Catron County, New Mexico, may be seeing the future of an aging population today. It has beautiful landscapes that draw retirees who fall in love with the area and want to stay among soaring rock formations and bright stars in dark skies. 

But it’s a tough place to get even minimal medical care. And employees are hard to find, with few young people to hire and support the tax base. It’s a microcosm of the national trend:  By 2034 the whole country may have more older adults than children; Social Security’s retirement fund could be exhausted by 2032, and the nation will depend on an ever-shrinking workforce of young people. 

“For quality healthcare, if you need even an X-ray, you are driving an hour and a half,” said Catron County Manager Deborah Mahler. “We have 900 miles of dirt roads that are not passable when it rains, so you have to have a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a high profile.” 

Some hospital systems send shuttle buses, but it’s not enough and the county would like to offer more medical transportation and attract a local medical practice. But there is little tax base to support either, Mahler said.

Local parks and ranches in the county, which abuts the state line with Arizona, provide world-class elk hunting and beautiful scenery such as the Cosmic Campground’s dark sky sanctuary for stargazers and the Catwalk National Recreation Trail through desert rock formations.

But with parks taking up so much land, there’s not much space for industry that might provide jobs for young families or provide a tax base to help older people, she said. 

There are now 17 states with more people over 65 than children under 18 as of last year. That’s up from 13 states in 2024 and just five in 2020, according to new U.S. Census Bureau estimates to be released Thursday. 

Michigan, New Mexico, South Carolina and Wisconsin are new to the list, which reflects ages as of mid-2025. 

Others may soon see some of the challenges already familiar to places like Sumter County, Florida, where there are almost 8 older adults per 1 child. In McCormick County, South Carolina; Catron County, New Mexico, and Jefferson County, Washington, the ratio is more than 4 to 1. 

Many states are enacting or considering legislation to support older residents: Wisconsin passed laws this year aimed at elder scams and easing the transition from hospital care to rehabilitation, and last year enacted a support program for dementia caregivers. 

New Mexico enacted a Medigap law in March allowing Medicare users to switch plans without insurers denying coverage or charging higher rates based on health status.

South Carolina’s state Senate passed a bill to give larger property tax breaks in February, but the measure stalled in a state House committee. 

Michigan is working on a state plan to help older residents and their families starting next year with a report due July 1 and taking effect in October. 

In 2020, the only states where older adults outnumbered children were Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia. Since then, besides the four states added in 2025, these states are also on the list: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

When SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, began trading on the stock market last week, he became the world’s first trillionaire.

The SpaceX IPO made the world’s richest man even richer, grabbing headlines worldwide. But it is merely the most vivid illustration of a U.S. trend that has been accelerating since 2022.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%.

The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies.

Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Using different methods than the Fed, French economist Thomas Piketty has asserted that the richest 1% of Americans held nearly half the nation’s wealth in 1928 and 1929, just before the Great Depression. Their share declined after that, during a period of high marginal income tax rates (the percentage of tax you pay on your last dollar of income) and widespread discomfort with astronomical pay for executives. Instead, corporations plowed their profits into expansion and higher wages for workers.

But the share of wealth held by the top 1% began rising again in the 1970s, according to the Piketty data.

Piketty, who theorizes that unfettered capitalism always leads to high concentration of wealth, told Stateline in an email that “there’s nothing natural about this — it’s all due to policies.”

“If the super-rich capture the state and pay little tax, then it’s easy to accumulate a lot, but history suggests that politics can revert quite quickly,” Piketty wrote.

Another prominent economist who recently studied the wealth of California billionaires, Emmanuel Saez, described the current spike in the share of wealth held by the top 1% as driven primarily by the stock market boom. Saez is director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley.

New taxes proposed

In at least a dozen states, including Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Virginia, lawmakers have proposed new taxes for the wealthiest taxpayers. Some of the proposals would tax annual incomes above a certain threshold while others would tax capital assets, including high-value stocks and real estate.

In California, advocates in April announced they had gathered enough signatures for a November ballot initiative that would impose a one-time tax on billionaires. The state’s billionaires held about $2.3 trillion in wealth as of June 10, assets that could generate almost $101 billion from the proposed tax.

This year, at least 12 billionaires left California. They include Lynsi Snider, who inherited the In-N-Out hamburger chain and moved to Tennessee, and car loan magnate Don Hankey, who moved to Nevada. However, moves into the state and new wealth created 23 new California billionaires this year. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has vowed to stay in California despite a potential $8 billion one-time tax bill.

There are no state-level statistics on the top 1%, though Census Bureau estimates from 2022 show the states with the highest shares of households with more than $500,000 in net worth are Hawaii (48%), the District of Columbia (47%) and Washington state (43%). Hawaii also has the highest average net worth at more than $1 million, mostly because homeowners in that state have an average of $600,000 of equity in their homes. The states with the next highest average net worth are California ($792,000), and Massachusetts ($751,000).

Conservative and liberal experts agree that a soaring stock market and business profits have made it a good time for the wealthy, while middle-class and lower-income people are doing less well, especially as inflation gobbles up wage increases. There’s also widespread agreement that Trump’s tariffs (since struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court) disproportionately harmed lower-income and middle-class people, and that the tax cuts in the broad tax and spending measure Trump signed last summer (commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) will disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

Chuck Marr, the center’s vice president for federal tax policy, pointed to the law’s extension of  a deep corporate income tax cut that dates from Trump’s first administration.

“Trump’s whole policy has really leaned into increasing this disparity,” Marr said. “You’ve got AI coming and globalization has shifted income and wealth upward, and instead of pushing back against that, Trump and others have leaned into it.”

Nevertheless, Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the U.S. government’s tax and spending policy is “still highly progressive in that low-income households receive benefits from the high-income households paying taxes.”

“It’s a little less so than it was prior to the passage of the (Trump tax and spending law) and the tariffs, but it’s still the case. It hasn’t changed the story that much,” Pomerleau said.

Marr agreed that the federal tax system is basically progressive, in that it uses taxes on high income earners to pay for the needs of low-income residents. But tax collections are low in the United States compared with other wealthy countries: Of the 20 wealthiest nations, only Ireland collects less government revenue as a share of GDP.

“Compared to other countries, inequality is high because we redistribute so much less money,” Marr said. “It’s a progressive tax system but it doesn’t raise a lot of money.”

Inflation divide

The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, an accounting of national economic conditions released June 3, found a divide in how inflation, which has increased as a result of the war in Iran, has affected American spending.

“Higher-income households remained resilient and less sensitive to price increase, while middle-income households were described as ‘squeezing more life out of every dollar before deciding to spend it,’ and low-income consumers showed greater financial strain,” the report said.

The “squeezing” analogy for the middle class came from a roundtable discussion of hospitality executives in the Kansas City, Missouri, area in late May, said Jeremy Hill, a regional economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Hill said there was a gasp in the room when one high-end restaurant chain executive said the chain could raise prices at will and keep expanding, hampered only by a shortage of high-end chefs to staff locations. Meanwhile, hotels, bars and restaurants serving the middle class are struggling to get people to come in and spend.

“It’s not that they (wealthy people) don’t care about inflation. They’re worried about what it might do to future demand or their own stocks,” Hill said. “But today, it’s not impacting the way they spend.”

The stock market’s recent run has contributed the most to the consolidation of wealth at the top. Rising real estate prices also have also added to wealth, especially for longtime homeowners.

“This has disproportionately helped those who already hold assets while the average American pays higher prices for everyday essentials,” said E.J. Antoni, chief economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation. “In other words, Wall Street got rich while Main Street got inflation.”

White Americans own outsized shares of assets such as stock and real estate, according to the federal statistics. White people are 57% of the population but own 82% of the assets, while Black and Hispanic people, who make up a combined 24% of the U.S. population, have less than 7% of assets. Asians are included in an “Other” category, which is about 9% of population and holds about  11.3% of the nation’s total assets.

By generation, Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 hold almost half of wealth, while Millennials and Gen X hold the lion’s share of liabilities, such as mortgages and consumer debt, that detract from net worth. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) have about 42% of liabilities and Gen X (1965-1980) have 35%, compared with 22% for Baby Boomers.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing for young people to be in debt as they build careers and pay off student loans, said Pomerleau, the American Enterprise Institute economist.

“Doctors with $450,000 in medical school debt might be in the bottom 10%, yes, but that person is going to be in the top 1% of wealth at some point in their lives,” Pomerleau said.

“You enter the labor force with a net liability, but you save over time, that liability is paid down, you’re paying off your mortgage, and that’s when your wealth starts growing.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

May housing starts fell to the lowest level since the pandemic disrupted construction six years ago, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Tuesday. Builder confidence has dropped recently because of higher material and financing costs.

The change threatens to exacerbate housing shortages and disrupt recent progress in most states toward building enough new housing for new residents.  

Starts were down to an annual rate of 1.17 million, the lowest since April 2020, and an 8.5% drop since May 2025. The drop since last year was especially severe in the South, down 15%, and the West, down 11%, but the Northeast saw a 19% increase and the Midwest increased 6%. 

The annual completion rate was down 14.2% from May 2025 at about 1.3 million units, the lowest since January 2022.  

New permits were about the same at 1.4 million, with apartment units up and single-family houses down. However, new apartment permits were down 26% in the Midwest, and single-family houses were down 7% in the West. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to weigh in on the issue of whether some immigrants with criminal records can be detained indefinitely.

The court accepted a case, Genalo v. Black, from New York state involving a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic arrested by immigration enforcement after an assault conviction and held for 21 months during deportation proceedings. 

An appeals court ruling in the case found that an “unreasonably prolonged” detention requires a bond hearing in which the government must show “clear and convincing evidence” that the immigrant would be a flight risk or a danger to the community if released. 

The Supreme Court on Monday also asked attorneys for arguments about whether the immigrant’s 2020 release makes the case moot. 

Indefinite Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention for immigrants either with criminal convictions or a record of illegally crossing a border has become legally controversial. Some appeals courts have upheld the Trump administration detention policy, while others have declared it unconstitutional. 

Individual judges have mostly ruled that non-criminals in immigration detention are entitled to a bond hearing or should be freed outright. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Consumer price inflation reached 4.2% in May, the highest mark in three years, boosted largely by higher energy prices that have spiked because of the Iran war, according to federal numbers released on Wednesday.

The higher year-over-year inflation rate was expected. But at more than double the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%, the new numbers dimmed hopes for a cut in the interest rate.

The so-called core inflation rate, which excludes volatile food and fuel costs, was 2.9%. Apparel costs were up 4.8% and the cost of transportation services increased by 4.1%.

Even before today’s report, the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute said that “Trump’s war of choice in Iran, coupled with his reckless budget and import tariff policies, offer strong arguments against the appropriateness of an interest rate cut at this juncture.”

The costs of the Iran war have  already outstripped recent economic benefits from bigger tax refunds under the Trump administration, according to a June 1 report from Moody’s Analytics.

“The bigger tax refunds Americans have received this year no longer cover the higher costs of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel caused by the war,” Mark Zandi,  chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, wrote in a social media post. “This is a big economic blow, but deficit-financed tax cuts have cushioned it — until now,” Zandi wrote.

The largest cost increases in the past year were for fuel oil, up 58.9% and gasoline, up 40.5%. The only decreases were in used car and truck prices, down 2%, and medical care commodities, down 1.8%.

Overall inflation was highest in the Northeast and Midwest at 5%, and lowest in the West at 3.5%.  It was 3.9% in the South.

A few metro areas reported separately. The highest rate was 5.1%, for both Honolulu, Hawaii, and the New York City area, including parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The next highest rates were 4.7% for Minneapolis-St. Paul,  4.1% for the Washington, D.C.,  area including parts of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, and 3.2% for the Tampa, Florida, area.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

The idea started with a sermon Micah Longmire heard at his Presbyterian church in Ogden, Utah, about the importance of grandparents in a child’s life.

Longmire, now 31, exchanged a look with his mother-in-law. “We were like, ‘I’d be OK living with you after that sermon,’ and the ball rolled downhill from there,” Longmire said.

Both families are now living in a house they bought together in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after a two-year nationwide search. Their partnership is an example of the lengths first-time homebuyers have gone to this year amid stubbornly high home prices and interest rates.

“I make $200,000 and I wouldn’t have been able to buy a house by myself. That’s ridiculous,” Longmire said. His wife’s parents contributed $200,000 from selling their own home in Utah and retired to live with them in a 3,500-square-foot house that cost $585,000.

Home prices rose this year, though not as much as inflation, so affordability increased in all regions as of April compared with a year before, according to the National Association of Realtors.

But prices are settling at a high level. After inflation adjustment, they’re still less than 4% below the 2022 peak, though some areas with large-scale building, mostly in Florida and Texas, have seen prices drop, according to real estate analyst Bill McBride’s CalculatedRisk newsletter.

Help from family and even shared living arrangements are becoming the norm in higher-priced areas.

“The family now has accumulated so much equity that they’re able to help their kids make these downpayments. Many people like to live in multi-generational households for reasons of culture and also cost,” said Nadia Evangelou, senior economist for the National Association of Realtors.

Nationally a typical single-family home cost $422,300 in April, up $4,300 from a year before, according to the National Association of Realtors. But the typical family made about $6,000 more in that time, and mortgage rates came down a little, so affordability improved.

But a shortage of affordable starter homes is slowing the market and keeping it hard to buy for first-timers. Last year the median age of first-time buyers reached a record 40 years old, while the median repeat buyer was 62, as the housing market became dominated by repeat buyers who could sell a house at today’s high prices.

“Affordability today is still nowhere near what it was for much of the last decade,” Evangelou said. Between 2009 and 2016, the typical family had about 70% more income than it needed to buy the typical median-priced house, while today it’s a much smaller margin of about 11% as of April.

San Francisco is an extreme example: The artificial intelligence boom has driven median home prices to a record $2.15 million, according to the real estate brokerage firm Compass. So Charlie and Nettie Culp felt lucky to get a 1,500-square-foot condo for $1.5 million. The couple, both 32, work in finance and tech and saved for years with some family help, putting down $500,000 and taking a $1 million mortgage in May.

“That’s a lot of money for what you get, but that’s the market and it’s a beautiful city,” Charlie Culp said. He has lived in the city since 2015, at times sharing rent among as many as four people while saving money.

“I saw the AI boom coming in San Francisco, so we decided to reach out to our landlord and ask if she was willing to sell,” he said.

First-time buyers are particularly hard-pressed: They lack profits from a previous house, and the smaller houses they can buy are in short supply.  The number of houses on the market is rising, but mostly at the high-priced end.

“Many young households still face the most challenging homebuying environment in decades,” Evangelou said. “The question isn’t simply whether more homes are coming into the market, the question is whether those homes that are available for sale are at price points that local households can actually afford.”

The nation needs another 311,000 houses selling for less than $261,000 to meet the needs of middle-income families — buyers earning around $75,000 — according to a May report that Evangelou co-authored. Several states considered legislation this year aimed specifically at creating more starter homes.

A New Mexico law signed in March by Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham creates no-interest loans of up to $75,000 for down payments to first-time buyers with moderate income. The loans are meant as an incentive for builders to create smaller houses.

Several states moved to curb minimum lot sizes, seen as an impediment to starter homes and other affordable housing, often drawing opposition from cities.

Colorado considered a measure this year allowing smaller lots for building, hoping to “expand attainable homeownership opportunities for first-time homebuyers.” It was opposed by the Colorado Municipal League, which said it “removes community planning and public input from the decision-making process.” The bill passed the state House but was killed in a state Senate committee.

Florida also considered smaller lots and other incentives for starter homes in a bill this year that died in committee after opposition from the Florida League of Cities.

A similar bill that would limit minimum lot sizes, aimed at creating more starter homes and other affordable housing, was under consideration this year in Hawaii but did not pass after clearing a state Senate committee. Democratic state Sen. Stanley Chang, the bill’s sponsor, told Stateline that “some version of the concept” will be considered in future sessions.

The Midwest continues to have the highest affordability, according to the National Association of Realtors report.

Ty Setty, 29, and his wife, Allisha, 32, had been renting for six years near Cincinnati, but they needed no family help to buy their new $170,000 house, a two-bedroom in suburban Delhi Township, Ohio.

“We had been looking at houses for a few years and just couldn’t afford them, or we let ourselves think that,” Ty Setty said.

After two weeks of looking on Zillow and touring nine houses, they saw this house as a new listing and “fell in love. We put an offer on it that night,” Ty Setty said. “They accepted the next morning. That was a long 12 hours.”

For the Longmire family in Chattanooga, the partnership between parents raising children and grandparents needing their own affordable housing has worked out well.

“Grandparents want to live with their grandchildren, and you know parents need a babysitter on date night,” Micah Longmire said. “The story that we’re telling through our life right now is, that if you can work with your family, don’t give in to the pressure of the world to go it alone.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Vaccine hesitancy fed by misinformation is causing new surges of measles and whooping cough, while COVID-19 hotspots persist in some states and a new threat looms from an Ebola outbreak in central Africa.  

Nationally there have been 1,983 measles cases this year, nearly the 2,288 total for all of 2025, which in itself was the worst year since 1991, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday.  

Halfway through the year, 12 states and the District of Columbia already have more measles cases than they did for a full year in 2025. That’s true for South Carolina and Utah, where cases are already more than double last year, and also for states such as Florida, which has 139 cases so far compared with eight in 2025, and Virginia, which already has 63 compared with six in all of 2025.  

South Carolina, the state with the highest number of cases this year at 669, declared an end in April to an outbreak that was the nation’s largest in 35 years. The outbreak in the northwestern part of the state was centered in Spartanburg County, where religious exemptions to vaccination have spiked.  

The Utah outbreak, which began in the Short Creek area on the Utah/Arizona border, where vaccination rates are low, has generated 484 cases this year and is now slowing, said Dr. Andrew Pavia, a pediatrician and professor at the University of Utah, speaking at a May 26 briefing for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. 

Dozens of measles patients have been hospitalized with serious symptoms such as brain inflammation or pneumonia, he said, and one baby developed life-threatening congenital measles during pregnancy but survived, he said.

The national increases signal that the U.S. will certainly lose the measles elimination status it gained in 2000, Pavia said, in a determination due this fall. 

“Most state public health departments are stretched very, very thin, limiting their ability to contain measles. Anti-vaccine rhetoric has made this all the more difficult,” Pavia said. He referred to $11 billion in federal funding cuts to local public health last year that were delayed by a restraining order when states sued. The case is in settlement negotiations, according to court records. 

The Trump administration cited a “non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago” in the funding cuts, but COVID-19 is still causing more than 1,000 deaths a month and wastewater surveillance still shows hotspots in the Appalachian region and some other states, including Michigan.

Whooping cough is also on the rise with Ohio and Florida most affected. Deaths last year were at the highest level, 22, since 2010, according to the latest CDC WONDER provisional statistics.  

“The rising number of deaths from whooping cough, including among infants, is a reminder of the vital importance of vaccination,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a pediatrician and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore who follows whooping cough trends. 

“Families who follow public health guidance on vaccination and other precautions can avoid a needless tragedy,” Sharfstein said. 

Louisiana was accused of unusual delays in reporting a whooping cough outbreak last year that claimed at least two lives. Shortly after the deaths were reported, the state ended promotion of vaccines and vaccination events. At least three babies died in Kentucky last year along with at least one in Oregon. 

Unvaccinated people are like fuel for the wildfire of disease outbreaks, said Pavia, of the University of Utah, in his remarks. 

“Until we can restore faith in vaccines and restore funding for our public health agencies and increase measles vaccine coverage, we have to anticipate that there will be many more outbreaks, and some of these may blow up into very large conflagrations,” Pavia said.

Meanwhile the Trump administration announced a new quarantine center in Kenya opening Friday, May 29, for Americans exposed to the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The move was criticized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America in a statement, saying the decision to send exposed Americans to Kenya “raises serious questions about resources, timing and the level of care Americans sent there will receive.”

On Ebola, a May 22 CDC directive prohibited United States entry of non-citizens who had been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or nearby Uganda or South Sudan, in the previous 21 days. The disease has killed 224 people in that region, and there are more than 900 suspected cases. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

A surge in voluntary departure agreements in immigration courts is raising concerns that Trump administration tactics are unfairly pressuring immigrants into leaving the United States, even if they have a legal right to stay.

Voluntary departures during the second Trump administration reached 89,494 cases as of May 1, according to a Stateline analysis of immigration court data processed by the Deportation Data Project, an academic research initiative. That’s more than seven times the number recorded in the last 16 months of the Biden administration (11,977).

A 10-month-old policy of mandatory detention without bond, now being challenged in appeals courts and likely to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, increases the pressure on immigrants to leave. Mandatory detention for immigrants who crossed a border illegally to get into the United States was upheld by an appeals court for Texas and Louisiana, which are the most common locations for voluntary departure cases, according to Stateline’s analysis.

“Conditions in some detention facilities are dire and, especially in the locations where bond is unavailable, individuals may feel voluntary departure is their best option in those circumstances,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Voluntary departure is a court agreement that requires an immigrant to pay for the trip out of the country and face fines for any delay. A possible benefit for the immigrant is avoiding a court order of removal that could make it all but impossible to return to the U.S. and live here legally.

Voluntary departure doesn’t include people who used a government app to leave with a federally paid plane ticket and a cash incentive, now $2,600.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is pushing to quickly build and open new detention centers, with human rights groups describing crowded, often unsanitary conditions. Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, 51 people have died in the facilities, ICE reported.

The Department of Homeland Security wants to reach 1 million deportations a year.

“We see people choosing to take voluntary departure, not because they don’t have a right to stay in the United States, but because they can’t handle being in these really inhumane conditions in detention any longer,” said Shayna Kessler, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Advancing Universal Representation Initiative, which advocates for a system like public defenders for immigration court.

Voluntary departure could be the best option, Kessler acknowledged, but “without consulting an attorney it’s impossible to know.”

Indefinite incarceration

Under the Trump policy, people who crossed the border illegally and were later arrested by immigration enforcement are incarcerated without bond. The Laken Riley Act, signed into law last year, had extended mandatory detention to immigrants arrested on suspicion of crimes as minor as shoplifting, even if the charges are later dropped.

The newer policy — which was described in the Project 2025 blueprint before Trump was elected in 2024 — would affect millions of people, no matter how long ago they came to the U.S. and even if they legally applied for asylum.

Three federal appeals courts have put the mandatory detention requirement on hold but two have let it stand, meaning the policy’s constitutionality likely will be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Earlier this year, a federal judge in Oregon accused immigration authorities of using the threat of extended detention to “win the numbers game at the cost of debasing the rule of law.”

“For the one detainee who has the audacity to challenge the legality of her detention and gains release, several more remain detained or succumb to the threat of lengthy detention, and then instead ‘voluntarily’ deport,” U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai wrote in a February opinion. He was referring to an agricultural worker arrested en route to the fields who won release after resisting pressure to sign voluntary departure papers.

One long-time immigrant in the same lawsuit, called Victor C.G. in court papers, said he was pressured to sign papers agreeing to leave for Mexico during a three-week detention after being arrested on his way home from work. He refused to sign and was released on bond after an attorney intervened; the man has lived in the United States for 26 years and had legal work authorization based on a pending visa for cooperating crime victims.

Similarly, an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit in Illinois filed in October accused immigration authorities of “coercing and threatening detainees” to sign voluntary departure agreements while held in squalid, crowded conditions at a detention center, giving up their right to fight deportation cases in court.

A November restraining order in that case required immigration authorities at the Broadview facility near Chicago to hold immigrants in sanitary conditions with access to attorneys, and to give them enough time and language help to understand paperwork such as voluntary departure agreements. The restraining order is still in place during settlement negotiations, according to court papers.

Pressure from judges

Immigration judges can also apply pressure for voluntary departure, said Jacquelyn Pavilon, coauthor of a report on voluntary departure for the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York City-based nonprofit with a mission to limit mass incarceration.

Notes from court observers, shared with the Vera Institute, show a pattern of judges suggesting voluntary departure, especially Republican-appointed judges speaking to immigrants without attorneys, Pavilon said. The Trump administration has fired immigration judges seen as too lenient and hired new ones, most recently 82 new judges announced May 21.

In a Newark, New Jersey, immigration court observed by Stateline on May 21, one Trump-appointed judge suggested voluntary departure to a family from Colombia after denying their asylum claim. “This would at least avoid a removal order,” said the judge, Leila McNeill Mullican.

The family, a married couple from Bridgeton, New Jersey, with a 20-year-old son who arrived in 2023, did not have an attorney. They chose to appeal McNeill Mullican’s decision instead of taking voluntary departure, saying they feared crime and Venezuelan-based gangs when they left in 2023. They told Stateline they would consider hiring an attorney for the appeal.

There were similar immigrant complaints about unfair pressure for voluntary departure during the first Trump administration and also under the Obama administration. Numbers peaked at around 3,000 a month under Obama and the first Trump administration, but reached more than 9,000 a month recently, according to the Stateline analysis.

One partner of an immigrant told Stateline in a chat message that signing the agreement seemed like the safest way to preserve an application for a green card. The couple left Los Angeles for Costa Rica last year through voluntary departure.

“Thankfully my partner was not detained but they were on basically weekly surveillance and being monitored with a Smart Link app,” the person wrote. “I think we just felt the pressure of what could happen if they remained in the U.S. and continued in removal proceedings. I would like to think that it’s working out for us.”

The Department of Homeland Security replied to Stateline questions with an unattributed statement: “We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App.

“The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live the American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”

In the past, DHS has said “tens of thousands” have used the app, which is not the same as a voluntary departure outcome in court that requires travel at the immigrant’s expense.

The department did not offer a new estimate in response to Stateline’s questions, but maintained that “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations” and that there had been 900,000 arrests and 900,000 deportations during the administration as of May 17.

It’s true that the noncitizen population has dropped sharply in government surveys — a Stateline analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey shows it dropped by 2.3 million to about 25 million between January 2025 and April 2026. But many experts such as those at the Center for Migration Studies see the reported drop as being caused not by self-deportations, but rather by fear of responding to government surveys in an atmosphere of hostility to immigrants.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Immigrants seeking green cards will have to return first to their home countries and wait despite years of potential backlogs, the Trump administration announced Friday. 

“An alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply,” Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in a statement. 

The change would apply to workers on temporary visas, as well as to people living here illegally but hoping for legal status through sponsorship by relatives such as spouses or children who are U.S. citizens.

The immigration advocacy group FWD.us said the new policy “will create chaos and impose massive costs on immigrants who have lived and worked legally in the United States for many years” in a statement to Stateline. 

Business leaders said the move is disruptive to tech industries that rely on foreign workers who have temporary visas and sometimes hope for a green card and eventual citizenship.  

Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and an adjunct professor of computer science at Stanford University, in an X post called the change “a capricious attack on legal immigration” that will “hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.” 

“This is the worst imaginable way to disrupt important work for the country and pretend you’re fighting some loophole,” Silicon Valley venture capitalist Nick Davidov wrote on X, saying at least three large startups in his portfolio would be hurt by the policy. 

The so-called green cards represent a status called lawful permanent residence, a legal immigration status that can lead to citizenship. 

The administration’s intent, Kahler said in the statement, is to prevent temporary visitors from seeking permanent legal status while they’re in the United States. 

“Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the U.S. for a short time and for a specific purpose,” Kahler wrote. “Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process.”

Those affected include many tech workers on temporary visas that might lead to green cards. 

“This includes top scientists in our universities, founders of billion dollar companies,” Davidov wrote in his post, referring to temporary visas such as O-1 (extraordinary ability) and H-1B (highly skilled specialties) visas that can lead to citizenship with employer sponsorship. FWD.us estimates H-1B visa holders and their families in the United States number about 1.3 million. 

People from India would have to wait through years of backlogs if they stopped working and went home to apply for green cards, and people from Russia would be unable to apply at all because there’s no U.S. embassy there, he noted. 

The USCIS announcement did refer to “extraordinary” circumstances that might allow continued processing of green cards in the United States but did not elaborate. 

According to a policy memo issued Friday, USCIS agents “must consider and weigh all the relevant evidence” and determine “if approval of the alien’s adjustment of status application is in the best interest of the United States.” 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Housing shortages have eased in most states since 2020, as new construction has made apartments and houses more affordable.

Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island are the only states that have lost housing units per capita since 2020, according to a Stateline analysis of housing data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Most other states have built more than enough housing to account for population growth.

The increase in the supply of apartments helped drive down the nation’s median rent in April by 1.7% compared with the same month last year, according to a May report from Apartment List, a company that posts rental listings online.

Single-family homes also are starting to get more affordable, according to a May report from the National Association of Realtors. The group determines “affordability” by calculating whether or not a typical family earns enough income to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced, existing single-family home.

The improvement in affordability is especially dramatic in the South and Midwest, while affordability is lagging but improving in the West and Northeast.

In analyzing the housing supply, one housing unit for 2.5 residents is considered a healthy balance, though the ratio can be lower in places with large families or higher where there are many young singles or older people living alone.

Nationwide, the ratio ranges from 1.8 people per unit in Maine to 2.7 people per unit in Utah, according to the Stateline analysis. In most places, the ratio of people to housing units is shrinking, as the housing supply grows.

Some states have added far more housing than residents since 2020. Vermont, for example, has added nearly 10 times as many housing units — around 12,000 —  as new residents. The District of Columbia and New Mexico have added five times as many new units as new residents.

The story is different in Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island. In those three states, the housing supply is lagging behind population growth, with about three new residents per new housing unit in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and almost four residents per unit in New Jersey.

New Jersey has added about 260,000 new residents since 2020, but only about 66,500 new housing units. The state is seeking to impose affordable housing quotas on towns, but has run into strong resistance from suburban residents.

In February, a group of New Jersey towns, led by Montvale in Bergen County, a New York City suburb,  asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop a March deadline for a new phase of affordable housing plans to start, but were rebuffed without explanation later that month by Justice Samuel Alito.

In court papers, town leaders said their residents don’t want the denser housing required by the 2024 state law, and that residents would likely vote them out of office if they implemented it.

At a February public hearing about the plan in Ridgewood, a town in Bergen County, “elected officials continued to receive objections from residents…ranging from accusations against local leaders of conspiracies, accepting campaign donations and personally benefitting from the rezoning,” according to court papers filed by the towns.

Apartment List does not consider Bergen County separately from the New York City area, where home prices have increased 5.6% from last year as of April 30, according to Zillow, to a median $773,069. A one-bedroom apartment in the county can command $2,400 or more according to Rentometer, a rental market analysis site.

In contrast, Travis County, Texas — which includes most of Austin — has added about 99,500 new residents and 120,000 new units since 2020. That disparity helps explain why the Austin area had the largest drop in median rent between 2025 and 2026 in the new Apartment List estimates, declining 5.7% since last year and 22% since 2022.

Along with Austin, apartment-building has driven a decline in rents in Sun Belt metros such as Denver, Orlando, Phoenix and Tampa, according to the Apartment List report.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Large, immigrant-rich cities saw population fall back between mid-2024 and mid-2025 after nation-leading increases the year before. 

Mid-sized cities led the pack in U.S. Census Bureau estimates to be released May 14. The largest numeric increases for the year were in Charlotte, North Carolina (up 20,731); Fort Worth, Texas (up 19,512); the Dallas suburb of Celina, Texas (up 12,710); and Seattle (up 11,572). 

Charlotte has been emphasizing affordable housing in recent years, including a city-sponsored 72-unit building on the site of a former mall, opening in late 2024. It was designed for older adults, people with incomes from 30% to 80% of the area’s median income, about $82,000 at the time. 

Morgan Dunn, 26, moved to Charlotte in 2024 for a banking job after growing up in California and living in Georgia and Utah. He and his wife are expecting their first child in September, and he said he likes having an affordable house with a half-acre lot where his four dogs can run.

“It’s a great city for the younger generations for the sake of job opportunities combined with the cost of living,” Dunn said in a message to Stateline.

New York City, which led the nation in growth between mid-2023 and mid-2024 with 162,991 more people, fell to dead last in population change — a decrease of 12,196 last year.  

Also near the bottom were Memphis, Tennessee (losing 4,575 people); Los Angeles, down 3,621; St. Louis, down 2,301, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, down 2,290. Like New York City, Los Angeles ranked high the year before with an increase of 24,421, seventh-highest in the nation before falling to third-to-last.

Part of the reason for New York City’s fast-changing population shifts is that population growth was revised up for 2022-2024 to reflect more immigration, especially from asylum seekers, some of whom were bused from Texas. Parts of Queens had some of the largest influxes in the nation from asylum seekers, especially from Ecuador, according to a Stateline analysis. 

But immigration fell off in late 2024 and early 2025 as both the Biden and Trump administrations sought to put a lid on asylum seekers. Between 2024 and 2024 immigration “retreated from recent historical highs to more typical levels experienced before the pandemic,” according to a March report by New York City. Of the city’s five boroughs, only the Bronx and Staten Island gained population. 

“Big-city growth slowed significantly between 2024 and 2025, with some major hubs even seeing small declines,” Matt Erickson, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division, said in a statement. “In contrast, midsized cities found a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where domestic and international migration, paired with new housing, helped prevent the sluggish growth seen in small towns and larger metropolitan centers.”

In some states smaller cities had the big increases, such as the contrast between New York City’s decline and an increase of 2,933 in suburban Kiryas Joel village, a Hasidic Jewish enclave in Orange County, or New Mexico, where Albuquerque lost population but its suburb Rio Rancho gained 1,972. 

Louisiana’s Baton Rouge gained while New Orleans lost, as did Everett, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb that grew as the city lost population.

Some urban areas did well anyway: Atlanta had the biggest increase in Georgia, as did Chicago in Illinois, Detroit in Michigan, Kansas City in Missouri, and Newark in New Jersey. 

Other milestones: Austin, Texas, became the 12th city with more than a million residents, and Raleigh, North Carolina, became the 39th city of more than 500,000. The South had 11 of the top 12 numeric gains. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

As appeals courts split on the constitutionality of mandatory detention for millions of immigrants, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to decide the matter.

A Trump administration policy threatening imprisonment without bond has been struck down by three appeals courts, which could soon be joined by a fourth, but upheld by two others. The conflicting orders mean the Supreme Court must straighten out the situation as immigrants now could face different fates in different states.

The new detention policy, implemented in a July 2025 memo, threatens millions of immigrants with imprisonment without bond if they crossed a border illegally to get into the United States, no matter how long ago or whether they’ve applied for asylum. Without bond means they must be detained while awaiting court action.

The policy is a key part of the Trump administration’s stated goal to get 1 million removals a year, including deportations and voluntary returns.

So far the pace is about half that, or roughly 460,000 for the current fiscal year, if the daily rate as of mid-April continues, according to an analysis by Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University.

This spring’s mixed appeals court rulings mean that in some states, detainees may be offered bond hearings and a chance to be released pending new court dates. In other states, people can now be held indefinitely.

Most recently, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee,  struck down the policy Monday, saying it “strains reason” to suggest Congress intended to put millions of people into immigration detention. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Alabama, Florida and Georgia, also struck it down last week, saying the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 does not give President Donald Trump “unfettered authority to detain, without the possibility of bond, every unadmitted alien present in the country.”

In April, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Connecticut, New York and Vermont, also struck down the policy, calling it “the broadest mass-detention-without-bond mandate in our Nation’s history for millions of noncitizens.”

Judges in another appeals court covering New England states, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, appeared skeptical of the policy in a hearing this month but have not yet ruled.

Meanwhile the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, encompassing Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, upheld the new policy, saying the status quo gives people living here illegally more rights than those at the border seeking legal admission.

“It seems strange to suggest that Congress would have preserved bond hearings exclusively for unlawful entrants,” the 5th Circuit ruling said. Those states have some of the largest detention centers in the country, often accepting transfers from other states. The cross-state transfers complicate legal cases attempting to free those detained there.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Arkansas and several Midwestern states, also upheld the Trump policy.

Conflicting appeals rulings like these, known as “circuit splits,” generally lead to a Supreme Court ruling to settle them, experts say.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a Stateline request for comment. Last July, a department spokesperson told The Associated Press that “President (Donald) Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe.”

The Trump administration policy flies in the face of decades of federal practice that let many immigrants stay free on bond while they pursue their court cases, said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group.

“This has done a lot of damage to people who are caught in detention with a very low amount of due process,” Dojaquez-Torres said.

The policy has also flooded federal courts with petitions for release by people denied bond under the policy, she added. Thousands were filed each week from January through late April, compared with a few dozen a week last year before the policy was enacted, according to a ProPublica report.

The threat of indefinite detention can be an incentive for immigrants who have been arrested to agree to the administration’s option of “voluntary departure.”

Hannia Ortega, who left Oklahoma for her native Mexico at age 22 last fall to avoid the threat of detention, said the policy has “helped me not to regret leaving.”

“I’ve had the opportunity to meet people here who were deported and were not given the chance to fight their cases in front of a judge. One of the people I met was an Uber driver who was deported after 36 years in the states,” Ortega wrote in an email to Stateline.

Ortega won an award for leadership and good grades in a Tulsa high school, and said she also earned a community college degree there with the help of a private scholarship for students living in the country illegally.

She decided staying in the U.S. was too risky. Her parents brought her illegally as a 6-year-old and she did not qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, a program with some deportation protections.

“It is scary and just speaks to how dangerous it has gotten for every single immigrant in the United States. I pray that better days are ahead for all but it seems unlikely any time soon,” Ortega wrote.

It’s hard to tell exactly how many immigrants are threatened with indefinite detention, but of about 14.6 million undocumented residents, the Center for Migration Studies estimates, something like 5.5 million could have entered the country illegally, making them subject to the detention policy.

There are no recent estimates for the percentage, said Robert Warren, senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies of New York. But in 2017 the center estimated 38% of unauthorized immigrants crossed the border illegally either by evading border patrol officers or surrendering to them and getting a court notice to fight deportation proceedings. Others overstayed legal visas and would not be subject to the new policy.

Mustafa Cetin, a New Jersey immigration attorney, said two of his clients from Turkey were denied bond despite a clean criminal record and active asylum cases in court. Both were arrested in October during routine check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he said.

Both won release on bond through federal court decisions, and one has already won an asylum case, he said. Both followed a familiar pattern of seeking asylum in 2023 and 2024.

“They say, ‘Don’t come in,’ but if you come in, they will process you (with a court appearance ticket),” Cetin said. “We’ve seen this play out for hundreds of thousands of people. Then, this administration, instead of trying to deal with those who come to the border, they decided to scare people away.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

A quarter of immigration arrests since August were labeled by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “collateral,” a type of arrest and detention that’s been challenged in court as an end run around civil rights.

Public outrage and lawsuits over the arrests may be tamping down the large-scale sweeps that foster them, but tens of thousands were arrested this way between August and early March.

Immigration arrests are usually based on warrants obtained ahead of time, showing either a removal order from immigration court or evidence of a crime or charge that makes the person subject to deportation.

But collateral arrests can result from street sweeps and raids in which a person is singled out for questioning based on appearance or proximity to someone wanted on a warrant. That person could be taken into custody if agents think they may be subject to deportation and also likely to flee if released.

Labeled for the first time ever, the collateral arrests are reported from August to early March in ICE arrest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Stateline. In that time there were about 64,000 collateral arrests, a quarter of the 253,000 total arrests by ICE.

About 70% of the collateral arrests were for people with immigration-related crimes or violations alone, compared with 41% for arrests with warrants. Less than 2% of those with collateral arrests were convicted of a violent crime, one-third the rate of other arrests, and only 18% were convicted of any crime, compared with 33% for other arrests.

The collateral arrests contributed to an overall pattern of lower and lower shares of arrests for serious crimes, and more for immigration offenses alone.

Arrests climbed from about 12,000 in January 2025 to more than 40,000 in December, but fell back to 30,000 this February. The share of people with only immigration-related crimes and violations rose to more than half in December and January, the peak months for collateral arrests, and the share of violent criminals fell from 10% to 4% of arrests in that time.

New policy

ICE announced a new policy in January to issue warrants in real time if agents think an immigrant is deportable and “likely to escape,” though that policy faces a court challenge.

Total arrests and collateral arrests have been falling since December, whether because of the new policy or because of cutbacks in the large-scale street sweeps that tend to produce them.

One factor is public outrage over raids sweeping up noncriminals in places like Minneapolis and Chicago, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

“The sort of large operations within big cities, as they were occurring, seems to have subsided somewhat,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said. “After the kind of public outcry following Minneapolis, it seems as though, at least for now, that tactic has kind of been paused.”

The Trump administration’s focus on mass deportation opened the way for more collateral street arrests with less investigation, she added.

“If it’s a more targeted arrest, they would take the time to sort of essentially have an investigation. It’s a pretty resource-intensive way that just would not yield the kind of numbers ICE was being told to produce,” she said.

The new policy was filed in court papers in February as a response to a lawsuit over ICE sweeps in the District of Columbia last year, alleging ICE agents “have flooded the streets of the nation’s capital, indiscriminately arresting without warrants and without probable cause District residents whom the agents perceive to be Latino.”

The case resulted in a preliminary injunction in December requiring a halt to warrantless arrests without establishing probable cause that the person is living here illegally and is a flight risk.

One plaintiff in the class-action case, José Escobar Molina, said in the lawsuit that agents in two cars pulled up to him as he approached his work truck on Aug. 21, grabbing him by the arms and legs and handcuffing him without asking any questions. Escobar, 47, said in the court papers that he’s lived in the district for 25 years and has had temporary protected status as a Salvadoran native the whole time. He was held overnight in Virginia before being released.

Other lawsuits are also challenging collateral arrests, such as an incident in Idaho in which agents with warrants for five people ended up arresting 105 immigrants at a Latino community event in October.

In North Carolina, four U.S. citizens and a visa holder sued in February, saying they were arrested in the Charlotte’s Web immigration crackdown in November without warrants, as is typical of collateral arrests.

“I have a lot of fear that this will happen to me again. I was essentially kidnapped based only on the color of my skin. That really weighs on me,” said Yoshi Cuenca Villamar, one of the citizens and a North Carolina native, in a statement announcing the lawsuit. He said he was doing landscaping work Nov. 15 when agents pushed him to the ground and handcuffed him, then held him in a car before releasing him.

One Illinois case that started in the first Trump administration challenged warrantless arrests and traffic stops used as a pretext for immigration arrests. A 2022 settlement required ICE to document “reasonable suspicion” of illegal status before arresting somebody. The case continues since a judge found in February that the new ICE policy of issuing warrants in real time after a detention violates the consent decree.

Shares of collateral arrests

In the months since August where collateral arrests are now labeled, the District of Columbia and Illinois stand out with high shares of collateral arrests. More than half the arrests in the district were collateral, as were 41% of those in Illinois. There were eight states in which at least 30% of arrests were collateral: Alabama, Maryland, West Virginia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine and Minnesota.

West Virginia, where there was a “statewide surge” of immigration enforcement in January with state and local cooperation, stands out for its high rate of total arrests as well as a large share of collateral arrests.

ICE labeled 1,300 arrests during Operation Metro Surge as ‘collateral’

For the eight months between August and early March, West Virginia had 1,831 arrests, or 1 in 10 of the state’s noncitizen population as of 2024, the latest data available. That’s by far the largest share in the country, followed by 7% in Wyoming (where truck drivers were targeted for immigration arrests in February) and 4% in Mississippi.

West Virginia Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey, in a statement, cited the cooperation of state and local agencies with ICE through the 287(g) program that assists with immigration enforcement. He praised ICE, saying “they have removed dangerous illegal immigrants from our communities and made our state safer for families and law-abiding citizens.”

Few of those arrested in the surge were violent criminals, however. More than half of those arrested during the surge were collateral arrests, and only 1% — nine immigrants — had a violent crime conviction, according to the Stateline analysis. More than three-quarters, about 500 people, had only an immigration-related violation or crime.

Judges didn’t always agree that collateral arrests and detentions in the West Virginia surge were legal under the U.S. Constitution. U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin, a Clinton appointee, ordered two detainees released in January. He noted that “similar seizures and detentions are occurring frequently across the country” without any evidence they’re necessary as required by the Constitution.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

An appeals court on Friday struck down the Trump administration’s closing of United States borders to asylum-seekers. 

An executive order by President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day last year, and later guidance to turn asylum-seekers around without a court hearing, are “unlawful” and “cast aside federal laws affording individuals the right to apply and be considered for asylum,” according to the ruling by a panel of the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Advocates sued and said the administration’s action violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and the right to seek asylum based on fears of persecution.

Trump’s proclamation on Jan. 20, 2025, said “the sheer number of aliens entering the United States has overwhelmed the system and rendered many of the INA’s provisions ineffective,” and that  “an invasion is ongoing at the southern border, which requires the Federal Government to take measures to fulfill its obligation to the States.”

The executive order, along with later guidance, required anyone crossing the border without permission to be turned around or quickly deported without a court date. As of March, about 2.7 million people had been released at the border with immigration court cases in recent years, according to a Stateline analysis. 

Those numbers peaked at more than 100,000 a month at times in 2023 during the Biden administration, and dropped quickly to a few hundred a month after Trump’s 2025 order. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking on Fox News, blamed the ruling on politics and called it “unsurprising.” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said the Department of Justice would seek further review of the decision. “We are sure we will be vindicated,” she wrote in an emailed statement to The Associated Press.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Amal Khalifa “felt human” for the first time after she fled Egypt in 2019 for the United States and found kind treatment from police when she reported being a victim of domestic violence.

“When I walked into that precinct I felt like a human being for the first time in my whole life,” Khalifa said. “I like the system here — it is there to help the people.”

Khalifa still faced a long road to asylum, which she gained last year, based on her fear of returning home to Egypt. As a government worker there she faced persecution for reporting corrupt activity by criminals and illegal pressure from the outlawed but powerful Muslim Brotherhood, she said.

But leaving her former fiancé after she got to the United States meant she had to support herself as her asylum case proceeded, and she was able to do that by working as an auditor for the New York State Department of Labor. She credits her ability to earn a living with legal work permission she could get after establishing her case.

That option to work could close soon for asylum-seekers for the foreseeable future.

Currently asylum-seekers must wait six months after filing an asylum request before they can work legally, but the Trump administration is seeking to extend that to one year. The new rule is open for comment until Friday. No effective date has been announced.

The proposal would also pause any new requests for work permission during times of high asylum case processing backlogs. Since the backlog is now 1.4 million asylum cases, that would effectively stop new and renewal work request applications for anywhere from 14 to 173 years, the administration estimates.

The rule would “make it impossible for asylum-seekers to work legally to support themselves,” and would result in more poverty and off-the-books workers competing with legal workers for jobs, according to a February statement from The Forum, a coalition of immigration-related advocacy groups.

At least half a million asylum cases would be affected immediately, if the rule takes effect, causing wage loss of $27 billion to $127 billion a year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated.

Not only new requests are affected — renewals will have to go through the same process and, if they’re even granted, would be shorter based on a rule change from December 2025. That new rule limits employment authorization and renewals to 18 months instead of the previous limit of five years.

“This makes it harder for people to gain work authorization and also more arduous to stay work-authorized,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that researches immigration policy.

The rule is meant to discourage “frivolous” asylum cases and “allow our asylum system to prioritize those actually seeking refuge from danger,” according to a February statement from the federal Department of Homeland Security.

“For too long, a fraudulent asylum claim has been an easy path to working in the United States, overwhelming our immigration system with meritless applications,” the statement said.

Amy Grenier, associate director for government affairs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group, said there are less drastic ways to curb frivolous asylum claims. For instance, the Migration Policy Institute has proposed new policies such as posting asylum officers at borders who are trained to make quick decisions on cases before the applications clog immigration courts.

“This rule seems designed to make it impossible for people to apply for asylum in the first place — a right which is protected under our laws,” Grenier said. “The administration will cause hardship for American businesses that rely on these legal workers, worsen asylum backlogs and harm people already fleeing for their lives.”

The move is likely to exacerbate the number of immigrants not authorized to work, especially the millions who arrived earlier this decade and sought asylum.

A Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas analysis found that nearly 550,000 immigrants without legal status left the United States last year, including through deportations and voluntary departure. That has put a lid on job growth but has also kept unemployment stable, the report concluded.

Two groups that recruit asylum-seekers for jobs told Stateline they’re opposed to the proposed new rules. Many industries need immigrants such as Khalifa with valid asylum cases and professional experience in their home countries.

“Immigration is a vital part of the solution to labor shortages, especially in health care,” said Avigail Ziv, chief program officer at Upwardly Global, an organization that helps work-authorized immigrants, refugees and asylees restart their careers in the U.S. The group helped Khalifa find her state job in New York.

“In the U.S. right now there’s over 270,000 underemployed immigrants that have been trained in health care in their home countries,” Ziv said.

Another group that helps asylum-seekers find jobs is Tent Partnership for Refugees, whose CEO Gideon Maltz said, “When the U.S. government curtails employment authorization for those who are already here and working, they’re not only hurting people seeking refuge, they’re undercutting the companies and communities that depend on their labor.”

Employers in manufacturing, hospitality and logistics need more workers, Maltz said, and “refugees and asylum-seekers have been helping keep those industries running, reliably stepping into the hardest-to-fill jobs and contributing from Day One.”

Many asylum-seekers waiting for work authorization work in low-paying gig economy jobs such as food delivery, said Ernesto Castañeda, director of American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, which interviewed hundreds of asylum-seekers in New York City and the Washington, D.C., area for a research project.

The New York State Labor Department, in an attempt to clear clogged migrant shelters, set up a program in 2023 to connect asylum-seekers with valid work permission to jobs. Employers who participated included those in the industries of home health care, food processing, parking and building services, according to information the department sent to Stateline at the time.

The proposed federal rule suggests that American workers could benefit from the changes, and that employers would benefit by hiring available Americans. States could benefit as well, the department said, if lower immigration numbers reduce the strain on social services.

There were similar attempts by the first Trump administration to curtail work permission for asylum seekers, but they were all struck down in court, sometimes on technicalities.

A one-year waiting rule, as well as longer permitted processing times, were struck down in 2022 after a judge ruled that an acting Department of Homeland Security secretary did not have the authority to implement the rules in 2020. A 2018 court ruling also forced fast 30-day processing of work permission requests for asylum-seekers.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Upwardly Global’s role in helping asylum-seekers get jobs. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Some of the Trump administration’s controversial new warehouse immigration detention centers are getting scaled back and postponed as states and cities fight back and new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reviews actions taken by his ousted predecessor, Kristi Noem.

Some states and cities have seen more communication and compromise as Mullin takes over and the Department of Homeland Security faces a continued funding shutdown that has reached 60 days.

That includes discussions about a proposed Arizona detention center where DHS agreed to scale back the number of prisoners by two-thirds and pay a city for lost taxes, and a proposed center in Maryland with a similar offer from the department. A lawsuit also is holding up work on that detention center. And in Georgia, a small city cut off the water supply to a proposed immigrant holding site.

A plan to house up to 1,500 immigrants in Surprise, Arizona, starting as soon as May was scaled back to 542 detainees starting in October at the earliest, and DHS agreed to pay the city $300,000 a year for lost property taxes. The department also may offer more to help with any police costs, after negotiations with DHS under Mullin.

“With the new leadership there’s been a lot of communication,” Surprise Mayor Kevin Sartor told a local radio show April 15, a contrast to the “very frustrating” experience of how the city learned from news reports in January that DHS had purchased a 418,000-square-foot distribution center for $70 million.   

“We do have a different leadership style,” Mullin said in a CNBC interview April 16, comparing himself to Noem. “We want to make sure people understand that we’re here working for the people, not against you.” 

In Maryland, the new DHS administration has also offered a scale-back from 1,500 detainees to 542, in a Williamsport warehouse bought for $102 million in January. An April 15 court order keeps most work on the center paused as the state continues a lawsuit claiming “impacts on the environmental, economic, and public health and safety interests of the state.”

In Arizona, dozens of Democratic state lawmakers sent a letter in April asking the city of Surprise to “stop the facility from opening at all costs,” but Mayor Sartor has said he doesn’t see a legal basis for a lawsuit. The mayor’s office is nonpartisan, but Republicans predominate among registered voters in the city by almost 2-1 over Democrats. 

Communities across the country are facing the results of a massive detention expansion fueled in large part by the record $45 billion approved for increased immigration detention by Congress last summer.

U.S. Reps. Maxwell Frost & Darren Soto tell Kristi Noem not to open ICE facility in Central Florida

Other state and local action on the plan to repurpose warehouses for detention centers include a Kansas City, Missouri, ban on nonmunicipal detention facilities passed in January, Developers halted the sale of a south Kansas City warehouse in February.

Owners of an Indiana warehouse sent a letter saying they weren’t in active negotiations with for the site, which had been reported as a potential detention center and drew local opposition from the town of Merrillville. Democratic lawmakers in Florida opposed plans for a warehouse detention center near Orlando in February, while some Republican lawmakers supported it. 

In Georgia, the city of Social Circle cut off water and sewer service for a $128.6 million warehouse proposed to hold 10,000 detainees, saying the town of 5,000 people did not have the capacity to serve it.

“The city’s infrastructure cannot accommodate this level of demand,” according to a February statement from the city, despite a “certainly creative” solution suggested by DHS to fill a water-supply cistern at times of low demand.  

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.