By JIM MUSTIAN and JACK BROOK

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Immigration officials have deported a father living in Alabama to Laos despite a federal court order blocking his removal from the U.S. on the grounds he has a claim to citizenship, the man’s attorneys said Tuesday.

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U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick last week ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to keep Chanthila “Shawn” Souvannarath, 44, in the United States while he presented what the judge called his “substantial claim of U.S. citizenship,” court records show. He was born in a refugee camp in Thailand but was granted lawful permanent residence in the U.S. before his first birthday, according to court filings.

But Souvannarath on Sunday messaged his wife on WhatsApp and told her he was in Dongmakkhai, Laos, according to a screenshot she shared with The Associated Press. The message ends with “love y’all.”

“It is very unfortunate, especially for the children that we have together,” Beatrice Souvannarath told AP.

Emails, phone calls and text messages sent to ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were not immediately returned.

The ACLU of Louisiana, which is representing Souvannarath, called the deportation a “stunning violation of a federal court order.” Before his deportation, Souvannarath had been detained at a newly opened ICE facility at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

“ICE just ignored a federal court order and tore yet another family apart,” said Alanah Odoms, executive director for the ACLU of Louisiana, in a statement. “This administration has shown it will ignore the courts, ignore the Constitution and ignore the law to pursue its mass deportation agenda, even if it means destroying the lives of American citizens.”

The deportation comes as Trump administration officials have repeatedly clashed with the courts over their attempts to deport large numbers of immigrants. There have been previous cases of U.S. citizens being deported, including U.S.-born children.

Chanthila Souvannarath was taken into ICE custody in June following an annual check-in with immigration authorities in Alabama, where he had been living, his wife said.

“When he went to check in, they detained him. And our two younger kids were with him,” Beatrice Souvannarath told AP. “It was the hardest two months of my life.”

He spent much of his childhood living with one or both of his parents in Hawaii, Washington state and California. His father, a native of Laos, is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and Souvannarath claims his citizenship derives from that status.

“I continuously lived in the United States since infancy,” Souvannarath wrote in a letter from immigration detention, “and I have always considered myself an American citizen.”

Souvannarath filed an emergency motion seeking to delay his deportation. Dick, the federal judge based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, issued a temporary restraining order Thursday, citing the “irreparable harm that would be caused by immediate deportation.”

“Though the government has an interest in the enforcement of its immigration laws, the potential removal of a U.S. citizen weighs heavily against the public interest,” wrote Dick, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama. Souvannarath would be “unable to effectively litigate his case from Laos,” she added.

The court docket shows no changes in Souvannarath’s case since the judge issued the temporary restraining order, which was set to expire Nov. 6. Dick declined to through her office to comment.

Mustian reported from New York.

By KEN SWEET

NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration is moving to overrule any state laws that may protect consumers’ credit reports from medical debt and other debt issues.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has drafted what’s known as an interpretative rule related to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, interpreting the law in a way that says the FCRA should preempt any state laws or regulations when it comes to how debt should be reported to the credit bureaus like Experian, Equifax and Trans Union.

This repeals previous Biden-era rules and regulations that allowed states to implement their own credit reporting bans. More than a dozen states like New York and Delaware prohibit the reporting of medical debt on a consumers’ credit report.

Medical debt is often the most disputed part of a consumer’s credit report, because insurance payments can take time, and oftentimes patients do not have the means to fully pay a medical bill if insurance is not covering a procedure that has already taken place.

The three credit bureaus jointly announced in 2023 they would no longer track any medical debts below $500, which at the time the bureaus said would eliminate 70% of all medical debts reported on consumers’ credit files. But some states have gone further than that. New York, Delaware and others passed laws where medical debts can no longer be reported to the credit bureaus.

The CFPB, which is largely not operating at the moment with the exception of actively repealing previous rules written under President Biden or earlier, says in its rule that Congress intended to “create national standards for the credit reporting system” under the FCRA and state laws run afoul of that intention.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that Americans owe roughly $220 billion in medical debt. In Republican-controlled states like South Dakota, Mississippi, West Virginia and Georgia, roughly one in six Americans have outstanding medical debt, according to the KFF.

Having outstanding, delinquent medical debt can impact the ability for an individual to apply for a mortgage, a credit card or an auto loan.

A spokesperson for the Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Grown-up boy band 5 Seconds of Summer and metal legends Iron Maiden are the first two acts announced to play Mystic Lake Amphitheater, the new 19,000-capacity outdoor venue that will open next year in Shakopee.

Tickets for 5 Seconds of Summer’s July 22 concert go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday through Ticketmaster. Iron Maiden’s Sept. 19 show, which also includes Megadeth as the opener, goes on sale at 3 p.m. Friday, also through Ticketmaster.

Not to be confused with Mystic Lake Casino’s own amphitheater, Mystic Lake Amphitheater will host more than 30 concerts each summer and create 700 permanent jobs, according to Swervo Development Corp., a local firm that also transformed the Armory and Uptown Theater in Minneapolis into concert venues. Live Nation will operate the amphitheater.

Mystic Lake Amphitheater serves as an anchor tenant of Canterbury Commons, a $400 million entertainment district in development near Canterbury Park. The district is also expected to include apartments, a brewery, restaurants and an office building. Work on the 37-acre site began in July 2023.

5 Seconds of Summer

Luke Hemmings, left, and Ashton Irwin from the band 5 Seconds of Summer perform on NBC’s Today show at Rockefeller Plaza on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022, in New York. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Formed in Australia in 2011, 5 Seconds of Summer found their first fame via YouTube and earned new fans worldwide after touring with One Direction in 2013. They stood out from the boy band pack as they played their own instruments and added elements of rock to their sound.

The band’s first three albums hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, while their next two each reached No. 2. Their sixth album, “Everyone’s a Star,” is due out Nov. 14. They’ve previously headlined the former Xcel Energy Center several times and the Armory in 2022 and 2023.

Iron Maiden

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Iron Maiden hit No. 4 on the British charts with their self-titled 1980 debut album. They didn’t find success in the States until their third release, 1982’s “The Number of the Beast,” the group’s first with vocalist Bruce Dickinson. For the decade that followed, Iron Maiden continued to release new music and tour heavily, including a handful of shows at the old Met Center. In 1993, Dickinson left Iron Maiden for a solo career.

Six years later, Dickinson returned to the band, who went on a worldwide reunion tour that ended with a show at the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil in front of an audience of more than 250,000. In the years since, Iron Maiden has continued to find success on the road. Last October, they played the former Xcel Energy Center for the third time in front of about 15,000 fans.

Additional shows at Mystic Lake Amphitheater will be announced on a rolling basis, according to a news release.

By MATT O’BRIEN and THALIA BEATY

OpenAI said Tuesday it has reorganized its ownership structure and converted its business into a public benefit corporation after two crucial regulators, the Delaware and California attorneys general, said they would not oppose the plan.

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The restructuring paves the way for the ChatGPT maker to more easily profit off its artificial intelligence technology even as it remains technically under the control of a nonprofit.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a call Tuesday that “the most likely path” for the newly formed business is that it becomes publicly traded on the stock market, “given the capital needs that we’ll have and sort of the size of the company,” though a Wall Street debut was not a part of the announcements detailed Tuesday.

Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings and California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in separate statements that they would not object to the restructuring, seemingly bringing to an end more than a year of negotiations and announcements about the future of OpenAI’s governance and the power that for-profit investors and its nonprofit board will have over the organization’s technology.

The company also said it has signed a new agreement with its longtime backer Microsoft that gives the software giant a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit corporation but changes some of the details of their close partnership. Microsoft’s $135 billion stake will be just ahead of the OpenAI nonprofit’s $130 billion stake in the for-profit company.

The attorneys general of Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, and California, where it is headquartered, had both spent months investigating the proposed changes.

“We will be keeping a close eye on OpenAI to ensure ongoing adherence to its charitable mission and the protection of the safety of all Californians,” said Bonta.

OpenAI said it completed its restructuring “after nearly a year of engaging in constructive dialogue” with the offices in both states.

“OpenAI has completed its recapitalization, simplifying its corporate structure,” said a blog post Tuesday from Bret Taylor, the chair of OpenAI’s board of directors. “The nonprofit remains in control of the for-profit, and now has a direct path to major resources before AGI arrives.”

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a mission to safely build AGI for humanity’s benefit. It later started a for-profit arm.

Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and the two companies formed an agreement that made Microsoft the exclusive provider of the computing power needed to build OpenAI’s costly technology. It was a lifeline for the startup research lab, which is now valued at $500 billion but continues to lose more money than it makes. In turn, Microsoft heavily used the technology behind ChatGPT to enhance its own AI products.

The two companies first revealed in January that they were altering that agreement, enabling San Francisco-based OpenAI to build its own computing capacity, “primarily for research and training of models.” That coincided with OpenAI’s announcements of a partnership with Oracle and SoftBank to build a massive new data center in Abilene, Texas.

It’s since announced what Altman described Tuesday as a “$1.4 trillion total financial obligation” over the next few years, which includes more data center projects planned in the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America, along with big deals with chipmakers like Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom.

Those investments left Microsoft’s OpenAI arrangement up in the air as the two companies appeared to veer further apart before reaching a tentative new agreement in September.

OpenAI had previously said its own nonprofit board will decide when AGI is reached, effectively ending its Microsoft partnership. But it now says that “once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel,” and that Microsoft’s rights to OpenAI’s confidential research methods “will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first.” Microsoft will also retain commercial rights to OpenAI products “post-AGI” and through 2032.

“Microsoft can now count on 7 years of runway,” said an investor note from JP Morgan analysts, interpreting the news as a positive development for the software giant.

FILE – The logo of Microsoft is seen outside its French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris on May 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

Microsoft put out the same joint announcement about the revised partnership Tuesday but declined further comment. Its shares spiked more than 2% on Tuesday.

Going forward, the nonprofit will be called the OpenAI Foundation and Taylor said it would grant out $25 billion toward health and curing diseases and protecting against the cybersecurity risks of AI. He did not say over what time period those funds would be dispersed.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, said this arrangement does not guarantee the nonprofit independence, likening it to a corporate foundation that will serve the interests of the for-profit.

Even as the nonprofit’s board may technically remain in control, Weissman said that control “is illusory because there is no evidence of the nonprofit ever imposing its values on the for-profit.”

The Delaware attorney general’s investigation focused on ensuring OpenAI put its commitment to safety first and before any financial interests. Jennings also said OpenAI promised to keep its nonprofit in control of the public benefit corporation, including the right to appoint and remove its board members.

The removal of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman in Nov. 2023 by the nonprofit’s board at the time — and his subsequent reappointment — kicked off the company’s effort to restructure.

The nonprofit’s board will continue to include a Safety and Security Committee, which will have the power “to oversee and review” OpenAI’s technology development. It will even have the power to stop the release of a new product, according to the Delaware attorney general’s statement.

Additionally, within a year, the nonprofit’s board will include at least two members who do not also serve on the public benefit corporation’s board.

OpenAI still faces a legal challenge from billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an early OpenAI investor who now runs his own AI firm, xAI, and has accused the startup he co-founded of betraying its original mission.

A federal judge in March denied Musk’s request for a court order blocking OpenAI from converting itself to a for-profit company but said she could expedite a trial to consider Musk’s claims.