Cowboys emphasize business trip mentality as they practice in Rio ahead of their game vs. Ravens

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The Dallas Cowboys began their preparations in Rio de Janeiro on Friday for their game against the Baltimore Ravens with an eye on the task at hand and not the sights for which the city is known.

Brian Schottenheimer, the Cowboys' second-year coach who's preparing for his first international game, said players were well aware their visit to Brazil would feel like a business trip. They will play 5,200 miles away from home.

“It’s a little bit different from other road games,” Schottenheimer said. “We were very up front with the guys early on. You’re not going to have the free time to do what you’d normally do.”

“We’re here to get better, grow, learn and we’ll keep putting the final touches on what’s been a short week,” he added.

The Cowboys practiced at the training grounds used by soccer club Flamengo in a remote part of Rio about 26 miles west of the iconic Sugarloaf Mountain. They'll get their first look at the city's historic Maracana Stadium during a walkthrough on Saturday.

The Ravens practiced at the training ground of another soccer club, Botafogo. Coach Jesse Minter has worked in Brazil before; he was the Los Angeles Chargers’ defensive coordinator last season, when they opened against the Kansas City Chiefs in Sao Paulo.

Minter won't have much free time either, but he is already keen on seeing some of the fans from 2025.

“They might not be necessarily cheering for one team or the other. They kind of get excited when both teams make plays. Both offenses and defense have to deal with the crowd,” he said.

The teams arrived in Rio on Friday morning following roughly 10-hour flights. Their game Sunday will be one of a record nine international contests on the NFL schedule this season.

“We have a lot of time between now and (kickoff),” Schottenheimer said.

Quarterback Dak Prescott, who will be playing in his first international game, also said the Cowboys are in a “strictly business trip” mode, though he noted he has enjoyed hanging out by the pool with his teammates and had tasted some of the local steaks at lunch.

“It is a place I want to return to as a tourist,” Prescott said, adding that he hopes to see the famous Christ the Redeemer statue from the bus when he heads to the game. “What we are looking for is a win.”

Prescott said he and his teammates expect to be fully rested by Saturday morning after their long trip.

“This is a first for the majority of the team,” Prescott said. “It is great to have an extra day to massage the game plan.”

“We’re excited about our game plan, we’ve got answers for whatever they’re going to do,” he added. “That just kind of goes into the rules of who we are, not trying to get outside of our box to combat anything they’re doing or counter them too much. We want to be the aggressors. We want to make them play on their heels and bring our best game to them.”

Prescott said even with the business trip mentality, his passion for football is the same.

“To be here in Brazil where there’s big fan group, big fan base and support, hopefully allow a lot of people to see me play and this team play for the first time in person,” he said. “It is something that I think about each and every game. ‘Who’s watching for the first time?’ Or ‘Who’s trying to pick up this game, and how can I inspire them?’ Just allows me to not take any play for granted, to be right where my feet are.”

The NFL has been playing in Brazil since 2024, but the two previous games were at the 48,000-seat NeoQuimica Arena in Sao Paulo, a larger market where both games were sellouts. Some tickets remain for Sunday's game.

Teams involved in those other games — the Packers, Eagles, Chargers and Chiefs — had more activities in Brazil.

See AP’s full NFL coverage here

Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson speaks after a practice for an NFL football game against the Dallas Cowboys in Rio de Janeiro, Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Baltimore Ravens players work out during a practice for an NFL football game against the Dallas Cowboys in Rio de Janeiro, Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Dallas Cowboys head coach Brian Schottenheimer speaks during a practice for an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens in Rio de Janeiro, Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Lucas Figueiredo)

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott speaks during a practice for an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens in Rio de Janeiro, Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Lucas Figueiredo)

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott (4) works out during a practice for an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens in Rio de Janeiro, Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Lucas Figueiredo)

NEW YORK (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday lifted restrictions on a controversial federal voter database before November’s elections, granting President Donald Trump a temporary win in his aggressive campaign against noncitizen voting.

The court's three liberal-leaning justices publicly dissented from the decision.

The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Trump administration's revamped version of a Department of Homeland Security program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls. It's a program that has drawn scrutiny for its use of voters' sensitive personal data and its tendency to wrongly flag some eligible voters as noncitizens.

States' use of the SAVE program is voluntary, limiting the ruling's impact on the midterm elections. Existing law also blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, said David Becker, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. He said DHS itself has admitted the data is not perfect.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who has refused to participate in the SAVE program, said the ruling will have no effect in her state because it “does not force states to change the way we run our elections.”

The plaintiffs and their lawyers in the case called the ruling “profoundly disappointing” and said it puts “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database” before the midterms.

On X, James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, responded to a post about the decision with, “Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

The court’s order puts on hold a federal judge’s June ruling that had deemed the Republican administration’s recently revamped version of SAVE illegal. U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan had blocked the use of the tool, saying it violated Americans’ privacy rights and could result in voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.

A federal appeals court let her order stand.

But the Supreme Court majority found that a 1996 law explicitly allows DHS to obtain information on citizenship and immigration from other federal agencies. The federal government also has “an obligation to respond” to states seeking to verify citizenship.

“The order below prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task,” the majority wrote in the unsigned order.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. The database has long been seen to fall under federal privacy laws, she wrote, and there are real risks that legitimate voter registrations could be mistakenly revoked.

“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote.

The plaintiffs pledged to do “everything in our power” to ensure the district court decision stands.

The SAVE program was created under an immigration law mandating that DHS help federal, state and local agencies prevent government benefits from going to noncitizens. The Trump administration last year moved to significantly expand its search abilities. Since then, at least 67 million registrations have been scanned through the program, but critics worry it could purge valid voters from the rolls.

Some registrants have already been wrongly flagged. In Travis County, Texas, for example, officials said they investigated 97 voters flagged by SAVE as apparent noncitizens and found that at least 10% of them — and likely up to 21% — were U.S. citizens. The county urged the Supreme Court to reject the administration’s appeal, while the state of Texas submitted its own brief defending the database.

In Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, voter Anthony Nels was disappointed that the Supreme Court allowed the continued use “of a system that harms people’s constitutional right to vote.”

Last year, after Texas ran its voter registrations through the SAVE system, Nels, 29, was flagged as a potential noncitizen, even though the South Africa native had become a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago. His local election office temporarily canceled his registration while he obtained a new passport to replace an expired one.

“This just seems like another illegitimate way to affect upcoming and future elections,” he said in a text to The Associated Press.

Stephen Richer, the Republican former top election official in Arizona's largest county, said the Supreme Court's ruling could be a positive step “if used responsibly.”

“That being said, the SAVE program has been shown time after time to be a highly-imperfect tool, so election administrators should only use it as a starting point, not as a definitive indicator of citizenship,” he wrote on social media.

Even though the use of the SAVE program was blocked for months ahead of Friday's ruling, the administration has said in court filings that it has continued using Social Security Administration data "in certain cases to verify information and help determine whether illegal voting may have occurred."

DHS in August launched its own investigation to find noncitizen voters on state rolls, according to a federal whistleblower statement that said the effort is rushed, filled with errors and potentially violates state laws. DHS has defended that investigation as being conducted “diligently and professionally.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also suggested over the summer that there could be as many as 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four states, an unsubstantiated claim that puzzled state election officials who said the numbers dramatically exceeded their own findings. In one of those, Nevada, DHS said it had identified 185 noncitizens on the voter rolls, but the state attorney general's office wrote to the agency earlier this week, saying a records check found that all of them were, in fact, U.S. citizens.

The effort to create a national voter list is one of the many steps Trump has taken during his second term to try to overhaul how elections are run. Most of those steps have been blocked by various courts, in part because the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, but provides no such power to the president. In mid-September, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s bid from Trump to restrict mail ballot procedures before the midterms.

Trump has remained fixated on the idea that massive numbers of noncitizens are voting in U.S. races, but all evidence says otherwise.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Georgia’s secretary of state found that 20 of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters were not U.S. citizens. In Ohio, prosecutors secured indictments against nine people for voting as noncitizens over the span of 10 years. The state has some 8 million registered voters. Even with the Trump administration laser-focused on the issue in his second term, DHS said its investigations into potential noncitizens on voter rolls nationwide had led to 160 arrests.

Those numbers are supported by a mountain of research at the national and state level that has found the percentage of noncitizens on voter rolls is a tiny fraction of the nation's nearly 228 million registered voters.

Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas, and Whitehurst reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Jessica Hill in Las Vegas also contributed.

FILE - The Supreme Court is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, Aug. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, file)