By REBECCA SANTANA, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday will visit the high-security El Salvador prison where Venezuelans who the Trump administration alleges are members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang have been held since their removal from the U.S.

Noem’s trip to the prison — where inmates are packed into cells and never allowed outside — comes as the Trump administration seeks to show it is deporting people it describes as the “worst of the worst.”

Since taking office, Noem has often been front and center in efforts to highlight the immigration crackdown. She took part in immigration enforcement operations, rode horses with Border Patrol agents and was the face of a television campaign warning people in the country illegally to self-deport.

Noem’s Wednesday visit is part of a three-day trip. She’ll also travel to Colombia and Mexico.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks at U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak during a tour, Monday, March 17, 2025, in Kodiak, Alaska. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

In El Salvador, she’ll visit the prison, called the Terrorism Confinement Center, and meet with President Nayib Bukele, according to a Homeland Security statement.

The Venezuelans were removed from the U.S. this month after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and said the U.S. was being invaded by the Tren de Aragua gang. The Alien Enemies Act gives the president wartime powers and allows noncitizens to be deported without the opportunity to go before an immigration or federal court judge.

A central outstanding question about the deportees’ status is when and how they could ever be released from the prison, as they are not serving sentences. They no longer appear in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online detainee locator and have not appeared before a judge in El Salvador. The U.S. government has acknowledged that many do not have criminal records.

Flights were in the air March 15 when a federal judge issued a verbal order temporarily barring the deportations and ordered planes to return to the U.S.

The Trump administration has argued that the judge’s verbal directions did not count, that only his written order needed to be followed and that it couldn’t apply to flights that had already left the U.S.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that about 261 people were deported on the flights, including 137 under the Alien Enemies Act.

Related Articles

Republicans look to rein in courts, judges as Trump rails against rulings

Democrats say EPA illegally canceled hundreds of grants aimed at boosting ‘environmental justice’

Newly unsealed memo sheds light on Justice Department’s rush to drop NYC mayor’s corruption case

Trump signs order seeking to overhaul US elections, including requiring proof of citizenship

President Trump pardons former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer

Bukele opened the prison in 2023 as he made the Central American country’s stark, harsh prisons a trademark of his fight against crime. The facility has eight sprawling pavilions and can hold up to 40,000 inmates. Each cell can fit 65 to 70 prisoners.

Prisoners can’t have visitors. There are no workshops or educational programs.

El Salvador hasn’t had diplomatic relations with Venezuela since 2019, so the Venezuelans imprisoned there do not have consular support from their government. On Monday, lawyers in El Salvador hired by the Venezuelan government said they had filed habeas corpus petitions seeking the Venezuelans’ release.

Video released by El Salvador’s government after the deportees’ arrival showed men exiting airplanes onto an airport tarmac lined by officers in riot gear. The men, who had their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down.

They were later shown at the prison kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform — knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs — and placed in cells.

For three years, El Salvador has been operating under a state of emergency that suspends fundamental rights as Bukele wages an all-out assault on the country’s powerful street gangs. During that time, some 84,000 people have been arrested, accused of gang ties and jailed, often without due process.

Bukele offered to hold U.S. deportees in the prison when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited in February.

Associated Press journalist Marcos Alemán in San Salvador, El Salvador, contributed to this report.

HONOLULU (AP) — Lava began bubbling out of Hawaii’s most active volcano once again on Tuesday as Kilauea’s sporadic eruption resumed.

The eruption restarted at midday when when molten rock began pouring out of a vent in Kilauea’s summit caldera, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said in a statement. The lava was contained within the caldera inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and wasn’t affecting any residential areas.

The volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii has been erupting on-and-off since Dec. 23. It’s shot tall fountains of lava high into the air and spilled molten rock across the caldera floor each time it’s come back to life. The spectacle is a popular attraction for tourists.

The current episode is the 15th of the current eruption. The shortest of the previous episodes lasted 13 hours while the longest went on for eight days. Pauses in between episodes have ranged between 24 hours to 12 days.

Kilauea is one of six active volcanoes in Hawaii, including one that is submerged underwater. The largest is Mauna Loa, which is also on the Big Island and which erupted in 2022.

By LAURA UNGAR, Associated Press

Federal health officials said Tuesday they are pulling back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funds for state and local public health departments and other health organizations throughout the nation.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

The statement said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects to recover the money beginning 30 days after termination notices, which began being sent out on Monday.

FILE – A sign marks the entrance to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, on Oct. 8, 2013. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

Officials said the money was largely used for COVID-19 testing, vaccination and global projects as well as community health workers responding to COVID and a program established in 2021 to address COVID health disparities among high-risk and underserved patients, including those in minority populations. The move was first reported by NBC News.

Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County & City Health Officials, said much of the funding was set to end soon anyway. “It’s ending in the next six months,” she said. “There’s no reason — why rescind it now? It’s just cruel and unusual behavior.”

In a related move, more than two dozen COVID-related research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health have been canceled. Earlier this month, the Trump administration shut down ordering from covidtest.gov, the site where Americans could have COVID-19 tests delivered to their mailboxes for no charge.

Although the COVID federal public health emergency has ended, the virus is still killing Americans: 458 people per week on average have died from COVID over the past four weeks, according to CDC data.

HHS wouldn’t provide many details about how the federal government expects to recover the money from what it called “impacted recipients.” But HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email: “The $11.4 billion is undisbursed funds remaining.”

Freeman said her understanding is that state health departments already had the COVID money.

Related Articles

New Parkinson’s treatment developed at Stanford could help millions

St. Paul: Hope Dental Clinic officially calls it quits, files for bankruptcy, auctions equipment

Do you eat a meal in 20 minutes or less? It might be time to slow down

Finding health advice on social media is easier than knowing which claims to trust

23andMe users alerted they may want to delete genetic data. Here’s how to do it

“The funding was authorized by Congress, was appropriated by Congress, and it was out the door, basically, into the hands of the grantees” — states, she said, which decide how to distribute it locally.

Some of the COVID money is used to address other public health issues, Freeman added. For example, wastewater surveillance that began during COVID became important for detecting other diseases, too.

“It was being used in significant ways to track flu and patterns of new disease and emerging diseases — and even more recently with the measles outbreak,” Freeman said.

Under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, billions of dollars was allocated for COVID response through legislation, including a COVID relief bill and the American Rescue Plan Act.

At this point, it’s unclear exactly how health departments will be affected by the pullback of funds. But some were starting to look at what it might mean for them. In Washington state, for example, health officials were notified that more than $125 million in COVID-related funding has been immediately terminated. They are “assessing the impact” of the actions, they said.

In Los Angeles County, health officials said they could lose more than $80 million in core funding for vaccinations and other services. “Much of this funding supports disease surveillance, public health lab services, outbreak investigations, infection control activities at healthcare facilities and data transparency,” a department official wrote in an email.

Associated Press reporters Mike Stobbe in New York, JoNel Aleccia in Temecula, California, Carla K. Johnson in Seattle and Amanda Seitz in Washington, D.C. contributed to this story.

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.