By R.J. RICO

ATLANTA (AP) — Immigration authorities are demanding that landlords turn over leases, rental applications, forwarding addresses, identification cards and other information on their tenants, a sign that the Trump administration is targeting them to assist in its drive for mass deportations.

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Eric Teusink, an Atlanta-area real estate attorney, said several clients recently received subpoenas asking for entire files on tenants. A rental application can include work history, marital status and family relationships.

The two-page “information enforcement subpoena,” which Teusink shared exclusively with The Associated Press, also asks for information on other people who lived with the tenant. One, dated May 1, is signed by an officer for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ‘ anti-fraud unit. However, it is not signed by a judge.

It is unclear how widely the subpoenas were issued, but they could signal a new front in the administration’s efforts to locate people who are in the country illegally, many of whom were required to give authorities their U.S. addresses as a condition for initially entering the country without a visa. President Donald Trump largely ended temporary status for people who were allowed in the country under his predecessor, Joe Biden.

Experts question whether landlords need to comply

Some legal experts and property managers say the demands pose serious legal questions because they are not signed by a judge and that, if landlords comply, they might risk violating the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.

Critics also say landlords are likely to feel intimidated into complying with something that a judge hasn’t ordered, all while the person whose information is being requested may never know that their private records are in the hands of immigration authorities.

“The danger here is overcompliance,” said Stacy Seicshnaydre, a Tulane University law professor who studies housing law. “Just because a landlord gets a subpoena, doesn’t mean it’s a legitimate request.”

ICE officers have long used subpoenas signed by an agency supervisor to try to enter homes. Advocacy groups have mounted “Know Your Rights” campaign urging people to refuse entry if they are not signed by a judge.

The subpoena reviewed by the AP is from USCIS’ fraud detection and national security directorate, which, like ICE, is part of The Department of Homeland Security. Although it isn’t signed by a judge, it threatens that a judge may hold a landlord in contempt of court for failure to comply.

Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokeswoman, defended the use of subpoenas against landlords without confirming if they are being issued.

“We are not going to comment on law enforcement’s tactics surrounding ongoing investigations,” McLaughlin said. “However, it is false to say that subpoenas from ICE can simply be ignored. ICE is authorized to obtain records or testimony through specific administrative subpoena authorities. Failure to comply with an ICE-issued administrative subpoena may result in serious legal penalties. The media needs to stop spreading these lies.”

These requests are new to many landlords

Teusink said many of his clients oversee multifamily properties and are used to getting subpoenas for other reasons, such as requests to hand over surveillance footage or give local police access to a property as part of an investigation. But, he said, those requests are signed by a judge.

Teusink said his clients were confused by the latest subpoenas. After consulting with immigration attorneys, he concluded that compliance is optional. Unless signed by a judge, the letters are essentially just an officer making a request.

“It seemed like they were on a fishing expedition,” Teusink said.

Boston real estate attorney Jordana Roubicek Greenman said a landlord client of his received a vague voicemail from an ICE official last month requesting information about a tenant. Other local attorneys told her that their clients had received similar messages. She told her client not to call back.

Anthony Luna, the CEO of Coastline Equity, a commercial and multifamily property management company that oversees about 1,000 units in the Los Angeles area, said property managers started contacting him a few weeks ago about concerns from tenants who heard rumors about the ICE subpoenas. Most do not plan to comply if they receive them.

“If they’re going after criminals, why aren’t they going through court documents?” Luna said. “Why do they need housing provider files?”

ICE subpoenas preceded Trump’s first term in office, though they saw a significant uptick under him, according to Lindsay Nash, a law professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law in New York who has spent years tracking them. Landlords rarely got them, though. State and local police were the most common recipients.

ICE can enforce the subpoenas, but it would first have to file a lawsuit in federal court and get a judge to sign off on its enforcement — a step that would allow the subpoena’s recipient to push back, Nash said. She said recipients often comply without telling the person whose records are being divulged.

“Many people see these subpoenas, think that they look official, think that some of the language in them sounds threatening, and therefore respond, even when, from what I can tell, it looks like some of these subpoenas have been overbroad,” she said.

By KEN SWEET, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — In the nearly six months since the Trump administration has had control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the bureau’s leadership has focused almost exclusively on rolling back any punishments, fines and penalties made against companies during the Biden administration.

In some cases, companies that were supposed to refund their customers or pay a penalty for unfair or deceptive practices are no longer bound to make their customers whole. Other companies facing charges of fraud of deceptive practices saw their lawsuits dropped in the early days of the Trump administration.

Here are some of the Trump administration’s rollbacks:

Navy Federal Credit Union

The CFPB accused Navy Federal Credit Union, the nation’s largest credit union, of having unfair and deceptive overdraft fee practices. NFCU settled with the bureau and agreed to refund its members $80 million in overdraft fees. However, when the new administration took over, NFCU asked to have the order dismissed, which the CFPB agreed to do without giving a reason. Navy Federal has not said whether it would refund their members, which are mostly service men and women, families and veterans.

Reduced overdraft fees

The CFPB proposed new regulations that would have reduced overdraft fees to $5 from their industry average of $27. The regulations focused on a bureau analysis on what it actually cost banks to make short-term loans to customers to cover those purchases when a customer’s account went negative. The banking industry stood to lose billions of dollars in overdraft revenue, although banks have been weening themselves off overdraft fee revenue for years. The regulations were overturned by the Republican-controlled Congress in April.

Capital One

In the last days of the Biden administration, the CFPB sued banking giant Capital One for allegedly cheating its customers out of $2 billion in interest payments on their savings accounts. The case involved a product that Capital One sold known as 360 Savings, which the bank advertised as having the best savings rate in the country. Capital One failed to tell some customers that it had another product with a higher savings rate. The case was dropped within days of the Trump administration taking over the bureau.

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Walmart

The CFPB filed a lawsuit in December against Walmart and workforce company Branch Messenger, accusing the companies of deceptively steering delivery drivers to open accounts with Branch, in order for those employees to get instant access to their wages. However, the CFPB said these Branch accounts came with high fees and deceptive marketing, and said Walmart and Branch should return $10 million to harmed drivers. Both Walmart and Branch denied the accusations. The lawsuit was dropped by the CFPB in the first weeks of the Trump administration.

Zelle

The parent company of Zelle, the peer-to-peer payment system, as well as some of the nation’s largest banks, were sued by the CFPB late last year over accusations they failed to protect hundreds of thousands of consumers from rampant fraud on Zelle, in violation of consumer financial laws. The CFPB’s lawsuit claimed hundreds of thousands of customers lost approximately $870 million in funds to fraud over the seven years that Zelle had been in existence. That lawsuit was dropped by the CFPB in March.

By FARNOUSH AMIRI and MATT BROWN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mike Waltz told lawmakers Tuesday at his confirmation hearing to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations that he plans to make the world body “great again,” echoing President Donald Trump’s message for revamping America.

“We should have one place in the world where everyone can talk — where China, Russia, Europe and the developing world can come together and resolve conflicts,” Waltz said. “But after 80 years, it’s drifted from its core mission of peacemaking.”

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it is the first time Waltz is facing lawmakers since he was ousted as national security adviser for mistakenly adding a journalist to a private Signal chat used to discuss sensitive military plans. More than an hour into the hearing, no lawmakers had mentioned the episode.

The U.N. post is the last one to be filled in Trump’s Cabinet following months of delay, including the withdrawal of the previous nominee. Waltz, a former Florida congressman, was introduced by Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida as “a seasoned policy mind and skilled negotiator.”

“With Waltz at the helm, the U.N. will have what I regard as what should be its last chance to demonstrate its actual value to the United States,” Lee said. “Instead of progressive political virtue signaling, the Security Council has the chance to prove its value, and settling disputes and brokering deals.”

First opportunity to ask about the Signal chat

The hearing is providing senators with the first opportunity to grill Waltz over revelations in March that he added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a private text chain on an unclassified messaging app that was used to discuss planning for strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen.

Waltz took responsibility even as criticism mounted against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who shared the sensitive plans in the chat that included several other high-level national security officials. Hegseth shared the same information in another Signal chat that included family, but Trump has made clear Hegseth has his support.

Waltz was removed as national security adviser in May — replaced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio — and nominated for the U.N. role.

Trump praised Waltz in the announcement, saying he has “worked hard to put our Nation’s Interests first.”

United Nations is facing major changes

If confirmed, Waltz would arrive at the U.N. at a moment of great change. The world body is reeling from Trump’s decision to slash foreign assistance — affecting its humanitarian aid agencies — and it anticipates U.S. funding cuts to the U.N. annual budget.

Under an “America First” foreign policy realignment, the White House has asserted that “some of the U.N.’s agencies and bodies have drifted” from their founding mission and “act contrary to the interests of the United States while attacking our allies and propagating anti-Semitism.”

With America being the largest United Nations donor, cutting U.S. funding to the U.N. budget would greatly impair operations.

Facing financial instability, the U.N. has spent months shedding jobs and consolidating projects while beginning to tackle long-delayed reforms. The U.N. is also facing growing frustration over what critics describe as a lack of efficiency and power in delivering on its mandate to end conflict and prevent wars.

John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. who was also national security adviser during Trump’s first term, was critical of the current state of the U.N.

“It’s probably in the worst shape it’s been in since it was founded,” Bolton, now an outspoken Trump critic, recently told The Associated Press.

Waltz accuses UN of antisemitism

Waltz painted a similar strategy to tackling the U.N. job as the previous nominee for the post, with a focus on combating China’s influence around the globe, review U.S. funding to U.N. agencies and initiatives as well as rooting out what he called deep antisemitism within the international body.

His priorities echo Trump and Secretary of State Rubio’s larger foreign policy platform, which has sought to reshape American diplomacy and worked aggressively to shrink the size of the federal government, including recent mass dismissals at the State Department.

Trump’s first nominee, Rep. Elise Stefanik, had a confirmation hearing in January and was expected to be confirmed, but Trump abruptly withdrew her nomination in March, citing risks to the GOP’s historically slim House majority.

At the time, the loss of a mere handful of seats could have swung the House majority to Democrats and derailed their recently successful efforts to enact Trump’s sweeping agenda.

Waltz is still on the White House payroll

Waltz, whose Florida House seat was filled during a special election earlier this year, has spent the last few months on the White House payroll despite being removed as national security adviser. The latest list of White House salaries, current as of July 1, includes Waltz earning an annual salary of $195,200.

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A White House official, granted anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said Waltz stayed on to “ensure a smooth and successful transition given the extreme importance of the role of NSA.”

Waltz was the first Green Beret elected to the House and easily won reelection for a fourth term in November before Trump asked him to join the administration.

Amiri reported from the United Nations. Associated Press writer Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

By JESSE BEDAYN, Associated Press

DENVER (AP) — The murder trial of a Colorado dentist accused of killing his wife by poisoning her protein shakes and later trying to pay someone to kill the lead investigator on the case will begin with opening arguments Tuesday.

James Craig, 47, allegedly used cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, an ingredient in over-the-counter eye drops, to kill his wife of 23 years, Angela Craig, two years ago in suburban Denver.

FILE – This undated booking photo provided by the Aurora, Colo., Police Department shows James Craig. (Aurora Police Department via AP, File)

Craig has pleaded not guilty to several charges, including first-degree murder.

Prosecutors say that Craig allegedly purchased arsenic around the time of his wife’s symptoms — dizziness and headaches that perplexed doctors — and that after his initial attempts to poison her failed, he ordered potassium cyanide.

They also said Craig searched Google for “how to make a murder look like a heart attack” and “is arsenic detectable in an autopsy,” and that he tried to make it appear his wife had killed herself.

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Angela Craig, 43, who had six children with James Craig, was hospitalized several times. After the first time, she can be seen on home surveillance video accusing her husband of implying to medical staff that she was suicidal.

“It’s your fault they treated me like I was a suicide risk, like I did it to myself, and like nothing I said could be believed,” she said to her husband on the video.

After Craig’s arrest in 2023, prosecutors alleged that he offered a fellow jail inmate $20,000 to kill the case’s lead investigator and offered someone else $20,000 to find people to falsely testify that Angela Craig planned to die by suicide.

In addition to first-degree murder, Craig has pleaded not guilty to the other charges, including solicitation to commit murder and solicitation to commit perjury.

Craig’s attorneys have questioned the reliability of the inmate’s claims, said the police were biased against the dentist and that tests of the protein shake containers didn’t reveal signs of poison.

Around the time of his arrest, prosecutors said Craig was experiencing financial difficulties and appeared to be having an affair with a fellow dentist, though they have not yet described a motive in his wife’s death.

Craig remains in custody, according to jail records.