By GREGORY BULL

SAN DIEGO (AP) — About a dozen religious leaders from the San Diego area visited federal immigration court Friday to serve as witnesses to “what goes down” as some cases arising from the Trump administration’s migration crackdown are heard, an organizer said.

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Some migrants have been arrested at the court by federal immigration officers. The Rev. Scott Santarosa, a Jesuit priest who was lead organizer of the group, said the purpose of the visitation “is more than anything just to provide some sense of presence.”

“People are longing for people of faith to walk with vulnerable migrants,” added Santarosa, the pastor of San Diego’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. “Our goal is not trying to prevent arrests — but we can witness it.”

The visit was preceded by a Mass at San Diego’s Catholic Cathedral with bishops and other clergy — including Bishop Michael Pham, the top-ranking official in the group and one of the first bishops to be appointed by Pope Leo XIV after his election as pontiff — offering prayers for refugees and migrants on World Refugee Day. Pham himself is a refugee; he came to the United States unaccompanied as a boy from Vietnam.

The idea for the court visit started during a diocese-wide call to plan events for World Refugee Day, in addition to each church holding a Mass to pray for migrants and refugees, Santarosa said.

The priest said he hopes that visiting the court helps migrant communities — both more recent arrivals and those without legal status to be in the country who have lived in the San Diego area for decades.

“They’re feeling like people just want them to disappear,” Santarosa said, adding that a woman told him, in Spanish: “Father, we feel as if we were hunted, as if we were animals.”

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.

By JOHN O’CONNOR

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — A judge has denied singer R. Kelly ‘s request to be freed from prison, saying she lacks jurisdiction to consider the convicted sex offender’s allegations that federal prison officials plotted to murder him.

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U.S. District Judge Martha M. Pacold canceled Friday’s scheduled arguments in Chicago, and instead issued a five-page ruling denying his emergency request to serve his time on home detention during a temporary furlough.

Born Robert Sylvester Kelly, the 58-year-old Grammy-winning R&B singer is serving sentences at a prison in Butner, North Carolina, for child sex crimes and racketeering.

Pacold noted that federal courts have only limited power in such cases, and one by one she examined and rejected various ways Kelly’s request could be considered.

“Jurisdictional limitations must be respected even where, as here, a litigant claims that the circumstances are extraordinary,” Pacold wrote. “Kelly has not identified (nor is the court aware of) any statute or rule that authorizes the court to exercise jurisdiction. Thus, the court cannot award relief in this case.”

Kelly claimed in a series of filings this month that prison officials solicited white supremacist leaders to kill him, to halt the disclosure of information damaging to prison officials.

Kelly’s attorney says he was then moved to solitary confinement and purposely given an overdose of medication, which required hospitalization and surgery for blood clots.

Pacold noted that Kelly offers no evidence to back up his claims. Government lawyers suggested Kelly had spun a “fanciful conspiracy.”

Known for such hits as “I Believe I Can Fly,” Kelly was found guilty in Chicago in 2022 of three charges of producing child sexual abuse images and three charges of enticement of minors for sex. In New York in 2021, he was found guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking. He is serving most of his 20-year Chicago sentence and 30-year New York sentence simultaneously.

His appeals have been unsuccessful, including to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kelly has also sought President Donald Trump’s help.

By DAVE COLLINS

A Connecticut man whose parents were kidnapped after he took part in a $245 million Bitcoin theft has pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering conspiracy charges and has agreed to testify against his co-defendants, according to court documents that were unsealed this week.

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Veer Chetal, 19, from Danbury, Connecticut, was one of three men charged with stealing 4,100 Bitcoins from a victim in Washington, D.C., in an elaborate online scam last August. The trio lived large after the heist, spending millions of dollars on cars, jewelry, rental mansions and nightclub parties, prosecutors say.

A week after the theft, Chetal’s parents were assaulted and kidnapped briefly in Danbury in a failed ransom plot aimed at Chetal, who the attackers believed had a large amount of cryptocurrency, authorities said.

Chetal’s criminal case was unsealed on Monday in federal court in Washington, revealing his guilty pleas in November and his agreement to cooperate with federal authorities investigating the Bitcoin theft. It also revealed new allegations that he was involved in about 50 similar thefts that raked in another $3 million between November 2023 and September 2024.

Another man charged in the Bitcoin theft, Malone Lam, was also among 13 people indicted by a federal grand jury in May in an alleged online racketeering conspiracy involving cryptocurrency thefts across the U.S. and overseas that netted more than $260 million, including the $245 million Bitcoin theft.

This photo provided by the U.S. Marshals in March 2025 shows Veer Chetal. (U.S. Marshals Service via AP)

Chetal is facing 19 to 24 years in prison, a fine between $50,000 and $500,000 and restitution to the victim that has yet to be determined, according federal sentencing guidelines and his plea agreement.

His lawyer, David Weinstein, declined to comment, saying Chetal’s case is still pending.

In September, federal agents with a search warrant raided Chetal’s apartment in Brunswick, New Jersey, and his parents’ home in Danbury in connection with the $245 million Bitcoin heist. Authorities said they found more than $500,000 in cash, expensive jewelry and watches and high-end clothing. Federal agents also said Chetal had $39 million worth of cryptocurrency that he turned over to investigators.

Authorities alleged Chetal, Lam and Jeandiel Serrano were involved in online “social engineering” attacks against cryptocurrency holders. Lam would send victims alerts about unauthorized attempts to access their crypto accounts, while the others would call the victims posing as representatives from well-known companies like Google and Yahoo and gain access to their accounts, authorities said.

Messages seeking comment were left with lawyers for Lam and Serrano on Friday.

A week after the theft, six Florida men were accused of kidnapping Chetal’s parents in broad daylight in Danbury. One of them crashed a car into the parents’ Lamborghini, while others pulled up in a van, police said. The attackers forced the couple out of their vehicle, beat them, put them in the van and tied them up, police said.

The plot was foiled, and the attackers were arrested quickly because there were eyewitnesses who immediately called police, and an off-duty FBI agent happened to be driving by at the time of the kidnapping, authorities said. Federal agents said a seventh man who was later arrested in connection with the kidnapping had previously gotten into a dispute with Chetal that turned physical at a Miami nightclub.

The attack on the couple is part of an increasing trend worldwide in robbers using violence to steal cryptocurrency.

Chetal, who was attending Rutgers University in New Jersey at the time of the $245 million theft and later withdrew, was born in India and came to the U.S. with his family when he was 4 years old in 2010, according to court documents. His father was granted a foreign worker’s visa, and his wife and children obtained related dependent visas.

Federal authorities said Chetal could face deportation as a result of the criminal case.

Authorities say Chetal’s father lost his job at Morgan Stanley because of the kidnapping and his son’s connection to it.

Chetal was initially released from federal custody on his own recognizance. But a judge ordered him detained until trial earlier this year after federal prosecutors said they discovered Chetal was involved in another crypto theft worth $2 million in October that he didn’t tell them about, after he had begun cooperating with federal authorities.

INTERNATIONAL FALLS, Minn. — When Nancy Imhof goes to the grocery store in International Falls, she glances at the bumpers of vehicles in the parking lot.

“I still look for Canadian license plates,” Imhof said. “There’s a few, not a lot, but there’s a few.”

Since President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20, he’s announced, and then delayed, significant tariffs on Canadian products and threatened to make Canada the “51st state,” prompting some Canadian citizens to boycott the U.S.

Now, their reluctance to visit their neighbor to the south is showing in the border crossing data at two northern Minnesota ports of entry.

From January through May, 25% fewer travelers entered the U.S. from Canada at International Falls compared to the same period last year, and 23% fewer travelers entered the country at the Grand Portage Port of Entry, according to data tracked by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. That includes those entering as pedestrians or in passenger vehicles and trucks.

Across the entire U.S. northern border, travelers crossing into the U.S. by those methods are down about 18% compared to last year.

“We’ve definitely noticed the street traffic being less,” said Imhof, who owns the clothing store Mason’s on Main in International Falls, just three and a half blocks from the border crossing — a bridge over the Rainy River to neighboring Fort Frances, Ontario.

The International Bridge, linking International Falls, Minn., and Fort Frances, Ontario.

“If people aren’t shopping, it’s more to defend their government,” said Imhof, who was born in Canada.

According to border entry data, monthly crossings into the U.S. at Grand Portage and International Falls in 2023 and 2024 were almost always higher compared to the previous year.

The COVID-19 pandemic made for a slow 2022, but Kjersti Vick, a spokesperson for Visit Cook County, said Grand Portage crossings were close to returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Then came 2025.

“It’s definitely noticeable,” Vick said. “We have definitely noticed a decrease.”

At Grand Portage, April saw the biggest dip with 6,800 travelers entering the country, down 38% compared to April 2024.

With fewer travelers on the road, Vick said gas stations, dining and retail are most affected.

Elliot Noyce, co-owner of the Angry Trout Cafe in Grand Marais, Minn., said customer counts are down this year, but since the restaurant doesn’t track where customers come from, he said it’s hard to gauge why.

Around Grand Marais and Cook County, Noyce said there’s uncertainty. “It’s sort of a thing that’s out of our control, so we don’t really give a lot of mind space to it,” she said.

Visit Cook County is running an advertising campaign inviting Canadian citizens to visit, Vick said.

“We want to make sure that they know that they’re welcome and that we love seeing them,” she said. “Because we consider them our neighbors.”

In International Falls, Imhof said the city and Fort Frances are intertwined. If one community doesn’t have something, the other might. For example, she said she is the only place in either town that rents tuxedos.

That interconnection makes cooling tensions between the two countries even more important.

“We just hope that this kind of blows over, or it comes to some sort of workable solution. … People who don’t live in border communities probably don’t understand just how close the relationship is — both directions,” Imhof said.

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