By PATRICK WHITTLE and MAE ANDERSON, Associated Press

OLD ORCHARD BEACH, Maine (AP) — The case of a Maine police officer arrested by immigration authorities even though he was vetted by a government system called “E-Verify” has raised questions about what employers can do to make sure they’re employing people who can legally work.

E-Verify is an online system that compares information entered by an employer from an employee’s documents with records available to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration. It’s used to determine the employment eligibility of citizens and noncitizens.

Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin accused Old Orchard Beach, Maine, of “reckless reliance” on the E-Verify program when it hired Jamaica national Jon Luke Evans, who was later detained and agreed to leave the country earlier this month.

But it’s the government’s own program. And experts say there’s not a whole lot more employers can do in terms of vetting.

“I think employers are between a rock and a hard place,” said Madeline Zavodny, an economics professor at the University of North Florida. “Even an employer who is trying to comply with the law can have difficulty doing it.”

What is E-Verify?

Before 1986, it was essentially legal for employers to hire people regardless of their immigration status. Then came the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which involved a large-scale immigrant legalization program that was paired with a requirement that employers no longer hire people who weren’t legally authorized to work in the U.S.

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Employers then had to fill out a form called an I-9, which required workers to present documents showing that they were authorized to work. But it was difficult to verify if the documents were valid. As part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the E-Verify system was established to help verify those documents.

Unlike I-9 forms, which are federally required for every employer, E-Verify is mandated on a state-by-state basis, otherwise it is voluntary. According to an Equifax tally, about 23 states require E-Verify for at least some public and/or private employers.

Zavodny said the system is generally accurate in terms of matching documents, but there are flaws. For example, if an employee’s right to work is revoked after it has already been verified — perhaps if their visa expires — it doesn’t automatically notify the employer.

A lack of biometrics also hinders the process. If there’s a photo in the E-Verify system, manual photo matching by the employer helps. But a lot of times, there’s no photo in the system.

And the system is not without critics. A 2021 review of E-Verify by the Office of the Inspector General concluded that until U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services addresses the system’s shortcomings, “it cannot ensure the system provides accurate employment eligibility results.”

Trump pushed for more E-Verify use

The federal government’s disagreement with Old Orchard Beach over E-Verify’s reliability came despite pushes by President Donald Trump and his allies to bring the system into wider use. Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term, calls for it to be mandatory.

Use of the system is not widespread. Barely a fifth of U.S. employers use it, though some huge businesses do, including Walmart, Starbucks and Home Depot.

Language calling for mandatory nationwide E-Verify was dropped from budget proposals during the first Trump administration. The system has also faced criticism from some employers.

An Omaha, Nebraska, food packaging company owner said a raid of his business by immigration officials this year came despite his use of E-Verify for employees. Glenn Valley Foods owner Gary Rohwer said in June that the business “did everything we could possibly do” to hire eligible workers.

Rohwer didn’t respond to requests for comment this month. Old Orchard Beach officials declined to comment on the town’s recent troubles. DHS officials also didn’t respond.

Others say they’ve had good experiences with the system. Kyle Sobko, CEO of SonderCare, a Calgary, Alberta-based company that makes hospital beds for the home, has a staff of 50, including 20 in the U.S.

He uses E-Verify and said he hasn’t had any problems.

“We trust the system for its reliability and integration with our hiring process,” he said.

Sobko said the situation in Old Orchard Beach raises some concerns about the system’s limitations. But he doesn’t plan on making any changes since the warning about “reckless reliance” on E-Verify.

Experts say reliance is not reckless

Despite the system’s flaws, characterization of E-Verify use as “reckless” is an “outrageous” claim, said Kathleen Campbell Walker, a Texas attorney who is a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Walker described the process as “not a get out of jail free card” for prospective employees, but as one that has evolved over the years and become more robust in its ability to provide accurate background checks.

Walker said McLaughlin’s description of “reckless reliance” on E-Verify should give employers pause.

“The whole idea is that I’m supposed to rely on E-Verify to show my good faith and to have a more secure workforce,” she said. “Not that reliance upon it is somehow irresponsible.”

Advocates for the rights of immigrants have said instances in which employees clear the E-Verify system but end up arrested by immigration officials anyway point to a broken immigration system.

“We have an immigration system that is not functioning to the extent that a federal system would both clear someone to work and at the same time, they could somehow get onto ICE’s radar,” said Molly Curren Rowles, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Going beyond E-Verify can be risky

Small businesses are in a tough spot since they don’t necessarily have the resources or motivation to do more than what is required to verify employment eligibility status.

“Businesses should not be in the business of being the paperwork investigator for the federal government,” said Frank Knapp Jr., president & CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce. “The federal government ought to be doing that.”

Knapp has pushed back on his state’s mandate for E-Verify because he said it puts too much of the onus on small business owners.

“It’s an extra layer of administration just to do the E-Verify for small businesses, and the federal government is saying, oh, you do this because you want to verify that somebody is in this country legally,” he said. “But now their own administration is saying, ‘Oh, no, no. That’s not enough.’”

James M. Cooney, a labor and employment law expert in the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations in New Jersey, said it can be tricky to go beyond the basics of what’s required to verify identification without running the risk of a discrimination charge.

“If an employer tries to do more than what is permitted under the I-9 and E-Verify, that will very often be seen as illegal discrimination,” he said. “And so that really puts employers at a tough spot.”

Anderson reported from New York.

Matcha — a green tea powder deeply rooted in Japanese tea ceremonies — has surged in U.S. popularity in recent years. Its vibrant green color has become a social media staple, flaunted by influencers and wellness-conscious consumers.

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Performative as it may seem, matcha is also addictively delicious — at least to some. To others, it just tastes like grass. But as anyone who has developed a habit for the earthy beverage will tell you, it’s also incredibly expensive.

I couldn’t possibly count how much I’ve paid for matcha since I first started drinking it in 2020 and if I could, I’d be embarrassed. In a moment of weakness, I once spent $11.50 on a latte, an unusually high price even for New York City, where I live.

But like any consumables, there’s no price ceiling — especially during a shortage, as with matcha. A limited supply combined with steep new U.S. tariffs could make both your — and my — daily fix that much more expensive.

How much does matcha typically cost?

Matcha represents a small portion of the U.S. tea market, says Peter Goggi, president of the Tea Association of USA, a trade group representing U.S. tea interests.

“The U.S. is very predominantly a black tea–drinking nation, and more than 70% of the tea consumed here is iced tea,” says Goggi. “So we’re a very different market than any other tea-consuming market in the world.”

Goggi says that matcha represents roughly 2.8% of the U.S. tea market by dollars — and even smaller by weight. At the end of the day, matcha is just powdered tencha leaves, which can be served hot or cold with water and as a latte with milk. Even so, the price can vary drastically on the shelf and in cafes depending on the location and type of matcha served.

Chains are no exception. Starbucks’s grande iced matcha latte costs $6.80 at my nearby Starbucks in Brooklyn. My colleagues logged $5.25 in Ann Arbor, Mich.; $5.89 in Tucker, Ga.; $5.95 in Ripon, Calif.; and $6.01 in Seattle. The coffee super giant recently added an upcharge for additional matcha powder.

If you make matcha at home, the price for a tin or bag of powder varies drastically by brand and amount, but also by tea leaf grade, which is used as an unofficial classification in the tea industry. One ounce of matcha can make roughly 14 servings of tea.

Ceremonial: First-harvest tencha leaves grown in shade for up to four weeks before handpicking. It’s then ground into a fine powder with a bright green hue. Ceremonial grade tea can only be sourced in Japan. It’s the most expensive of the three grades. You can purchase, at the lowest end, ceremonial grade for around $30 an ounce, but the highest quality powders can go for up to $6,000 per pound, according to Goggi.

Ready-to-drink: Made with second-harvest tencha leaves. It falls somewhere between culinary grade and ceremonial grade in taste and cost. The powder looks less vibrant than ceremonial grade, but still clearly a vivid green.

Culinary: The lowest cost matcha and is meant to be used in cooking and baking. The tencha leaves used in culinary grade matcha are typically older — third-harvest or more. The color of the powder is usually a dull brownish-green color. A typical bag of the powder can cost anywhere from $10 to $25 per ounce.

Why is there a matcha shortage?

Like most shortages, matcha’s comes down to supply and demand. In this case, demand has boomed, largely due to social media trends and appeal for health-minded consumers, says Goggi. “At this point, the pressure is almost all on matcha,” he adds.

The Global Japanese Tea Association (GJTA) reports that Japanese tea exports have grown from 1% of the country’s total production in the early 2000s to roughly 10% by the end of 2023. And in 2024, half of the 8,798 metric tons of green tea exported from Japan was matcha, according to Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

In Kyushu, one of Japan’s four main islands, tea exports grew by 24% in 2024, largely due to matcha’s popularity, the GJTA said. The U.S. is its key export market.

Local producers in Japan are overwhelmed, even as suppliers have expanded to other nations including China and India. But ceremonial matcha, by definition, can only be produced in Japan, which puts added pressure on suppliers.

“It’s one of the few teas you can’t just ‘turn on the spout’ and make more of,” says Goggi. “It requires very specific treatment before harvest, and that takes time.”

The seasonality of matcha production makes it more difficult to meet year-round demand. Tencha plants take five years to mature and are picked once a year — in springtime. The highest grade matcha requires a certain amount of shading before it’s picked in order to boost chlorophyll and L-theanine, which affect its color and flavor. After picking, the leaves must be steamed, dried, sorted, slowly ground up using stone mills and packaged.

“Matcha only represents about 7% to 8% of total tea production in Japan, but Japan really owns the market,” says Goggi. “The entire infrastructure of tea production has declined mainly because of the aging of people involved in the tea business. Most of these farms are family-owned tea farms, so there’s a lot of pressure on tea consumption and production in Japan.”

Producing matcha is a labor-intensive process and there aren’t enough workers to meet the demand, says Goggi. The downward trend is largely due to an aging population in agriculture as fewer young workers are opting to enter tea farming.

Like most agriculture, matcha farmers also struggle with the effects of climate change, including high heat which stunts production. Last year was Japan’s hottest year on record and July marked the nation’s highest month on record.

How will tariffs affect the cost of matcha?

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that his tariffs will boost domestic manufacturing and production. But agricultural imports are different and U.S. production won’t be able to replace Japanese supply.

“[Tea farms in the U.S.] represent 0.02% of what’s consumed in the U.S. — so it’s virtually nothing,” says Goggi. “There’s no way that the U.S. can ever be a large enough tea producer to satisfy domestic demand.”

It’s the same story with other agricultural products, like bananas or coffee. Yes, the U.S. grows some, but nowhere near the scale needed to meet consumer demand. That means that imports remain essential.

The Tax Foundation projects that 75% of all food imports will be impacted by tariffs, and says those tariffs will lead to higher prices for consumers.

Matcha is primarily sourced from Japan, which faces a 15% tariff. Secondary producers face even higher tariffs — India was recently slapped with a 50% tariff, while China currently has a 30% tariff, which could go up if a deal isn’t reached.

Unless distributors or retailers swallow the added cost, matcha prices will likely rise on store shelves, your online cart and at your local cafe. Tariffs, combined with Japan’s production limits, could push prices even higher.

“Ultimately, the price of tea will have to absorb these tariffs,” says Goggi. “And that happens on the shelf — consumers will pick it up.”

Anna Helhoski writes for NerdWallet. Email: anna@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @AnnaHelhoski.

The article Can Your Matcha Addiction Survive a Shortage and Tariffs? originally appeared on NerdWallet.

By MIKE STOBBE, Associated Press Medical Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The CDC is in chaos and some groups are starting to step in and take over work the agency was doing.

The moves come in response to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s extensive — and some say illegal — restructuring and downsizing of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Many public health veterans see an agency wracked by a leadership crisis, staff cuts, budget cuts and unprecedented levels of political meddling. The concern hit a crescendo when the White House moved to oust the agency’s director and some top CDC leaders resigned in protest.

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But even before CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired, some organizations started pursuing new ways to do jobs formerly handled by the CDC.

Some are working to preserve longstanding vaccination recommendations. Some are trying to release information that CDC has stopped providing. Others aim to maintain health data collections at risk of being lost.

But these outside efforts don’t have the federal funding, resources, legal mechanisms or platform that have been the underpinning of the nation’s public health system. As noble as they are, these patchwork efforts probably won’t cut it, some experts say.

“There may be some workarounds,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health. “But I’m not sure it’s fair or appropriate that people feel like they have to turn to private groups instead of the government.”

Vaccination guidance tops the list

For decades, the CDC has set the nation’s standards on vaccines — which ones are recommended and who should get them.

The recommendations were guidance, not law. But they were automatically adopted by doctors, school systems, health insurers and others.

They were the result of a lengthy data review process involving a panel of outside experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

But in May, Kennedy — a longtime leader in the anti-vaccine movement — announced COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women. He made the decision without input from the ACIP.

In June, he abruptly dismissed the entire panel, accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers. He replaced them with a handpicked group that included several vaccine skeptics, and then shut the door to several doctors groups that had long helped form ACIP recommendations.

It’s not clear what other changes are in store for ACIP, but a number of medical groups say Kennedy can’t be counted on to make decisions based on robust medical evidence.

The moves sparked a group of public health researchers and others to form the Vaccine Integrity Project, based at the University of Minnesota, which is aims to become the kind of compiler and reporter of medical evidence that the CDC and ACIP have been in the past.

A committee meeting without CDC

In mid-August, the group held an ACIP-like Zoom meeting, in which subject-matter experts presented lengthy reviews of recent research about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19, flu and RSV vaccines for children, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.

It also featured a four-person panel of experts, including the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. Like ACIP members, they asked presenters questions about their analyses.

Presenters made clear that they had to base their presentations on what had appeared in medical journals and was publicly available; they weren’t privy to unpublished surveillance and safety data that CDC collects.

The group is not making vaccination recommendations itself. But it is working with doctors organizations that are. One is the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which has said pregnant women should continue to get COVID-19 shots — counter to what Kennedy announced. Another is the American Academy of Pediatrics continuing to recommend them for children ages 6 months to 2 years.

But as medical societies split from CDC, it’s not yet clear which recommendations insurers will heed when making coverage decisions. And there remain a number of other questions, such as: What will happen in states that have vaccination policies tied to ACIP recommendations?

In Massachusetts, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey included language in a $2.45 billion supplemental budget bill that gives the health department authority to set its own recommendations and requirements if the federal government “fails to maintain a robust schedule of vaccine recommendations.”

Some other efforts now underway:

Vaccine finders

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC teamed up with researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School on www.vaccines.gov. The website told about newly developed vaccines recommended to protect against the coronavirus and served as a search engine to help people find nearby pharmacies that had the shots in stock.

But the site gradually dropped information about vaccines and why they were recommended, and this year became a stripped-down version that simply said: “Find a pharmacy near you” and a box to type in your zip code. When the government’s contract with Boston Children’s Hospital ended in late July, the site stopped working altogether.

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital this month restarted a version of the site that existed before the pandemic, www.vaccinefinder.org.

“We’re turning back to what it was,” said John Brownstein of Boston Children’s, who founded the site. “Obviously, as a (government) site it carries more weight. But if that isn’t in the cards, we’re very happy to carry the torch.”

Dental safety

Last month, the Association for Dental Safety launched a new institute for dental safety that was designed to pick up some of the work done by the CDC’s Division of Oral Health, which was eliminated in the spring. The new institute is first focused on updating infection controls guidelines for dental offices, which the CDC last updated in 2003.

“Without a doubt, ADS is the best choice to continue oversight of dental infection prevention and control guidelines, ensuring recommendations are current, scientifically sound, translated into lay terms and disseminated to those who need them on a daily basis,” said Nicole Johnson, former associate director in the CDC’s Division of Oral Health, in a press statement.

Pregnancy data

The CDC’s Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, which annually surveys women across the country, lost its entire staff — about 20 people — in layoffs this year. It was the most comprehensive collection of data on the health behaviors and outcomes before, during and after childbirth. Researchers have been using its data to investigate the nation’s maternal mortality problem.

Some states that have the money and motivation might decide to run similar surveys, just within their borders. California runs its own, PRAMS-like survey.

But “if states are doing their own thing, then we don’t have national, comparable data across jurisdictions and across time,” meaning its not possible to see where problems are most severe and which policies to reduce maternal deaths are working, said Jamie Daw, a Columbia University health policy researcher focused on pregnancy.

Violence prevention

Kennedy recently fired about 100 CDC staffers who provided training, education, and advice to state and local violence prevention programs, and evaluate how well they were working.

“What’s the point in knowing the about the rates of violence if you’re not going to do anything about it?” said Sarah DeGue, one of the laid-off CDC researchers.

But existing programs still need technical guidance and expertise. In May, DeGue founded Violence Prevention Solutions, a consulting firm, to help community organizations develop and evaluate programs.

“It’s us trying to rebuild what we had somewhere else, in a different way, so that all the knowledge and experience and resources that we had can still be available,” she said.

AP reporter Michael Casey in Boston contributed.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By SEUNG MIN KIM, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has revoked Secret Service protection for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a senior White House official on Friday.

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Former vice presidents typically get federal government protection for six months after leaving office, while ex-presidents do so for life. But another person familiar with the matter says then-President Joe Biden quietly signed a directive that had extended protection for Harris beyond the traditional six months.

The people insisted on anonymity Friday to discuss a matter not made public.

Trump is a Republican, and Biden and Harris are Democrats. Trump defeated Harris in the presidential election last year after Biden dropped out of the contest and Harris replaced him.

Harris is a former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney. She recently announced she will not run for governor next year.