about six weeks. A recent Times analysis suggests that Texas’ abortion rate declined by only 10 percent after the bill passed, as more women traveled out of state or ordered medication abortions by mail. But poor patients often lack those options.

“Assuming just 10 percent of women aren’t able to to secure an abortion, that’s a massive rise in fertility,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies religious liberty, health law and equality.

“There’s no way there are any institutions prepared to meet that demand.”

Three years ago, T. was a bookkeeper for a chain of fitness centers. At $36 an hour, it was the best-paying job she had ever held. She was proud to become her family’s main breadwinner after her partner, whom she has been with since high school, lost his construction job during the pandemic. But early in her pregnancy with Cason, she developed complications that eventually forced her to quit her job.

The family economized, moving into smaller and smaller homes until late last year, when they finally had to move in with the mother of her partner. The couple were unloading their belongings, with their infant daughter in her stroller nearby, when “he snapped on me,” T. said. Her partner choked her, she said, until she lost consciousness. When she was revived by a stranger she had trouble speaking, and a ring of bruises circled her neck. Terrified for her children, she fled the next morning to a shelter for domestic violence victims, she said.

She said she had never sought an abortion before. But the prospect of raising four young children on her own, and of giving birth alone, filled T. with desperation. She agonized about the needs of her three children, and about sacrifices. “If I do this, I will make sure they’re always good, are always taken care of,” she said she recalled thinking.

“It was a very difficult decision, but I felt like it was a smart one for me.”

Her sister drove her to Southwestern Women’s Surgery Center, an abortion provider in Dallas. But Texas had just enacted Senate Bill 8, and the providers told T. that she was about seven weeks pregnant — too far along for an abortion in Texas. Could she travel to New Mexico? In the waiting room, T. sobbed. The trip was impossible. She had no money, and so few child care options that she had brought her baby daughter with her to the appointment. She didn’t know about medication abortion.

T. rejoined her sister, who was waiting in the parking lot. She was sitting in the car, distraught, when an anti-abortion “sidewalk counselor” approached.

“‘You are not alone. If you are pregnant and you need help, we can help you,’” the sidewalk counselor told her, T. recalled.

“I just started crying,’’ T. said, “in a sense of relief.”

The next day the woman T. had met in the parking lot guided her to Birth Choice, an anti-abortion pregnancy resource center located in the same office complex as the abortion provider.

Some anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers have come under scrutiny for misleading or misinforming women seeking abortion care. But in that moment, “They asked me the perfect questions,” T. said of the Birth Choice counselor. “Am I OK? Are my kids doing OK? What did I need?”

“Mind you, I had left everything,” she said. “They provided me with everything right there: baby bag, diapers, formula, clothes for me. They even gave me a couple of little clothes for my daughter and a toy,” T. said.

“Then my counselor comes back and says, ‘I found you a place.’”

The place was Blue Haven Ranch, based in Argyle, about 45 minutes from Dallas.

Blue Haven provides housing, help with household bills, job training, and financial and other counseling for up to a year or more after delivery for pregnant women with existing children. Among Americans who seek abortion care, 60 percent are already mothers, and half have two or more children. Most are in their late 20s, and poor.

Ms. Schlackman, 34, a former dental hygienist, evangelical Christian and mother of two, founded Blue Haven in 2020.

She grew up believing that women seek abortion care for the sake of convenience. “Now I can understand why they would choose it,” she said.

Ms. Schlackman requires women to attend group informational sessions with a strong religious component in a community church on Monday nights. Blue Haven does not seek money from the government or anyone else that might question its religious approach. It takes in donations from abortion rights supporters as well as opponents, Ms. Schlackman said, reading a note from one, who sent $50: “‘I don’t share your beliefs about abortion and Christianity, but I do hope you’ll use your strength to encourage similar initiatives elsewhere.’”

Blue Haven supports five families, and there are 12 on the waiting list. The cost is about $2,500 per family per month for housing and utilities, plus gas and unexpected household expenses. A financier in Boston who read about Blue Haven and offered to help recently negotiated a deal on a used car for a mother with a poor credit score.

Currently there is no ranch; the families live in rented apartments. Ms. Schlackman and her husband Bryan have plans to buy a patch of rolling acreage outside Denton, Texas, and build a compound with small homes, a meeting house and group kitchen, plus open spaces and livestock for “farm therapy.”

Standing in the wheat field where she envisions the houses will stand, Ms. Schlackman estimated that she would need to raise $13 million for the land, construction and three years’ operating funds. After Roe was overturned, Blue Haven received $25,000 in donations in two days.

Its focus on the Bible and emphasis on Christian family ideals make some Blue Haven mothers uncomfortable. But for T., the group offered a lifeline in a time of dwindling options. One recent Monday night she attended a group session while her children played on the church’s pristine playground, supervised by grandparent volunteers. Other volunteers laid out a communal supper.

Blue Haven threw a baby shower for T., and its supporters bought everything on a registry that Ms. Schlackman created. (T. chose a zoo animal theme for her son’s layette, in shades of blue and green.) When Cason was born Ms. Schlackman was there, attending to T. in the spalike birthing center where she had delivered her own sons.

Blue Haven’s assistance will end about a year after Cason’s first birthday.

“The pressure is really on,’’ T. said on a Thursday, four days after she gave birth to Cason. “I have one year to rebuild my life while my body heals, and four kids to take care of at the same time. It’s scary. I try not to think about what will happen when I leave the program. I know I can be a great mom, it’s just, can I provide for my children, keep the kids healthy and safe and have a roof over our head, and food?”

She is hoping, she said, to get another job as a bookkeeper and eventually move into her own home.

She said she has a message for the Texas Legislature.

“You don’t know what is best for any family, you didn’t protect me or my kids. I protect my kids. Only a mom can know what is best for herself and her family. And if you’re going to force women to have all of these babies that they are not equipped to have, then you need to provide support for women and their children after the babies are born.”

Earlier in the week, just a day and a half after giving birth, T. had something else to say.

“Women, all we really have is our dignity and our voices,’’ she said. “And you’re taking them away.”

Erin Schaff contributed reporting from Argyle, and Margot Sanger-Katz from Washington.

More people flew out of airports in the United States on Sunday — 2.46 million according to the Transportation Security Administration — than on any other day so far this year. Thursday and Friday going into this Fourth of July holiday are expected to be even busier, with Hopper, a travel booking app, predicting that nearly 13 million passengers will fly to, from and within the United States this weekend.

The question for many travelers is whether they can trust airlines to get them where they want to go on time.

You could not blame them for assuming the answer is no. On June 17, the Friday before the Monday Juneteenth holiday, nearly a third of flights arrived late, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking company. Between last Saturday and Monday ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, U.S. carriers already canceled nearly 2,500 flights. In a June 16 meeting, Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, told airlines that he’d be closely monitoring their performance. The very next day, his own flight from Washington to New York was canceled.

In a letter on Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders urged Mr. Buttigieg to begin fining airlines for particularly egregious cancellations and delays. Among other proposals, he suggested that airlines should pay $55,000 per passenger for any canceled flight that it was clear in advance they could not staff.

Before postponing any upcoming trip, though, it’s worth taking a close look at cancellation and delay data for insights into how travel has, and has not, changed this year.

Percentage of cancellations so far this year vs. a comparable time in 2019: 2.8 percent vs. 2.1 percent.

Lesson: The idea that air travel was so much better before the pandemic may be clouded by nostalgia for Before Times.

Social media is filled with declarations that air travel is the worst it’s ever been. Indeed on some holiday weekends and stormy weeks it’s been astoundingly bad. As Mr. Sanders noted in his letter, airlines have canceled flights four times as often on high-travel weekends as they did in 2019. But the reality is that airline reliability was pretty terrible even before the pandemic.

U.S. airlines have been operating somewhere between 21,000 and 25,000 flights a day in recent months. So far in 2022, an average of one of out five flights a day arrived behind schedule — a total of more than 820,000 delayed flights according to FlightAware. More than 116,000 flights have been canceled. All of this adds up to tens of thousands of people missing weddings, funerals and work events and grappling with how to salvage vacations. But in 2019 during a comparable period, it was not that much better. Back then, 17 percent — instead of 20 percent — also arrived late and the average delay time was 48 minutes instead of 49 minutes.

“I think the reason people are noticing it so much more is because it’s clustered on these holiday periods,” said Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial pilot who is now a spokeswoman for FlightAware.

Though holiday weekends have always been a bit of a gamble, crew staffing issues magnified by overambitious schedules means there’s now less slack in the system, Bob Mann, a longtime airline executive who now runs R.W. Mann & Company, an airline consulting company, said. Weather that might have canceled a dozen flights in a few airports is now more likely to have a far more dramatic ripple effect, canceling thousands of flights in dozens of airports. This has been particularly true for low-cost carriers like JetBlue and Spirit airlines, which canceled a whopping 10.3 percent and 9 percent of flights in April, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

“A number like 10 percent I’ve never seen before,” said Mr. Mann.

If you want to build in protection in case your flight is canceled, never book the last flight of the day, advised Shawn Pruchnicki, a former airline pilot and professor of aviation safety at the Ohio State University.

Least reliable airports: Newark, LaGuardia and Orlando

Lesson: Major hubs were always nightmarish particularly on busy weekends. Changing travel patterns and air traffic control staffing issues have made them worse.

So far this year, two New York area airports, Newark Liberty International and LaGuardia, have had the most cancellations in the United States — around 6 percent of total flights — according to FlightAware data. In terms of delays, Newark was also one of the top two most aggravating airports to fly out of, delivering people to their destination late nearly 30 percent of the time. Only Orlando International had a comparable percentage of delayed flights.

In general, flying out of Florida has been rough. More than one out of four flights at airports in Fort Myers, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa have been delayed so far this year. Only flights from Dallas Love Field and Chicago Midway airports arrived late at comparably poor rates, according to FlightAware data.

Neither region can blame its lack of reliability entirely on coronavirus-related issues. But each has gotten worse for reasons connected to the pandemic, aviation experts say.

Airports in travel hubs such as New York City have long had more cancellations and delays than other airports, said Dr. Pruchnicki. That’s partly by design. If airlines need to cut flights, they’ll use one from New York as a sacrificial lamb “because it gives them more options for rerouting passengers,” he said.

New York City has also long been vulnerable to delays because air traffic controllers have to choreograph activity for numerous airports within 50 miles of one another. “It’s a spaghetti ball of flying,” said Mr. Mann, the former airline executive.

Lately, at least according to Scott Kirby, United Airlines’ chief executive, there haven’t been enough air traffic controllers to manage the spaghetti.

“They are doing everything they can but, like many in the economy, they’re understaffed,” Mr. Kirby told Bloomberg last week. In an internal memo, United outlined plans to temporarily slash 50 flights from Newark on July 1 to “keep flights moving on-time.”

In Florida, the heart of the issue, several analysts said, is the state’s supersized popularity as a vacation and relocation destination. Airlines have responded by increasing flights. But then when thunderstorms strike — as they frequently do in Florida — because air traffic control in the area is already pushed to the limit, it’s harder for the airlines to get back on track than before, said Kenneth Byrnes, the flight department chair at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla.

That said, avoiding hubs may not be the way to go, some analysts said, because if your flight is canceled, hubs offer more options for rebooking.

The most-delayed major airline in recent months: JetBlue

Lesson: Paying more for a ticket on an airline with a better on-time track record may be worthwhile for short trips.

Over the past three months, JetBlue, Allegiant Air and Frontier arrived late an abysmal one third of the time, with average delays of nearly an hour, according to FlightAware data. The three low cost carriers were also the most-delayed in 2021, according to the annual Airline Quality Rating Report, an analysis of Department of Transportation data published by Wichita State University in Wichita, Kan.

Throughout the pandemic JetBlue has often blamed staffing for delays and cancellations. In a statement on Thursday, an airline spokeswoman said that the airline had made the necessary schedule cuts and now has enough pilots and other crew to keep flights running when they are supposed to. The airline blamed the bulk of recent delays on air traffic control issues in “the congested weather-prone Northeast corridor.”

“We made the decision in April to reduce flying by more than 10 percent this summer so that we can more reliably operate our schedule with our current staffing and other constraints on the national aviation system,” the spokeswoman said in the statement. “With our reduced capacity, JetBlue had a sufficient number of pilot and inflight crews to operate our schedule in June,” she added.

The Transport Workers Union, which represents JetBlue flight attendants, has often butted heads with the company on delays and cancellations. On Thursday, Gary Peterson, the international vice president of the union, said he thought that explaining away poor flight performance as primarily a weather and air traffic control issue was bogus. “In typical fashion JetBlue is looking to blame everyone but their own leadership team for the airline’s failings for not only passengers but also flight crew,” he said.

The lesson for the average traveler may be to pay close attention to which airline is selling that ticket before clicking buy. Particularly on short weekend trips, losing even an hour may not be worth saving $100. In recent months, no major carrier could be relied on to arrive on time more than 90 percent of the time — something that was rare even before the pandemic — but Delta, Hawaiian, Alaska and United came the closest with more than 80 percent of flights arriving on time, according to FlightAware and Bureau of Transportation data.

Ultimately for those who want to be certain that their flight is not canceled or delayed, the best bet seems to be skip air travel during busy weekends.

Delta seemed to be offering that advice when, on Thursday, it said it would waive change fees and ticket-price differentials for anyone who was booked to fly between July 1 and July 4 and wanted to switch to another date on or before July 8.

As for this Fourth of July weekend, “My advice is go buy hot dogs and stay home,” said Dean Headley, the co-author of the Wichita State University airline rankings.

BALTIMORE — Local news wars have largely gone the way of the phone booth as newspapers have shriveled and reporter jobs have been cut. But one is taking shape in Baltimore, bringing a new kind of rivalry.

The Baltimore Banner, an online news site that started publishing in recent weeks, is trying to go head to head with the 185-year-old Baltimore Sun. The Banner has hired some of The Sun’s best reporters, building a newsroom of more than 40 people so far. And it has had a string of exclusive reporting, including on a feud between the sons of the Baltimore Orioles’ owner over the future of the baseball team.

This wasn’t the original plan of Stewart W. Bainum Jr., the hotel magnate behind The Banner. He tried to buy The Sun last year but lost out to Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has become the country’s second-largest newspaper operator. Now he’s competing against them, wary of the plans that Alden, which is known for cutting newsroom costs, has for The Sun.

“I kept thinking about local news during Covid, sitting here in Maryland, thinking about the dearth of local news,” Mr. Bainum, a longtime resident of Chevy Chase, Md., said in an interview.

“I just think there has to be a way to figure this out,” he added.

The Banner, which charges for a subscription, is already one of the largest in a raft of local news start-ups that are trying to fill the void left by the closing and downsizing of thousands of newspapers around the country since the rise of the internet. More than 360 local newspapers closed between late 2019 and May alone, according to a report released this week by Northwestern University’s journalism school. And Mr. Bainum has plans to build The Banner to a newsroom of more than 100, eclipsing the size of The Sun, and has promised to contribute or raise $50 million over the first four years.

The bold entry is a test of whether a subscription model for digital-only local news can be sustainable beyond the initial philanthropic capital, and whether there’s an appetite for a second large news publication in cities where competition used to be commonplace. There are also several smaller digital news outlets in the region, including Baltimore Fishbowl, Baltimore Brew and Baltimore Witness. Axios plans to expand its local newsletters to the city this year, and Baltimore Beat, a Black-run nonprofit, plans to resume publishing after a hiatus during the pandemic.

“If you’re really going to take on an established media entity in this kind of economic climate, you better go in like a samurai,” said Josh Tyrangiel, a former Bloomberg Media and Vice executive who grew up in Baltimore and provided informal advice to Mr. Bainum.

“Don’t tread softly, go in forcefully, and expect that you’ll have to spend a lot of money on the product and to market the product,” Mr. Tyrangiel said. “The people of Baltimore are now conditioned to expect very little from their newspaper.”

Trif Alatzas, the publisher and editor in chief of The Sun, said in a statement that Baltimore Sun Media, which also encompasses several other local newspapers, was proud to have the largest news-gathering team in the region, with 100 journalists total.

While Mr. Alatzas did not respond to a question about the competition posed by The Banner, he said his paper’s subscriber numbers had increased this year.

“We continue to see growth, and we are looking forward to continuing to provide our readers with Baltimore’s most comprehensive news and information,” Mr. Alatzas said.

Baltimore became a battleground in the local-news crisis over two years ago when Alden revealed that it had taken a 32 percent stake in Tribune Publishing, the parent company of The Sun and newspapers like The Chicago Tribune and The New York Daily News, making it the company’s largest shareholder.

Worried journalists began desperately seeking local owners to take over the newspapers because of the hedge fund’s reputation for eking out profits by gutting newsrooms. In February 2021, Tribune announced that it had reached a deal to give Alden full ownership and sell The Sun and two smaller Maryland publications to Mr. Bainum.

But the deal ran aground. Mr. Bainum then made bids for all of Tribune, including an offer valuing the company at about $650 million in which he would put up $200 million of his own money. In May 2021, shareholders voted to approve the sale of Tribune to Alden for roughly $630 million.

The failed attempt to buy The Sun did not deter Mr. Bainum, who found himself energized by the thought of setting up a nonprofit newsroom to serve the city. Mr. Bainum, the chairman of Choice Hotels International and a former Maryland state legislator, consulted with other nonprofit leaders and executives at major media companies to figure out a model that could work.

He worked with Ted Venetoulis, a former county executive and publisher in Baltimore who had long been trying to buy The Sun. They decided that the best shot was starting with a sizable newsroom with the best talent they could find, instead of building slowly.

Running The Banner as a nonprofit would made it easier to finance and to accept contributions, as well as easier to do partnerships with other nonprofits in the community.

Mr. Venetoulis died in October at age 87. The nonprofit organization that runs The Banner was named the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism in his memory.

Mr. Bainum hired Kimi Yoshino, a top editor at The Los Angeles Times, as editor in chief. Ms. Yoshino moved to Baltimore in January. She said the vast majority of the journalists she had hired were from Baltimore or Maryland, or had previously worked there.

Liz Bowie, a longtime education reporter for The Sun who was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 2020, is one of the hires.

“I worked at The Sun for 35 years, my husband worked at The Sun, my mother worked at The Sun,” Ms. Bowie said in an interview. “So I was really committed to that institution.”

But, she added, “I sort of emotionally left The Sun” when shareholders voted to sell to Alden. Ms. Bowie joined The Banner this year as one of its first reporters.

“I think we’ll be able to be larger and we’ll cover more of the city because all of the money will go straight back into the journalism,” she said.

In addition to Ms. Bowie, The Banner has hired the reporters Justin Fenton, Tim Prudente and Pamela Wood from The Sun. Mr. Fenton, an award-winning investigative reporter whose book about a corrupt Baltimore police unit, “We Own This City,” was recently turned into an HBO series, had worked at The Sun for 17 years.

He said that he had watched The Sun’s newsroom diminish to a shadow of its former self, when it had foreign bureaus and 300 reporters, and that he was excited by the thought of building something new.

“Now we’re going head to head,” he said. “Can this town sustain two large news organizations?”

Imtiaz Patel, a former Dow Jones executive who is the chief executive of The Banner, said the operating budget for the first year was about $15 million. He said paid subscriptions would be about half the revenue mix, with advertising making up about a quarter and the rest coming from things like events and donations.

Readers can read a certain number of free articles a month before a paid subscription is required. A subscription is $3.99 a week, or $155 for the year.

Mr. Patel said the goal was to get to 100,000 paid subscribers to break even and five million monthly unique views on the website by 2025. He said he wanted to no longer rely on funding from Mr. Bainum after a few years.

Mr. Bainum said the goal was to build a first-rate local news site for Baltimore and to figure out whether it was a business model that would work elsewhere. But he also said he wasn’t going to let the experiment last forever.

“If at four or five years this is just a black hole, then you know there are other places to invest philanthropically,” Mr. Bainum said. “But I’m going to stick with it for four or five years anyway at least.”

JERUSALEM — Nearly a decade ago Yair Lapid, then the new leader of Israel’s political center, was asked by a television interviewer if he envisaged becoming prime minister after the next election.

“I assume so,” he replied, though he had been elected to Parliament for the first time just a week earlier.

It was a rookie mistake. Mr. Lapid, then better known as a popular television host, journalist, actor and songwriter, was widely ridiculed as a cocky and superficial political novice.

By the time he finally stepped into the coveted office at midnight on Thursday, albeit as the prime minister of a caretaker government following the collapse of the ruling coalition, he had grown considerably in experience and public stature.

As the leader of the centrist Yesh Atid, or There is a Future, party, now Israel’s second largest after Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud, Mr. Lapid, 58, has since served in government as a minister of finance, strategic affairs, foreign affairs and as an alternate prime minister, along with a stint as the leader of the opposition.

“Once in politics he learned the business quite quickly,” Nahum Barnea, a veteran Israeli political columnist for the popular Yediot Ahronot newspaper, said in an interview.

Mr. Lapid is expected to remain in charge until an election scheduled for Nov. 1 and for some weeks or months after it, as the parties typically require lengthy negotiations to put together a new coalition.

While many new parties in Israel have risen and fallen from fashion within one election cycle, Mr. Lapid succeeded in building a party with a strong infrastructure and an army of volunteer foot soldiers.

Another positive surprise, Mr. Barnea said, was how Mr. Lapid learned to “put aside his ego” and concede to others as he played a long game in his bid for power.

When Yesh Atid joined forces with other centrist parties under the banner of the Blue and White alliance in 2019, Mr. Lapid, the No. 2 on the slate, willingly gave up on an agreement he had with the No. 1, Benny Gantz, a former military chief, to rotate the premiership if they won an upcoming election.

Mr. Lapid, who lacks the security credentials that have eased the paths of other Israelis into power, understood that the agreement was harming Blue and White’s chances.

More striking was what happened after the March 2021 election, the fourth inconclusive ballot to be held within two years, as Mr. Netanyahu repeatedly tried to cling to power despite being on trial for corruption.

Mr. Netanyahu again failed to cobble together a majority and as a result, Mr. Lapid, the runner-up, was given the opportunity to form a government. He succeeded in assembling an ideologically diverse coalition of eight parties with a razor-thin majority.

And in what many viewed as a selfless act untypical of Israeli politicians, he allowed Naftali Bennett, a coalition partner who led a small, right-wing party, to take the first turn as prime minister in another rotation pact, because Mr. Bennett was seen as more acceptable to the right-wing flank of the coalition.

That arrangement lasted a year. Under the terms of their coalition agreement, Mr. Lapid was supposed to take over from Mr. Bennett in August 2023. But in a reflection of the unifying and inclusive political climate they strove to create after years of toxic divisiveness, Mr. Bennett announced that he was honoring their pact and would hand over the reins to Mr. Lapid with the dissolution of Parliament.

The powers of a caretaker government are limited, so Mr. Lapid is unlikely to introduce any significant policy changes, but he will have the advantage of campaigning for the next election as the incumbent. He will also have the chance to welcome President Biden in mid-July, when he makes his first trip to the Middle East since he took office.

In a head-to-head election race with Mr. Netanyahu — who is leading in the polls despite his continuing legal troubles — Mr. Lapid can hold his own as a polished, articulate and telegenic communicator.

The son of Yosef Lapid, an often abrasive former government minister and Holocaust survivor, and Shulamit Lapid, a novelist, Mr. Lapid was known during his television days for his amicable interviewing style. With his good looks and suave manner, his celebrity status stemmed in part from his image as a quintessential Israeli.

One of his more successful songs, “Living on Sheinkin,” referring to a trendy street in Tel Aviv, became a hit for an Israeli girl band in the late 1980s.

Mr. Lapid founded Yesh Atid in 2012. The party was the surprise of the election the following year, winning 19 seats in the 120-seat Parliament. Mr. Lapid became finance minister in a Netanyahu-led government.

He rode in on a wave of middle-class frustration with Israel’s ever rising cost of living and housing, which had given rise to widespread social justice protests in 2011. One of his catchphrases was, “Where’s the money?”

In his first years in politics, he championed popular demands for a more equal sharing of the burden, particularly an end to automatic military exemptions for thousands of ultra-Orthodox students who opt for full-time Torah study, as well as a reduction in taxes that were choking the middle class.

Mainly popular in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area and secular, suburban Israel, Mr. Lapid and his party have suffered in the past from taking safe, centrist positions that were less engaging than those of more ideological parties.

“At first the political center was very amorphous,” said Orit Galili-Zucker, a former strategic communications adviser to Mr. Netanyahu and a political branding expert. “It wasn’t clear what it was.”

At times, when Mr. Lapid tried to appeal to soft-right voters, he was accused of blowing with the wind and saying what he thought people wanted to hear. He has denounced supporters of boycotts against Israel and its settlements in the occupied West Bank as antisemites and has harshly criticized an Israeli anti-occupation group that collects testimony from former soldiers, called Breaking the Silence.

Now, Ms. Galili-Zucker said, he has established himself as being more on the center-left. He has stated his support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even if that seems unattainable right now.

At the same time, he has become more accommodating toward the ultra-Orthodox parties, which have been linchpins of most governing coalitions in recent decades.

A father of three and a former amateur boxer with a black belt in karate, Mr. Lapid is married to Lihi Lapid, a successful writer. Their daughter, Yael, is on the autism spectrum, and Mr. Lapid became emotional in May when the cabinet discussed additional funding for people with disabilities, telling the ministers, “This is the most important thing you will ever do.”

After his father died in 2008, at 77, Mr. Lapid wrote “Memories After My Death,” the story of his father’s life from his days in the ghetto of Budapest through his period as minister of justice in Ariel Sharon’s government.

Mr. Lapid once related in a television interview that his father told him four days before he died, “Yairi, I am leaving for you a family and a state.”

After Parliament was dissolved on Thursday, and hours before he formally took over as prime minister, Mr. Lapid headed straight to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial.

“There,” he wrote on Twitter, “I promised my late father that I will always keep Israel strong and capable of defending itself and protecting its children.”

WASHINGTON — She is an American professional basketball star, accused of carrying hashish oil in her luggage.

He is a notorious Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” serving a 25-year federal prison sentence for conspiring to sell weapons to people who said they planned to kill Americans.

And the Kremlin appears interested in linking their fates, in a potential deal with the Biden administration that would free both.

The vast disparity between the cases of Brittney Griner and Viktor Bout highlights the extreme difficulty President Biden would face if he sought a prisoner exchange to free Ms. Griner, the detained W.N.B.A. player, from detention in Moscow. The Biden administration, reluctant to create an incentive for the arrest or abduction of Americans abroad, would be hard-pressed to justify the release of a villainous figure like Mr. Bout.

At the same time, Mr. Biden is under pressure to free Ms. Griner, who was arrested at a Moscow-area airport in February and whom the State Department classified in May as “wrongfully detained.” That reflects concern that the Kremlin considers her leverage in the tense confrontation between the United States and Russia over Ukraine. Last week, dozens of groups representing people of color, women and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans sent a letter urging Mr. Biden to “make a deal to get Brittney back home to America immediately and safely.”

Ms. Griner’s trial was scheduled to start on Friday.

Mr. Bout, 55, a former Soviet military officer who made a fortune in global arms trafficking before he was caught in a federal sting operation, could be the price for any deal. Russian officials have pressed Mr. Bout’s case for years, and in recent weeks Russian media outlets have directly linked his case to Ms. Griner’s. Some, including the state-owned Tass news service, have even claimed that talks with Washington for a possible exchange are already underway, something that U.S. officials will not confirm.

Mr. Bout’s New York-based lawyer, Steve Zissou, said in an interview that Russian officials are pressing to free Mr. Bout, who was convicted in 2011 of offering to sell weapons, including antiaircraft missiles, to federal agents posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Mr. Zissou said that he met with Anatoly I. Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, in June in Washington and that Mr. Antonov told him the release of Mr. Bout was a very high priority for the Russian government.

“It has been communicated to the American side very clearly that they’re going to have to get real on Viktor Bout if they expect any further prisoner exchanges,” Mr. Zissou said. “My sense of this is that no American is going home unless Viktor Bout is sent home with them.”

U.S. officials have declined to substantiate that notion and won’t discuss any potential deal to free Ms. Griner. The State Department as a matter of practice dismisses questions about prisoner exchanges around the world, warning that they set a dangerous precedent.

“Using wrongful detention as a bargaining chip represents a threat to the safety of everyone traveling, working and living abroad,” the department’s spokesman, Ned Price, recently said.

Mr. Biden did agree to a prisoner exchange in April, in which Russia released Trevor Reed, a former U.S. Marine from Texas who had been held since 2019 on charges of assaulting two police officers. The United States in return freed Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot sentenced in 2011 to 20 years in prison for drug smuggling. But White House officials stressed that Mr. Reed’s failing health made his case exceptional.

Many people have expressed support for Ms. Griner, a star athlete and basketball icon. Less obvious is the Russian government’s solidarity with an organized crime titan linked to terrorists and war criminals. In December, a government building in Moscow exhibited two dozen of Mr. Bout’s pencil sketches and other artwork produced from his cell in a federal penitentiary building near Marion, Ill.

By the time of his arrest in 2008, Mr. Bout (pronounced “boot”) was so known that an arms-trafficking character played by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 film “Lord of War” was based on his life.

Born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, he attended a Russian military college and served as a Soviet air force officer.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Bout began making money ferrying cargo between continents. U.S. officials say he soon became one of the world’s top arms dealers, transporting weapons from the former Soviet military in Ilyushin transport planes, with a particularly lucrative business in war-torn African countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone. Mr. Bout denies that he knowingly trafficked arms.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the United States and European nations were sure that Mr. Bout’s weapons shipments were not only fueling death and misery but also violating United Nations arms embargoes. They were particularly alarmed by intelligence suggesting he may have done business with the Afghan Taliban and even Al Qaeda, charges he denies.

Eventually, the United States lured Mr. Bout into a trap. In 2008, a pair of Drug Enforcement Administration agents posing as members of Colombia’s leftist FARC rebel group arranged a meeting in Bangkok with Mr. Bout to buy weapons including 30,000 AK-47 rifles, plastic explosives and surface-to-air missiles for use against Colombia’s government and the American military personnel supporting its campaign against the FARC.

“Viktor Bout was ready to sell a weapons arsenal that would be the envy of some small countries,” Preet Bharara, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said after his conviction. “He aimed to sell those weapons to terrorists for the purpose of killing Americans.”

The FARC’s official status at the time as a foreign terrorist organization meant that Mr. Bout drew a mandatory federal minimum sentence of 25 years.

One former U.S. official familiar with Mr. Bout’s situation said the Russian government’s interest in his freedom appeared to be personal and that he has ties to powerful people close to President Vladimir V. Putin.

Another former American official pointed to a somewhat more principled reason: Mr. Bout was arrested in Thailand and extradited from there to New York. Russian officials have complained about what they call the growing “practice used by the U.S. of actually hunting down our citizens abroad and arresting them in other nations,” as Grigory Lukyantsev, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, said in August, according to the Russian news outlet RT.

The first former U.S. official said it was highly unlikely that, given the magnitude of his crimes, Mr. Bout would be freed in any deal for Ms. Griner — even if, as some have speculated, the trade were to include Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine imprisoned in Moscow since December 2018 on espionage charges. The former official said Russia had sought Mr. Bout’s release in even higher-profile cases in the past and had been firmly rejected.

Both former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss their knowledge of Mr. Bout’s case publicly.

Danielle Gilbert, an assistant professor of military and strategic studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy who specializes in hostage diplomacy, agreed that releasing Mr. Bout would be a difficult political proposition. But she did not rule out the idea. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re at least considering the possibility,” she said, noting that she does not speak for the U.S. government.

Mr. Bout has at least one advocate for his release in the United States: Shira A. Scheindlin, the judge who presided over his case. In an interview, Ms. Scheindlin said that swapping Mr. Bout for Ms. Griner would be inappropriate, given the scale of his offense in relation to her alleged violation.

But she said a deal that also included Mr. Whelan might even the scales. Mr. Bout has already served 11 years in prison, she noted, saying that “he was not a terrorist, in my opinion. He was a businessman.” Although she was required to impose his mandatory 25-year sentence, she added: “I thought it was too high at the time.”

“So, having served as long as he has, I think the United States’ interest in punishing him has been satisfied,” she said, “and it would not be a bad equation to send him back if we get back these people who are important to us.”

Even if the United States were open to such a deal, Mr. Zissou said it would not be imminent. He said he believed that Russia — which insists Ms. Griner faces legitimate charges and is not a political pawn — was determined to complete her trial before negotiating her release. “And that is likely to take a few months,” he said.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the Biden administration’s efforts to end a Trump-era immigration program that forces asylum seekers arriving at the southwestern border to await approval in Mexico.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members. Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with much of the chief justice’s analysis.

The challenged program, known commonly as Remain in Mexico and formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols, applies to people who left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. After the policy was put in place at the beginning of 2019, tens of thousands of people waited in unsanitary tent encampments for immigration hearings. There have been widespread reports of sexual assault, kidnapping and torture.

Soon after he took office, President Biden sought to end the program. Texas and Missouri sued, and lower courts reinstated it, ruling that federal immigration laws require returning immigrants who arrive by land and who cannot be detained while their cases are heard.

Since the Biden administration restarted the program in December, far fewer migrants have been enrolled than during the Trump era. That is in part because the United States agreed to take additional steps to meet certain demands from Mexico, including that migrants be sent back under the program only if there is sufficient shelter space.

By the end of May, the Biden administration had enrolled into the program more than 7,200 migrants since December 2021. Most of those enrolled in recent months are from Nicaragua and are men.

From January 2019, when the Trump administration started the program, to the end of 2020, nearly 70,000 migrants were sent back to Mexico to wait for their court hearings, according to the American Immigration Council.

The case, Biden v. Texas, No. 21-954, was unusually complex, involving three statutory provisions pointing in different directions.

One provision said that the federal government generally “shall detain” immigrants while they await consideration of their immigration proceedings. But Congress has never allocated enough money to detain the number of people affected.

In 2021, for example, the government processed about 670,000 migrants arriving along the Mexican border but had the capacity to detain about 34,000.

The second provision said the government “may return” migrants who arrive by land to the country from which they came.

The third provision allowed the government to release migrants into the United States while they await their hearings “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, in Amarillo, ruled last year that immigration laws required returning noncitizens seeking asylum to Mexico whenever the federal government lacked the resources to detain them.

The Biden administration promptly asked the Supreme Court to intervene, but it refused to block Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, which required it to restart the program. The three more liberal justices dissented.

The court’s brief, unsigned order at the time said that the administration had appeared to have acted arbitrarily and capriciously in rescinding the program, citing a 2020 decision that had refused to let the Trump administration immediately rescind an Obama-era program protecting the young immigrants known as Dreamers.

The Biden administration then took steps to restart the program even as it issued a new decision seeking to end it. Administration officials, responding to criticism that they had acted hastily, released a 38-page memorandum setting out their reasoning.

They concluded that the program’s costs outweighed its benefits. Among those costs, the memo said, were the dangerous conditions in Mexico, the difficulty immigrants faced in conferring with lawyers across the border and the ways in which the program undermined the administration’s foreign policy objectives and domestic policy initiatives.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected the administration’s plan to shut down the program.

“The government says it has unreviewable and unilateral discretion to create and to eliminate entire components of the federal bureaucracy that affect countless people, tax dollars and sovereign states,” Judge Andrew S. Oldham wrote for the panel. “The government also says it has unreviewable and unilateral discretion to ignore statutory limits imposed by Congress.”

“And the government says it can do all of this by typing up a new ‘memo’ and posting it on the internet,” he added. “If the government were correct, it would supplant the rule of law with the rule of say-so. We hold the government is wrong.”

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.