By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ and CHRISTOPHER WEBER, Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A researcher at Texas A&M University flying home from abroad was detained for more than a week by immigration authorities at the San Francisco International Airport, sleeping in a chair and living off food sold in the airport, his family and attorneys said Thursday.

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It was unclear why Tae Heung “Will” Kim, who is a legal permanent resident with a green card, was detained July 21, his attorney Karl Krooth said at a news conference. Kim, who went to South Korea to attend his brother’s wedding, is now in removal proceedings to be deported and is being held at an immigration detention facility in Arizona, Krooth said, adding that he has yet to talk to his client.

Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that any green card holder who has a drug offense is in violation of their legal status and can be detained. His attorneys said Kim was charged in 2011 with misdemeanor marijuana possession in Texas, where recreational use is illegal.

His attorneys declined to discuss those charges Thursday. But one attorney told the Washington Post, which first reported on Kim’s detention, that he fulfilled a community service requirement and successfully petitioned for nondisclosure to seal the offense from the public record.

Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has launched an unprecedented campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him. American citizens, legal permanent residents, visa holders and visitors have been stopped at airports and detained for days. Some have faced deportation for minor infractions.

Kim, 40, has spent most of his life in the U.S., arriving at the age of 5. After helping out in his family’s doll-manufacturing business following the death of his father, he recently entered a doctoral program at Texas A&M and is helping to research a vaccine for Lyme disease.

His attorney said holding Kim at the airport denied him his right to due process.

“The airport is not a detention facility. The airport is not in the immigration courtroom. And Customs and Border Protection officers are interrogators, they are not neutral arbiters,” he said.

Krooth said his client was moved between two small rooms in the daytime at the airport.

“He was moved within what’s called secondary inspection at least twice per day from one area where there were no windows,” Krooth said.

At night he was moved to another room where he slept in a chair, Krooth said. An airport spokesperson said in an email that “the airport is not notified when CBP denies entry to a passenger,” referring inquiries to federal officials.

His attorneys were not allowed access and Kim while he was at the airport and he was given only one phone call and periodic texts with his brother. There has been no communication with Kim since he’s been transferred to Arizona, Krooth said.

Kim’s mother, Yehoon “Sharon” Lee, told reporters Thursday through an interpreter that her son has asthma and she worries about him getting proper medical care in detention.

Lee told the Washington Post that she and her husband entered the U.S. on business visas in the 1980s, and by the time they became naturalized citizens, Kim was too old to get automatic citizenship.

Weber reported from Los Angeles.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — SpaceX was back one day after a weather-related scrub and threaded the needle amid threatening clouds to send up the Crew-11 mission to the International Space Station.

A Falcon 9 rocket topped with the Crew Dragon Endeavour lifted off from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A at 11:43 a.m. carrying NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov to space.

“I have no emotions but joy right now. That was absolutely transcendent — ride of a lifetime,” said Cardman, making her first trip to space.

“Boy, it’s great to be back in orbit again,” added Fincke, a veteran of three previous missions. “Thank you to SpaceX and NASA to get us here. What a ride.”

The first-stage booster made its third flight and touched back down for what was SpaceX’s final use of Landing Zone 1 at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station sending a sonic boom across the Space Coast.

The rocket shot through a break amid darkening clouds and into space. The previous day, they had their launch scrubbed with one minute and seven seconds on the countdown clock  when a storm cell opened up right over the pad. They actually had to put on raincoats over their spacesuits as they made their way out of the capsule for what turned out to be just a one-day delay.

The quartet, who arrived to KSC on Saturday, were back Friday getting prepped for launch, donning their spacesuits after 7 a.m. at the Neil Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building. They made their walkout after 8 a.m. to ride over to launch pad in black Teslas with license plates that read “Live,” “Laugh” and “Launch.”

By 9 a.m. the had made their way up the launch tower to climb back on board their spacecraft. With an hour to go, all were prepped in their seats with the hatch closed awaiting fueling and arming of the launch escape system.

When it does launch, NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich said it will be groundbreaking for NASA use of a commercial spacecraft.

“We worked very hard with SpaceX to complete all the reuse activities for this vehicle. We had certified the vehicles – the Dragons – for only five flights. Now, we’ve completed all that work, and we’re really ready to go,” he said.

It was the same Crew Dragon that flew the first astronauts for SpaceX back in 2020, now part of a stable of five crew-capable Dragons. With Crew-11’s launch, SpaceX will have flown 74 humans across 19 missions in just over five years.

The mission will relieve the Crew-10 members who have been on board the space station since mid-March, but won’t undock until they complete a short handover period during with the space station population will grow from seven to 11.

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Crew-11 is targeting docking with the station around 3 a.m. Saturday after a 16-hour trip. The crew will be on the station for at least six months, but NASA could stretch the mission to as long as eight months.

For its members, Cardman and Platonov are rookies while Yui is making his second trip having flown to the station a decade ago, and Fincke is making his fourth trip to space having last flown to the station as part STS-134, the last flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour, as well as two previous missions on Soyuz spacecraft.

Cardman had originally been tapped to command the Crew-9 mission, but was bumped after NASA needed space on board to allow for the return flight to the two Boeing Starliner astronauts that were left behind on the station when their spacecraft was sent home without crew because of safety concerns.

Fincke and Yui had both been training to fly future crewed missions of Starliner, but were shifted to this SpaceX mission as Boeing’s beleaguered spacecraft continues to face delays.

With their arrival to the station, the orbiting laboratory will have welcomed 290 people from 26 nations. The station will mark 25 years of continuous human presence in November having began Expedition 1 in 2000. The Crew-11 crew will become of Expedition 73 when they arrive and continue on as part of Expedition 74 that begins in November when the next replacement crew from Russia arrives.

By ALEXANDRA OLSON, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The Senate confirmed Andrea Lucas to another term as commissioner of the country’s workplace civil rights agency, demonstrating firm Republican support for her efforts to root out diversity programs, roll back protections for transgender workers and prioritize religious rights in the workplace.

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Democratic lawmakers and prominent civil rights groups fiercely opposed Lucas’ confirmation, saying she has subjected the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to the whims of the president, who elevated her to acting chair in January and, in an unprecedented act, fired two of the agency’s Democratic commissioners before their terms expired.

Lucas, who was first appointed to the EEOC in 2020, secured another five-year term with a 52-45 party-line Senate vote on Thursday night, but it will be up to President Donald Trump if she continues as chair.

Lucas has firmly aligned the EEOC with Trump’s civil rights agenda, declaring during her confirmation hearing last month that she doesn’t consider the agency to be independent, a position she acknowledged was a shift from her previously stated views.

In compliance with Trump’s executive order declaring two unchangeable sexes, the EEOC dropped lawsuits on behalf of transgender workers and stalled progress on others. Lucas has also leveraged the EEOC’s enforcement powers to help the Trump administration target private institutions over their DEI programs or allegations of antisemitism. Her confirmation came a week after the EEOC secured a $21 million settlement with Columbia University over allegations of harassment against Jewish employees, part of a broader agreement with the Trump administration to restore federal research money.

“I look forward to continuing the historic progress this agency has made since the start of the second Trump Administration under my leadership — from securing multiple settlements with some of the world’s largest law firms to disavow DEI and embrace merit-based hiring and other employment practices, to obtaining the largest EEOC settlement to date for victims of antisemitism on behalf of Jewish employees at Columbia University,” Lucas said in a statement following her confirmation.

Democrats have assailed Lucas’ leadership as part of the Trump administration’s wider attempts to increase his authority by politicizing agencies long considered to be independent.

“In just a few short months as Acting Chair, Andrea Lucas has warped the mission of the EEOC beyond recognition and weaponized the agency to green light discrimination, roll back protections for people who are sexually assaulted at work, and intimidate anyone who challenges President Trump,” Sen. Patty Murray said in a statement.

Last week, legal and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against the EEOC claiming that is has unlawfully refused to enforce federal protections for transgender workers.

But Republican senators and some business groups and religious institutions have praised Lucas’ leadership, especially her commitment to rolling back Biden-era guidance and regulations strengthening protections for transgender workers and women seeking abortions, birth control and fertility treatments.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supported Lucas’ confirmation, saying in a statement that she “believes in finding balance in EEOC policies and decisions.”

The EEOC, which investigates employment discrimination in the private sector, was created by Congress under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The dismissals of the commissioners left the EEOC without the quorum needed to make some major decisions. That will change if the Senate confirms a second Trump nominee, Britanny Panuccio.

By MELINA WALLING, Associated Press

HAMBURG, Germany (AP) — Watching his dad make a brand-new miniature train car look old, placing the wooden parts to weather in the sun and rain, pulled Peter Martínez into the world of miniatures. He recalls his father, who made model trains mostly for collectors or hobbyists, wondering why anyone would pay him to do what he thought was the most fun part of the hobby.

“But luckily they did, and we were able to build an industry around it,” Martínez said.

The Argentine family business, United Scale Arts, is now partnering with Germany’s Miniatur Wunderland, a museum that houses the largest model train set in the world, to develop new exhibits depicting parts of South America, including the Amazon rainforest and Atacama Desert. But with miniature power comes great responsibility — and both Martínez’s company and the museum are determined that the miniature world reflect both the good and bad of the real thing.

Real world problems

So alongside the perfectly shaded rocks and trees, they depict poverty, crime and environmental degradation. In the exhibits already running in Hamburg, built by a team that has grown over the years to hundreds of people, it means that tiny trains pull tiny coal cars into a mining town, but also, on a city bridge, a tiny semitruck hauls the tiny giant blade of a wind turbine.

And the builders say it means the new models won’t shy away from illustrating real life in the Amazon: they will include scenes of illegal mining, deforestation and forest fires.

“These are social problems that exist in the real world, and we need to show them also in the models, because I think it’s important not to make this kind of idealistic view of the world, but also to show reality and to use these tools as a learning experience for everyone that visits the Wunderland,” Martínez said.

Replicas of famous landmarks

Visitors have a lot to see in the multistory warehouse that is Wunderland. From Las Vegas to Miami Beach, from Rio de Janeiro to Monaco, cars zoom past tiny replicas of buildings as throngs of people, with heads smaller than your fingernail, mill about famous landmarks.

Cargo ships dominate the glasslike surface of a tiny bay as they chug in with their deliveries. Planes taxi down the runway of an airport. And of course, plenty of trains roll through every landscape to the delight of kids and adults alike.

‘A dream come true’

Twin brothers Gerrit and Frederik Braun joined with business partner Stephan Hertz and took out a loan to create Miniatur Wunderland after they left the nightclub business. Frederik had visited a model railroad shop in Zurich, called his brother and suggested they create their own — but a whole lot bigger.

Gerrit laughed at first. Unlike his brother, he loved the nightclub. But he eventually agreed and now can’t imagine doing anything else.

“It’s a dream come true that we sit here 25 years later, and playing all day,” he said, chuckling.

Serious work mixed with play

But he takes the work seriously. The brothers came up with most of the initial plans for the museum within two weeks, Gerrit said. It’s grown in scope and ambition since then.

“Ten years ago, we were looking to the old section and saw the real world has changed in this time,” Gerrit said. They realized they needed to update the exhibits to include technologies like electric cars, wind turbines, nuclear power and more. “I have children, and I believe in global warming and I’m sure that we have done it … So if you believe in this, and you have the possibility to show the images, why not?”

Political issues

There’s no one process by which the designers and model builders decide what to include in their models, but as they have added to the collection, they haven’t shied away from depicting technology or from political or contentious topics.

In 2017, when Donald Trump was first elected U.S. president, the Wunderland put up a model concrete wall with barbed wire around the section with the American landscapes. In 2019, Wunderland launched a scathing exhibit on the treatment of animals in large-scale farming that sparked deep criticism from the agriculture industry.

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Next came weeks of conversation, farm visits and the eventual launch of a special exhibit aimed at depicting the current reality of pig farming, featuring industrial production and organic farms.

They’re usually striving to depict the world exactly as it is. But building models also reminds Gerrit that “you can build the world a little bit like you want,” he said.

Feelings of nostalgia

It’s an art form that can have practical purposes but also can capture longing, nostalgia or other feelings about a particular time or place, said Kit Maxwell, a curator with The Art Institute of Chicago, which houses the popular Thorne Miniature Rooms.

“One of the most compelling things about these rooms is that you imagine yourself in them,” he said.

Aware of that power of imagination,Martínez also said builders have to be careful not to unfairly cast countries in a bad light as they seek to include imperfections.

“You need to kind of balance, when you show the bad things in contrast with the good things, that they are not overdone or they are not too much,” he said. “You want also that the people that go there have a good time and not get really sad after seeing this model.”

Follow Melina Walling on X @MelinaWalling and Bluesky @melinawalling.bsky.social.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.