Jeanette Vizguerra, an immigration advocate being held in an Aurora, Colorado, detention facility, has been named a winner of an annual human rights award by a nonprofit set up in the late Robert F. Kennedy’s memory.

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights announced last week that the activist will be a recipient of its 42nd annual Human Rights Award alongside Maine Gov. Janet Mills and former U.S. Department of Justice pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer.

However, barring any changes to her U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, Vizguerra will be unable to attend the ceremony in Washington, D.C., on June 5. She was taken into federal custody on March 17 and has since fought ICE’s claim of a reinstated removal order in court on the premise that her First Amendment rights were allegedly violated.

“Recently, while detained in a detention center, I received the news that I had received this human rights award,” Vizguerra said in a news release issued Thursday. “I work independently, using my own resources. With these resources, although limited, I believe I have made a difference in the movement for social justice.”

Vizguerra’s attorney, Laura Lichter, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights is a nonpartisan organization named after the former senator who served as U.S. attorney general during his brother’s presidency and was assassinated in 1968 while he ran for the Democratic nomination for president.

The organization is led by Kerry Kennedy, his daughter, who is also a human rights activist. She is the sister of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary in President Donald Trump’s administration, who has ignited controversy over his vaccine skepticism and more.

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Her nonprofit described the RFK Human Rights Award as an honor bestowed upon recipients who strive to further social justice in nonviolent ways. It includes a cash prize and additional support from the organization.

“As the daughter of our former attorney general, I know firsthand the necessity of protecting and preserving our democracy,” Kerry Kennedy said in a statement. “From taking a stand against unlawful executive orders and bolstering the moral strength of the Department of Justice to advocating for vulnerable immigrants, these women have chosen to stand up for their beliefs during a time when it is increasingly difficult to do so.”

Vizguerra first crossed the U.S. southern border from Mexico illegally in 1997, and she gained national attention for her advocacy after sheltering in two Denver churches to avoid deportation during Trump’s first term. She was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2017.

“The government wants to silence my voice, but I will continue to sow rebellion until I reap freedom,” Vizguerra said. “This award is not only for me but for every person who has been involved in my life — especially my children and my immigrant community. I hope our voices are never silenced.”

By CHRIS MEGERIAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — In Joe Biden’s family, there’s a saying that the three worst words anyone can hear are “you have cancer.”

One decade ago, his son Beau died from a brain tumor. Several years later, his wife Jill had two cancerous lesions removed in her own brush with the disease.

Now it is the former president’s turn. Biden’s office disclosed his prostate cancer diagnosis over the weekend, saying it has already spread to his bones.

Although the cancer can possibly be controlled with treatment, it is no longer curable. The announcement is a bitter revelation that a disease that has brought so much tragedy to Biden’s life could be what ends it.

“Cancer touches us all,” Biden wrote on social media. “Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places.”

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Even before the diagnosis, Biden’s post-presidency was shadowed by questions about his health and whether he should have run for reelection. As questions about his fitness for office mounted, he abandoned the campaign and Donald Trump retook the presidency by defeating Kamala Harris. As the 82-year-old Biden works to safeguard his damaged political legacy, he’ll also be fighting a disease that shaped the final chapters of his decades-long career.

Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president when Beau died in 2015. He decided not to seek the Democratic nomination the following year, which helped clear a path for Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016.

Valerie Jarrett, a longtime Obama adviser, said Biden wanted to “channel his grief into action and figure out how we can do better” on treating cancer to “make sure that other people didn’t have to go through what he went through.”

The effort was formalized as a White House task force, with Biden in charge. After a few years out of office, Biden re-entered politics to campaign against Trump in 2020. The heartache from Beau’s death was never far from the surface though. His eldest son had been Delaware’s attorney general and often viewed as Biden’s political successor.

“Beau should be the one running for president, not me,” Biden said, a thought he echoed on many occasions.

He made fighting cancer a focus for his presidency, resurrecting a “moonshot” initiative to increase funding for research and improve treatment. He unveiled the initiative at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in 2022, echoing the Democratic icon’s famous speech declaring that “we will go to the moon” six decades earlier.

“Beating cancer is something we can do together,” Biden said.

By this point, he had already signed legislation known as the PACT Act to expand healthcare benefits for veterans. The law guarantees treatment for chronic illnesses blamed on burn pits, which were used to dispose of chemicals, tires, plastics, medical equipment and human waste on military bases.

Biden left no doubt that he believed Beau’s death resulted from his service with the National Guard in Iraq.

“When they came home, many of the fittest and best warriors that we sent to war were not the same — headaches, numbness, dizziness, cancer,” he said. “My son Beau was one of them.”

Denis McDonough, who led the Veterans Affairs Department under Biden, said the president didn’t talk about Beau’s death during policy discussions. But he said it was clear that Biden “knew the experience that other families were having, and he was going to be damn sure that we weren’t going to miss an opportunity to address that.”

McDonough recalled that Biden wanted the new law to take effect as quickly as possible.

“He had an option to stretch it out,” he said. “He said no way.”

The following year, first lady Jill Biden had two cancerous lesions removed, one above her right eye and the other on her chest. They were both basal cell carcinoma.

Learning of the diagnosis “was a little harder than I thought,” she told The Associated Press during a trip to Africa.

“I’m lucky,” she said. “Believe me, I am so lucky that they caught it, they removed it, and I’m healthy.”

Biden’s cancer diagnosis is not the first time that he’s faced his own mortality.

Months after ending his first presidential campaign in 1988, he collapsed in a New York hotel room. In his memoir “Promises to Keep,” he described “lightning flashing inside my head, a powerful electrical surge — and then a rip of pain like I’d never felt before.”

He had suffered a brain aneurysm that required surgery. Biden wrote that “I had no real fear of dying. I’d long since accepted the fact that life’s guarantees don’t include a fair shake.”

McDonough imagined that Biden would feel similarly about his current situation.

“He’s always on to the next fight,” he said.

By JAKE COYLE

CANNES, France (AP) — Last year, the Cannes Film Festival produced three best actress nominees at the Oscars. This year’s edition may have just supplied another.

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In Lynne Ramsay’s “Die, My Love,” Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson play a married couple with a newborn who move into an old country house. In Ramsay’s messy and moving marital psychodrama, Lawrence plays an increasingly unhinged young mother named Grace whose postpartum depression reaches darkly hallucinatory extremes.

For Lawrence, the 34-year-old mother of two, making “Die, My Love” was an intensely personal experience.

“It was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what (Grace) would do,” Lawrence told reporters Sunday. “I had just had my firstborn, and there’s not really anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating. She doesn’t have a community. She doesn’t have her people. But the truth is, extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating, no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.”

“Die, My Love,” which is in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, was one of the most anticipated premieres of the festival. That was owed partly to the widely respect for Ramsey, the Scottish director of “Ratcatcher” (1999), “Movern Callar” (2002) and “ You Were Never Really Here” (2017). Lawrence sought her out for the film.

“I’ve wanted to work with Lynne Ramsay since I saw ‘Ratcatcher’ and I was like, ‘There’s no way,’” said Lawrence. “But we took a chance, and we sent it to her. And I really, I cannot believe that I’m here with you.”

In Ramsay’s “Die, My Love,” adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel, is disorienting experience, pulsating with animalistic urges and manic spurts of violence. As a portrait of a marriage in trouble, it makes “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” look tame.

“Die, My Love” was quickly snapped up by Mubi on Sunday. In easily the biggest sale of the festival, the indie distributor plunked down $24 million for distribution rights to the film in the U.S. and multiple other territories.

Lawrence’s performance, in particular, drew the kind of raves in Cannes that tend to lead to Oscar consideration. Lawrence has been nominated four times by the Academy Awards, winning once for 2013’s “Silver Linings Playbook.”

Since then, much has changed for Lawrence, including becoming a mother. On Saturday, Lawrence said parenthood has been such an enriching experience for her that, she joked, “I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”

“Having children changes everything. It changes your whole life. It’s brutal and incredible,” Lawrence said. “I didn’t know that I could feel so much.”

“My job has a lot to do with emotion, and they’ve opened up the world to me,” she added. “It’s almost like feeling like a blister or something. So sensitive. So they’ve changed my life, obviously, for the best, and they’ve changed me creatively.”

Pattinson, who recently had his first child with Suki Waterhouse, chimed in that he found having a baby “gives you the biggest trove of energy and inspiration.”

Lawrence mockingly pounced on him: “You get energy?!”

Pattinson let out a sigh. “This question is impossible for a guy to answer correctly,” he said, to laughter.

By TED ANTHONY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — By the middle of last week, it became clear that something odd was happening. It was about the time that the fake video started circulating about the woman purporting to recount the “situationship” she’d had with Robert Prevost, the new American pope, decades ago when he was just another guy from Chicago.

We’d already seen Topps, the baseball-card company, issue a new card of Pope Leo XIV that was all over eBay. We’d heard about his affinity for the White Sox and seen a glimpse of him in the crowd at the 2005 World Series. And in the wake of online speculation over whether he favored the Chicago beef sandwich or Chicago-style hot dogs, we’d seen Portillo’s, a local eatery, name a sandwich after him — “”a divinely seasoned Italian beef, baptized in gravy and finished with the holy trinity of peppers.”

Then there was the Instagram video featuring two guys outlining the ways the new pontiff was a product of his upbringing: “The pope’s a Midwesterner. Bread and wine is now cheese and beer,” says one. Retorts the other: “The pope’s a Midwesterner. Collection baskets now accept Kohl’s cash.”

Popes: They’re just like us?

The Chicago White Sox honors Pope Leo XIV on the scoreboard before a baseball game against the Miami Marlins, Friday, May 8, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/David Banks)

Not exactly. The former Bob Prevost is hardly just another guy from Chicago. But you wouldn’t know that by the burst of American fanfare surrounding the newly minted Pope Leo XIV. He has been called out for his eating proclivities (Jimmy Fallon: “deep-dish communion wafers?”), for his sports affiliations, for his lively sibling relationships and more. Fake videos of him weighing in on basketball and Donald Trump in classic Midwestern ways are proliferating.

Why are we so focused on making sure the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church is also a regular guy from the Midwest? Some of it is pride, you betcha. But another answer lies in Americans’ peculiar and complex relationship with fame and power that goes way back to the founding of the nation itself.

American ‘regular guy-ism’ began with the nation itself

When the United States became the United States in 1776, it rejected King George III, the crown’s taxes and the ornate accoutrements and sensibilities that surrounded royalty.

In its place grew democracy, effectively the cult of the regular guy. As the decades passed, the sensibility of “effete” royalty from back east — whether “back east” was England or, ultimately, Washington — became scorned. By the time Andrew Jackson’s form of populism began to flourish in the 1830s, the “regular guy” in the rising democratic republic became a revered trope. Thus the tales of Abraham Lincoln growing up in a log cabin and splitting rails just like the rest of us — or, at least, the 19th-century rural American “rest of us.”

“Our culture is one that is based on the rejection of monarchy and class distinctions and yet is fascinated by monarchies and those who we see as set above and apart,” says David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “We want these figure to look up to but also to sit down with.”

And it has stayed that way, politically and culturally, right up until today.

A man takes a picture of a brochure that reads “A prayer of thankfulness for the election of Pope Leo XIV” during a mass at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, Sunday, May 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Think about how the ideal presidential candidate has evolved from the time of, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an effete Easterner who favored a long cigarette holder, to today. Ronald Reagan talked in the homespun language of hearth and home. Bill Clinton played a sax and answered the time-honored question of “boxers or briefs.” George Bush, now a nondrinker, became “a guy you’d want to have a beer with.” (Jon Stewart famously shot that down by saying: “I want my president to be the designated driver.”)

This down-to-Earth sensibility was evident in the press conference that American cardinals held after Leo was elevated. No intense church music accompanied their entrance; instead, it was “American Pie” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” — foundational pillars of popular culture, with an emphasis on “popular.” The message: This is not a “back east” pope.

“Popes have always been alien — strangers,” says John Baick, an American historian at Western New England University. “We like and trust that he is one of us. The Midwest is the place of hard work, the place of decency, the place of listening, the place of manners. This is the person you want to sit on the other side of that diner on a Sunday morning.”

He places Leo’s ascension as a bookend to John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 — a resounding signal, this time globally, that Catholicism is compatible with Americanism.

But as for the “he’s one of us” approach, that says more about the people watching Leo than about the actual pope. “He has done none of this himself,” Baick says. “The connections are things that we have desperately created. We are so desperate for normalcy, for a regular guy.”

This guy is far more than the pope next door

And yet …

Americans famously adored Princess Diana, “the people’s princess.” People like the Kennedys and Grace Kelly — before she became an actual princess — were referred to as “American royalty.” And even though we’re a long way from the days of Bogie, Bacall and Greta Garbo — a generation into the “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” era — Americans still love to put people on pedestals and bring them back down, sometimes at the same time.

Grace Mellor prays as she holds a brochure that reads “A prayer of thankfulness for the election of Pope Leo XIV” during a mass at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, Sunday, May 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

The latest iteration of this is tied to reality TV, which took regular people and turned them into personalities, figures, commodities.

“This country is positioned as a place where anybody can succeed. It plays directly into that — the regular person who succeeds on a large scale,” says Danielle Lindemann, author of “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.”

“We’re kind of obsessed with this everyday Joe who is plucked from obscurity and becomes famous. In the United States, that’s a salient and dominant narrative,” says Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “We almost feel like we have relationships with these people. We’re getting so much personal information about him, and it facilitates that sense of closeness.”

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Prevost, of course, is not your average Midwesterner. His Spanish, among other tongues, is fluent. He spent two decades in Peru, where he also holds citizenship (and where, it must be said, there is footage of him singing “Feliz Navidad” into a microphone at a Christmas party). And there’s that small matter that he is now the head of a global church of 1.4 billion souls.

So a new era begins for both the United States and the Catholic Church — an age-old hierarchy and a society that demands egalitarianism, or the appearance of it, from the people it looks up to. And at the intersection of those two principles sits Robert Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, an accomplished man in his own right but also an empty vessel into which broad swaths of humanity will pour their expectations — be they about eternity or simply the South Side of Chicago.

“Popes want to connect with people, and the church wants that as well. But the peril is that such familiarity breeds not so much contempt as disobedience,” Gibson says.

“The pope is not your friend. He is not going to sit down and have a beer with you,” he says. “If you think the pope is your pal, will you feel betrayed when he reminds you of your religious and moral duties, and chides you for failing to follow them?”

Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.