Today’s edition of quick hits.

* All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz: “Leaders from the coalition of G7 countries — which is made up of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom — met virtually today to discuss how to ease the economic strain caused by the Iran war, including the possibility of escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz with military assets.”

* In related news: “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it struck two ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, as the war disrupts one of the world’s most crucial economic passageways and threatens industries across the globe.”

* A case I’ve been following: “The U.S. must keep making payments on the $16 ​billion New York Hudson Tunnel, after an appeals ‌court on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s bid to halt paying for the project.”

* All of the latest inflation data was collected before the war: “Prices consumers pay for a broad range of goods and services rose in line with expectations for February, offering a final look at inflation pressures before an oil shock tied to the Iran war rattled the outlook. The consumer price index increased a seasonally adjusted 0.3% for the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 2.4%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Wednesday. Both numbers matched the Dow Jones consensus forecast.”

* The Epstein files: “On the heels of news reports that more than 40,000 files were either withheld or taken down from the Department of Justice’s site with documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, the DOJ late last week released documents including FBI memos related to accusations against President Donald Trump. But MS NOW has found that the released files still appear to be incomplete, missing FBI notes and memos reflecting interviews with women alleging abuse by other prominent men.”

* In related news: “The anonymous artists who have targeted President Donald Trump with satirical statues and installations in Washington struck again on the National Mall on Tuesday morning with an enormous statue of the president embracing the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a reenactment of a famous scene from the movie ‘Titanic.’”

* Bringing more guns to more convicted criminals: “The Trump administration quietly restored the gun rights to 22 people who had lost them because of felonies, indictments or other convictions this year as it prepares to revive a long-dormant program that’s expected to draw a tsunami of applications.”

* This proposal seems entirely worthwhile: “Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is introducing new legislation Wednesday to recover federal money that’s been paid out to U.S. presidents through settlements resulting from White House coercion. Here’s a copy of his billfirst obtained by HuffPost. In case it’s not obvious, the legislation is directly aimed at President Donald Trump.”

See you tomorrow.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The Trump administrationhas launched its latest urgent complaint to the Supreme Courtasking the justices to immediately halt a lower court order that stops the administration from quickly ending humanitarian immigration protections — this time for Haitians.

The government’s application Wednesday comes after another recent one regarding Syriathat the high court could rule on at any time. And it follows previous Supreme Court orders siding with the administration on lifting protections for Venezuelan nationals.

Continuing a theme throughout President Donald Trump’s second term, the Justice Department’s top Supreme Court lawyer, John Sauercast the lower court action he wants lifted as only the latest example of judges encroaching on executive authority.

“This is the government’s fourth application for a stay arising from lower courts’ refusal to allow the Executive Branch to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for various countries on the eve of the terminations taking effect,” Sauer said in Wednesday’s filingnoting that the previous ones “involved Venezuela (twice, resulting in stays from this Court) and Syria (currently pending).”

Sauer said all those cases and others in the lower courts involve “challenges that second-guess the underpinnings” of Kristi Noem’s decisions to terminate protections when she was the head of the Department of Homeland Security.

He said the “main variation” among these cases is that some of the lower courts, including in the Haiti case, “endorse a far-fetched and far-reaching equal-protection claim based on decisionmakers’ purported racial animus.” He warned that such a theory “threatens to invalidate virtually every immigration policy of the current administration.”

Ruling against the administration last monthU.S. District Judge Ana Reyes wrote that Noem “has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants,” but that, as homeland security secretary, she was “constrained by both our Constitution and the APA [Administrative Procedure Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

The Biden-appointed judge noted that Trump had called Haiti a “s—hole country,” suggested Haitians “probably have AIDS” and complained that their immigration to the United States is “like a death wish for our country.”

A divided federal appeals court panel in Washington declined to lift the district court order last week. The two Democratic appointees in the majority said the government couldn’t show why it needed instant relief, whereas Haitians face “substantial and well-documented harms” if they lose protections, including “risk of detention and deportation, separation from family members, and loss of work authorization.” Trump appointee Justin Walker dissented, arguing that the government is irreparably harmed by courts intruding into executive policy. He also emphasized the “temporary” nature of temporary protected status.

The latest lower court loss led Sauer to ask not only that the Supreme Court lift the order protecting Haitians, but also that the justices take up the issue on full review before the appeals court has had a chance to issue a final ruling — an unusual procedural move called “certiorari before judgment.”Sauer had asked the justices for that same relief in the pending Syria-related application. In this latest application related to Haiti, he urged the court to grant certiorari before judgment in both appeals.

Haitian TPS holders will have a chance to weigh in before the justices act. But they weighed in on the Syrian case docket in an  amicus brieftelling the justices that, if the administration has its way, more than 350,000 Haitian nationals could face deportation “to one of the world’s most dangerous countries” and would “face the threat of literal death if deported to Haiti while the appeal in their case is pending.”

In that pending Syria TPS appeal, Syrian nationals told the justicesthat the government “apparently needs urgent authority to send them to a country in the middle of an active war,” observing that Syria “has been caught in the crossfire as the military conflict in Iran has threatened to unleash a full-scale regional war.”

Subscribe to theDeadline: Legal Newsletterfor expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.