WASHINGTON — A District of Columbia Superior Court judge Friday seemed inclined to bar any new felony charges against former Olympian David Hearn, after the Trump administration accused the Maryland man of damaging part of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman raised concerns about President Donald Trump’s public pressure campaign on the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, following a quiet earlier move by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro  to dismiss the charges.

Trump, who oversaw the multi-million-dollar renovation of the pool, has blamed vandals for the damage.

“The president of the United States is pressuring your office… to recharge Mr. Hearn (on) what you have decided is meritless,” said Edelman, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama. 

Government lawyers could not answer whether the Trump administration might again try to charge Hearn, of Bethesda, with damaging the reflecting pool. Pirro’s motion for dismissal was without prejudice, which means the case could be filed again.

“I don’t know what the future will bring,”  Michael Spence of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said. “Ten minutes from now that decision could change.” 

Hearn has pleaded not guilty to the charges. 

Reflecting pool drama

Hearn’s case has preoccupied Trump, who faces public backlash and protest as he’s moved to reshape the historic landmarks and landscapes of the nation’s capital. 

That has ranged from moving forward with a triumphal arch that dwarfs the tallest structure in the district, the Washington Monument, to removing iconic cherry blossom trees along the East Potomac Park.  

Over the summer, the Trump administration charged Hearn, an Olympic canoeist, with more than $1,000 worth of damage to the reflecting pool on June 19. 

When Pirro asked the court to dismiss the charges, Trump was angered. Trump said that Pirro “choked” and “folded like an umbrella” and pushed for charges to be refiled.

“Frankly, I think she choked because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked,” Trump told reporters. “I don’t know what the hell happened.”

Pirro said her office wouldn’t have sought charges if the Interior Department, which manages the Lincoln Memorial, had initially shared more information about repair work on the reflecting pool.

Supporters rally

Attorneys for Hearn, as well as dozens of supporters, gathered outside D.C. Superior Court before the hearing. 

They included Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, who slammed the Trump administration for initially bringing felony charges against Hearn. 

“Stop setting up our citizens for fraudulent purposes,” said Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. 

After the hearing, Hearn gave a brief statement. 

“This is not about me, this is about defending democracy,” he said. 

One of his attorneys, Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders Fund, said if his client could be charged, then “every American is at risk.”

Edelman said he would make a decision soon.

WASHINGTON — For years, Jose Palma has advocated for immigrants with Temporary Protected Status who hail from countries deemed too unstable for return.

But as the Trump administration has stripped those humanitarian protections for nearly a million people, the Salvadoran national is uncertain if his own legal status will remain in place next week. 

“I’m going day by day,” Palma, who lives in Texas, told States Newsroom in an interview. 

Within two years under the Trump administration, the bipartisan humanitarian Temporary Protected Status program created by Congress in 1990 and signed into law by former Republican President George H.W. Bush has been nearly obliterated.

Palma first obtained TPS in 2001, along with roughly 170,000 recipients from El Salvador, due to several earthquakes that displaced more than one-sixth of the population and left thousands dead. The United States renewed protections over the years, citing continued displacement and ongoing violence.

But the TPS designation for El Salvador is set to expire Sept. 9, and the Department of Homeland Security has made no indication if protections will be renewed. 

Under DHS policy, an announcement typically is made 60 days in advance of the date of a TPS expiration if a renewal is planned. 

Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, who helped write the statute for TPS when he was a congressional staffer, said he’s asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to renew protections for El Salvador.

“I still haven’t received a response back,” McGovern said during a Thursday press conference at the U.S. Capitol. He was joined by Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon, who said many Salvadoran TPS recipients work and live in his Omaha district. 

DHS did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

The Trump administration’s position on the program is that it’s “temporary,” and that country conditions have improved, despite warnings from the State Department to not travel to some of those countries where TPS designation has ended, such as Haiti.

If TPS for El Salvador ends, only 103,000 out of initially 1.3 million recipients from around the globe will have protections: 150 from Lebanon, 1,790 from Sudan and 101,150 from Ukraine.

Supreme Court decision

TPS is granted to nationals who hail from a country experiencing a natural disaster, violence, or other extreme circumstances, allowing them to remain in the U.S. and obtain work permits. 

Some protections can last through six-to-18-month cycles, and each renewal process requires a TPS holder to go through a background check and other vetting.  

Before the second Trump administration, 17 countries were in the program. Only four, including El Salvador, remain as the White House has forged ahead aggressively on its mass deportation campaign. 

The Supreme Court made the move easier after it ruled this summer that decisions from the executive branch to end TPS were not subject to judicial review. The order meant that lower courts that initially blocked the Trump administration from ending the designations had to reverse their decisions.

Now recipients face the end of TPS with just 60 days’ notice.

“It’s one of those things that is kind of cruel, to have families who are stable and have been stable for decades, to have people who have been doing everything the government asked them to do for 25 years, and suddenly, if the decision is to end TPS, provided only 60 days protection before forcing people to go back to a country they haven’t been for decades,” Palma said. 

One of the first countries after TPS was written into law to receive the designation was El Salvador. 

Stripping TPS from Salvadorans would not only harm the U.S. economy, but it would also negatively impact El Salvador’s fragile economy, advocates predict. More than one quarter of El Salvador’s Gross Domestic Product comes from family members sending money back to relatives in their country of origin, known as remittances. 

“El Salvador’s economy has been built thanks to all the remittances,” said Ana María Méndez-Dardón, the director for Central America at the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA.  “So if people are returning, that would have a huge impact because the economy depends on the money that people from El Salvador living in the U.S. send to El Salvador.”

The spending also has an impact in the United States. Salvadoran TPS recipients contribute $5.4 billion to the U.S. economy and pay $1.5 billion in federal, state and local taxes, according to the immigration advocacy research group FWD.us. 

About 152,000 TPS recipients from El Salvador are in the workforce, mainly in construction, manufacturing, building and transportation.

Attempts in Congress

TPS does not create a pathway to citizenship and a recipient can only apply for it when the country receives its designation. 

Some TPS recipients can apply for asylum if they qualify, or others could apply to adjust their status to that of a lawful permanent resident, or green-card holder, through a family-based or employer-based petition. 

Congress has made some effort to extend TPS for some recipients. Earlier this year, the House passed a bill to extend TPS for up to 350,000 Haitians on a bipartisan basis, but it’s stalled in the upper chamber. 

Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen attempted to advance a bill in the Senate to create a legal pathway to citizenship for immigrants with TPS, but was blocked by Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt. 

McGovern said Thursday that there is a bipartisan push to extend protections for TPS recipients. Proof of that was Bacon’s presence at the press conference.

“What good is it to force out folks who’ve been here legally, who are working, who are part of our community?” Bacon said. “It does no one any good.”

Human rights in El Salvador

Many Salvadorian TPS recipients are worried about being forced back to El Salvador, where human rights groups have raised concerns about the authoritarian government of President Nayib Bukele, said WOLA’s Méndez-Dardón.

WOLA is a research and advocacy group that aims to advance human rights in North and South America. It has documented how Bukele’s political party has suspended due process rights and has carried out a mass incarceration of suspected gang members in an effort to reduce crime and murders. 

More than 90,000 Salvadorans have been jailed without due process and hundreds have died in prisons and altogether disappeared, human rights groups have reported.

“So for Salvadorians who might be returned, the risk no longer are the criminal groups or the gangs because many of them fled the country because of the security situation,” Méndez-Dardón said. “But although the gangs are no longer the threat, now the threat is the state.” 

Bukele has met with President Donald Trump several times at the White House and has a years-long working relationship with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who last year granted El Salvador the highest possible safety rating for travel, a level 1. 

In 2024, the State Department gave El Salvador a level 3 advisory, warning people to reconsider travel because of security and safety concerns.

The Trump administration also last year made a deal with the Salvadoran government to pay up to $6 million to detain hundreds of Venezuelans at a brutal mega-prison. In the high-profile case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland Salvadoran who was mistakenly deported to the mega prison, lawyers documented mental and physical torture he experienced while there. 

“People are basically under a constant fear of being detained by the security forces,” Méndez-Dardón said. 

U.S. citizen children

Palma, who also attended the press conference, said he, along with other Salvadoran TPS recipients, are concerned about El Salvador’s government.

“So crime has gone down, but now abuses to human rights have increased,” he said. “That is concerning, because it’s also the government is becoming more aggressive against opposition, public media.”

Palma questioned if El Salvador would have the infrastructure to accept as many as 200,000 Salvadorans, made up of the TPS recipients and their families. Many have U.S. citizen children. 

Palma, who has four U.S. citizen children, said two of his kids are still in primary school. One is 11 and another is 8 years old. 

“This is their country,” he said of his four children. “They are from here. But if I were to lose the TPS protection and I were to be forced to go back to El Salvador, it’s not just affecting me. It’s affecting the whole family. That’s kind of like the situation that so many people across the country are going through right now.”

Supporting her mom

There are roughly 150,000 U.S. citizen children who have a parent who is a Salvadoran TPS recipient, according to the National TPS alliance. 

Cristel Argueta is one of those children. At 20 years old, she’s a college student at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. But on Thursday, she missed four classes relating to her criminology and criminal justice degree to travel to the nation’s capital and advocate for an extension to TPS for El Salvador. 

“I’m missing class to be here, but it’s worth it because it’s for my family,” she said.

Her mother, a TPS holder from El Salvador, came to the U.S. when she was 19, fleeing the civil war that lasted from 1979 until 1992. Her mother was able to get TPS in 2001.

“She has been in this country longer than she has been in El Salvador,” Argueta said. “TPS was started by Salvadorans, and I don’t want to lose my mother.” 

She’s hoping her mother’s TPS is extended until at least Argueta’s 21st birthday, when Argueta will be able to become a sponsor and apply to change her mother’s status to that of a lawful permanent resident. 

“No one should be going through this at any age,” she said. “Seeing the difference in my peers at school who are 20 years old, waiting to turn 21, to get that first legal drink or go party, but I want to turn 21 just to give my mom a legal status. A permanent legal status.”

A federal judge in Maryland Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s second attempt to redefine birthright citizenship. 

In a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman barred the Trump administration from carrying out the president’s executive order that would deny citizenship to babies born in the United States to parents deemed part of a designated terrorist organization or to parents who purposefully came to the U.S. to gain citizenship in what critics call “birth tourism.” 

The executive order also aimed to deny citizenship to children born to foreign diplomatic staff and children born in U.S. territories where Congress has not passed a law granting citizenship, which is only American Samoa.

In her order, Boardman said this summer’s Supreme Court ruling affirmed the country’s long understanding that babies born on U.S. soil were guaranteed American citizenship. 

“The 2026 Executive Order is almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class for the simple reason that the Supreme Court in Barbara already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth,” she wrote, referring to the earlier case. “This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”

The White House did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

WASHINGTON— More than 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant youth remain at risk of losing their legal representation, one month after the Trump administration ended a federal contract with an organization that provided legal services to migrant children, advocates and attorneys said Tuesday.

Most of those children who initially had attorneys through funding provided by Congress still have access to lawyers because the Acacia Center for Justice and its network of 100 nonprofits have continued to represent the children without pay. 

But unaccompanied immigrant children who have been placed into federal custody since the contract expired after July 31 are likely without attorneys as they appear in immigration court, said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Justice, which is part of Acacia’s network. 

“Many nonprofits are not taking on new cases,” Lukens said. “We have not closed any case of a child we were already representing — that obviously is not a sustainable model. We feel both ethically and morally obligated to continue as long as we can.”

Without a lawyer, fewer than 10% of immigrant children win the right to remain in the United States while their cases go through immigration court.

Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, the deputy director of Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, said the organization is currently representing 600 children, and cannot represent several children who have recently arrived in Arizona, where the group is based. 

“This is something that is happening across the nation,” she said. 

Contract expired

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for unaccompanied children, let a contract with Acacia for legal services expire July 31. 

The center has a network of roughly 100 organizations it works with that provide legal aid and representation to immigrant children across the country in their immigration court appearances. Acacia has provided legal services for unaccompanied minors for decades. 

Additionally, since December, HHS has not released $65 million that Congress appropriated for legal representation of unaccompanied children in immigration cases, meaning that Acacia and its legal providers have gone for months without reimbursement.

Leaders of Acacia have said the funds were withheld because attorneys refused to hand over to the Trump administration sensitive case data from the unaccompanied children, such as medical records and the types of legal relief the minors are seeking. 

After the contract expired in July, HHS initially awarded a single $150 million contract to a small Texas firm, headed by a former Trump official who served during the first administration. But the law firm, which only had two attorneys that specialized in immigration law and primarily focused on regulatory work, backed out of the contract. 

New contract

In August, the Trump administration awarded a $158 million no-bid contract to a controversial anti-human-trafficking organization called Our Rescue, a Utah-based company that was previously known as Operation Underground Railroad. 

The group was founded by Tim Ballard, who presented it as an “anti-sex-trafficking” organization. The group was featured in the conservative film “Sound of Freedom” that promoted several QAnon conspiracy theories. 

After the movie’s release, Ballard was accused of sexual misconduct by several employees and has since left the organization. 

Our Rescue now specializes in working with law enforcement related to child trafficking cases and is run by a former Department of Homeland Security official, Derek Benner. It’s unclear if there are any immigration attorneys on staff and the group does not have a history of providing legal representation to unaccompanied immigrant youth in immigration court.

Our Rescue did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

Bilal Askaryar, the communications director for Acacia, said Our Rescue has not been in contact with Acacia to transfer over case information.

Avila-Cimpeanu said she has also not heard from Our Rescue to start the transition process for representing the children’s cases. 

“I think it’s very unclear what their role is,” she said. 

The Our Rescue contract will run from Aug. 7 until Feb. 6, 2027, according to its award.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

WASHINGTON — A federal judge over the weekend allowed the Trump administration to force-feed the man charged with shooting two National Guard members, killing one and injuring another, in the District of Columbia in November.

For months, Rahmanullah Lakanwal has refused to eat while incarcerated. 

The Aug. 29 order from U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District of Columbia gives the go-ahead for medical staff at the Bureau of Prisons to conduct several types of nonconsensual feeding methods “to preserve defendant Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s life or to prevent a foreseeable deterioration in his condition that if not treated is likely to lead to death; replacement, maintenance, and care of defendant’s feeding tube when medically necessary; and lab work relating to the administration of nutrition.”

The order will allow for a feeding tube through Lakanwal’s nasal passage and into his stomach to provide nutrients; feeding through veins; or feeding through an already established tube connected to his stomach. The order does not allow for a tube to be established through his stomach, usually done via surgery. 

The Department of Justice charged Lakanwal with first-degree murder in the shooting of 20-year-old U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and with the attempted murder of U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe. Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty to all 17 DOJ charges. 

He is an Afghan national who came to the United States under a humanitarian program after the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from the country. Following the shooting, the Trump administration paused all immigration processing for nationals from Afghanistan. A federal judge later reversed that move.  

The two West Virginia guard members last year were shot on Thanksgiving eve while stationed blocks from the White House as part of the president’s crackdown on crime, despite a continued decrease in violent crime.

Mehta, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, has in the past considered but turned down the Trump administration’s requests for a court-ordered nonconsensual nutrition supplement, noting that Lakanwal has refused meals and medical treatment. 

In several hearings in federal court before Mehta, Lakanwal has appeared gaunt and has used a wheelchair. 

Mehta’s order will remain in effect until Oct. 28 and will allow the DOJ to request an extension if needed. 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Treasury’s recent proposed regulation to limit refunds for certain tax credits based on immigration status is the latest move by the Trump administration to restrict noncitizens’ access to federal benefits.

In President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, he has employed a governmentwide approach to fulfilling his immigration agenda that includes not only the central campaign promise of mass deportations, but curtailing what few federal benefits some immigrants had. 

Those actions include pushing out foreign-born workers from the trucking industry, barring noncitizens from accessing government-subsidized housing even for families that include U.S. citizens, and pressuring banks to restrict immigrants’ access to opening accounts or borrowing money.

Previous presidents generally restricted management of immigration to the departments of Homeland Security, State or Justice. But in Trump’s second term, several unrelated federal agencies have undertaken initiatives meant to disadvantage immigrants.

“What’s been unique about this administration is beginning to incorporate agencies that have never before been involved in immigration,” Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an analyst with the immigration think tank Migration Policy Institute, said.

In Trump’s second term, the Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Small Business Administration and Federal Communications Commission are among the agencies that have sought to carry out the president’s immigration crackdown.

Administration officials have said the benefits of federal programs should be reserved for U.S. citizens.

An executive order Trump signed in February 2025 to limit immigrants from receiving benefits, said it was necessary to “prevent taxpayer resources from acting as a magnet and fueling illegal immigration to the United States, and to ensure, to the maximum extent permitted by law, that no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens.”

In an Aug. 26 statement to States Newsroom, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said the “Trump Administration is putting Americans first.”

“As promised, President Trump secured the border, cracked down on illegal immigration, and put Americans first,” Rogers said.

Pace accelerating

Trump’s first administration was partially defined by its aggressive immigration policy, including visa restrictions, a travel ban from certain countries, a higher bar for asylum cases in immigration court, and forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their asylum cases were pending. 

But the rate at which the second Trump administration is pursuing immigration-related actions is far surpassing the first, according to an analysis from the Migration Policy Institute. 

In its first year, the administration took more than 500 immigration actions, including executive orders and regulations, compared to 472 actions in all four years of the first administration, according to MPI’s analysis.

Welfare restrictions

Federal public benefits are generally denied to “not qualified” immigrants, under a welfare reform law enacted during the Clinton administration known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or PRWORA.

The law limits certain public benefits for individuals who do not meet a specific immigration status or eligibility requirements. 

Over the years, Congress has expanded certain immigrant categories and federal agencies have interpreted which programs are covered under PRWORA.

But Trump reversed that trend.

Last February, he signed an executive order directing federal agencies to review any programs that benefit immigrants and reverse any expansions. 

Following the order, the departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Education, Labor, HUD and the IRS either rescinded notices that clarified eligibility or issued reinterpretations of PRWORA.

HHS in July 2025 designated 13 additional programs, including the early-childhood Head Start program, that are subject to PRWORA qualifications. 

HUD in October restricted certain housing programs and grants based on immigration status. 

USDA now considers certain licenses, grants, payments and loan programs to fall under the law’s requirements.

The Labor Department updated a policy that now forces noncitizens with temporary work authorization to go through reverification every three months in order to participate in a program to help access employment or education.

And the Department of Education issued a notice that certain higher education programs, such as Pell grants, loans and workforce programs fall under “federal public benefits.” 

A preliminary injunction currently prevents the Trump administration’s new interpretation of PRWORA from taking effect.

The FCC, which is supposed to operate as an independent federal agency but has shown a deference to Trump during his second term, issued a proposed rule in April that would limit the Lifeline program, which provides a discount on phone services for low-income consumers, to U.S. citizens and immigrants with a “qualified” status. 

That group includes lawful permanent residents, refugees, people granted asylum, certain survivors of trafficking and victims of abuse. All other immigrants, including those with some form of legal status, are considered “not qualified.” 

Livelihoods at stake

While the second Trump administration has expanded efforts to limit benefits, it has also moved to restrict access to the workforce in a couple of policies.

The SBA in March banned noncitizens from applying for small business loans. 

And the DOT issued a rule that limits the types of visas which can be used to obtain a Commercial Driver’s License for foreign-born truck drivers while pushing for veterans to fill the void. 

That approach was novel, David Bier, the director of immigration studies of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, said.

“There were certainly some benefits that they attempted to restrict more on the welfare side of things,” Bier said of the first Trump administration. 

“But I can’t think of an instance where they attempted to try to use their regulatory authority to prevent people from being able to engage in certain occupations that they would otherwise be eligible for if they were authorized to work.”

Restrictions in GOP megabill

The massive tax cuts and spending package that the Republican-controlled Congress passed last year also limits safety net programs for immigrants.

The “big, beautiful” law restricted eligibility for immigrants in Medicaid, Medicare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Affordable Care Act coverage, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The bill struck several categories of non-citizens who were previously eligible for SNAP, such as immigrants with longstanding humanitarian status like refugees, asylees, parolees and those with suspended deportation status. 

It also implemented tighter proof-of-citizenship or immigration verification requirements for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, while also discouraging states from covering insurance for immigrants until that status is verified. 

The law also bars several other groups of immigrants from ACA subsidies. 

Immigrants with asylum or a pending claim, in the country on a humanitarian basis, who hold Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, or who an immigration judge has deemed their home country too dangerous to return are ineligible, under the law.

The Trump administration’s focus on limiting safety net programs to noncitizens has produced a chilling effect. 

An estimated one in ten adult immigrants stopped participating in government benefits for food, housing or healthcare because they were afraid to enroll in benefits they qualified for, according to a report from the Migration Policy Institute.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service took another step Thursday in implementing a Trump administration policy to restrict mail-in voting, even as a high-stakes legal battle plays out and midterm elections approach.

The agency published an FAQ about its new rule that compels states to send their voter rolls to the federal government and only deliver mail ballots to voters who match federal citizenship data. The rule also updates standards for mail ballots that states have said would be difficult to implement before the Nov. 3 elections that will determine the balance of Congress.

The controversial rule, which two dozen Democratic states and voting rights groups are challenging in federal court, increases the federal government’s role in elections and voting. 

The states have argued the rule violates the U.S. Constitution, which grants them the power of administering elections.

In a Thursday brief defending the rule, the U.S. Justice Department said it only contained “modest improvements and modernizations of the Postal Service’s infrastructure” and would have minimal effect on states’ election administration.

“The Rule does not displace a single State election law,” the brief said. “And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

Democrat-led states and voting rights groups re-filed lawsuits Wednesday to block the Trump administration from executing the rule after a Supreme Court ruling Monday that temporarily greenlit the policy on procedural grounds.

USPS acknowledged pending litigation in the FAQ, and noted it would make any changes spurred by the suits. 

Republicans, including Trump, have long made the accusation that noncitizens vote in federal elections, which multiple studies have shown occurs rarely.   

On Thursday, Trump said he believed states could implement the new rule, even in North Carolina where ballots are set to be mailed next week.  

“North Carolina is great,” Trump said. “And they do some mail-in ballots. But basically they ruled on the legitimacy and the way we want to make them legitimate. And it was a great ruling for the Republicans.”

Those states suing to block the rule are California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, as well as the District of Columbia.

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this story.

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security is planning to drastically increase the fee for hiring high-skilled foreign workers within the United States to $100,000, according to a preview of a proposed rule published Monday. 

The administration noted in the Federal Register that it plans to use the fee to “serve as a dedicated revenue mechanism to help recover a portion of the federal government’s costs of administering the lawful immigration system, including activities carried out by DHS” and the departments of Justice, State and Labor.

Currently, it costs anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 for an employer to hire a highly skilled foreign worker through the H-1B visa program. Congress created the program in the 1990s and visas are capped annually at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 for foreign workers who graduate with a masters or doctoral degree from a U.S. institution.

A federal judge in June struck down the Trump administration’s attempt to increase the H-1B visa to $100,000 for foreign workers hired outside the U.S. 

Workers on a temporary H-1B visa work in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine or education.  

Employers use the H-1B program to hire foreign workers who have a minimum of a bachelor’s degree for up to three years, but the temporary visa can be extended for up to six.  

Last year, the Trump administration imposed a one-time $100,000 H-1B visa fee to employers in an effort to prevent high-skill jobs going to foreigners instead of U.S. citizens. However, the program is used to fill high-skill jobs that are difficult to fill with American workers. 

WASHINGTON — Fentanyl seizures decreased by 39% during the first year of the second Trump administration after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shifted the Department of Homeland Security’s criminal investigations arm to conducting immigration enforcement, according to a report government investigators published Friday. 

Agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a subagency of DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reported an “all hands-on deck” environment toward immigration enforcement began in January 2025, according to the DHS Office of Inspector General report.

“With ICE dedicating more staff hours to immigration investigations, staffing hours for fentanyl investigations declined,” the report said.

The report found that the hours dedicated to fentanyl investigations for fiscal 2025 declined by more than 250,000 hours, or 31%, compared to fiscal 2024.

“At the same time, immigration enforcement saw the largest increase across all investigative categories, rising more than 1.7 million hours (over 800 percent),” according to the report.

Inspectors interviewed more than 100 agents from 11 HSI field offices for the report.

At one HSI office, approximately 99% of work was dedicated to immigration, leaving almost no capacity for fentanyl investigations, the watchdog found. A drug investigation team of seven agents was reduced to about three and the rest of the personnel was reassigned to work on immigration cases, according to the report.  

Fentanyl is a highly addictive synthetic opioid that is the main driver of overdose deaths in the United States. HSI plays a key role in countering fentanyl smuggling in the U.S. by targeting routes, laboratories and collaborating with law enforcement to investigate smuggling operations.    

ICE agrees

The inspector general recommended that HSI review staffing levels “to ensure an appropriate level of coverage commensurate with the relative priority of fentanyl investigations.”

Inspector general reports are presented to the affected agency for comment ahead of publication. ICE agreed with the recommendations in the DHS OIG report.

“Homeland Security Investigations will review staffing levels, and determine and implement next steps, as needed, to ensure an appropriate level of coverage commensurate with the relative priority of fentanyl investigations,” ICE’s comments in the report read.

ICE estimated that recommendation would be completed by June 2027.

The report also found that the technology HSI agents and analysts used had limitations during fentanyl investigations and their missions were “hindered by delays in agents obtaining funds to purchase information and evidence (i.e., drugs) during an investigation; a lack of independent authority to investigate fentanyl-related offenses; and low, inconsistent referral of fentanyl cases from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to HSI.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump can continue building a White House ballroom for now, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday, reversing a federal judge’s order that barred above-ground construction on the grounds of the former East Wing.

The one-page order from Chief Justice John Roberts allows the justices more time to consider the legal arguments as to whether the president can continue with construction. 

The National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, a nonprofit Congress created to protect public buildings, sued to block construction late last year. The group charged that Trump violated the U.S. Constitution and federal law when he demolished part of the White House last July without approval from Congress. 

The trust wrote in its brief to the high court that the trial court’s pause should remain in place because any progress on the project could not easily be undone.

“We are grateful for the Decision of the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote on social media after the order. “The Military/Ballroom Complex being built on the hallowed grounds of the White House, which is so vital for National Security, will be THE GREATEST OF ITS KIND! Construction is under budget and ahead of schedule.”

Trump has argued the 90,000-square-foot ballroom — which the administration said this month will cost $400 million, double the initial estimate — is needed to reinforce security features and provide a larger space to host foreign dignitaries. Trump has said the project is being funded with private donations.

The East Wing of the White House was built in 1942. Workers last October demolished it, even after Trump said the ballroom construction would not impact the building. 

A federal appeals court this month upheld the lower court order that barred further construction of the ballroom above ground, but allowed for below-ground construction. The appeals court stayed its decision for 14 days to give the administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court.

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union has petitioned a federal court in New Hampshire to reaffirm a ruling that found President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order unconstitutional, after the president renewed his attempts to redefine American citizenship despite his loss at the Supreme Court.

“This case has always been, and remains, about the President’s effort to fashion new exceptions to birthright citizenship,” according to the ACLU’s Tuesday filing. 

Trump last week signed two executive orders. One seeks to expand the narrow exemptions to birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil. Another aims to end birth tourism, which is a term for the practice of foreign nationals traveling to the United States only for the purpose of giving birth in order to obtain citizenship for the baby.  

The ACLU filing noted the Supreme Court’s ruling has settled the matter of birthright citizenship, after the justices found the president’s order violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“This new Order violates the Court’s existing preliminary injunction, as it purports to strip birthright citizenship from members of the provisionally certified class despite the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” according to the ACLU brief. 

“To avoid any doubt in this regard, the Court should underscore that the government may not strip away class members’ citizenship through any executive orders or other similarly flawed assertions of Executive power over birthright citizenship.”

The White House did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.  

The ACLU is asking federal Judge Joseph N. Laplante to either “clarify the preliminary injunction or, in the alternative, modify or issue a new preliminary injunction.”

Laplante was nominated by former President George W. Bush.

The groups who sued the Trump administration include: the ACLU, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus and Democracy Defenders Fund.

“President Trump may not like the fact that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, and he may not like that he lost in the Supreme Court, but that is really beside the point,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel, said in a statement. “It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end.”

Wofsy led the ACLU’s legal team in the birthright citizenship argument, from the federal courts to the Supreme Court. 

The recent executive order that Trump signed aims to deny citizenship to children born to parents who belong to groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations; children born to foreign diplomatic staff; and children born in U.S. territories where Congress has not passed a law granting citizenship, which is only American Samoa.

The children of diplomats are already exempt from birthright citizenship — one of the few carve-outs — but the executive order aims to expand that exemption to include the children of noncitizen staff who work on behalf of a foreign government, such as an embassy. 

Birthright citizenship has been a longstanding core principle in the United States, in which nearly any child — regardless of their parents’ immigration status — born on U.S. soil is automatically granted citizenship. 

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” according to the clause in the 14th Amendment.

WASHINGTON — Even before Haitian immigrants in Ohio officially lost their Temporary Protected Status, the Department of Homeland Security required dozens of them to report to immigration appointments and accept ankle monitors, according to their attorneys and local advocates.

The practice of using electronic monitoring appears to only be happening in Springfield, Ohio, according to a half dozen advocates and immigration attorneys representing Haitians. 

Additionally, community leaders and lawyers from other cities with large Haitian immigrant populations such as Boston, Chicago and Miami have not seen the same tactic. One advocate has seen an increased presence of federal immigration agents in Brooklyn, New York, but so far no check-ins. The advocates and lawyers from Springfield said they do not know the exact number of Haitians under electronic monitoring. 

“It’s really just theater,” said Lynn Tramonte, the executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, an advocacy group. “They’re putting ankle monitors on people to make it look like they’re doing something, but it’s devastating for the people who are getting these placed on their ankle. They’re a constant reminder that you’re not free.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a detailed list of questions from States Newsroom regarding the use of ankle monitors. 

The use of ankle monitors for immigrants who have no criminal background and previously held legal status is a departure from standard practice. Typically an ankle monitor is used for immigrants with a criminal record, an order for deportation, or a missed appearance in immigration court. 

Springfield is home to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. The community became a focus of President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to conduct mass deportations in September 2024 when he falsely accused them of eating house pets and vowed to terminate their legal protections in order to deport them. 

The Supreme Court in June cleared the way for the Trump administration to end TPS for up to 350,000 Haitians. The case is now back at a lower court in the District of Columbia, which is litigating whether the government’s decision to end protections for Haitians was based on racial animus. 

Deportation or monitoring

Following the ruling, the DHS sent letters to Haitians in Springfield as early as July 22, said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. States Newsroom has reviewed a copy of the letter that dozens of Haitians in Springfield received directing them to bring all their immigration documents to an appointment at an ICE office.

Then, on July 31, about 50 Haitians had check-in appointments at the Cincinnati ICE field office. At the appointments, they were pressured to accept $2,600 to self-deport or alternatively to wear an ankle monitor. 

All of them rejected the money, Jozef said. 

“Being deported to Haiti right now is a death sentence,” she said. 

Two days later, on Aug. 2, a dozen Haitians with TPS were summoned to check-ins and left with ankle monitors, said Katie Kersh, the managing attorney for Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to immigrants in Ohio.

“The people getting the ankle monitors are the people who are complying … and they’re getting this thing that we connote with criminality, which is an ankle monitor, when they’ve literally gotten that because they followed the orders of the call-in letter,” Kersh said.

The practice could ramp up following Wednesday’s order from a federal judge that lifted a stay in place since February that prevented the Trump administration from ending temporary protections for as many as 350,000 Haitians. 

On the same day the stay was lifted, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in an interview with NewsNation that the department was “going after (Haitians) right now.”

“We are giving them an opportunity to either leave on their own and we’ll help you, or we’ll arrest you and send you back,” he said. “Either way, you don’t have status inside this country anymore.”

Chaotic rollout

Immigration attorneys and advocates for Haitians in Ohio described to States Newsroom a disorganized scene at the ICE check-in appointments on July 31 and Aug. 2.

Kersh said she witnessed ICE officers taking out brand-new ankle monitors that weren’t charged. 

Instructions were only provided in English and Spanish, when the first language for many Haitians is usually Creole. A translator was nowhere to be found, she added, so she brought one along.

ICE personnel appeared unable to be flexible when issues arose. A Haitian woman who worked a night shift wouldn’t have time to charge the ankle monitor given to her Aug. 2, Kersh said.

An ICE officer told the woman “to just charge it while you’re sleeping,” and the woman, whom Kersh represented, again told the officer that she worked nights, Kersh said. 

Kersh said she tried to find other options for electronic monitoring for her clients, such as a daily facial recognition check-in or a wrist monitor, but said the immigration officials would not deviate.

She said an ICE officer told her that “we are being told from headquarters that we have to ankle monitor them specifically.” 

Permission to travel to court

Another issue is the ankle monitor’s 75-mile radius, Kersh said. 

Ohio’s only immigration court is located in Cleveland, 188 miles from Springfield. So a Haitian with an ankle monitor would first have to get permission from an ICE officer to travel to their court hearing. 

“It just sort of feels like the wheels are off the bus,” she said.

Getting to the appointments was its own hurdle. 

When Haitians received a letter directing them to attend ICE check-ins, many of them had to scramble to find a way to attend because of recently expired driver’s licenses. Ohio legislators passed a law that ties a valid driver’s license to immigration status.

Jozef said the Haitians fitted with ankle monitors last week were told by ICE officers that they would need to return several weeks later and were given no other information on what would happen at future check-ins.

“We are not sure what will happen to the people, but as of right now, the tactic that is being used is to have those call-ins to be able to control the movement of the people, and to be able to target them more easily,” Jozef said.

Longtime Trump goal

Revoking legal status for Haitians to open them up for removal has been a goal of Trump’s since his first administration, but he has ramped up the effort in his second term that began after he made mass deportations a central campaign theme. 

“They really, really, really, really want to target these people,” said Geoffrey Pipoly, the attorney who represented the Haitian TPS holders before the Supreme Court. 

During the first Trump administration, the government tried to end TPS for Haiti with an 18-month wind-down period, but courts blocked the termination. 

“We went from the first Trump administration giving these folks 18 months to get their affairs in order to now, their position is: We’re not even going to give you 32 days from the final judgment of the Supreme Court … as soon as the earliest possible time that we are legally allowed to start deporting people, that’s what we’re going to start doing,” Pipoly said.

After the Supreme Court’s decision in June, lower courts typically have a 32-day deadline to implement the high court’s ruling, meaning that the estimated date for the 6-3 decision regarding Haitians would go into effect July 27. But Haitians were already receiving letters from ICE dated July 22 to report for a check-in. 

16 years of protections

Congress created TPS in the 1990s as a way for nationals who hail from countries deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, natural disasters or other destabilizing factors, to remain safely in the U.S. The status allows them to remain and work in the United States anywhere from six to 18 months. 

In order to qualify for the program, immigrants must go through a background check and pay application fees each renewal cycle. 

TPS does not provide a pathway to citizenship, but recipients can apply for another immigration status, such as asylum. 

Of the roughly 350,000 Haitians with TPS, about 200,000 of them are in the workforce, according to the immigration advocacy group FWD.us. Of that group, they work in industries like healthcare, retail, agriculture and manufacturing. 

Haiti was first granted TPS in 2010 after a devastating earthquake. In 2021, President Joe Biden extended the protections after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. 

The State Department currently has a “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday signed two executive orders in his second attempt to deny citizenship to babies born to noncitizens, following the Supreme Court’s defeat this summer of an earlier order to redefine birthright citizenship.

Trump said the Supreme Court ruling was “an unfortunate decision” so “we’re making adjustments” to birthright citizenship, which is included in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. 

Both executive orders are likely to face swift legal challenges, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court again.

The Supreme Court in June rejected Trump’s executive order, signed on the first day of his second term, that would deny citizenship to children born to parents who either do not have legal status, or hold temporary legal visas. The justices ruled the executive order violated the 14th Amendment.

One of Thursday’s executive orders seeks to expand the narrow exemptions to birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil. 

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is the chief architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, gave an overview of the orders in the Oval Office. 

The Trump administration wants to deny citizenship to children born to parents who belong to groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations; children born to foreign diplomatic staff; and children born in U.S. territories where Congress has not passed a law granting citizenship, which is only American Samoa.

The children of diplomats are already exempt from birthright citizenship, but the executive order aims to expand that exemption to include the children of noncitizen staff. 

Historically, the other exemption to birthright citizenship was meant to apply to Indigenous people who resided in Native nations — part of their tribal governments until Congress in 1924 specifically passed the Indian Citizenship Act to grant birthright citizenship to Indigenous people, regardless of their residence in Native nations. 

Guidance in 30 days

Thursday’s order directs all executive departments and agencies to issue public guidance within 30 days on implementing the executive order.

Birthright citizenship has been a longstanding core principle in the United States, in which nearly any child — regardless of their parents’ immigration status — born on U.S. soil is automatically granted citizenship. 

The text of the clause in the 14th Amendment is: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Birth tourism

The second executive order aims to end birth tourism, which is a term for the practice of foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. only for the purpose of giving birth in order to obtain citizenship for the baby. 

The order directs the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to adopt rules and guidelines to put the order in place. 

Some of those actions can include denying visas to foreign nationals suspected of coming to the U.S. for the sole purpose of having a child.

“If you’re telling a consular officer you’re here as a tourist, but your true purpose and intent is to go to a baby mill and give birth and try to mint an American citizen while you’re here, then you’re committing fraud against the American government,” Miller said. 

The most expansive estimates from U.S. Census Bureau data shows that about 26,000 babies are born annually through birth tourism, compared to more than 3.5 million U.S. births each year overall, according to the Migration Policy Institute, which is a think tank that tracks migration.

‘It’s the same Constitution’

In oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that birthright citizenship incentivized pregnant women to travel to the United States for the purpose of obtaining citizenship. 

The justices pushed back and called the issue of birth tourism “marginal” and pressed Sauer for an answer of how frequently it happened. 

Sauer said “no one knows for sure,” and argued that “we’re in a new world now, … where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”

But Chief Justice John Roberts rejected that argument. 

“Well, it’s a new world, it’s the same Constitution,” Roberts said.

WASHINGTON — The Department of Health and Human Services plans to award a $150 million contract to a small Texas firm — with no specialty in immigration law and run by a former Trump official — to provide legal services to tens of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children, according to a Wednesday pre-published notice in the Federal Register. 

The notice, which HHS is scheduled to officially publish Thursday, comes after the department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for unaccompanied children, let a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice for such services expire. The center has a network of roughly 100 organizations it works with that provided legal aid and representation to immigrant children across the country, including in immigration court appearances.

Lawyers from Acacia said the Trump administration did not renew the contract because attorneys refused to hand over sensitive information about their clients. 

Burke Law Group, a Houston-based law firm founded in 2023, “advises companies on complex environmental, regulatory, and enforcement matters,” according to its website.

The firm will be tasked with representing as many as 24,000 unaccompanied immigrant children through their court proceedings.

The founder, Marcella Burke, during the first Donald Trump administration worked at the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior. From 2017-2018 she served as the deputy general counsel for EPA and from 2018 to 2020 worked at Interior as deputy solicitor and senior counsel, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The Burke Law Group did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

Of the nearly 30 lawyers on the law firm’s website, only two list experience in immigration and asylum law.

The multi-million-dollar contract is set to start Aug. 15 and run through August 14, 2027. Because it’s a “single-source cooperative agreement” contract, it gives the law firm the flexibility to subcontract work out to other firms at its discretion.

Since Monday, unaccompanied minors have lost access to their legal representation. Without it, fewer than 10% of immigrant children win the right to remain in the United States while their case goes through immigration court. 

A handful of legal organizations have been able to dip into savings to continue legal coverage. But some have had to stop altogether, especially after the Trump administration since December has refused to reimburse more than $65 million in completed legal work.

A federal judge on Thursday is set to hear arguments whether to hold the Trump administration in contempt for violating an April 2025 court order that ordered the government to continue funding legal representation for unaccompanied children.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge lifted a stay Wednesday on the termination of temporary protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in order to comply with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for the Trump administration to remove their legal status and open them up for deportations. 

The order from U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes means that between 330,000 to 350,000 Haitians living in the United States have lost their Temporary Protected Status, even while legal arguments on a racial discrimination claim continue. 

Reyes’ order, in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, brought the case into compliance with a 6-3 Supreme Court decision that Haitians and Syrians were not entitled to postponements of their status while litigation continues.

The June Supreme Court ruling also said courts could not review the Homeland Security secretary’s decision to end TPS.

As part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, the administration has moved to revoke the legal status of millions of immigrants, including those with TPS, which is given to nationals who hail from countries deemed too dangerous to return to. 

The State Department has a “do not travel” advisory for Haiti due to gang violence and kidnappings. 

Work authorization for Haitians expired last week, along with some driver’s licenses for immigrants residing in Ohio and Florida, two states that have passed laws that tie eligibility for a driver’s license to immigration status.

Racial animus

The remaining legal argument is whether the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS for Haiti was based on racial animus, which would violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. 

On the campaign trail, then-presidential candidate Trump singled out Haitians living in Springfield, Ohio, claiming that their legal protections were illegitimate and falsely accusing them of eating house pets. 

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority decision in June, said that the Haitians’ arguments that their equal protection claim that their protections were terminated on a racial animus were unlikely to prevail in court.

Discovery issues 

The attorney who represented the Haitian TPS holders before the Supreme Court, Geoffrey Pipoly, told States Newsroom this week that he was not expecting Reyes to issue a new stay to halt the ending of protections. 

Pipoly and his team had not yet obtained enough evidence through discovery, a process that can take months, to try and secure another stay, he said. 

Pipoly said the documents produced by the Department of Justice so far were limited and heavily redacted.

“They’re just taking this exceptionally robust view of privilege in a way that I’ve never seen a government defendant exert privileges before,” he said. “What’s behind those redactions is going to influence the scope of our ongoing equal protection claim. But we’re going to have to litigate what’s behind those redactions.”

Reyes in her Wednesday order also denied the administration’s request to issue a stay on the discovery process and ordered both parties to submit a briefing schedule.

WASHINGTON — More than 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children Monday lost their legal representation because the Trump administration has not entered into a new agreement to take over their legal services after it let a longstanding contract with a nonprofit expire.

Without legal representation, fewer than 10% of immigrant children win the right to remain in the United States while their case goes through immigration court. Immigration attorneys and advocates worry the loss in legal aid will put children on a fast track to deportations.

“Right now we’re all in the dark, and the secrecy is a big part of the problem,” said Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, which previously held the contract that expired July 31.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which issues the contract, did not respond to several emails from States Newsroom asking which new organization will take over legal services in immigration courts for unaccompanied kids. 

HHS has also not submitted any request for new contractors to provide legal services to unaccompanied minors, according to a States Newsroom review of the federal government’s website for contracts.

Additionally, Scott Ehlers, the director of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, an organization that the Trump administration was initially eyeing to take over legal services for unaccompanied minors, told States Newsroom it had not been awarded a contract from HHS and had not been contacted by the department regarding one. 

Aber said that HHS has not informed Acacia who the new contractor will be, implemented a transition of children’s cases to new attorneys, or paid the organization for completed legal work since December. 

HHS has not reimbursed $65 million to Acacia, which distributes the federal funding to roughly 100 organizations across the country who provide legal representation to unaccompanied children in immigration cases. 

Struggle over sensitive information

The Trump administration let the contract with Acacia expire after attorneys refused to hand over sensitive case information about their clients, such as whether a child has a pending visa. 

Aber said since January, immigration attorneys have seen government attorneys try to use visa information in order to place children in deportation proceedings. 

“The government has come up with this novel idea that they’re using in the immigration court proceedings that if a visa is pending for a child, that means it’s purely speculative that the child would ever have status, and therefore they are ordering deportations for kids who actually have pending T visas, that’s a trafficking visa, kids who have pending special immigrant juvenile status, kids with U visas,” she said. “All of those kids are being ordered removed by the courts, even as their visas are awaiting them.”

U nonimmigrant status, or U visas, are set aside for immigrants 21 and younger who were the victim of a crime, or helped provide information to prosecutors about criminal activity. 

Separately, a special immigrant juvenile status is extended to immigrant children who have been “abandoned, abused, or neglected” by a parent, and that visa provides a pathway for a green card. 

A nonprofit in Pennsylvania, the Jewish Family and Community Services of Pittsburgh, recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of several immigrant children against the Trump administration’s practice of targeting children with pending visas for deportation.

Aber said she is worried that the next organization to obtain the contract will hand over that sensitive information to the Trump administration.  

“We are very concerned about any agreement that the government has entered into with a new contractor about sharing confidential details or privileged information contrary to children’s interests,” she said.

Confusion about legal services

Aber said HHS is still working on accepting a transition proposal, meaning that Acacia and providers in its network cannot even begin having conversations with children to inform them that someone else will be representing them in immigration court. 

“To have those really sensitive conversations with the child, where you’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m not going to be able to represent you anymore, or like these are your options in terms of representation’ …. we can’t start having those conversations with kids without that information,” she said. 

She added that officials at the Office of Refugee and Resettlement, the agency within HHS that houses some unaccompanied immigrant children, are still reaching out to Acacia and its legal services providers even after the contract expired, asking for legal services for newly arrived children. Almost 1,800 children are in ORR’s care, according to agency data from June. 

“They keep on reaching out to our legal service services network, asking if someone could please go over on their own dime to talk to new arriving children,” Aber said. 

Some of the organizations that partner with Acacia have been able to dip into reserves to continue providing services to kids, but others have had to stop providing the services altogether, Aber said. 

 

 

WASHINGTON — Bryan Chavez knows that having access to legal representation as an unaccompanied minor can be a lifeline.

In 2017, immigration officials separated him from his mother and brother at the southern border, as they were caught up in the family separation policy of the first Trump administration. 

The 15-year-old remained in a detention center for children, knowing that if he were sent back to Mexico, he would likely die at the hands of the cartel who threatened to kill him, his brother and father. 

“Everything changed when attorneys from (the Immigration Defenders Law Center) arrived,” he told reporters during a press conference Friday. “For the first time, someone explained what was happening. As a child, I couldn’t understand why I was being separated from my mother.”

Chavez, who is now a case worker at the same center that provided him legal services as an unaccompanied minor, worries about what will happen to the thousands of immigrant children who are set to lose their legal representation at midnight Saturday. 

That’s because the Trump administration declined to renew a federal contract with nonprofits that provide legal aid services to more than 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children. 

Chavez, along with a handful of advocates and attorneys for immigrant children, detailed their concerns during a virtual press conference about the end of the contract. 

They warned that it will lead to children being quickly deported, because without a lawyer, fewer than 10% of immigrant children win the right to remain in the United States while their case goes through immigration court. 

“For many of them, an attorney can be the difference between fear and hope, separation and reunification, or even life and death,” Chavez said. “I came to this country asking for help. The children I work with today are asking for the same thing.”

No reimbursements to lawyers

For more than six months, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, has not reimbursed $65 million to the Acacia Center for Justice, which distributes the federal funding to roughly 100 organizations across the country who provide legal representation to unaccompanied children in immigration cases. 

The Acacia Center for Justice has said those funds are being withheld because attorneys refused to hand over to the Trump administration sensitive case data from the unaccompanied children, such as medical records and the types of legal relief the minors are seeking. 

“For months, Acacia has been negotiating in good faith with the government to find a way to continue representing unaccompanied children who would be left without their trusted lawyers, and at the whims of an administration that seems intent on finding new and crueler ways to target and deport them as quickly as possible,” said Bilal Askaryar, communications director at the Acacia Center for Justice.

HHS did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

‘A lot of uncertainty’

The Acacia Center for Justice’s chief of staff, Bettina Rodriguez Schlegel, said that on Wednesday, government officials submitted a solicitation notice giving the Acacia Center for Justice time to transition legal services to another provider. 

Rodriguez Schlegel said she doesn’t know for sure to whom the Trump administration will contract legal services, but the administration is eyeing a small Texas state commission that aids low-income people with criminal defense representation. 

“What will happen on Monday morning when kids go to court?” she asked. “There remains a lot of uncertainty and a great deal of concern.”

Sensitive job

Additionally, with the contract ending, children who have experienced trauma will have to recount painful experiences to attorneys who might not have the proper training. That can cause more anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress for kids, said Dr. C. Nicholas Cuneo.

Cuneo is an assistant professor of pediatrics and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the executive director at HEAL Refugee Health and Asylum Collaborative, which provides trauma-informed healthcare services to immigrants.

“A trusted attorney can buffer that harm, explaining an incomprehensible process, providing consistency and safety, protecting a child’s interests, and connecting them to healthcare, school, housing, and other essential support,” he said. “Abruptly severing that relationship can not only reactivate the abandonment and powerlessness from which children are trying to recover, but really cause direct physical and mental health injury.”

Cuneo said Congress recognized those consequences, and created the Unaccompanied Children Program to provide funding for legal representation of migrant children. 

Erin Maxwell, a social worker at Legal Services for Children in California, said so much of their training is in providing trauma-informed legal services.

“I’m afraid that if a group of attorneys that were not trained on working with children, were not trained on providing trauma-informed legal services, that children wouldn’t be able to fully participate in their cases (to share their stories),” she said. 

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced an initiative Thursday for veterans to quickly obtain commercial driver’s licenses, as the administration attempts to fill vacancies in the industry after pausing license renewals for foreign-born truck drivers.

“The radical left wants more jobs for illegal aliens and more migrants (in) 18-wheelers, and (the) Trump administration wants safer roads and more jobs for the American veteran,” Trump said. 

The policy builds on a program that allows veterans to automatically obtain a  commercial driver’s license if their service included operating heavy vehicles by expanding the waiver from 12 months since military service to 24 months.  

The initiative also creates a fast-track program for veterans without experience. The Veterans Affairs Department will cover the costs of the program, and will launch a campaign to inform veterans of the opportunity. 

“Any veteran with heavy vehicle experience from the military will now be eligible to skip redundant road tests to obtain a commercial driver’s license,” Trump said. “If they didn’t drive a truck in the military,… they’re going to learn, and they’re going to learn very quickly and they’ll be licensed in a matter of a few weeks.”

As part of Trump’s broad immigration crackdown, his administration has aimed to curtail the number of foreign-born truck drivers, who make up about 18% of truckers nationwide, through several federal regulations. 

A March Department of Transportation rule to limit the types of visas that make someone eligible for a commercial driver’s license is expected to push out of the industry about 200,000 immigrant truck drivers, the administration has said.

The rule applied to immigrants with several forms of legal status, including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Temporary Protected Status, asylum seekers and refugees. Those who were exempt from the rule included lawful permanent residents and some immigrants with H-2A and E-2 visas.

So far, about 28,000 licenses from foreign-born truck drivers have been canceled, Trump said. 

He added that industry giant Werner Trucking has hired 1,400 veterans as drivers.

Trucker shortage

The industry has a shortage of roughly 60,000 to 80,000 drivers, according to the American Trucking Associations, the industry’s largest national advocacy group. 

“As we get illegal aliens off the roads today, we’re also taking action to replace these unqualified migrant truck drivers with highly qualified American veterans,” Trump said.

The president has said, without evidence, that immigrants driving commercial vehicles pose a safety threat and has accused them of not knowing English. 

Trump issued an executive order last year that required truck drivers to be proficient in English, which he said has resulted in 24,000 commercial licenses being removed. And last year, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened to pull federal highway funding from several states for not enforcing the president’s executive order that required commercial truck drivers to be proficient in English. 

Growing list of states

Trump said that he hopes more states partake in the waiver program, known as the Even Exchange Program that allows qualified military drivers to be exempt from taking a test to obtain a commercial driver’s license. 

To qualify, a veteran needs a related speciality, including motor transport operator, fueler, equipment operator, or pavement and construction equipment operator.

Dozens of states already participate in the waiver program. Trump announced two more Thursday: Indiana and Wyoming. 

The states already in the program are Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, North Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Missouri, South Carolina, Idaho, Georgia, New Mexico, West Virginia, California, Iowa, Minnesota, Texas, Ohio, Maine, Utah, Washington, Mississippi, Tennessee, Michigan, Montana, South Dakota and Pennsylvania.

Maryland, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida and Alabama have committed to implementing the program.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen Wednesday tried to advance in the Senate a bill that would create a legal pathway for immigrants with Temporary Protected Status.

However, his request for unanimous consent, a way to expedite legislation in the chamber, was blocked by Missouri Republican Eric Schmitt. 

Van Hollen said the bill, S. 2106, is in response to the Supreme Court’s decision last month to allow the Trump administration to continue with its efforts to strip legal status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians with TPS. They are bracing to lose their deportation protections this week. 

“That decision puts them and other TPS holders at risk of deportation to countries where violence, instability, and humanitarian crises continue to threaten their lives,” Van Hollen said. 

TPS is a form of legal status given to nationals who hail from countries deemed too dangerous for return, and protections can last anywhere from six to 18 months. Immigrants must be vetted during each renewal cycle to keep their work authorization and deportation protections in place. 

Before the second Trump administration came into office, more than 1 million immigrants hailing from 17 countries had temporary protections. 

“There are already reports that ICE is planning to target Haitian TPS holders for deportation as soon as this week, which would force hundreds of thousands of people to return to a country that our State Department warns is unsafe for travel,” Van Hollen said. 

The State Department advises against any travel to Haiti, citing kidnapping and gang violence. 

“In other words, the Trump administration would force people back to a country where the State Department says, ‘Don’t go there because it’s unsafe,’” Van Hollen said. 

In a United Nations security meeting this month, senior officials gave a briefing on conditions in Haiti, citing that millions of Haitians “remain displaced or food insecure, while women and children bear the brunt of the violence.”

Van Hollen added that the bill is needed because the Trump administration’s actions to end TPS circumvent Congress’ original intent when it created the program in the 1990s. 

“The Supreme Court decision does not have to be the end of the story,” Van Hollen said. “We can write the end of the story, and it’s our responsibility as a Congress to preserve that bipartisan congressional intent from back in 1990, and we must provide that certainty that these individuals deserve.”

GOP objection

Schmitt argued a pathway for citizenship for TPS holders harmed U.S. citizens, such as immigrants holding jobs that he said should go to Americans. 

“There is nothing compassionate about flooding the labor market with more foreign workers while Americans struggle for a decent wage,” Schmitt said.

Many Haitian TPS holders work in the healthcare industry, providing care to thousands of Americans, and contribute $5.9 billion in taxes each year. 

Business leaders have warned about the economic consequences of thousands of workers suddenly pulled out of the labor market. There are roughly 330,000 to 350,000 Haitians with TPS. 

Schmitt added that Americans elected President Donald Trump on the promise of an immigration crackdown, including ending TPS. While on the 2024 presidential campaign trail, Trump vowed to end TPS for Haitians and made false statements that Haitians were eating house pets. 

“There is nothing compassionate about betraying your own citizens,” Schmitt said. “Foreign nationals do not have a right to permanent settlement here. We had an election on this issue.”

 

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has for more than a year used personal information airline passengers provide to the Transportation Security Administration for immigration enforcement, according to documents obtained by a government watchdog group.

The documents, collected by the government accountability organization American Oversight, show for the first time a formal data-sharing agreement since May 2025 between TSA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

The agreement contradicts congressional testimony from a TSA official who told lawmakers that passenger data was not being collected for the purpose of immigration enforcement. 

American Oversight obtained the records in a federal lawsuit to compel their release through a Freedom of Information Act request. The group posted the documents online Tuesday with a cover letter showing they were obtained July 23.

The New York Times was the first to report on the agreement between TSA and ICE.

As the Trump administration continues its aggressive deportation campaign in the interior of the country, the access to passenger information opens a larger group to immigration enforcement. It is unclear from the documents how many deportations or other immigration enforcement actions the agreement has generated.

Any noncitizen who has an expired visa, is waiting for a legal status renewal or is not authorized to be in the country could have their passenger information handed over to immigration officials, based on the agreement. 

American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu, said in a statement that the agreement sets “a dangerous precedent with consequences far beyond immigration.”

“Americans provide their personal information to board a plane safely, not to become part of an immigration enforcement system or a government surveillance network,” Chukwu said. “Once the government begins expanding how it uses Americans’ personal information, it raises profound concerns about privacy, civil liberties, and public trust.”

TSA and ICE are both within the Department of Homeland Security. The agreement between the agencies will remain in effect until officials terminate the contract, which will be reviewed every five years to determine if it shall continue, according to the agreement. 

Testimony to Congress

In January, TSA acting Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeil told lawmakers on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee that the agency shares some information with ICE, but does not “send the information to ICE.”

New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman asked McNeill about an agreement with ICE to share information for the purpose of checking if passengers have a deportation order. 

“That is not what is occurring,” she said. “We don’t send the information to ICE, we help ICE check against information.” 

New Jersey Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver also asked McNeill what passenger information TSA was sharing with ICE.

McNeill did not detail the information TSA shares with ICE, but said her agency was “within our authorities to share information within the Department of Homeland Security to further the national security mission.”

In the newly released documents, TSA cites the 2008 Secure Flight Final Rule as its authority to share data with ICE. The TSA regulation lays out federal procedures for using passenger information for aviation safety.  

David Cummins, President Donald Trump’s pick to be TSA administrator, at a Senate confirmation hearing this month did not detail information that ICE and TSA share when pressed by Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.

Cummins said he would “try to provide as much as we can within our bounds,” but said he could not commit to sharing details.

TSA and DHS did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.