LAREDO, Texas — A month after ICE agents sent the young Ecuadorian mother and her 7-year-old daughter to a sprawling detention center 1,300 miles from their Minnesota home, they were finally free.

But when the bus pulled up to a migrant shelter in the border city of Laredo, dropping off a half-dozen families lugging bags stuffed with belongings, the stress of recent weeks tracked mother and daughter like the long shadows on that mid-February afternoon.

Night after night inside south Texas’ Dilley Immigration Processing Center with hundreds of other families, the grade-schooler wept and pleaded to know why they were being held.

“She would tell me, ‘Mom, what crime did I commit to be a prisoner?’ I didn’t know what to tell her,” said the 29-year-old, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear being identified could negatively affect their immigration case. Her husband was deported to Ecuador soon after they were taken into custody.

Many Americans were alarmed last month when photos circulated showing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis detaining a 5-year-old boy wearing a bunny hat and carrying a Spiderman backpack. The concern followed Liam Conejo Ramos and his father when they were sent to Dilley, surrounded by chain-link fences on a dusty plain about 75 miles south of San Antonio.

But Liam was hardly an outlier. ICE has been holding hundreds of children at Dilley — many for months.

“We are all Liam,” Christian Hinojosa, an immigrant from Mexico, said by phone from Dilley, where she and her 13-year-old son were held for more than four months. They were released this month and allowed to return home to San Antonio where she works as a health aide.

She noted that Liam and his father were released from Dilley after 10 days, when members of Congress and a judge intervened.

“My son says, ‘That’s unfair, Mama. What’s the difference between him and us?’”

When the Obama administration opened Dilley in 2014, nearly all families detained there had recently crossed the border from Mexico. Detentions at the facility were scaled back by the Biden administration in 2021, before it was closed three years later.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

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Since being reopened by President Donald Trump’s administration last spring, life inside Dilley — a compound of trailers and other prefabricated buildings — has been shaped by three decisive changes.

The number of detained families has risen sharply since last fall. The government is holding many children well beyond the 20-day limit set by longstanding court order. And many detainees have lived in the U.S. for several years, with roots in neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, according to lawyers and other observers.

“Just imagine that you’re a child and you’re taken out of your surroundings,” said Philip Schrag, a Georgetown University law professor and author of “Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America.”

Suddenly you’re in “a completely strange environment with the doors locked and guards in uniform roaming around,” said Schrag, who counseled Dilley detainees as a volunteer lawyer during the Obama administration.

ICE booked more than 3,800 children into detention during the first nine months of the new Trump administration, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project. On an average day more than 220 children were held, with most of those detained longer than 24 hours sent to Dilley. More than half of Dilley detainees during that period were children.

Nearly two-thirds of children detained by ICE were eventually deported and almost 1 in 10 left the country when their parents accepted voluntary departure, according to an AP analysis of the latest comprehensive data. About a quarter were released in the U.S., requiring their parents to check in regularly with ICE as their legal cases proceed.

The number of detainees at Dilley has risen sharply since the period covered by the data, nearly tripling between last fall and late January to more than 1,300, according to Relevant Research, which analyzes immigration enforcement data.

“We’ve started to use 100 days as a benchmark because so many children are exceeding 20 days,” said Leecia Welch, the chief legal director at Children’s Rights, who visits Dilley regularly to ensure compliance. In a visit this month, Welch said she counted more than 30 children who had been held for over 100 days.

The increased detention of children comes as the Trump administration has gutted a Department of Homeland Security office responsible for oversight of conditions inside Dilley and other facilities.

“It’s a particular concern that family detention is being increased,” said Dr. Pamela McPherson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist contracted by DHS from 2014 until last year to inspect and investigate conditions at Dilley and other ICE facilities holding children.

“Just who’s providing that check-and-balance now?”

Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents the congressional district where Dilley is located, said multiple visits have convinced him criticism of the center is unfair.

He said he’d been impressed by Dilley’s facilities and the professionalism and dedication of staff. “They’re not doing policy. They’re just fulfilling a duty,” said Gonzales, a Republican.

DHS did not respond to detailed questions about Dilley submitted by the AP. But both DHS and ICE sharply refuted allegations of poor care and conditions there.

“The Dilley facility is a family residential center designed specifically to house family units in a safe, structured and appropriate environment,” ICE Director Todd M. Lyons said in a statement this week. Services include medical screenings, infant care packages as well as classrooms and recreational spaces.

But concerns about Dilley are personal for Kheilin Valero Marcano, a Venezuelan immigrant detained with her husband and 1-year-old daughter, Amalia, in December and held for nearly two months.

When the child got a high fever, Valero Marcano said Dilley staff told her it was just a virus. Two weeks later, Amalia started vomiting, then losing weight. Valero Marcano said she took her to the Dilley doctor’s office at least eight times but was offered Tylenol and ibuprofen.

The baby was eventually sent to two hospitals, where doctors diagnosed COVID, bronchitis, pneumonia and stomach virus, she said.

ICE disputed Valero Marcano’s account, saying in a statement the baby “immediately received proper medical care” at Dilley before being sent to the hospital. Back in Dilley, “she was in the medical unit and received proper treatment and prescribed medicines,” it said.

The family’s return to Dilley coincided with a measles outbreak there. They were released earlier this month after their lawyers petitioned the court.

“I’m so worried for all the families who are still inside,” Valero Marcano said.

After more than two months in a cramped room at Dilley with three other families, the 13-year-old girl’s depression turned increasingly dark.

The eighth grader stopped eating after finding a worm in her food, family members said. Staff sometimes withheld medications she’d long been prescribed to keep her anxiety in check and help her sleep.

When a total lockdown was imposed, a guard blocked the teen from leaving the crowded room to join her mother and sister in the bathroom. She spiraled into crisis, and used a plastic knife from the cafeteria to cut her wrist.

“She said she didn’t want to live anymore because she preferred to die rather than having to keep living in confinement,” her mother, Andrea Armero, told the AP in a video call from Colombia, where the family was deported this month. The AP generally avoids identifying people who attempt or die by suicide.

The girl’s struggles began before she arrived at Dilley. Soon after starting middle school in Colombia, she learned a family member had sexually abused her younger sister. Armero said she saw no option but to leave and in early 2024 she and her daughters traveled to the U.S. border with Mexico, applying for asylum.

Living with family in Florida, the 13-year-old was doing well in school but sometimes experienced panic attacks about being sent back to Colombia. Under a psychiatrist’s care, she was prescribed anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications and regularly saw a therapist. Then, in December, ICE agents detained Armero and her daughters during a routine check-in.

At Dilley, the 13-year-old calmed herself by drawing, producing haunting pictures of a girl locked inside gates. But when she and other detainees took part in a protest after 5-year-old Liam and his father got to Dilley, guards took away drawing materials and ordered everyone to stay inside.

The teen’s mental health collapsed. She tried to harm herself with the plastic knife, Armero said, and repeatedly hit her head. The family was put into isolation without seeing a doctor, then deported to Colombia on Feb. 11 after a judge ordered them removed, she said.

Dilley discharge documents described “active problems,” including a “suicide attempt by cutting of wrist” and “self-harm,” in addition to a “history of post-traumatic stress disorder” and “history of anxiety.” AP also spoke with detainees and attorneys who independently described the girl’s suicide attempt.

Responding to questions from AP, a DHS official acknowledged there had been “a case of self-harm” inside the facility, but did not specify what had happened, or how staff handled the incident. When AP asked for details, DHS did not respond to follow-up questions.

“No child at Dilley … has been denied medical treatment or experienced a delayed medical assessment,” said Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, the for-profit prison company that operates the facility under contract with ICE. Gustin declined to answer specific question about the 13-year-old girl, citing privacy rules.

On a phone call from inside Dilley, 13-year-old Gustavo Santino-Josa introduced himself to a reporter by name and the 9-digit identification number ICE assigned him when he was taken into custody with his mother.

“Until today I don’t know what we did wrong to get detained,” Gustavo said. “I’ve seen my mom cry almost daily and I ask God that we can go out and go home soon.”

He worried they might never be released.

“My mom says that as long as there is hope it is worth fighting for,” Gustavo said before handing the phone to his mother, Christian Hinojosa, the health care aide originally from Mexico.

“All his friends have left already,” his mother said. “Some were deported. Some got released recently. And it hurts. It hurts to see people leaving and you’re staying here.”

Dilley was built to hold 2,400 people, housed in clusters ICE calls “neighborhoods.” Bunk beds are arranged side-by-side for up to four families, frequently putting parents with young children in close quarters.

Once in full operation, Dilley is expected to generate about $180 million in annual revenue for CoreCivic, according to the company’s recent filing with securities regulators.

In a video on its website, CoreCivic says Dilley’s “open campus layout allows residents to move freely and unescorted throughout the day.”

It does not mention that parents and their children are locked inside.

In response to questions from the AP, CoreCivic’s Gustin said the staff at Dilley includes a pediatrician, pediatric nurse practitioner, other trained medical professionals, as well as mental health services to “meet the needs of children and families in our care.”

In talks with parents of children held at Dilley, however, the same problems come up repeatedly, said Welch, the children’s rights lawyer.

Kids cry often and don’t get enough sleep, in part because lights are on around the clock, she said. The water tastes terrible and causes stomachaches and rashes, so some families stick to what they can buy in the commissary.

Their children don’t eat enough and have lost weight, Welch said. There are classrooms, but instruction is limited to an hour daily, mostly filling out worksheets.

A 14-year-old girl, identified in court papers by the initials NVSM, reported there were tensions with up to 12 people sharing their room. At night when she and her mother tried to sleep, others insisted on turning up the TV.

“I feel very sad and stressed to be here,” the teen said in an account filed with the court that oversees a binding settlement governing detention and release of children. “My nerves are so high. I don’t know what is happening. My muscles will twitch because I’m so nervous and on edge.”

As the government’s detention of parents and their children came under scrutiny in 2014, an ICE official insisted that family detention centers, equipped with basketball courts and medical clinics, were “more like a summer camp.”

The characterization irritated McPherson, the child psychiatrist who, along with another physician, was retained in 2014 by DHS to inspect family detention centers. Their contracts were not renewed by the Trump administration last year after DHS announced sweeping staff reductions.

“Having a clean place to sleep, having food, that’s not the same thing as having family and community,” McPherson said.

The doctors’ investigations of family detention centers exposed consistently inadequate staffing and disregard by administrators for the trauma caused by detention, concerns they reported in 2018 to a Senate caucus set up to hear from whistleblowers.

At Dilley, the doctors noted a persistent shortage of pediatricians and the inability to hire a child psychiatrist from the time they began their inspections until they alerted senators.

Employees unsure how to deal with 2-year-olds biting and hitting each other placed the children and their parents in medical isolation for days, McPherson and her colleague told senators. Without supervision, a nurse at Dilley gave adult-strength hepatitis A shots to about 250 children in 2015, the American Immigration Lawyers Association reported.

DHS responded to many of the findings by making changes before a special committee recommended in late 2016 that the government discontinue family detention except in rare cases. The first Trump administration increased family detention before the Biden administration began phasing it out in 2021.

That the Trump administration is again holding families at Dilley after so many warnings feels “dystopian,” McPherson said.

“The decision to knowingly traumatize children and subject them to chronic stress, I just have no words for it,” she said.

Huddled around picnic tables at the Laredo migrant shelter, parents released from Dilley searched anxiously for flights back to the homes they left behind. They called relatives, friends, teachers, anyone who might help with money to get there.

The young Ecuadorian mom talked of returning to Minneapolis, where her 2-year-old daughter, born in the U.S., was staying with a friend. With her husband deported, parenting will be entirely her responsibility.

That means getting her 7-year-old back in school. Then the woman, who had a work permit and a job in a Minneapolis restaurant before being detained, needs to keep her children fed.

“Let’s go home, Mom, but don’t go back to work because ICE is going to pick you up again,” the little girl said. Her mother tried to reassure her.

That won’t happen, she said, because now they have a special paper telling ICE to leave them alone.

She hopes that’s a promise she can keep.

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AP Data Reporter Aaron Kessler contributed from Washington.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

By JESSE BEDAYN and MICHAEL BIESECKER

A grand jury on Wednesday rejected indictments over the fatal shooting last year of a U.S. citizen by a federal immigration agent during a traffic encounter in Texas, prosecutors said.

As Khelin Marcano was preparing for her routine scheduled appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December, she debated packing a bag full of her 1-year-old daughter’s clothes. While she and her husband had been attending appointments without issue, she knew others were being detained at government buildings by immigration authorities. 

“When they told us we were being detained, it felt like we already knew, all along,” Marcano told ABC News.

The family, including 1-year-old Amalia, was quickly sent from El Paso to Texas’ Dilley immigration detention center, where they were detained for 60 days — joining hundreds of other families that the government has held for durations that advocates say exceed the limits established by federal court rulings.

Those restrictions stem from the Flores Settlement, a 1997 legal agreement that a federal court has interpreted to mean that the government generally should not hold children in immigration custody for more than 20 days.

As of last month, there were about 1,400 people being held at Dilley, including children and parents, according to RAICES, a legal immigrant advocacy group. The facility was closed during the Biden administration and was re-opened last year as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown ramped up. 

The 60 days that Marcano, her husband Stiven Prieto, and their daughter were held there is three times the general legal limit permitted by the settlement.

“The Trump administration is holding children and families in detention for prolonged periods of time, weeks, months,” Elora Mukherjee, the family’s lawyer, told ABC News. “Children and families at the Dilley facility don’t have access to sufficient clean drinking water, where they don’t have access to sufficient nutritious food, [and] don’t have access to adequate medical care.

‘Why does this happen to us?’

The family entered the U.S. using the Biden-era Customs and Border Protection app in 2024, according to court documents. They were processed and granted parole to live in the country while applying for asylum. The family was released last week after their 60-day detention and their first court date is scheduled for 2027, according to their attorney. 

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the family “was released into the country under the Biden administration,” and confirmed their detention. 

“For years, the Flores consent decree has been a tool of the left to promote an open borders agenda,” the DHS spokesperson said. “It is long overdue for a single district in California to stop managing the Executive Branch’s immigration functions. The Trump administration is committed to restoring common sense to our immigration system.”

Early on during their detention, the family says 1-year-old Amalia developed a persistent fever. Marcano told ABC News that despite her repeated pleas for medication, the medical staff dismissed the symptoms.

“The doctor told me that fever was a good sign because it meant she was actively fighting a virus,” Marcano said in Spanish. “I got really upset … and told her that whatever the case was, a fever is not a good thing. If she didn’t know that fever could kill people, or that fever could cause convulsions, fever would never be good.”

In a habeas petition Marcano filed against the government, she and her attorney claimed the Dilley facility lacked basic hygiene and nutrition, and that they saw bugs in the food. They alleged that the tap water smelled so strongly of chlorine that the family spent their limited funds on bottled water for their daughter. 

Marcano told ABC News that at one point during their detention, Amalia seemed to lose her strength and collapsed in her arms.

“I grabbed her and I dressed her and I took her back to the clinic, and I began to argue with the doctors, asking who would be responsible for my daughter if something happened to her,” Marcano said.

Marcano said it was only then that staff at Dilley transported her and Amalia by ambulance to a regional hospital, and later to a larger hospital in San Antonio. The 1-year-old was diagnosed with COVID-19 and a respiratory virus.  according to the family and their habeas petition.

According to Marcano’s complaint, hospital staff provided her with a nebulizer and Albuterol to treat Amalia’s respiratory distress — but when they returned to the Dilley facility, the staff immediately confiscated both the nebulizer and the medication.

“They took her treatment away,” Marcano said. “Why does this happen to us if we have done everything right? I was begging the officers to please help me get out of there, and no one listened to me.”

The family was released together shortly after they filed a habeas petition. Marcano told ABC News that, while inside the facility, she met families with pregnant women and saw children as young as 2 months old.

Long-term effects

Several immigrant advocates and attorneys told ABC News that the Trump administration is keeping children and families who are seeking asylum and other forms of legal relief in prolonged detention.

In Minneapolis, where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was detained along with his father on their way home from school last month, local school officials told ABC News that immigration authorities had detained four other students from the district. One of them, 11-year-old Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano, was detained along with her mother for more than one month, according to the family’s attorney, Bobby Painter.

“They were pulled over by ICE and pulled out of their car, thrown on an airplane and sent to Dilley, all in the span of maybe 24 hours,” the attorney said.

Some families have been held for months, attorneys told ABC News.

“The effects of detention are long-term on children,” Mukherjee, Marcano’s attorney, told ABC News. “Children who are with their parents and who are safe with their parents should never be detained when it’s not in a child’s best interest.”

The DHS, in a statement, said “being in detention is a choice.”

“We encourage all parents to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App,” the spokesperson said. “The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now.”

Since being released, Marcano said her daughter hardly cries at night anymore like she did when they were at the detention center.

“We’re feeling very good and thank god for his blessings,” she told ABC News. “We’re still a little on edge about what we were planning to do given everything ahead. So we’re left here thinking about what is going to happen to us and that gives us a bit of fear.”

“Are they going to leave us alone?” Marcano said. “That’s what we hope, but we don’t know.”

 

Updated 6:00 AM

Hearing came together following Pretti’s death

 

Updated 6:00 AM

Rep. Tony Gonzales to seek answers on cooperation between federal and local officials

 

Updated 6:00 AM

Fight over reining in ICE, CBP continues in Congress

By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN, Associated Press

BALTIMORE (AP) — Kilmar Abrego Garcia was due to check-in with immigration authorities on Friday, some 14 hours after he was released from detention on a judge’s orders.

Abrego Garcia became a flashpoint of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown earlier this year when he was wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. He was last taken into custody in August during a similar check-in.

Abrego Garcia, who was scheduled to appear at the Baltimore Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, first stopped at a news conference outside the building, escorted by a group of supporters chanting “We are all Kilmar!”

“I stand before you a free man and I want you to remember me this way, with my head held up high,” Abrego Garcia said through a translator. “I come here today with so much hope and I thank God who has been with me since the start with my family.”

He urged people to keep fighting.

“I stand here today with my head held high and I will continue to fight and stand firm against all of the injustices this government has done upon me,” Abrego Garcia said. “Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws and I believe that this injustice will come to an end.”

After Abrego Garcia spoke, he went through security at the field office, escorted by supporters.

The agency freed him just before 5 p.m. on Thursday in response to a ruling from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland, who wrote federal authorities detained him after his return to the United States without any legal basis.

Mistakenly deported and then returned

Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen with an American wife and child who has lived in Maryland for years. He immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager to join his brother, who had become a U.S. citizen. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, where he faces danger from a gang that targeted his family.

While he was allowed to live and work in the U.S. under ICE supervision, he was not given residency status. Earlier this year, he was mistakenly deported and held in a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison despite having no criminal record.

Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, Trump’s Republican administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges and asked a federal judge there to dismiss them.

A lawsuit to block removal from the US

The 2019 settlement found he had a “well founded fear” of danger in El Salvador if he was deported there. So instead ICE has been seeking to deport him to a series of African countries. Abrego Garcia has sued, claiming the Trump administration is illegally using the removal process to punish him for the public embarrassment caused by his deportation.

In her order releasing Abrego Garcia, Xinis wrote that federal authorities “did not just stonewall” the court, “They affirmatively misled the tribunal.” Xinis also rejected the government’s argument that she lacked jurisdiction to intervene on a final removal order for Abrego Garcia, because she found no final order had been filed.

ICE freed Abrego Garcia from Moshannon Valley Processing Center, about 115 miles (185 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, on Thursday just before the deadline Xinis gave the government to provide an update on Abrego Garcia’s release.

He returned home to Maryland a few hours later.

Immigration check-in

Check-ins are how ICE keeps track of some people who are released by the government to pursue asylum or other immigration cases as they make their way through a backlogged court system. The appointments were once routine but many people have been detained at their check-ins since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.

Washington — Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to his Maryland home Thursday night, after a judge ordered the immediate release of the Salvadoran national who was mistakenly deported to his home country earlier this year.

Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told CBS News on Thursday that he was officially out of Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Pennsylvania. Hours later, he was spotted arriving at his home in Maryland.

Abrego Garcia has been instructed to check in at an ICE field office in Baltimore at 8 a.m. Friday, his legal team told CBS News. When he was given similar instructions over the summer, following his release from pretrial detention, he was taken into ICE custody, and there are concerns he could be rearrested Friday on different legal grounds.

Earlier Thursday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis granted Abrego Garcia’s habeas corpus petition seeking release from custody. It’s a significant victory for Abrego Garcia, whose immigration case became a major flashpoint in President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign when he was removed to El Salvador earlier this year. An earlier order had prohibited the U.S. from removing him to his native country because of possible persecution by local gangs.

Xinis, in her order, found that there was no final order of removal from the government to deport Abrego Garcia from the United States, despite the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to remove him. 

“Because respondents have no statutory authority to remove Abrego Garcia to a third country absent a removal order, his removal cannot be considered reasonably foreseeable, imminent, or consistent with due process,” Xinis wrote in Thursday’s order. 

“Although respondents may eventually get it right, they have not as of today,” the judge continued. “Thus, Abrego Garcia’s detention for the stated purpose of third country removal cannot continue. Respondents’ conduct over the past months belie that his detention has been for the basic purpose of effectuating removal, lending further support that Abrego Garcia should be held no longer.”

Assistant Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called the judge’s decision “naked judicial activism by an Obama-appointed judge.”

“This order lacks any valid legal basis and we will continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts,” McLaughlin said. 

The Trump administration has been attempting to re-deport Abrego Garcia to the African nations of Uganda, Eswatini or Ghana, but none of the countries have agreed to accept him.

In October, however, the administration informed the court that Liberia had agreed to take Abrego Garcia and was making “final necessary arrangements” for his deportation there.

Sandoval-Moshenbergsaid at the time that unless Liberia guaranteed it would not send Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, deporting him to the West African nation “is no less unlawful than sending him directly” to his home country again.

In November, the Trump administration argued that Abrego Garcia had received significant due process in the U.S. In a court filing, the Justice Department said a U.S. government asylum officer had interviewed Abrego Garcia, who has been in federal immigration detention since late August, and determined he had failed to prove he would face persecution or torture in Liberia.

Xinis heard testimony in October from John Schultz, an ICE official, about the Trump administration’s efforts to remove Abrego Garcia. Schultz said the administration remains in active discussions with Eswatini about removing him there, though the east African country rejected a request to take him.

Schultz said that once the administration has been informed that a third country is willing to accept Abrego Garcia, it could deport him within 72 hours if allowed by the court.

Abrego Garcia has said he is willing to go to Costa Rica and designated the country as his preferred country of removal, and Costa Rica has indicated it would provide him refugee status or residency. But during the hearing Oct. 10, a Justice Department lawyer said there had not been discussions about deporting him there.

Lawyers for Abrego Garcia accused the Trump administration of gamesmanship and deliberately seeking to remove him to countries where he could raise claims of reasonable fear of persecution, with the goal of keeping him detained for longer.

Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. from El Salvador in 2011 and has lived in Maryland with his wife and children. But he was arrested by immigration authorities in March and deported there, though he’d been granted the legal status in 2019 that should have prevented his removal to that country.

As part of a civil case Abrego Garcia and his wife brought against the Trump administration, Xinis ordered DHS to facilitate his return to the U.S. But immigration officials resisted doing so for months. Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. in June, but only after a federal grand jury in Tennessee indicted him on two charges of human smuggling, stemming from a November 2022 traffic stop.

Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty, and a judge in Tennessee ordered him to be released on bail ahead of a criminal trial set to begin in January. But he remained in criminal confinement for several more weeks because of concerns from his lawyers that immigration authorities would arrest him upon his release and deport him from the U.S.

He was released from jail in Tennessee in August and returned to Maryland. But days later, he was taken into custody by immigration authorities after being summoned for an interview at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore. The Trump administration notified Abrego Garcia’s lawyers he could be deported to Uganda, though Abrego Garcia expressed fear of persecution and torture, as well as a concern that the Ugandan government would send him back to El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia also filed a new legal challenge to his confinement and the Trump administration’s efforts to deport him for a second time, which Xinis is presiding over. She has blocked immigration officials from removing Abrego Garcia from the U.S., and he had since remained in detention at a facility in Pennsylvania.

At the heart of Abrego Garcia’s challenge is a 2001 Supreme Court case, in which the high court said the government cannot indefinitely detain a person in the U.S. illegally if there is no significant likelihood of removal in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argued that he has been in near-continuous confinement since March, when he was deported to El Salvador and held in prisons there. His only period of freedom was for a weekend in August, in between his release from criminal custody in Tennessee and his arrest by immigration authorities in Maryland.

WASHINGTON — Sophia Nyazi’s husband, Milad, shook her awake at 8 a.m. “ICE is here,” he told her.

Three uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were downstairs at the family’s home on Long Island, N.Y., on Tuesday, according to a video reviewed by The Times that she captured from atop the staircase.

Nyazi said the agents asked whether her husband was applying for a green card. They told her they would have to detain him because of the shooting of two National Guard members a week earlier in Washington, D.C.

“He has nothing to do with that shooting,” Nyazi, 27, recalled answering. “We don’t even know that person.”

Her protests didn’t matter. The Trump administration has put into motion a broad and unprecedented set of policy changes aimed at substantially limiting legal immigration avenues, including for immigrants long considered the most vulnerable.

Milad Nyazi, 28, was detained because, like the man charged in the shooting which left one National Guard member dead, he is from Afghanistan.

The administration has paused decisions on all applications filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, by people seeking asylum. The visa and immigration applications of Afghans, whom the U.S. had welcomed in 2021 as it pulled all troops from the country, have been halted.

Officials also froze the processing of immigration cases of people from 19 countries the administration considers “high-risk” and will conduct case-by-case reviews of green cards and other immigration benefits given to people from those countries since former President Biden took office in 2021.

Immigration lawyers say they learned that dozens of naturalization ceremonies and interviews for green cards are being canceled for immigrants from Haiti, Iran, Guinea and other countries on the list.

In a couple of cases, immigration officers told immigrants that they had been prepared to grant a green card, but were unable to do so because of the new guidance, said Gregory Chen, government relations director at American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

Although it is unclear exactly how many people could be affected by the new rules, 1.5 million immigrants have asylum cases pending with USCIS.

“These are sweeping changes that exact collective punishment on a wide swath of people who are trying to do things the right way,” said Amanda Baran, former chief of policy and strategy at USCIS under the Biden administration. “I worry about all the people who have dutifully filed applications and whose lives are now on hold.”

Administration officials called the Nov. 26 shooting a “terrorist attack” and defended the changes as necessary to protect the country. Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, faces charges stemming from the shooting that killed Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and critically wounded Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24.

“The protection of this country and of the American people remains paramount, and the American people will not bear the cost of the prior administration’s reckless resettlement policies,” Joseph Edlow, director of USCIS, said in a message posted Nov. 27 on X. “American safety is non-negotiable.”

Lakanwal pleaded not guilty last week and his motive remains under investigation. In Afghanistan, he served in a counterterrorism unit operated by the CIA.

Lakanwal entered the U.S. in 2021 through a Biden administration program that resettled nearly 200,000 Afghans in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, officials said. He applied for asylum in December 2024 and it was approved under the Trump administration in April, according to a statement by the nonprofit #AfghanEvac.

Afghans who worked with U.S. troops were believed to face danger if left behind under the Taliban-run government. Along with undergoing routine security screening, they submitted to additional “rigorous” vetting, which included biometric and biographic checks by counterterrorism and intelligence professionals, the Department of Homeland Security said at the time.

Two federal reports from 2024 and this year pointed to some failings of the screening, including data inaccuracies and the presence of 55 evacuees who were later identified on terrorism watch lists, though the latter report noted that the FBI had then followed all required processes to mitigate any potential threat.

It’s unclear exactly how the administration will carry out reviews of thousands of people who already live legally in the U.S. The federal government can’t easily strip people of permanent legal status. The threat of reopening cases, however, has sparked alarm in immigrant communities across the country.

About 58,600 Afghan immigrants call California home as of 2023, far more than any other state, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Interviews with a dozen local community advocates, immigration attorneys and family members of those detained paint an aggressive effort by the federal government to round up recent Afghan immigrants in the wake of the D.C. shooting.

“Unfortunately, I think the administration took this one very tragic incident and politicized it as a way to shut down even legal immigration. And it’s definitely gone much broader than the Afghan community,” said Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, the director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

Trump administration officials cited the shooting in a spate of policy changes last week.

On Friday, USCIS announced it had established a new center to strengthen screening with supplemental reviews of immigration applications, in part using artificial intelligence. The USCIS Vetting Center, based in Atlanta, will “centralize enhanced vetting of aliens and allow the agency to respond more nimbly to changes in a shifting threat landscape,” the agency said.

On Thursday, USCIS said work permits granted to immigrants would expire after 18 months, not five years. The change includes work permits for those admitted as refugees, with pending green card applications and with pending asylum applications.

In a memorandum Tuesday outlining the pause on asylum applications and the immigration cases of people from the 19 countries also subject to a travel ban, USCIS acknowledged that the changes could result in processing delays but had determined it was “necessary and appropriate” when weighed “against the agency’s obligation to protect and preserve national security.”

Immigrants already had been on high alert as the Trump administration canceled temporary humanitarian programs, cut back refugee admissions — except for a limited number of white South African Afrikaners — and increased attempts to send those with deportation orders to countries where they have no personal connection.

Before the Washington shooting, a Nov. 21 memo showed that the administration planned to review the cases of more than 200,000 refugees admitted under the Biden administration. Although asylum seekers apply after arriving in the U.S., refugees apply for admission from outside the country.

Nyazi questioned why Afghans are being singled out, noting that a white person allegedly assassinated Charlie Kirk, but “I don’t see any ICE agents going into white people’s houses.”

Asked why Milad Nyazi was detained, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant public affairs secretary for Homeland Security, called him a criminal, citing two arrests on suspicion of domestic violence.

“Under Secretary [Kristi] Noem, DHS has been going full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and criminal illegal aliens that came in through Biden’s fraudulent parole programs and working to get the criminals and public safety threats OUT of our country,” McLaughlin said in a statement.

Nyazi said the charges, which did not stem from incidents of physical violence, were dropped and his record was later expunged.

She and her husband got engaged in 2019 in Afghanistan and applied for a fiance visa, because Nyazi is a U.S. citizen. Their application was approved in 2021. Soon after, with the Taliban takeover in full force, the U.S. government allowed Milad Nyazi to fly to the U.S. He has a pending green card application, Nyazi said.

On Tuesday, the couple’s 3-year-old daughter screamed and cried as her father was handcuffed and taken away. He has a court hearing this week.

Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and others say Afghans in various stages of their legal immigration process — not only those with deportation orders — have been targeted. She said at least 17 Afghans in the Bay Area have been detained since Monday.

Lawyers said many of the Afghans detained last week had arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they had sought asylum.

Paris Etemadi Scott, legal director of the Pars Equality Center in San José, said three of her clients, an Afghan mother and her two sons who are both in their early 20s, were detained Dec. 1 during a routine check-in with ICE. All have pending asylum applications, she said.

Rebecca Olszewski, managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said her Afghan client, who also has a pending asylum case, reported for his monthly virtual check-in Friday and was told to show up in person the next day, where he was detained.

Since the shooting, administration officials and the president have used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants. In announcing the 19-country travel ban Dec. 1, Noem posted on X that she was recommending a “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

In a Cabinet meeting the next day, Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” who “contribute nothing.” (A few days later, Noem said the administration would expand the travel ban to more than 30 countries.)

On Thanksgiving Day, Trump had said on his social media platform that he intends to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and deport those who are “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

In recent days, a ghostly quiet has overtaken Shafiullah Hotak’s regular haunts in North Sacramento, where the Afghan population in the city is especially dense. Hotak, 38, is an Afghan immigrant who served as a program manager at refugee resettlement organization Lao Family Community Development until layoffs due to federal cuts forced him out of work in May.

On Thursday, immigration agents banged on doors at an apartment complex on Marconi Avenue, where hundreds of Afghans have resettled. Just one employee sat in an Afghan-owned tax and bookkeeping business that was typically buzzing with clients. A nearby park, where teenagers kick around soccer balls and giggling packs of children roam after school, was empty. And the lines at a halal market known for its sesame-topped Afghan bread had disappeared.

“The situation we have in our community reminds me of when we used to go to work in Afghanistan,” Hotak said. “We had to take different routes every day because people who were against the U.S. mission in Afghanistan were targeting people. There were bombings and shootings.”

Hotak said “Kill the eyes,” is what the enemies of the U.S. in Afghanistan used to advise as to how to deal with local Afghans aiding the military, in order to blind their operations.

“But nowadays those ‘eyes’ are here in the U.S. and the U.S. government is looking to pick them up and put them in jail,” Hotak said.

Times staff writers Castillo reported from Washington and Hussain and Uranga from Los Angeles.

KENNER, La. — The doors of Carmela Diaz’s taco joint are locked, the tables are devoid of customers and no one is working in the kitchen. It’s one of many once-thriving Hispanic businesses, from Nicaraguan eateries to Honduran restaurants, emptied out in recent weeks in neighborhoods with lots of signs in Spanish but increasingly fewer people on the streets.

In the city of Kenner, which has the highest concentration of Hispanic residents in Louisiana, a federal immigration crackdown aiming for 5,000 arrests has devastated an economy already struggling from ramped-up enforcement efforts this year, some business owners say, and had far-reaching impacts on both immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

“Fewer and fewer people came,” said a crying Diaz, whose Taqueria La Conquistadora has been closed for several weeks now with both customers and workers afraid to leave home. “There were days we didn’t sell anything. That’s why I made the decision to close the business — because there was no business.”

On Wednesday, convoys of federal vehicles began rumbling back and forth down Kenner’s main commercial streets as the Department of Homeland Security commenced the latest in a series of immigration enforcement operations that have included surges in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina. Bystanders have posted videos of federal agents detaining people outside Kenner businesses and at construction sites.

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino also made an appearance in the city, surrounded by agents in tactical gear, to tout to reporters the launch of the operation dubbed Catahoula Crunch, a name derived from the big game hound that is the Louisiana state dog.

The state’s Hispanic population has boomed in the last two decades, with many of them arriving in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina to help rebuild. In Kenner, just west of New Orleans between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, Hispanics make up about 30% of residents.

Diaz, who is from El Salvador, arrived in 2006 after years of doing farm work in Texas. She opened food trucks, earning enough to buy a home in Kenner, and her business has since expanded to a fleet of trucks and two brick-and-mortar restaurants.

Nearly all that is shuttered at the moment due to the crackdown, and Diaz is scraping by through making home deliveries to people fearful of being swept up by agents.

“They don’t respect anyone,” Diaz said. “They don’t ask for documents. They don’t investigate. They slap the handcuffs on them and take them away.”

Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Thursday that federal agents have already made dozens of arrests, though the agency has not released a full list of people detained.

“Americans should be able to live without fear of violent criminal illegal aliens harming them, their families, or their neighbors,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “In just 24 hours on the ground, our law enforcement officers have arrested violent criminals with rap sheets that include homicide, kidnapping, child abuse, robbery, theft, and assault.”

The office of Mayor Michael Glaser, a former police chief, declined to comment on his stance on the operation. But it said the crackdown “falls under federal jurisdiction” and the mayor expects all agencies operating in the city to conduct themselves “professionally, lawfully and with respect for our community.” It also said the city is “not participating in or advising” on the operation.

However, the city’s police are among the hundreds of local and state law enforcement agencies nationwide that have signed agreements to be part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that authorizes them to hold detainees for potential deportation.

Sergio Perez, a Guatemalan immigrant and U.S. citizen who has lived in Kenner since 2010, said he has loved ones there who lack legal permission to be in the country risk and being detained or deported. He also worries that anyone who is Hispanic is at risk of abuse by federal agents, regardless of their immigration status.

While Perez considers Kenner home — a place where it’s easy to find favorite dishes like “caldo de res,” a hearty beef and vegetable stew — he’s prepared to leave the country if family members are deported.

“They don’t want us here,” Perez said. “It’s like you are in someone’s house and you don’t feel welcome. They’re just killing our spirit.”

___

Cline reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Associated Press writer Valerie Gonzalez in McAllen, Texas, contributed.

___

Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

President Trump said late Thursday night that he would suspend immigration from developing nations to the U.S.

In a post to Truth Social, Mr. Trump wrote that he “will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover.”

The declaration follows Wednesday’s shooting in downtown Washington, D.C., just blocks from the White House, in which a National Guard member was killed and a second Guard member critically wounded. The suspect detained in the shooting has been identified as a 29-year-old Afghan national who was admitted to the U.S. in September 2021, along with thousands of other Afghan refugees, a month after the U.S. withdrew its troops from Afghanistan.  

Since the shooting, the Trump administration has taken an aggressive stance on U.S. immigration policies it says are to blame for allowing the suspect into the U.S., and has vowed to change them.  

The president did not clarify when such a move might take effect or how the pause would be implemented. He also did not disclose which countries would fall under such a designation.

CBS News has reached out to the White House for clarification.

The president also wrote that he would “terminate” the status of millions of migrants admitted under former President Joe Biden’s administration and “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.”

He said he would end “Federal benefits and subsidies” for “noncitizens” and deport foreign nationals who are determined to be a “security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Earlier Thursday, the Trump administration said it would be conducting a “full-scale, rigorous reexamination” of all green cards for every immigrant from 19 countries “of concern.”

Those countries included Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Venezuela.

Also Thursday, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to CBS News in a statement that the White House is now reviewing all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration.

Prior to the shooting, on Nov. 21, the Trump administration, in a memo directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to review the cases of all refugees admitted under Biden.

The suspect in the shooting, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, immigrated to the U.S. from Afghanistan in September 2021, paroled on humanitarian grounds, a DHS official told CBS News. His asylum case was granted earlier this year, during Mr. Trump’s presidency, the DHS official said.  

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Thursday that the suspect lived with his family in Bellingham, Washington, and drove across the country to D.C. prior to the attack.   

Mr. Trump said Thursday that the suspect, who was shot by a National Guard member following the ambush attack, is in serious condition. Authorities 

The CIA also disclosed Thursday that Lakanwal previously worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar that ended in 2021 following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.  

Jennifer Jacobs,

Ahmad Mukhtar and

Camilo Montoya-Galvez

contributed to this report.

MUSINA, South Africa — It’s 6 a.m. and Tholakele Nkwanyana is one of the first people to arrive at the Diepsloot public health clinic in Johannesburg, not to seek medical attention but to stop foreigners from getting care.

She and fellow members of South Africa’s anti-immigrant group Operation Dudula — which means “to get rid of by force” — are dressed in military-style fatigues as they block the entrance and demand to see patients’ identity documents. Mothers carrying children and others who are sick are turned away and told to go to private hospitals, which unlike public ones aren’t free.

Similar scenes have played out at government-run clinics across South Africa’s most populous province, Gauteng, as healthcare becomes the new battleground in the country’s long and painful debate over immigration.

The Johannesburg High Court has ordered Operation Dudula to stop harassing migrants. The group says it will appeal.

“In our operations we are saying, ‘Put South Africans first,’” Nkwanyana told The Associated Press. “The problem we have is that the influx of foreigners is too much and the medication is not enough.”

Africa’s most developed economy, which hosts world leaders this week for the Group of 20 summit, attracts migrants from neighboring Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho and as far away as Nigeria and Ethiopia.

In the year ending March 31, the Department of Home Affairs deported 46,898 migrants who had entered South Africa without documentation, an 18% increase from the previous year.

Operation Dudula emerged a few years ago, and its visibility has grown as mostly young Black South Africans take part. It’s not clear how many members the group has. Its actions have included closing down foreign-owned shops and blocking the children of foreigners from entering public schools.

Operation Dudula members assert that migrants entering without documents are taking jobs from South Africans, who face one of the world’s highest unemployment rates at over 31%.

South Africa has seen sometimes deadly waves of such sentiment. In 2008, 68 people were killed in attacks on foreigners across the country.

But the focus on denying them health care is new, along with Operation Dudula’s organized structure. The group has regional leaders and participates in news conferences and debates, and it has hinted at forming a political group.

South Africa’s government has condemned Operation Dudula’s actions and insists that the law guarantees health care for everyone, including foreigners in the country illegally.

“We are healthcare professionals. We don’t turn patients away because they don’t have documentation,” Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has said.

He and others have met multiple times with Operation Dudula and the government has posted security at public clinics, but police are overstretched in a country where the crime rate is high.

“They cannot wait at a clinic just in case something happens. They have a lot of other work to do,” national police commissioner Fanie Masemola has said.

In August, three Operation Dudula members were arrested after going into a maternity ward in Soweto and demanding that patients produce identity documents. Nurses called police. They have since been released on bail.

The South African Human Rights Commission, which has sharply criticized Operation Dudula’s actions, has said South Africa is following a global rise in anti-immigrant sentiment.

“You have seen them in the United States of America and Europe. It is a trend everywhere,” SAHRC commissioner Tshepo Madlingozi said.

South Africa spends 8.5% of its gross domestic product, or about $15 billion, on health care, higher than everything but education. And yet it has overcrowded hospitals, shortages of medication and poor management.

But many people in other African countries see South Africa as a relatively attractive destination.

South Africa had an estimated 2.4 million foreign nationals in 2022, about 3.9% of the population, according to official statistics, with no breakdown of those there legally or illegally. That was up from the estimate of over 958,000 in the census of 1996.

“We acknowledge that there are a lot of problems in the health care sector, the shortage of nurses, the shortage of doctors,” Madlingozi said. “There is crumbling infrastructure, so there’s a lot of issues. But as a commission, we are quite clear that nonnationals should not be scapegoated.”

In May, Zimbabwean national Blessing Tizirai moved from South Africa’s capital of Pretoria, where she had looked for work, to the town of Musina near the border. Four months pregnant, she had been turned away from public clinics several times by Operation Dudula or similar, smaller groups. She chose Musina because Operation Dudula does not operate there.

“Since I arrived, I have never been turned away from the clinic,” she said.

Nonhlanhla Moyo, who also had come from Zimbabwe in search of work, was among those turned away from the Diepsloot clinic by Operation Dudula.

“If I’m unable to get my asthma pump, how am I supposed to live? It is very difficult,” said Moyo, who remained in Gauteng.

Both dread the possibility of going to a clinic in Zimbabwe, where the public health system has collapsed under chronic underfunding and neglect. Patients visiting public hospitals there often must bring their own medicines, syringes, bandages and even water.

Operation Dudula’s actions have drawn attention in Zimbabwe, where a lawmaker during one recent Parliament debate brought up the group and suggested that the government do something about the rising tensions — like pay for its citizens’ treatment in South Africa.

Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi replied that the government would not. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s political elite largely seek treatment abroad, including in South Africa.

___

Associated Press writer Farai Mutsaka in Harare, Zimbabwe, and video journalist Alfonso Nqunjana in Johannesburg contributed to this report.

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For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse

The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Behind Trump’s reversal on releasing Epstein files; Judge accuses DOJ of “disturbing pattern” of missteps in Comey case.

A top Border Patrol commander touted dozens of arrests in North Carolina’s largest city on Sunday as Charlotte residents reported encounters with federal immigration agents near churches, apartment complexes and stores.

The Trump administration has made the Democratic city of about 950,000 people its latest target for an immigration enforcement surge it says will combat crime, despite fierce objections from local leaders and down trending crime rates.

Gregory Bovino, who led hundreds of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on a similar effort in Chicago, took to social media to document a few of the more than 80 arrests he said agents had made. He posted pictures of people the Trump administration commonly dubs “criminal illegal aliens,” for people living in the U.S. without legal permission who have alleged criminal records. That included one of a man with an alleged history of drunk driving convictions.

“We arrested him, taking him off the streets of Charlotte so he can’t continue to ignore our laws and drive intoxicated on the same roads you and your loved ones are on,” Bovino wrote on X.

The effort was dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web” as a play on the title of a famous children’s book that isn’t about North Carolina.

But the flurry of activity immediately prompted fears and questions, including where detainees would be held, how long the operation would last and what agents’ tactics — criticized elsewhere as aggressive and racist — would look like in North Carolina. On Saturday, at least one U.S. citizen said he was thrown to the ground and briefly detained.

At Camino, a nonprofit group that offers services to Latino communities, some said they were too afraid to leave their homes to attend school, medical appointments or work. A dental clinic the group runs had nine cancellations on Friday, spokesperson Paola Garcia said.

“Latinos love this country. They came here to escape socialism and communism, and they’re hard workers and people of faith,” Garcia said. “They love their family, and it’s just so sad to see that this community now has this target on their back.”

Bovino’s operations in Chicago and Los Angeles triggered a flurry of lawsuits over the use of force, including wide deployment of chemical agents. Democratic leaders in both places accused agents of inflaming community tensions. Federal agents fatally shot one suburban Chicago man during a traffic stop.

Bovino, head of a Border Patrol sector in El Centro, California, and other Trump administration officials have called their tactics appropriate for growing threats on agents.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, did not respond to inquiries about the Charlotte arrests. Bovino’s spokesman did not return a request for comment Sunday.

Elsewhere, DHS has not offered many details about its arrests. In the Chicago area, the agency only provided names and details on a handful of its more than 3,000 arrests in the metro region from September to last week. U.S. citizens were detained during several operations. Dozens of protesters were also arrested.

By Sunday, reports of CBP activity around Charlotte were “overwhelming” and difficult to quantify, Greg Asciutto, executive director of the community development group CharlotteEast, said in a morning email

“The past two hours we’ve received countless reports of CBP activity at churches, apartment complexes and a hardware store,” he said.

City council member-elect JD Mazuera Arias said federal agents appeared to be focused on churches and apartment buildings.

“Houses of worship. I mean, that’s just awful,” he said. “These are sanctuaries for people who are looking for hope and faith in dark times like these and who no longer can feel safe because of the gross violation of people’s right to worship.”

DHS said it was focusing on North Carolina because of so-called sanctuary policies, which limit cooperation between local authorities and immigration agents.

Several county jails house immigrant arrestees and honor detainers, which allow jails to hold detainees for immigration officers to pick them up. But Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, does not. Also, the city’s police department does not help with immigration enforcement.

DHS alleged that about 1,400 detainers across North Carolina had not been honored, putting the public at risk.

“We are surging DHS law enforcement to Charlotte to ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

___

Tareen and Dale reported from Chicago. Witte reported from Annapolis, Maryland.

NEW YORK — Central Park’s iconic horse-drawn carriages will trot on, for now.

A proposal to ban the popular tourist attractions that have been fixtures in Central Park for more than 150 years failed to clear a key New York City Council committee on Friday.

The council’s Committee on Health voted against sending the proposal to the full council for its consideration following a packed hearing.

The Transport Workers Union of America, which represents horse carriage workers, applauded the panel for standing up for their members.

“They are hardworking immigrants who take good care of their horses, and have consistently been attacked and slandered by monied interests who care nothing about animal welfare,” John Samuelsen, the union’s president, said in a statement.

But animal rights advocates who have long called for ending the industry, derided the vote as a “sham” as they vowed to continue their fight.

The debate over the popular tourist draw was revived over the summer when a carriage horse collapsed and died near its stables, with videos and photos of the animal’s body in a city street circulating widely online.

Critics say carriage horses can get easily spooked on city streets, leading to accidents and injuries. They also say the horses are overworked and live in inadequate stables, and that their drivers flaunt city regulations, including leaving behind piles of horse manure.

“Horses have collapsed, even dropped dead on the streets recently. Multiple horses have had violent runaway spooking incidents, crashing into vehicles, sending New Yorkers to the hospital, and nearly trampling others,” New Yorkers for Clean, Livable, and Safe Streets, or NYCLASS, said in a Friday statement.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said city lawmakers ignored the opinions of the “vast majority of New Yorkers” who want the industry ended. The outgoing Democrat threw his support behind the proposed ban in recent months and issued an executive order stepping up enforcement of the industry,

“It’s a shame that the City Council has once again refused to follow the will of our citizens, while simultaneously endangering pedestrians, drivers, and animals alike,” Adams said in a statement.

The council’s Democratic leadership has long resisted calls to hold a public hearing and vote on the proposal, which calls for winding down the industry as early as next summer.

Friday’s vote was instead instigated by the bill’s sponsor, who invoked a procedural rule to force a committee vote.

“This was one of the most undemocratic displays I have ever witnessed in the New York City Council,” Council Member Robert Holden, an outgoing Queens Democrat, said in a statement after his bid was denied. “The Council could not care less what New Yorkers think.”

Benjamin Fang-Estrada, a spokesperson for City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, suggested Holden simply failed to do the “legislative work of building support” among his colleagues.

“The Council recognizes that this is a difficult and emotional issue, and any path forward requires a sponsor bringing all parties together in a constructive way,” he said in an emailed statement.

The Central Park Conservancy, the influential nonprofit that manages the 843-acre (341-hectare) park, also came out in support of an industry ban, citing its outsized impact on public safety and road infrastructure in the increasingly crowded park.

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Follow Philip Marcelo at https://x.com/philmarcelo

You’ve seen the videos in newscasts and social feeds: Federal agents employing chokeholds, firing pepper spray at close range, and even using vehicle maneuvers to control immigration protests.

These videos have spurred debate over whether agents have violated federal policies on use of force, which is authorized “only when no reasonably effective, safe, and feasible alternative appears to exist,” according to Department of Homeland Security policies.

A review of hundreds of videos, most recorded on cellphones by protesters and posted online, shows repeated instances that don’t appear to meet that standard.

We asked Eric Balliet, a career federal agent who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations for more than two decades, to review some of the tactics used in these videos. Balliet led internal investigations into use of force misconduct for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement until last year.

“This isn’t policing and law enforcement as I practiced it for 25 years,” he said.

Customs and Border Protection commander Gregory Bovino, who is leading the federal agents responding to protests in Chicago, disagrees.

“If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them,” Bovino said in an interview with CBS News. “Don’t protest and don’t trespass.”

Protesters and media organizations in Chicago have filed a complaint in federal court about the tactics employed under Bovino’s command, as well as those captured on video recordings in Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles and other cities. Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Sara L. Ellis issued an order blocking federal agents from deploying chemical spray, tear gas or any other less-lethal weapon “unless such force is necessary to stop the immediate threat of physical harm to another.” The Trump administration has filed an appeal.  

DHS is now racing to file its implementation guidance in response to the judge’s order. Revised directives informing DHS personnel of banned use-of-force tactics must be issued by the end of the day Tuesday.

“I see little reason for the use of force that the federal agents are currently using,” Ellis said in her ruling from the bench.

“The use of force shocks the conscience,” Ellis said.

But President Trump said in an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” earlier this month that the tactics employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement “haven’t gone far enough.” 

“I don’t know where the leadership is here,” said Balliet. “It seems to be non-existent. Any oversight and justification for the use of force seems to be absent across the board.”

Balliet reviewed dozens of videos at the request of CBS News, and he identified several clear areas of concern with the tactics he saw in use against demonstrators.

Firing less than lethal munitions at protesters’ heads and torsos

Videos taken outside the ICE facilities show federal agents standing several stories above protesters and shooting less than lethal munitions towards their heads and torsos. 

One cellphone video from September, taken outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, shows a priest looking up toward agents standing several stories above him. In the video, agents fire pepper balls that land nearby him, and explode on the ground. One agent then fires a pepper ball that strikes the man in the head, and he crumbles to the ground.

Agency policy prohibits agents from firing at anyone above the waist, stating they “shall not intentionally target the head, neck, groin, or female breast.” 

Balliet says such incidents show a lack of proper training.

“They are elevating the force to a degree that is excessive,” Balliet said.

During an interview, CBS News showed Bovino the September video and asked him if the agent had breached department policy. He said the agent had not — because the protesters were “trespassing” on federal grounds and the use of pepper balls didn’t deviate from policy.

“The use of that less lethal device, a pepper ball, was absolutely in line with policy. And I applaud them for protecting that federal facility there.” He said use of force outside of the Broadview facility has been “exemplary.”

Tear gas and pepper spray at close range

Videos collected from Portland, Chicago and Los Angeles show agents deploying large amounts of tear gas and pepper spray at protesters, sometimes at close range.

In one October cellphone video from Portland, a federal agent can be seen spraying a form of tear gas called “oleoresin capsicum” spray directly at an individual protester at close range and in high volume. 

The protester can be seen verbally confronting two agents in the street. Another agent then walks up to the protester and sprays her directly in the face with a large can of pepper spray. 

“If you take direct shots to the eye, it can scratch or prick your cornea,” said Balliet. In his experience, agents have gone to the emergency room for eye damage after being sprayed at similar ranges with this type of munition. 

DHS policy allows the deployment of chemical irritants only in cases when subjects offer “active resistance.” The footage shows protesters yelling but not physically threatening the agents, which Balliet said was not a sufficient provocation for this level of response.

“For this particular one, it’s a little disturbing because there does not appear to be any sort of de-escalation attempt,” Balliet said. 

Vehicle maneuvers used as deadly force

Cellphone videos have also caught federal agents in several cities using vehicles to push or move  demonstrators.

In one video from Chicago, an agent in an unmarked federal vehicle slowly drives into a protester. The agent can be heard yelling, “I’m gonna slam you on the f****** ground,” as the vehicle makes contact with the demonstrator.

Balliet says driving a vehicle into a protester constitutes “deadly force,” or what the DHS use of force policy defines as “action that carries a substantial risk of causing death or serious bodily injury.”  

“Anytime you introduce a vehicle into an already volatile situation, it drastically changes the dynamics,” Balliet said. “It rises into that deadly force arena.”

The fact that the vehicle was unmarked and the lack of communication created further risk, he said. A protester in the video can be heard saying, “Who are you?” as the car continues to push into the demonstrator. 

“I can’t stress enough the significance of markings,” Balliet said. “When you blur the line in that world, it presents a danger to everyone involved.”

Prohibited chokeholds and hand-on contact

Videos received by CBS News reveal agents using aggressive hands-on tactics, including chokeholds, which DHS policy forbids unless the “deadly force” is authorized. 

“Chokeholds and carotid restraints must not be used as a means to control non-compliant subjects or persons resisting arrest,” states a 2023 DHS Use of Force policy.

But in two videos from Chicago, federal agents are seen putting their hands or arms directly around the necks of protesters during tense encounters. In one Broadview incident, agents surround a female protester who is attempting to block a car from leaving the facility. An agent, who is masked but not wearing a helmet, even as other agents fire pepperballs from an elevated location, puts his arm around her throat. Another officer then pulls the man off the woman and she is released. 

“It’s considered lethal force for a reason,” Balliet said. “If I were the commander, that individual would be off the team 30 seconds after it happened.”

In another Chicago video, a Border Patrol agent places his hands around the neck of a protester and slams him onto the ground. As the agent engages in the hands-on approach, he swings his rifle behind him, leaving the muzzle of his potentially loaded gun unprotected.

“The fact that that weapon, that M4, is just flailing around muzzling the agents, muzzling the crowd, is basically begging some bad actor to grab it,” said Balliet. “It’s good that somebody didn’t get extremely hurt or killed in this.”

Agents commended by commander, despite alleged violations of DHS policy

Bovino confirmed no one has been disciplined in Chicago in connection to incidents documented during Operation Midway Blitz.

“Absolutely not,” Bovino said when asked if anyone acted outside policy.

But Balliet said he believes the lack of accountability could have long-term negative consequences for federal law enforcement.

“This is gonna have an irreparable harm to the trust and faith that the general public has in its law enforcement officers,” he said. “It is creating a divide that is going to take years — if it can ever be fully repaired.”

In a statement to CBS News, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said federal agents are “trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves.”

The agency argued that protesters have “thrown rocks, bottles, and fireworks” at agents, “slashed the tires of their vehicles, rammed them, ambushed them, and …destroyed multiple law enforcement vehicles.” 

“Despite these real dangers, our law enforcement shows incredible restraint in exhausting all options before force is escalated,” the agency statement said.

HONG KONG — Vaishnavi Srinivasagopalan, a skilled Indian IT professional who has worked in both India and the U.S., has been looking for work in China. Beijing’s new K-visa program targeting science and technology workers could turn that dream into a reality.

The K-visa rolled out by Beijing last month is part of China’s widening effort to catch up with the U.S. in the race for global talent and cutting edge technology. It coincides with uncertainties over the U.S.’s H-1B program under tightened immigrations policies implemented by President Donald Trump.

“(The) K-visa for China (is) an equivalent to the H-1B for the U.S.,” said Srinivasagopalan, who is intrigued by China’s working environment and culture after her father worked at a Chinese university a few years back. “It is a good option for people like me to work abroad.”

The K-visa supplements China’s existing visa schemes including the R-visa for foreign professionals, but with loosened requirements, such as not requiring an applicant to have a job offer before applying.

Stricter U.S. policies toward foreign students and scholars under Trump, including the raising of fees for the H-1B visa for foreign skilled workers to $100,000 for new applicants, are leading some non-American professionals and students to consider going elsewhere.

“Students studying in the U.S. hoped for an (H-1B) visa, but currently this is an issue,” said Bikash Kali Das, an Indian masters student of international relations at Sichuan University in China.

China is striking while the iron is hot.

The ruling Communist Party has made global leadership in advanced technologies a top priority, paying massive government subsidies to support research and development of areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors and robotics.

“Beijing perceives the tightening of immigration policies in the U.S. as an opportunity to position itself globally as welcoming foreign talent and investment more broadly,” said Barbara Kelemen, associate director and head of Asia at security intelligence firm Dragonfly.

Unemployment among Chinese graduates remains high, and competition is intense for jobs in scientific and technical fields. But there is a skills gap China’s leadership is eager to fill. For decades, China has been losing top talent to developed countries as many stayed and worked in the U.S. and Europe after they finished studies there.

The brain drain has not fully reversed.

Many Chinese parents still see Western education as advanced and are eager to send their children abroad, said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

Still, in recent years, a growing number of professionals including AI experts, scientists and engineers have moved to China from the U.S., including Chinese-Americans. Fei Su, a chip architect at Intel, and Ming Zhou, a leading engineer at U.S.-based software firm Altair, were among those who have taken teaching jobs in China this year.

Many skilled workers in India and Southeast Asia have already expressed interest about the K-visa, said Edward Hu, a Shanghai-based immigration director at the consultancy Newland Chase.

With the jobless rate for Chinese aged 16-24 excluding students at nearly 18%, the campaign to attract more foreign professionals is raising questions.

“The current job market is already under fierce competition,” said Zhou Xinying, a 24-year-old postgraduate student in behavioral science at eastern China’s Zhejiang University.

While foreign professionals could help “bring about new technologies” and different international perspectives, Zhou said, “some Chinese young job seekers may feel pressure due to the introduction of the K-visa policy.”

Kyle Huang, a 26-year-old software engineer based in the southern city of Guangzhou, said his peers in the science and technology fields fear the new visa scheme “might threaten local job opportunities”.

A recent commentary published by a state-backed news outlet, the Shanghai Observer, downplayed such concerns, saying that bringing in such foreign professionals will benefit the economy. As China advances in areas such as AI and cutting-edge semiconductors, there is a “gap and mismatch” between qualified jobseekers and the demand for skilled workers, it said.

“The more complex the global environment, the more China will open its arms,” it said.

“Beijing will need to emphasize how select foreign talent can create, not take, local jobs,” said Michael Feller, chief strategist at consultancy Geopolitical Strategy. “But even Washington has shown that this is politically a hard argument to make, despite decades of evidence.”

Recruitment and immigration specialists say foreign workers face various hurdles in China. One is the language barrier. The ruling Communist Party’s internet censorship, known as the “Great Firewall,” is another drawback.

A country of about 1.4 billion, China had only an estimated 711,000 foreign workers residing in the country as of 2023.

The U.S. still leads in research and has the advantage of using English widely. There’s also still a relatively clearer pathway to residency for many, said David Stepat, country director for Singapore at the consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates.

Nikhil Swaminathan, an Indian H1-B visa holder working for a U.S. non-profit organization after finishing graduate school there, is interested in China’s K-visa but skeptical. “I would’ve considered it. China’s a great place to work in tech, if not for the difficult relationship between India and China,” he said.

Given a choice, many jobseekers still are likely to aim for jobs in leading global companies outside China.

“The U.S. is probably more at risk of losing would-be H-1B applicants to other Western economies, including the UK and European Union, than to China,” said Feller at Geopolitical Strategy.

“The U.S. may be sabotaging itself, but it’s doing so from a far more competitive position in terms of its attractiveness to talent,” Feller said. “China will need to do far more than offer convenient visa pathways to attract the best.”

___

AP writer Fu Ting in Washington and researchers Yu Bing and Shihuan Chen in Beijing contributed.

Chicago police officers responded to a call of gunshots fired at federal agents Saturday amid immigration enforcement operations that drew residents to protest in the streets, the department said.

There were no reports of anyone being hit by gunfire, according to police, and the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on the social platform X that the shots were fired by a man in a black Jeep who was targeting the agents.

The suspect and the vehicle have not been located, according to DHS.

Tensions are high as federal enforcement has grown increasingly aggressive some two months into an immigration operation in Chicago dubbed Operation Midway Blitz. Some residents have protested, at times following and confronting heavily armed agents.

A federal judge issued an extensive injunction this week restricting agents’ use of force after saying a top Border Patrol official repeatedly lied about threats posed by protesters.

Saturday’s Border Patrol operation in Little Village, a largely Mexican neighborhood, attracted protesters who blew whistles, honked car horns and yelled at agents to leave. Some confronted police officers they viewed as helping the federal agents.

One police vehicle had its taillight smashed and windshield damaged. DHS said some protesters threw a paint can and bricks at agents’ vehicles.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An Ontario man who was shot by an immigration officer was charged on Friday with assault on a federal officer.

Also, a sworn statement filed in federal court in Riverside along with the criminal complaint revealed some new details about the interaction that led to the shooting on Thursday, Oct. 30. Immediately after the shooting, federal officers said the driver, Carlos Jimenez, backed up his SUV at them before the officer shot him.

The statement filed on Friday said Jimenez had first argued with officers before ultimately backing up his car.

According to the affidavit, an “enforcement team” made up of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, an Enforcement and Removal Operations Deportation officer and two U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations officers was conducting a “planned immigration enforcement operation” in Ontario on Thursday. The team had stopped a Honda Accord going southbound on Vineyard Avenue.

An officer was speaking to the three occupants of the Honda on the car’s driver’s side when Jimenez pulled up in his Lexus RX350, also on the driver’s side where the officer was, the complaint states.

That’s when Jimenez “engaged in a verbal altercation with the officers at the vehicle stop,” and another officer approached with his firearm and told Jimenez to leave, before holstering his firearm and taking out his pepper spray, according to the complaint.

Jimenez initially pulled his car forward and left, away from the Honda and officers, but then stopped and turned the car’s wheels and “rapidly” accelerated back towards the officers and the stopped Honda, court papers say. The officer that had been talking to the Honda’s occupants said he feared that Jimenez’s car would hit him and the Honda.

As Jimenez accelerated backwards, an officer fired a shot that hit Jimenez in the shoulder, the complaint states.

“Then, Jimenez drove away from the scene and later checked himself into a hospital. After Jimenez was medically cleared and released from the hospital, Jimenez was taken into HSI custody,” the complaint says, referring to Homeland Security investigators.

Family members said Thursday that Jimenez drove himself to his nearby home and was taken to a hospital.

It is unclear what the outcome of the immigration enforcement activity conducted on the occupants of the Honda Civic was.

At Jimenez’s initial court appearance on Friday evening, a few protesters gathered outside the George E. Brown Jr. federal building to support Jimenez and protest how the federal government is handling the mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

“Melt ICE Dump Trump,” one sign said. A long banner demanded, “ICE out of the Inland Empire.”

One of the protesters was 34-year-old Ana Wilson of Riverside. Her message is “ICE out of the Inland Empire. Fascists out of the U.S.,” she said. “They are breaking the law in the name of law enforcement.”

A planned increase in federal immigration enforcement in the Bay Area is now on pause throughout the region and in major East Bay cities, not just in San Francisco, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said Friday.

Lee said in a statement that Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez had “confirmed through her communications” with federal immigration officials that the planned operations were “cancelled for the greater Bay Area — which includes Oakland — at this time.”

The announcement followed lingering concerns about ramped up immigration enforcement among East Bay leaders after President Trump and San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Thursday that a planned “surge” had been called off in San Francisco.

Trump and Lurie had very specifically addressed San Francisco, even as additional Border Patrol agents were being staged across the bay on Coast Guard Island, which is in the waters between Alameda and Oakland.

At a press conference following Trump’s annoucement about San Francisco, Lee had said the situation remained “fluid,” that she had received no such assurances about the East Bay and that Oakland was continuing to prepare for enhanced immigration enforcement in the region.

Alameda County Dist. Atty. Ursula Jones Dickson had previously warned that the announced stand down in San Francisco could be a sign the administration was looking to focus on Oakland instead — and make an example of it.

“We know that they’re baiting Oakland, and that’s why San Francisco, all of a sudden, is off the table,” Jones Dickson said Thursday morning. “So I’m not going to be quiet about what we know is coming. We know that their expectation is that Oakland is going to do something to cause them to make us the example.”

The White House on Friday directed questions about the scope of the pause in operations and whether it applied to the East Bay to the Department of Homeland Security, which referred The Times back to Trump’s statement about San Francisco on Friday — despite its making no mention of the East Bay or Oakland.

In that statement, posted to his Truth Social platform, Trump had written that a “surge” had been planned for San Francisco starting Saturday, but that he had called it off after speaking to Lurie.

Trump said Lurie had asked “very nicely” that Trump “give him a chance to see if he can turn it around” in the city, and that business leaders — including Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Marc Benioff of Salesforce — had expressed confidence in Lurie.

Trump said he told Lurie that it would be “easier” to make San Francisco safer if federal forces were sent in, but told him, “let’s see how you do.”

Lurie in recent days has touted falling crime rates and numbers of homeless encampments in the city, and said in his own announcement of the stand down that he had told Trump that San Francisco was “on the rise” and that “having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery.”

In California and elsewhere, the Trump administration has aggressively sought to expand the reach and authority of the Border Patrol and federal immigration agents. Last month, the DOJ fired its top prosecutor in Sacramento after she told Gregory Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, that he could not carry out indiscriminate immigration raids around Sacramento this summer.

In Oakland on Thursday, the planned surge in enforcement had sparked protests near the entrance to Coast Guard Island, and drew widespread condemnation from local liberal officials and immigrant advocacy organizations.

On Thursday night, security officers at the base opened fire on the driver of a U-Haul truck who was reversing the truck toward them, wounding the driver and a civilian nearby. The FBI is investigating that incident.

Some liberal officials had warned that federal agents who violated the rights of Californians could face consequences — even possible arrest — from local law enforcement, which drew condemnation from federal officials.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche responded with a scathing letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and others on Thursday in which he wrote that any attempt by local law enforcement to arrest federal officers doing their jobs would be viewed by the Justice Department as “both illegal and futile” and as part of a “criminal conspiracy.”

Blanche wrote that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution precludes any federal law enforcement official to be “held on a state criminal charge where the alleged crime arose during the performance of his federal duties,” and that the Justice Department would pursue legal action against any state officials who advocate for such enforcement.

“In the meantime, federal agents and officers will continue to enforce federal law and will not be deterred by the threat of arrest by California authorities who have abdicated their duty to protect their constituents,” Blanche wrote.

The threat of arrest for federal officers had originated in part with San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins, who had written on social media that if federal agents “come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents … I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”

The Trump administration has made preparations to expand its nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration in the San Francisco area with a team of Border Patrol agents, two U.S. officials familiar with the internal plans told CBS News on Wednesday.

The officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said Border Patrol’s operations in the Northern California area could start as early as later this week, but that the timing could shift.

One of the U.S. officials said the Border Patrol agents would stage at the U.S. Coast Guard base in Alameda, roughly 15 miles from San Francisco. That plan was reported earlier Wednesday by The San Francisco Chronicle. The Department of Homeland Security oversees Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Coast Guard.

The U.S. officials said Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, one of the most visible faces of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, is expected to be involved in the operation. Bovino is currently leading Border Patrol arrests in Chicago, where a judge on Monday ordered him to answer questions about agents’ use of force during those operations. He also oversaw the agency’s controversial immigration raids in the Los Angeles area this summer.

Representatives for DHS and Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a video posted on social media Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, denounced the Trump administration’s plans, accusing the president of seeking to create “conditions for anxiety” in American cities.

“He sends out masked men, he sends out Border Patrol. He sends out ICE, creates anxiety and fear in the community, so that he can lay claim to solving for that by sending in the Guard in the first place,” Newsom said.

President Trump has recently floated the idea of dispatching federal agents to San Francisco.

“We’re going to go to San Francisco. The difference is I think they want us in San Francisco,” Mr. Trump said in a Fox News interview that aired over the weekend.

On Wednesday, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said local residents would protest peacefully if the Trump administration uses “un-American tactics to target immigrant communities” in the area.

“This federal administration wants to divide us, but we know San Francisco is strongest when we come together to stand up for each other and our values,” Lurie added.

As part of an aggressive expansion in deportation efforts across the country, the Trump administration has deployed teams of Border Patrol agents to large, Democratic-led American cities far away from a U.S. border.

As federal immigration officers, Border Patrol agents have the legal authority to arrest individuals suspected of being in the U.S. illegally anywhere in the country. However, they have expanded search powers in areas close to a coastal or land border.

In recent weeks, Border Patrol has been carrying out immigration arrests throughout the Chicago area, sometimes as part of operations at worksites and public places that have garnered local backlash. Earlier in the year, Border Patrol launched a similar campaign in the Los Angeles area, arresting suspected unauthorized immigrants in Home Depot parking lots, car washes and other locations. 

SAN FRANCISCO — SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — President Donald Trump keeps threatening to send National Guard troops to San Francisco next, blasting the California city as crime-ridden and saying its residents are clamoring for federal help.

But local and state leaders say that couldn’t be farther from the truth, noting overall crime is down and the city has started to turn around its downtrodden pandemic image. Residents and workers out downtown this week said they’re puzzled and concerned by Trump’s threat.

“This is a safe American city,” Mayor Daniel Lurie told The Associated Press last week. “We got this in San Francisco.”

The Republican president has referenced crime as his justification for possibly sending troops to the city of roughly 830,000. He’s deployed the Guard over crime concerns to Washington, D.C., where he has direct control of the National Guard, and Memphis, where the Republican governor supports their presence. Los Angeles was the first city where Trump deployed the Guard, arguing it was necessary to protect federal buildings and agents as protesters fought back against mass immigration arrests. He’s since said they’re needed in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, as well.

Residents and leaders in Portland were surprised by Trump’s attention when he described the city as besieged by violent protests. In reality, nightly protests were small and limited to the area outside a federal immigration building. While there were some arrests for violence, the demonstrations were far less intense than those that roiled the downtown in 2020 following the death of George Floyd.

In San Francisco, too, Trump seems to be relying on an outdated picture of a city often targeted by conservatives.

“The difference is, I think they want us in San Francisco,” Trump said Sunday on Fox News. “San Francisco was truly one of the great cities of the world. And then, 15 years ago, it went wrong. It went woke.”

His comments angered and baffled Kate Freudenberger, who works in retail.

“You’ve been walking around the city, it’s peaceful, there is no insurrection,” she said Tuesday morning, adding that immigration authorities have not been as active in San Francisco as in other cities, “so there’s really been nothing for us to coalesce around.”

Marc Benioff, the chief executive of San Francisco-based software giant Salesforce, caused a stir when he told the New York Times earlier this month that he’d welcome Guard troops ito help quell crime ahead of his major annual business conference. He has since apologized for his remarks, saying the conference was the “largest and safest” in its history and the Guard is not needed.

San Francisco is still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, which emptied its downtown and brought renewed attention to street homelessness and open drug dealing. But signs indicate a city on the upswing. Artificial intelligence startups are snapping up office space, and home rental prices are rising. San Francisco saw a 21% increase from last year in office visits, according to location analytics platform Placer.ai, and public transit ridership is at its highest levels since the pandemic.

The Wall Street Journal this week declared the city was emerging from its “doom loop,” an article the mayor eagerly shared on social media.

Sidewalks are cleaner and tent encampments have largely disappeared from view. In the Tenderloin, one of the most troubled neighborhoods, teams of city and nonprofit workers on Monday helped school children cross the street, walked around picking up trash or counseled homeless people. It was a different image than during the pandemic, when hundreds of people camped on sidewalks.

Still, the Tenderloin is a problem spot for public drug use and dealing, as are the Mid-Market and Mission neighborhoods. But overall crime is down more than 26% this year compared to the same period last year, according to the San Francisco Police Department. Vehicle break-ins — which have vexed tourists and residents alike — are at a 22-year low, Lurie said.

Lurie, a centrist Democrat who has tried to avoid confrontations with Trump by ignoring many of the president’s comments, said Monday he’d welcome more federal help to arrest drug dealers and disrupt drug markets. But sending in the Guard wouldn’t achieve that, he said.

“The National Guard does not have the authority to arrest drug dealers—and sending them to San Francisco will do nothing to get fentanyl off the streets or make our city safer,” Lurie said in a statement.

San Francisco voters in 2024 gave police the authority to use drones, surveillance cameras and other technology to fight crime. They also ousted politically progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin in a 2022 recall election and installed Brooke Jenkins, considered to be much tougher on crime than her predecessor. Lurie has pushed to hire and retain police officers, and entry-level police applications are up 40% over last year.

Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has said it would push back forcefully on any deployment, as it did when Trump first ordered the California National Guard into Los Angeles against Newsom’s wishes. California Attorney General Rob Bonta vowed to “be in court within hours, if not minutes” if there is a federal deployment.

Lawsuits by Democratic officials in Chicago and Portland have so far blocked troops from going out on city streets.

Libby Baxter, a retired nurse, said Trump has sent the National Guard to Democratic cities to create “chaos and unrest” and she fears the same could happen in San Francisco.

“I believe that that may happen if they come to San Francisco because we are a very tolerant community, but we don’t do well with somebody coming in and trying to dictate or take over certain parts of our city,” she said.

State officials on the front lines of preparing for natural disasters and responding to emergencies say severe cuts to federal security grants, restrictions on money intended for readiness and funding delays tied to litigation are posing a growing risk to their ability to respond to crises.

It’s all causing confusion, frustration and concern. The federal government shutdown isn’t helping.

“Every day we remain in this grant purgatory reduces the time available to responsibly and effectively spend these critical funds,” said Kiele Amundson, communications director at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

The uncertainty has led some emergency management agencies to hold off on filling vacant positions and make rushed decisions on important training and purchases.

Experts say the developments complicate state-led emergency efforts, undermining the Republican administration’s stated goals of shifting more responsibility to states and local governments for disaster response.

In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the new requirements were necessary because of “recent population shifts” and that changes to security grants were made “to be responsive to new and urgent threats facing our nation.”

Several DHS and FEMA grants help states, tribes and territories prepare for climate disasters and deter a variety of threats. The money pays for salaries and training, and such things as vehicles, communications equipment and software.

State emergency managers say that money has become increasingly important because the range of threats they must prepare for is expanding, including pandemics and cyberattacks.

FEMA, a part of DHS, divided a $320 million Emergency Management Performance Grant among states on Sept. 29. But the next day, it told states the money was on hold until they submitted new population counts. The directive demanded that they omit people “removed from the State pursuant to the immigration laws of the United States” and to explain their methodology.

The amount of money distributed to the states is based on U.S. census population data. The new requirement forcing states to submit revised counts “is something we have never seen before,” said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association, a group representing emergency managers. “It’s certainly not the responsibility of emergency management to certify population.”

With no guidance on how to calculate the numbers, Hawaii’s Amundson said staff scrambled to gather data from the 2020 census and other sources, then subtracted he number of “noncitizens” based on estimates from an advocacy group.

They are not sure the methodology will be accepted. But with their FEMA contacts furloughed and the grant portal down during the federal shutdown, they cannot find out. Other states said they were assessing the request or awaiting further guidance.

In its statement, DHS said FEMA needs to be certain of its funding levels before awarding grant money, and that includes updates to a state’s population due to deportations.

Experts said delays caused by the request could most affect local governments and agencies that receive grant money passed down by states because their budgets and staffs are smaller. At the same time, FEMA also reduced the time frame that recipients have to spend the money, from three years to one. That could prevent agencies from taking on longer-term projects.

Bryan Koon, president and CEO of the consulting firm IEM and a former Florida emergency management chief, said state governments and local agencies need time to adjust their budgets to any kind of changes.

“An interruption in those services could place American lives in jeopardy,” he said.

In another move that has caused uncertainty, FEMA in September drastically cut some states’ allocations from another source of funding. The $1 billion Homeland Security Grant Program is supposed to be based on assessed risks, and states pass most of the money to police and fire departments.

New York received $100 million less than it expected, a 79% reduction, while Illinois saw a 69% reduction. Both states are politically controlled by Democrats. Meanwhile, some territories received unexpected windfalls, including the U.S. Virgin Islands, which got more than twice its expected allocation.

The National Emergency Management Association said the grants are meant to be distributed based on risk and that it “remains unclear what risk methodology was used” to determine the new funding allocation.

After a group of Democratic states challenged the cuts in court, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order on Sept. 30. That forced FEMA to rescind award notifications and refrain from making payments until a further court order.

The freeze “underscores the uncertainty and political volatility surrounding these awards,” said Frank Pace, administrator of the Hawaii Office of Homeland Security. The Democratic-controlled state received more money than expected, but anticipates the bonus being taken away with the lawsuit.

In Hawaii, where a 2023 wildfire devastated the Maui town of Lahaina and killed more than 100 people, the state, counties and nonprofits “face the real possibility” of delays in paying contractors, completing projects and “even staff furloughs or layoffs” if the grant freeze and government shutdown continue, he said.

The myriad setbacks prompted Washington state’s Emergency Management Division to pause filling some positions “out of an abundance of caution,” communications director Karina Shagren said.

Emergency management experts said the moves have created uncertainty for those in charge of preparedness.

The Trump administration has suspended a $3.6 billion FEMA disaster resilience program, cut the FEMA workforce and disrupted routine training.

Other lawsuits also are complicating decision-making. A Manhattan federal judge last week ordered DHS and FEMA to restore $34 million in transit security grants it had withheld from New York City because of its immigration policies.

Another judge in Rhode Island ordered DHS to permanently stop imposing grant conditions tied to immigration enforcement, after ruling in September that the conditions were unlawful — only to have DHS again try to impose them.

Taken together, the turbulence surrounding what was once a reliable partner is prompting some states to prepare for a different relationship with FEMA.

“Given all of the uncertainties,” said Sheets, of the National Emergency Management Association, states are trying to find ways to be “less reliant on federal funding.”

SAN DIEGO — SAN DIEGO (AP) — The father of a Marine who was arrested by immigration authorities when visiting his pregnant daughter at Camp Pendleton has a criminal record that includes charges of domestic violence and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday.

Esteban Rios was deported to Mexico in 1999, removed from the United States again in 2005 and ordered deported by an immigration judge in 2020 after entering the country illegally a third time, the department said.

The statement was the first detailed account that Homeland Security provided since the Marine, Steve Rios, said last week that his father was detained after visiting the Southern California military base, released with ankle monitors and detained again when reporting days later to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, as ordered.

Homeland Security initially did not provide details when asked several times by The Associated Press on Tuesday for information on any criminal record Esteban Rios had, saying only that “criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.” The department said it had no other information to release.

On Thursday — one day after AP published a story on Esteban Rios, and two days after it sought details from the department — DHS released the detailed account of his criminal record. The department also accused the AP of having “deliberately obscured the facts,” despite the agency having not provided AP with the information it accused the news organization of obscuring.

Steve Rios of Oceanside, California, told San Diego station KNSD that his parents inspired him to enlist in the Marines. He said they came to the U.S. from Mexico more than 30 years ago and have washed cars and cleaned houses for his whole life.

“It was just making them proud, right? I’ve seen all the struggles they’ve gone through,” Steve Rios told the station. “The least I could do, right, and serve this country and try to, you know, put some time in.”

Steve Rios said he and his parents were picking up his younger sister and her husband, who is also a Marine, at Pendleton on Sept. 28, as they have done that every weekend for the past few months while she is expecting her first child. After stopping at the gate, ICE officials arrived to detain both parents, later releasing them with ankle monitors. He said his father was deported Oct. 10.

The Rios family told the station the parents had no criminal record, had pending green card applications sponsored by Steve and authorization to work.

In response to inquiries from AP, Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokeswoman, issued a statement Tuesday that read, “Under President (Donald) Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem, if you break the law — including domestic violence and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon — you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.”

The statement did not say anything about Esteban Rios, including whether he was arrested or charged with any crime or if he had any immigration history.

When AP followed up to ask if Esteban Rios and his wife had criminal histories, Luis Alani, a communications strategist at ICE, wrote, “By statute, ICE has no information on these aliens. To clarify, there is no information we can release.”

A coalition of legal organizations and undocumented immigrants has filed suit in Los Angeles challenging an ICE policy that authorizes the “routine” jailing and deportation of noncitizen survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, according to court papers obtained Wednesday.

The suit filed Tuesday by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and others contends the policy “violates the very legal protections, crafted by Congress and passed with bipartisan support, that were designed to shield vulnerable adults and children from harm.”

The plaintiffs also allege in Los Angeles federal court that ICE “routinely imprisons and deports immigrant survivors who have been formally granted the right to remain in the U.S.” and “regularly deports survivors of trafficking and other serious crimes without carrying out the required legal review to determine if they are eligible for protections that Congress specifically created to keep survivors safe from deportation.”

A message requesting comment sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not immediately answered Wednesday.

According to the lawsuit, the government’s practices are harming “vulnerable survivors,” including Yessenia Ruano, who says she came to the United States from El Salvador seeking safety from human trafficking in 2011 and worked as a teacher’s aid in Milwaukee until June 2025, when she says she was forced by ICE to self-deport.

In compliance with the law, Ruano said she applied for a T Visa, which protects survivors of crimes related to human trafficking, in February while working in Wisconsin, and her attorney requested a stay. ICE denied the stay in March and informed her attorney that if she did not “promptly” return to El Salvador, she would be detained at a forthcoming June check-in with ICE, according to the lawsuit.

Ruano returned to her home country with her U.S. citizen children.

“At the first check-in, the agents told me I would be deported,” Ruano said, according to a news release from the plaintiffs in the suit. “They said that if I didn’t go on my own, they would hunt me down and find me, and that I would be separated from my daughters, detained and deported. I was in turmoil, because I also could not face being taken away from my kids and imprisoned.”

In front of a cheering audience late Tuesday, Oct. 14, a split Riverside City Council approved creating identification standards for federal agents who are involved in immigration enforcement operations in the city.

The council voted 4-3 to back a proposal spearheaded by Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes, who is running for state Assembly. Cervantes, joined by Councilmembers Sean Mill, Philip Falcone and Steve Hemenway voted in support of the resolution that would require law enforcement personnel to clearly identify themselves when on duty. Councilmembers Steven Robillard, Chuck Conder and Jim Perry voted against the new standards.

“Sometimes when we can come together,” Cervantes said Tuesday, “and we can truly come to compromise, when the end goal is taking care of people and protecting our neighborhoods — we can find solutions.”

Over 60 speakers showed up to the council chambers Tuesday. All but three were in favor of new identification standards for law enforcement.

“If the agents were proud of what they’re doing, they wouldn’t be hiding behind masks,” Canyon Crest resident Betsy Rice said. “And if they’re ashamed of what they’re doing, they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing.”

The resolution was a response to “increasing reports of ongoing immigration enforcement operations” within Riverside, according to report prepared by city staff in advance of Tuesday’s meeting.

With their vote Tuesday night, the council approved requiring officers to provide clear identification, with their name and badge number, and prohibiting them from concealing their identities with masks. The resolution also bars the city from sharing information about residents with federal agencies.

Under the new standards, the Riverside Police Department will monitor federal officers operating within the city, and the city will create data privacy protections, bolster efforts to educate citizens about their rights, and provide $50,000 to legal aid nonprofits.

The council may also set aside $50,000 in a legal justice fund in partnership with immigrants’ rights groups, civil rights and legal aid organizations. The council may consider a $50,000 match if an agreed upon partner organization can raise $50,000 on its own, for a total of $100,000, according to the report.

Riverside City Council members are expected to discuss Tuesday, Oct. 14, whether to create identification standards for federal agents who are involved in immigration enforcement operations in the city.

The proposal, spearheaded by Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes, who is running for state Assembly, comes on the heels of a new California law banning law enforcement officers from wearing masks.

“One of the biggest things I’m emphasizing,” Cervantes said of the proposal, “is our commitment to serving and protecting all of our residents … and ensuring that they can live in their city and come out to have access to their parks and facilities we fund to support them.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in the Los Angeles area, as well as the protests against them, grabbed national attention earlier this, but masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles have also visited Inland Empire cities.

Under the resolution proposed by Cervantes, the Riverside Police Department would monitor federal officers operating within the city, create data privacy protections, bolster the city’s efforts to educate citizens on their rights, and possibly provide $50,000 to nonprofits that provide legal aid.

The resolution is a response to “increasing reports of ongoing immigration enforcement operations” within Riverside, according to report prepared by city staff in advance of Tuesday’s meeting. Officers would be required to provide clear identification, with their name and badge number, and they would not be allowed to conceal their identities with masks. The resolution also prohibits the city from sharing information about residents to federal agencies.

The council may also set aside $50,000 in a legal justice fund in partnership with immigrants’ rights groups, civil rights and legal aid organizations. The council may consider a $50,000 match if an agreed upon partner organization can raise $50,000 on its own, for a total of $100,000, according to the report.

“We want to make sure that this is a community safety resolution because we need to make sure that people know that there’s not masked vigilantes that are potentially kidnapping, or going to take advantage of the situation we’re seeing right now,” Cervantes said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the “No Secret Police Act” in September, banning most local and federal law enforcement, including ICE agents, from concealing their identities while on duty. It goes into effect Jan. 1, 2026.

The Riverside City Council will discuss Cervantes’ resolution at 5 p.m. Tuesday in the council chambers at City Hall, 3900 Main St.

SEATTLE (AP) — In what appears to be the first major challenge to the new $100,000 fee required for H-1B visa applications, a coalition of health care providers, religious groups, university professors and others filed a federal lawsuit Friday to stop the plan, saying it has “thrown employers, workers and federal agencies into chaos.”

President Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Sept. 19 requiring the new fee, saying the H-1B visa program “has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.” The changes were slated to go into effect in 36 hours, which caused panic for employers, who instructed their workers to return to the U.S. immediately.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, said the H-1B program is a critical pathway to hiring healthcare workers and educators. It drives innovation and economic growth in the U.S., and allows employers to fill jobs in specialized fields, the lawsuit said.

“Without relief, hospitals will lose medical staff, churches will lose pastors, classrooms will lose teachers, and industries across the country risk losing key innovators,” Democracy Forward Foundation and Justice Action Center said in a press release. “The suit asks the court to immediately block the order and restore predictability for employers and workers.”

They called the new fee “Trump’s latest anti-immigration power grab.”

Messages seeking comment from the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which are named as defendants along with Trump and the State Department, were not immediately returned.

The H-1B visa program was created by Congress to attract high-skilled workers to fill jobs that tech companies find difficult to fill. About a third of H-1B workers are nurses, teachers, physicians, scholars, priests and pastors, according to the lawsuit.

Critics say the program is a pipeline for overseas workers who are often willing to work for as little as $60,000 annually, well below the $100,000-plus salaries typically paid to U.S. technology workers.

Historically, H-1B visas have been doled out through a lottery. This year, Seattle-based Amazon was by far the top recipient of H-1B visas with more than 10,000 awarded, followed by Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Apple and Google. Geographically, California has the highest number of H-1B workers.

The $100,000 fee will discourage the best and brightest minds from bringing life-saving research to the U.S., said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors.

Mike Miller, Region 6 Director of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, said Trump’s plan “prioritizes wealth and connections over scientific acumen and diligence.”

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, contends the “exorbitant fee” invites corruption and is illegal. Congress created the program and Trump can’t rewrite it overnight or levy new taxes by executive order, the groups said.

Federal officials on Friday confirmed that Florida has been reimbursed $608 million for the costs of building and running an immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades, exposing “Alligator Alcatraz” to the risk of being ordered to close for a second time.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in an email that the state of Florida was awarded its full reimbursement request.

The reimbursement exposes the state of Florida to being forced to unwind operations at the remote facility for a second time because of a federal judge’s injunction in August. The Miami judge agreed with environmental groups who had sued that the site wasn’t given a proper environmental review before it was converted into an immigration detention center and gave Florida two months to wind down operations.

The judge’s injunction, however, was put on hold for the time being by an appellate court panel in Atlanta that said the state-run facility didn’t need to undergo a federally required environmental impact study because Florida had yet to receive federal money for the project.

“If the federal defendants ultimately decide to approve that request and reimburse Florida for its expenditures related to the facility, they may need to first conduct an EIS (environmental impact statement),” the three-judge appellate court panel wrote last month.

The appellate panel decision allowed the detention center to stay open and put a stop to wind-down efforts.

President Donald Trump toured the facility in July and suggested it could be a model for future lockups nationwide as his administration pushes to expand the infrastructure needed to increase deportations.

Environmental groups that had sued the federal and state governments said the confirmation of the reimbursement showed that the Florida-built facility was a federal project “from the jump.”

“This is a federal project being built with federal funds that’s required by federal law to go through a complete environmental review,” Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “We’ll do everything we can to stop this lawless, destructive and wasteful debacle.”

___

Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social

The Trump administration’s new $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications is sowing confusion among some immigrant workers and their employers, including whether it’s safe for current holders of the visa to travel outside the U.S.

The new fee, which President Trump announced in a proclamation on Friday, represents a major change to a 35-year-old program that has enabled millions of immigrants to work legally in the U.S. The visa has become a mainstay in the technology industry, including among bellwethers such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, and is also widely used in the financial sector.

Over the weekend, the White House sought to clarify the new policy, stating that the fee doesn’t apply to current H-1B holders and that it is a one-time cost required only when initially applying for the visa.

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said the addition of a $100,000 charge for H-1B visas on top of the existing fees reflects President Trump’s promise “to put American workers first, and this commonsense action does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down American wages.”

She added, “The text of the proclamation is very clear, and it is unfortunate that uninformed reporters and corporate lawyers attempt to sow chaos and confusion. Americans have another reason to celebrate unprecedented action by President Trump to protect Americans from cheap foreign labor.”

After the White House outlined the new policy on Friday, some tech companies including Google and Microsoft this weekend instructed H-1B employees who were traveling outside the U.S. to return immediately, expressing concern they might not be allowed to re-enter without the $100,000 payment, according to workers and immigration lawyers. 

Despite the White House’s clarification that the new fee applies only to new visa applications, not existing H-1B holders, there remains “a great degree of uncertainty on the ground,” Parul Koul, president of the union that represents employees at Google owner Alphabet, said during a press conference on Monday to address the new policy. 

CBS News spoke with attorneys and other sources about the new policy — here’s what to know. 

Who pays the $100,000 fee? 

Under current H-1B rules, employers pay the application fees on behalf of workers. Assuming that approach continues, that could deter many employers from picking up the additional $100,000 fees — roughly 10 times what they previously paid for an applicant, Emily Neumann, an immigration attorney and managing partner at Houston-based Reddy Neumann Brown, told CBS MoneyWatch. 

“Very few employers would be willing to shell out that kind of money,” she said. 

Such an outcome would appear to align with the White House’s goals of spurring employers to hire within the U.S. rather than recruiting foreign workers.

“It is therefore necessary to impose higher costs on companies seeking to use the H-1B program in order to address the abuse of that program while still permitting companies to hire the best of the best temporary foreign workers,” Mr. Trump said in his order. 

When does the fee go into effect? 

The new fee must be paid in submitting any new H-1B visa application and went into effect at 12:01 am EST on Sept. 21, according to a White House statement. 

Each year, the federal government approves 85,000 H-1B visas for highly skilled non-U.S. workers, who typically require at least a bachelor’s degree and a skill in a highly specialized field, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. An estimated 700,000 people in the U.S. hold a H-1B visa, according to Capital Economics.

The USCIS says it has already reached its applicant cap for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. That means those applications would be excluded from having to pay the fee, but new applicants filing during the next fiscal year would be subject to it, Neumann explained.  

What are the main issues for current H-1B holders? 

According to the White House, the proclamation “does not prevent any holder of a current H-1B visa from traveling in and out of the United States.”

H-1B visas are valid for three years, but can be extended for an additional three years. A White House official said the one-time $100,000 fee is only charged when applying for a visa for the first time — the payment is not required for current visa holders or those renewing the document, and those fees aren’t changing. 

Yet the new rules leave some gray areas for current H-1B holders, Neumann said. For instance, the new fee is targeted at new visa applicants residing outside the U.S. That raises questions about whether current H-1B visa holders who are applying for changes, such as a visa renewal or a change of employer, might be caught up in the new requirement if they leave the U.S., Neumann and other immigration attorneys said.

“Where the question comes in is, what if after September 21 they file that extension and then they need to travel — are they going to be expected to pay that in order to get back into the U.S.?” she said. “That’s kind of an open question right now.”

Although the White House said the fee doesn’t apply to current H-1B holders and won’t impact their travel, Neumann said she believes more guidance is needed because the White House’s Sept. 21 FAQ notes the fee applies to “any other H-1B petitions submitted after 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on September 21, 2025.”

“This makes it sound like it could apply to an employee who travels with any petition filed after September 21, 2025. Although it seems clear that it does not apply to individuals currently in the United States, it is not clear how it impacts those who later travel and have a petition filed after the relevant date,” she said.

For now, Neumann said she is advising her corporate clients to direct their H-1B employees not to leave the U.S.. That was echoed by Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and an immigration attorney.

“Until we have more clarification, which hopefully we’ll have soon, we’re telling people to just sit tight and not travel,” Joseph said.

Asked about the issue of H-1B holders who are applying for a change and who travel outside the U.S., the White House said the one-time $100,000 fee doesn’t apply to renewals or current visa holders.

How does the new fee impact the H-1B program? 

The $100,000 fee is likely to have a “chilling effect” on skilled foreign workers moving to the U.S., Joseph of the American Immigration Lawyers Association said.

Although the tech industry has long been the biggest beneficiary of the H-1B program, the visa is designed for highly skilled workers across many industries, he added. Employers who rely on the visa include those in health care, which often recruit medical professionals outside the U.S. in areas where they have shortages, he said.

More than 7 in 10 recipients of H-1B visas are from India, followed by China, at more than 1 in 10 recipients. The remainder of H-1B visa holders come from a range of countries, including Canada, South Korea, the Philippines, Mexico and Taiwan, according to a 2022 USCIS report.

What about the national security exemption?

A provision in Mr. Trump’s proclamation exempts some workers, companies and even entire industries from the new $100,000 fee if they are deemed to support the “national interest” and are adjudged not to pose a threat to the security or welfare of the U.S. 

For now, however, it’s unclear how to receive such an exemption, including which federal agency will be charged with approving them, Neumann said. 

“There’s no guidance out there yet,” she said. “What are the national interest exemptions going to be? How would a company apply for that, if they can get the entire company to get the exemption? How would the individual apply?”

The White House didn’t respond to questions about how the national security exemption would be applied or which agency will be handling the issue.

California became the first state to ban most law enforcement officers, including federal immigration agents, from covering their faces while conducting official business under a bill that was signed Saturday by Gov. Gavin Newsom and swiftly denounced by Trump administration officials.

The ban is a direct response to recent immigration raids in Los Angeles, where federal agents wore masks while making mass arrests. The raids prompted days of protest and led President Donald Trump to deploy National Guard troops and Marines to the area.

Newsom said at a news conference in Los Angeles, where he signed the bill flanked by state lawmakers, education leaders and immigrant community members, that California is unique in that 27% of its residents are foreign born.

“We celebrate that diversity. It’s what makes California great. It’s what makes America great. It is under assault,” he said.

The Democratic governor said the state is pushing back against the practice of masked agents without identification or badge numbers detaining people on the streets.

“The impact of these policies all across this city, our state and nation are terrifying,” Newsom said. “It’s like a dystopian sci-fi movie. Unmarked cars, people in masks, people quite literally disappearing. No due process, no rights, no right in a democracy where we have rights. Immigrants have rights, and we have the right to stand up and push back, and that’s what we’re doing here today.”

But it’s unclear how — or whether — the state can enforce the ban on federal agents.

Trump administration officials have defended use of masks, saying immigration agents face strident and increasing harassment in public and online as they carry out enforcement in service of Trump’s drive toward mass deportation. Obscuring their identities is necessary for the safety of the agents and their families, officials contend.

Bill Essayli, acting U.S. attorney for Southern California, said on the social platform X that the state does not have jurisdiction over the federal government and he has told agencies the mask ban has no effect on their operations. “Our agents will continue to protect their identities,” he said.

Essayli also criticized Newsom’s comment on X saying Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was “going to have a bad day today,” adding that there is zero tolerance for “direct or implicit threats against government officials.” He referred the matter to the Secret Service, which said in a statement, also on X, that it could not comment on the specific case but must investigate any potential threat.

Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs, called it “despicable and a flagrant attempt to endanger our officers.”

“While our federal law enforcement officers are being assaulted by rioters and having rocks and Molotov cocktails thrown at them, a sanctuary politician is trying to outlaw officers wearing masks to protect themselves from being doxxed and targeted by known and suspected terrorist sympathizers,” she said via email.

The men and women of federal immigration agencies put their lives on the line to arrest violent criminal illegal aliens, she said, and rhetoric like Newsom’s has contributed to a surge in assaults.

Newsom countered that concerns about doxing agents, or publishing their personal information online, are unfounded and unproven.

“There’s an assertion that somehow there is an exponential increase in assaults on officers, but they will not provide the data,” he said. “All they have provided is misinformation and misdirection.”

The new law prohibits neck gaiters, ski masks and other facial coverings for local and federal officers, including immigration enforcement agents, while they conduct official business. It makes exceptions for undercover agents, medical masks such as N95 respirators or tactical gear, and it does not apply to state police.

Democrats in Congress and lawmakers in several states, including Tennessee, Michigan, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, have introduced similar proposals calling for mask bans.

Proponents of the California law said it is especially needed after the Supreme Court ruled this month that the Trump administration can resume its sweeping immigration operations in Los Angeles. The law aims to boost public trust in law enforcement and stop people from impersonating officers to commit crimes, supporters said.

Constitutional law expert Erwin Chemerinsky at the University of California, Berkeley, also defended the legislation. Federal employees still have to follow general state rules “unless doing so would significantly interfere with the performance of their duties. For example, while on the job, federal employees must stop at red lights,” he wrote in an opinion piece for the Sacramento Bee.

Newsom also signed legislation Saturday preventing immigration agents from entering schools and health care facilities without a valid warrant or judicial order and requiring schools to notify parents and teachers when agents are on campus.

Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, said “students cannot learn if they live in fear of being deported. The California Safe Haven Schools Act is a clear message to Donald Trump: ‘keep ICE out of our schools.’”

Earlier this year the Legislature also authorized giving $50 million to California’s Department of Justice and other legal groups, which has resulted in more than 40 lawsuits against the Trump administration.

The Trump administration is adding $100,000 to the existing fee for H-1B visa applications, taking aim at a program that is used to attract highly skilled workers to the U.S. 

President Trump signed a proclamation late Friday adding the new visa application fee and barring H-1B workers from entering the U.S. unless they had made the $100,000 payment. 

“We’re going to be able to keep people in our country that are going to be very productive people, and in many cases these companies are going to pay a lot of money for that, and they’re very happy about it,” Mr. Trump said.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson clarified to CBS News in an email Saturday that the fee “does not apply to anyone who has a current visa,” and “only applies to future applicants in the February [2026] lottery who are currently outside the U.S. It does not apply to anyone who participated in the 2025 lottery.”

“The Proclamation does not impact the ability of any current visa holder to travel to/from the U.S.,” Jackson said.

A White House official told CBS News Saturday that the $100,000 is a one-time fee that only applies to new visas and is not an annual payment. It does not apply to renewals or current visa holders, the official said.

This comes after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had told reporters Friday that the fee was “annual.” 

“President Trump promised to put American workers first, and this commonsense action does just that by discouraging companies from spamming the system and driving down wages,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told CBS News in a statement Saturday. “It also gives certainty to American businesses who actually want to bring high-skilled workers to our great country but have been trampled on by abuses of the system.”

The additional charge would impact employers including technology giants such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Google, which have relied on the program to hire foreign workers. 

The plan was reported earlier by Bloomberg News.

H-1B visas are already expensive, with the cost ranging from about $1,700 to $4,500, depending on whether the visa is expedited. The fees are typically considered a business expense for the employer. 

The new fee comes amid a debate over the H-1B visa, which some critics say enables companies to hire foreign applicants at lower salaries than American workers. Some employers also award H-1Bs for entry-level roles rather than for senior positions with greater skill requirements, detractors of the program say.

Tech companies have been among the primary beneficiaries of the visa program. Amazon received the most H1-B visas of any business in 2024, Department of Labor data shows. This year, the online retailer remains the leading recipient of the visas, with more than 10,000 awarded, followed by Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Apple and Google.

“This will ensure that the people they’re bringing in are actually very highly skilled and that they’re not replaceable by American workers. So it’ll protect American workers, but ensure that companies have a pathway to hire truly extraordinary people and bring them to the United States,” a White House aide said.

Still, Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, said the plan could backfire if it incentivizes U.S. companies to shift jobs overseas, especially in specialized areas like research and development.

“The second impact will further decrease the number of international students who have an interest in coming to study in the U.S. If there’s no opportunity work in the U.S., it’s much less likely they’ll enroll in U.S. programs,” Anderson told CBS News.

Last year, the most popular type of job for H-1B visas was software developer. To receive an H-1B visa, which is awarded by lottery, an applicant needs to have at least a bachelor’s degree in their field and have been offered a temporary job by a U.S. company.

President Trump plans to order the Labor Secretary to start a new rule-making process that would update wage levels for the program, Bloomberg reported. Currently, U.S. companies must offer the prevailing wage or the actual wage of similarly qualified workers, whichever is higher, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The program is capped at 65,000 new visas each year, although an additional 20,000 can be issued for employees with a master’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The cap and higher-degree exemption quota is already filled for fiscal year 2026, according to the USCIS. 

The H-1B program is already the most restrictive visa program in the U.S., with about 20% of applications resulting in approved workers, according to a March study from the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy. 

— With reporting by Aaron Navarro.

Grace Kazarian,

Jennifer Jacobs and

The Associated Press

contributed to this report.

LOS ANGELES — Hundreds of people gathered at MacArthur Park on Saturday for the launch of a community initiative to monitor federal enforcement of suspected illegal immigration.

The Save America Movement is described as “a rapid-response and civic empowerment initiative to ensure the American people have a clear understanding of the actions and impact of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in our communities while providing support to impacted communities.”

Organizers plan to have trained camera crews and volunteers help capture ICE operations as they’re happening. The group unveiled three specially outfitted vans Saturday, dubbed Liberty Van One, Two, and Three, which will be staffed by trained volunteers, including lawyers, clergy, veterans and videographers.

“Los Angeles will always stand with families under threat,” Mayor Karen Bass said. “Angelenos are showing the country that when our communities are targeted, we respond with solidarity, with resources, and with an unbreakable commitment to justice.”

President Donald Trump, while campaigning, promised safety and security. He promised that changes to immigration policy would target criminals. His campaign, he said, was intended to rid the country of people he has called murderers, terrorists, drug dealers, animals -– “the worst they have in every country, all over the world.”

Critics, however, have called the government’s mass deportation campaign inhumane.

In the coming weeks, organizers will be recruiting and training volunteers to staff the Save America Movement vehicles, to be deployed in early October.

More information can be found at thesaveamericamovement.org

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

WASHINGTON — The Indian government expressed concern Saturday about President Donald Trump’s latest push to upend American immigration policy, dramatically raising the fee for visas that bring tech workers from India and other countries to the United States.

The president on Friday signed a proclamation that will require a $100,000 annual fee for H-1B visas — meant for high-skilled jobs that tech companies find hard to fill. He also rolled out a $1 million “gold card” visa for wealthy individuals, moves that face near-certain legal challenges amid widespread criticism he is sidestepping Congress.

If the moves survive legal muster, they will deliver staggering price increases. The visa fee for skilled workers would jump from $215.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs said Saturday that Trump’s plan “was being studied by all concerned, including by Indian industry.″ The ministry warned that ”this measure is likely to have humanitarian consequences by way of the disruption caused for families. Government hopes that these disruptions can be addressed suitably by the U.S. authorities.″

H-1B visas, which require at least a bachelor’s degree, are meant for high-skilled jobs that tech companies find difficult to fill. Critics say the program undercuts American workers, luring people from overseas who are often willing to work for as little as $60,000 annually. That is well below the $100,000-plus salaries typically paid to U.S. technology workers.

Trump on Friday insisted that the tech industry would not oppose the move. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said “all big companies” are on board.

Representatives for the biggest tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, did not immediately respond to messages for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.

Lutnick said the change will likely result in far fewer H-1B visas than the 85,000 annual cap allows because “it’s just not economic anymore.”

“If you’re going to train people, you’re going to train Americans,” Lutnick said on a conference call with reporters. “If you have a very sophisticated engineer and you want to bring them in … then you can pay $100,000 a year for your H-1B visa.”

Trump also announced he will start selling a “gold card” visa with a path to U.S. citizenship for $1 million after vetting. For companies, it will cost $2 million to sponsor an employee.

The “Trump Platinum Card” will be available for $5 million and allow foreigners to spend up to 270 days in the U.S. without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income. Trump announced a $5 million gold card in February to replace an existing investor visa — this is now the platinum card.

Lutnick said the gold and platinum cards would replace employment-based visas that offer paths to citizenship, including for professors, scientists, artists and athletes.

Critics of H-1Bs visas who say they are used to replace American workers applauded the move. U.S. Tech Workers, an advocacy group, called it “the next best thing” to abolishing the visas altogether.

Doug Rand, a senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration, said the proposed fee increase was “ludicrously lawless.”

“This isn’t real policy — it’s fan service for immigration restrictionists,” Rand said. “Trump gets his headlines, and inflicts a jolt of panic, and doesn’t care whether this survives first contact with the courts.”

Lutnick said the H-1B fees and gold card could be introduced by the president but the platinum card needs congressional approval.

Historically, H-1B visas have been doled out through lottery. This year, Amazon was by far the top recipient of H-1B visas with more than 10,000 awarded, followed by Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Apple and Google. Geographically, California has the highest number of H-1B workers.

Critics say H-1B spots often go to entry-level jobs, rather than senior positions with unique skill requirements. And while the program isn’t supposed to undercut U.S. wages or displace U.S. workers, critics say companies can pay less by classifying jobs at the lowest skill levels, even if the specific workers hired have more experience.

As a result, many U.S. companies find it cheaper to contract out help desks, programming and other basic tasks to consulting companies such as Wipro, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Tata in India and IBM and Cognizant in the U.S. These consulting companies hire foreign workers, often from India, and contract them out to U.S. employers looking to save money.

Ron Hira, a professor in the political science department at Howard University and a longtime critic of H-1B visas, said the plan was a move in the right direction.

“It’s a recognition that the program is abused,’’ he said.

Raising the visa fee, he said, was an unusual way to address the H-1B program’s shortcomings. Normally, he said, reformers seek ways to raise the pay of the foreign workers, eliminating the incentive to use them to replace higher-paid Americans. He noted approvingly that Trump’s proclamation calls for the U.S. Labor Department to “initiate a rulemaking to revise the prevailing wage levels’’ under the visa program.

Critics of H-1B visas have also called on the lottery to be replaced by an auction in which companies vie for the right to bring in foreign workers.

First lady Melania Trump, the former Melania Knauss, was granted an H-1B work visa in October 1996 to work as a model. She was born in Slovenia.

In 2024, lottery bids for the visas plunged nearly 40%, which authorities said was due to success against people who were “gaming the system” by submitting multiple, sometimes dubious, applications to unfairly increase chances of being selected.

Major technology companies that use H-1B visas sought changes after massive increases in bids left their employees and prospective hires with slimmer chances of winning the random lottery. Facing what it acknowledged was likely fraud and abuse, USCIS this year said each employee had only one shot at the lottery, whether the person had one job offer or 50.

Critics welcomed the change but said more needs to be done. The AFL-CIO wrote last year that while changes to the lottery “included some steps in the right direction,” it fell short of needed reforms. The labor group wants visas awarded to companies that pay the highest wages instead of by random lottery, a change that Trump sought during his first term in the White House.

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Ortutay reported from Oakland, Calif. Associated Press writers Adriana Gomez Licon in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Paul Wiseman in Washington contributed to this report.

Delphine Cherry knows as well as anyone how intractable violent crime is in Chicago. In 1992, her teenage daughter was gunned down in one of the city’s toniest neighborhoods — a bystander caught up in a gang shootout. Twenty years later in a suburb just south of the city, it claimed her son.

“You don’t think it’s going to happen twice in your life,” she said.

Chicago has been bracing for weeks for President Donald Trump’s promised deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s third-largest city. Although Trump said the troops would help fight crime in a city he described as a “hellhole,” his administration has been tightlipped about the operation’s details, including when it would start, how long it would last, how many troops would be used and what role they would play in civilian law enforcement.

Trump has also veered back and forth on sending troops to Chicago — at times insisting he would act unilaterally to deploy them and at other points suggesting he would rather send them to New Orleans or some other city in a state where their governor “wants us to come in.” Most recently, he said this week that Chicago is “probably next” after National Guard troops are sent to Memphis.

Although Chicago has had one of the highest rates of gun violence of any major American city for some time, city and state leaders overwhelmingly oppose the planned operation, calling it political theater. And even those most directly affected, including people who have lost loved ones to violent crime, wonder how sending in troops would have any lasting effect on the fight against it.

With plans for the Chicago deployment unknown, the ways National Guard troops have been used in Los Angeles and Washington this summer might offer clues.

In June, Trump deployed thousands of Guard troops to Los Angeles amid protests over his administration’s immigration crackdown there. Although the troops initially were assigned to guard federal property, they also provided protection for immigration agents during raids and took part in a show of force at a park in a heavily immigrant neighborhood of LA that local officials believe was meant to sow fear.

In August, Trump announced he was placing Washington’s police force under his control and mobilizing federal forces to reduce crime and homelessness there. The troops who were deployed have patrolled around Metro stations and in the most tourist-heavy parts of the nation’s capital. But they have also been spotted picking up trash and raking leaves in city parks.

The White House reported that more than 2,100 arrests had been made in Washington in the first few weeks after Trump announced he was mobilizing federal forces. And Mayor Muriel Bowser credited the federal deployment with a drop in crime, including an 87% decline in carjackings, but also criticized the frequent immigration arrests by masked ICE agents. However, an unusually high rate of cases being dropped has some, including at least one judge, wondering whether prosecutors are making charging decisions before cases are properly investigated and vetted.

Washington is unique in that it is a federal district subject to laws giving Trump power to take over the local police force for up to 30 days. The decision to use troops to try to fight crime in other Democratic-controlled cities would represent an important escalation.

Although the Trump administration hasn’t said what the troops would be doing and what parts of Chicago they would operate in, they have explicitly promised a surge of federal agents targeting immigration enforcement. The city’s so-called sanctuary policies are among the country’s strongest and bar local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.

Chicago isn’t the only Democratic-led city in Trump’s sights — he’s also mentioned Baltimore as a likely target. But Trump seems to harbor particular scorn for the Windy City, warning in an “Apocalypse Now”-themed social media post earlier this month: “’I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The president’s criticism, though, is more often focused on how the city’s and state’s Democratic leaders deal with crime.

Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker have repeatedly pointed to a drop in crime in Chicago and have asked for more federal funding for prevention programs instead of sending in the National Guard.

Last year, the city had 573 homicides, or 21 per every 100,000 residents, according to the Rochester Institute of Technology. That’s 25% fewer than in 2020 and was a lower rate than several other major U.S. cities. Like most big cities, violent crime isn’t evenly spread out in Chicago, with most shootings happening on the South and West sides.

“If it was about safety, then the Trump administration would not have slashed $158 million in federal funding for violence prevention programs this year,” said Yolanda Androzzo, executive director of gun violence prevention nonprofit One Aim Illinois.

After Cherry’s 16-year-old daughter, Tyesa, was killed in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood by a stray bullet that a 14-year-old fired at rival gang members, the devastated mother moved her family to Hazel Crest, a suburb just south of the city.

“We were planning for prom. She was going on to college to be a nurse,” Cherry said.

Her son, Tyler, was fatally shot in the driveway of the family’s suburban home in 2012, 20 years after Tyesa was killed.

Although her children’s deaths have made Cherry an antiviolence advocate — she sits on One Aim Illinois’ board — she doesn’t believe bringing in troops will do anything to fight crime in Chicago, and that it could making the streets more dangerous.

“They’re not going to ask questions,” Cherry said of the National Guard. “They are trained to kill on sight.”

Trevon Bosley, who was 7 years old when his 18-year-old brother, Terrell, was shot and killed in 2006 while unloading drums outside of a Church before band rehearsal, also thinks sending in troops isn’t the answer.

“There is so much love and so much community in Chicago,” said Bosley, whose brother’s killing remains unsolved. “There are communities that need help. When those resources are provided, they become just as beautiful as downtown, just as beautiful as the North Side.”

Like Johnson, Pritzker and other critics of the promised troop deployment, Bosley thinks better funding would make a real positive difference in parts of the city with the highest crime and poverty rates.

“It’s not like we have a police shortage,” Bosley said. “The National Guard and police show up after a shooting has occurred. They don’t show up before. That’s not stopping or saving anyone.”

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Associated Press reporter Christine Fernando contributed to this report.

President Trump signed an executive order Friday to offer up fast-track “Gold Card” visas to people willing to pay $1 million or more.

“The Trump Gold Card is Here,” reads a government website, which features a mock-up of a bright, gilded card embossed with a photo of Mr. Trump, his signature and images of a bald eagle and the Statue of Liberty: “Unlock life in America.”

Under the Gold Card program, which Mr. Trump first floated in February, non-Americans who give a gift of at least $1 million to the Commerce Department will be eligible for an “expedited process” to gain an immigrant visa, the executive order states. Corporations can sponsor people for Gold Cards if they give the government at least $2 million.

Some 80,000 Gold Cards will be made available, according to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who said the program is still in the “implementation phase.”

People who are approved for a Gold Card after vetting by the State Department and Department of Homeland Security — and who pay a $15,000 “vetting fee” — will be considered lawful permanent residents, more commonly known as green-card holders, Lutnick told reporters Friday. He said Gold Cards will take the place of the existing EB-1 and EB-2 visa programs, which offer green cards to people with “exceptional ability” in business or other fields.

“You can prove exceptional value for the United States of America by contributing $1 million to the United States of America. That’s a pretty good expectation that they’re highly valuable,” he said.

Lutnick said: “In less than a month, the other visa Green Card categories are likely to be suspended, and this will be the model that people can come into the country.”

The administration is also considering offering a $5 million “Platinum Card” that will allow people to spend up to 270 days in the country without paying taxes on their non-U.S. income. That program, which Lutnick said would not offer a pathway to citizenship, will need approval from Congress before it launches. The federal government has set up an online waiting list.

Separately, Mr. Trump signed an executive order Friday that imposes an extra $100,000 fee for people who wish to enter the U.S. on an H-1B visa, a non-immigrant visa that allows tens of thousands of people to live and work in the U.S. for up to six years. 

The change could mark a substantial crackdown on the H-1B program. Critics argue that the visas allow employers to undercut U.S. workers by sponsoring foreign job applicants willing to work for lower salaries. But supporters of the program argue it is essential to industries like tech that often struggle to find qualified U.S.-based workers — with firms like Amazon applying for thousands of H-1Bs per year — and employers are already required to pay H-1B recipients no less than the wages earned by similarly qualified workers.

Asked Friday how he believes tech companies will react to the new H-1B fee, Mr. Trump told reporters: “I think they’re going to be very happy.”

“And we’re going to be able to keep people in our country that are going to be very productive people, and in many cases, these companies are going to pay a lot of money for that, and they’re very happy about it,” the president said.

By JESSICA SACHS and ANN MARIE VANDERVEEN/News21

ALLENTOWN, PA. (AP) — Junior Clase’s cluttered kitchen table paints a picture of his life in the United States. Scattered across it are bottles of deodorant and conditioner that he sends back to the Dominican Republic, a Spanish-language Bible and a plastic medical brace for his wife, Solibel Olaverria.

Olaverria began having intense headaches and vomiting five months after she joined her husband in the U.S. In the emergency room, she was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm; during surgery to stop it from rupturing, she suffered a stroke and was induced into a coma.

She left the couple’s Allentown row house in December 2022 and has yet to return. Clase worries she never will.