The sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has sent the White House, congressional leadership and the presidential campaign into overdrive. As President Obama moves forward with plans to name a successor, and Republicans vow not to approve anyone until after the November election, a number of key Open Society issues hang in the balance—including, but hardly limited to, the fate of Obama’s immigration executive actions, which could provide relief from the fear of deportation, as well as the prospect of work permits, for up to 5 million undocumented persons currently living in the U.S.

Advocates spent much of the weekend on conference calls, and, in consultation with key White House personnel, coordinating talking points to rebut Senate Republican leadership arguments that it is unprecedented to consider a high court nomination after voters had begun casting ballots for the next president (in fact, several senior members of the Senate Republican caucus, including now-Majority Leader McConnell, voted to confirm Anthony Kennedy in February 1988, a presidential election year). Advocates sought to stress how unusual it was for a vacancy to arise due to the death of a sitting justice—a situation that has arisen just four times since the 1950s—and pointing out that leaving the vacancy unaddressed means, in effect, that the court could go two terms without a full complement of justices. Grantee the Constitutional Accountability Project was preparing an op-ed on how a strict constructionist like Scalia would regard one branch deciding to leave another branch hobbled, suggesting any fair reading of Article II calls the Senate to do its duty in acting promptly on a Supreme Court nomination sent over from the White House. By late Tuesday, Sen. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had indicated he would wait to see who Obama nominated before deciding how to proceed.

Hopes for a cease-fire in Syria’s civil war remained checkered, as the U.S. chastised Russia, its putative partner in the effort, for continued bombing in the northern part of the war-torn country.

Advocates circulated new reports indicating how much harsh xenophobic rhetoric of the 2016 campaign to date was damaging the GOP’s brand among Latinos.

GOP candidate Ben Carson told an interviewer that he felt Muslims who believed in American democracy must be suffering from mental illness, so opposed were the precepts of the two institutions.

Authorities braced for hundreds of thousands of Catholics to cross from El Paso to Ciudad Juarez Wednesday, as the Pope readies a special mass for migrants.

 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit prepared to hear oral arguments in two key national security cases, including one brought by grantee ACLU, a FOIA challenge seeking to force the CIA to release documents shedding light on its use of drone strikes to carry out targeted killings.

Appearing on 60 Minutes, CIA Director John Brennan asserted that encryption technology was hampering the intelligence community’s ability to investigate and stop attacks by groups like ISIS.

Advocates monitored reports of heightened threats against attendees at the Islamic Center, just off the University of Arizona campus in Tucson.

Among other grantee activities:

--Moveon.org launched a petition drive aimed at pressuring members of the Senate to carry out members’ constitutional duty to advise and consent on presidential nominations in light of the Scalia vacancy.

--The National Immigration Law Center and ACLU are among the grantees and advocates preparing a briefing on how Scalia’s death may impact the high court’s decision-making on U.S. v Texas, the challenge to Obama’s immigration executive actions.

--The Center for American Progress’s ThinkProgress sought to game out what might happen, assuming no replacement for the late Justice Scalia is immediately forthcoming, in a variety of high-impact cases before the Supreme Court on abortion, voting rights, immigration and the power of unions. Another ThinkProgress piece called for a change in the way America selects and confirms judges.

--Media Matters kept tabs on the high and low water marks of the coverage of the Scalia vacancy, pointing to Donald Trump’s fueling rumors that the late justice might have been assassinated and conservative commentator Laura Ingraham’s suggestion that the mere fact of President Obama’s race constituted a form of undue pressure on Republicans vowing not to confirm a Supreme Court nominee.

--Human Rights First (OSPC) released a letter signed by more than 40 retired military leaders urging all presidential candidates to denounce torture as an ineffectual tool that runs counter to America’s national security interests.