GARLAND, Texas — The police chief in Garland, Texas, made clear Monday that his department had no advance warning that two gunmen from Phoenix would target a controversial art exhibit.

A week ago Sunday, two men armed with assault rifles and wearing body armor pulled up to the Curtis Culwell Center and opened fire, wounding a security guard.

Five Garland police officers, who were providing security at the Muhammad Art Exhibit, returned fire, killing Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi.

“We had no information from the FBI or anyone else that Elton Simpson posed a threat to our event,” Police Chief Mitch Bates said at a news conference Monday.

WASHINGTON — More than 100 Republican members of Congress urged a federal appeals court Monday to block the Obama administration’s sweeping new immigration policies such as deferred deportations.

The 25 senators and 88 representatives told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that the policies go beyond the president’s power because they create a new class-based program. That class would be the roughly 4 million parents — their children are U.S. citizens — who are illegally in the country, the brief states.

“The government’s creation of a categorical, class-based program is neither moored in constitutional authority nor in authority delegated by a lawful statute passed by Congress,” the lawmakers’ amicus brief states.

The 5th Circuit is considering the Obama administration’s request to remove an injunction put in place by a federal judge in Texas in February. The injunction, issued after 26 states brought the case, prevented the government from implementing actions that President Barack Obama announced in November, as he blamed congressional gridlock for inaction on immigration.

A former CIA officer has been sentenced to 42 months in prison for telling a reporter secrets of a classified operation aimed at sabotaging Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Jeffrey A. Sterling, 47, was convicted in January of leaking details of the potential operation to New York Times reporter James Risen, who used some of those details in his 2006 book “State of War.”

Sterling was convicted in January of seven counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information, one count of unauthorized conveyance of government property and one count of obstruction of justice, court records show. He will be jailed at a federal prison near St. Louis, records show.

The sentence was far shorter than federal prosecutors requested.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Sterling to a minimum of 20 years in prison.

MIAMI — Pope Francis will visit three Cuban cities and the National Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, the shrine of Cuba’s patron saint, during a September visit to the island, the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba announced Monday.

The bishops said Francis would arrive in Cuba on Sept. 19 and remain on the island until Sept. 22, when he leaves from Santiago in eastern Cuba for a trip to the United States.