By GEOFF MULVIHILL

The number of abortions in the U.S. rose again in 2024, with women continuing to find ways to get them despite bans and restrictions in many states, according to a report out Monday.

The latest report from the WeCount project of the Society of Family Planning, which supports abortion access, was released a day before the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended nearly 50 years of legal abortion nationally for most of pregnancy.

Currently, 12 states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions, and four have bans that kick in at or about six weeks into pregnancy — often before women realize they are pregnant.

While the total number of abortions has risen gradually over those three years, the number has dropped to near zero in some states while abortions using pills obtained through telehealth appointments has become a more common method in nearly all states.

Pills are used in the majority of abortions and are also prescribed in person.

The overall number of abortions has risen, but it is below historic highs

The latest survey, released Monday, tallied about 1.1 million abortions nationally last year, or about 95,000 a month. That is up from about 88,000 monthly in 2023 and 80,000 a month between April and December of 2022. WeCount began after Roe was overturned, and the 2022 numbers don’t include January through March, when abortions are traditionally at their highest.

The number is still well below the historic peak in the U.S. of nearly 1.6 million a year in the late 1990s.

The Society of Family Planning relies primarily on surveys of abortion providers and uses estimates.

Pills prescribed by telehealth now account for one-fourth of US abortions

WeCount found that in the months before the Dobbs ruling was handed down, about 1 in 20 abortions was accessed by telehealth.

But the last three months of 2024, it was up to 1 in 4.

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The biggest jump over that time came in the middle of 2023, when laws in some Democratic-controlled states took effect with provisions intended to protect medical professionals who use telehealth to prescribe pills to patients in states where abortion is banned or where there are laws restricting telehealth abortion.

WeCount found that about half telehealth abortions last year were facilitated by the shield laws. The number of telehealth abortions also grew for those in states without bans.

WeCount is the only nationwide public source of information about the pills prescribed to women in states with bans. One key caveat is that it is not clear how many of the prescriptions result in abortion. Some women may change their minds, access in-person abortion — or could be seeking pills to save for future use.

The WeCount data could help explain data from a separate survey from the Guttmacher Institute, which found the number of people crossing states lines for abortion declined last year.

Anti-abortion efforts are focused on pills

Anti-abortion efforts are zeroing in on pills.

Three states have sued to try to get courts to limit telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone, one of the two drugs usually used in combination for medication abortions. President Donald Trump’s administration last month told a judge that it does not believe the states have legal standing to make that case.

The U.S. Supreme Court last year found that anti-abortion doctors and their organizations didn’t have standing, either.

Meanwhile, officials in Louisiana are using criminal laws, and there is an effort in Texas to use civil penalties against a New York doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to women in their states. Louisiana lawmakers have also sent the governor a bill to further restrict access to the pills.

By CHRISTINE FERNANDO

CHICAGO (AP) — Many of the protesters who flooded the streets of Los Angeles to oppose President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown wore masks or other face coverings, drawing scorn from him.

“MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests,” Trump posted on his social media platform, adding that mask-wearing protesters should be arrested.

Protesters and their supporters argue Trump’s comments and repeated calls by the Republican president’s allies to ban masks at protests are an attempt to stifle popular dissent. They also note a double standard at play: In Los Angeles and elsewhere, protesters were at times confronted by officers who had their faces covered. And some U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have worn masks while carrying out high-profile raids in Los Angeles and other cities.

All of which begs the question: Can something that covers your mouth protect free speech? Protesters say the answer is an emphatic yes. Several legal experts say it’s only a matter of time before the issue returns to the courts.

‘What do these people have to hide, and why?’

Trump’s post calling for a ban on masks came after immigration raids sparked protests, which included some reports of vandalism and violence toward police.

“What do these people have to hide, and why?” he asked on Truth Social on June 8.

The next day, Trump raged against the anti-ICE protests, calling for the arrest of people in face masks.

It’s not a new idea. Legal experts and First Amendment advocates warn of a rising number of laws banning masks being wielded against protesters and their impacts on people’s right to protest and privacy amid mounting surveillance.

The legal question became even more complicated when Democratic lawmakers in California introduced legislation aiming to stop federal agents and local police officers from wearing face masks. That came amid concerns ICE agents were attempting to hide their identities and avoid accountability for potential misconduct.

“The recent federal operations in California have created an environment of profound terror,” state Sen. Scott Wiener said in a press release.

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called the California bill “despicable.”

“While ICE officers are being assaulted by rioters and having rocks and Molotov cocktails thrown at them, a sanctuary politician is trying to outlaw officers wearing masks to protect themselves from being doxed and targeted by known and suspected terrorist sympathizers,” McLaughlin said in a statement.

State restrictions on mask-wearing

At least 18 states and Washington, D.C., have laws that restrict masks and other face coverings, said Elly Page, senior legal adviser with the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law. Since October 2023, at least 16 bills have been introduced in eight states and Congress to restrict masks at protests, the center says.

The laws aren’t just remnants of the coronavirus pandemic. Many date back to the 1940s and ’50s, when many states passed anti-mask laws as a response to the Ku Klux Klan, whose members hid their identities while terrorizing victims. Amid protests against the war in Gaza and Trump’s immigration policies, Page said there have been attempts to revive these rarely used laws to target protesters.

Page also raised concerns about the laws being enforced inconsistently and only against movements the federal government doesn’t like.

In May, North Carolina Senate Republicans passed a plan to repeal a pandemic-era law that allowed the wearing of masks in public for health reasons, a move spurred in part by demonstrations against the war in Gaza where some protesters wore masks. The suburban New York county of Nassau passed legislation in August to ban wearing masks in public.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, last month sent a letter to the state’s public universities stating protesters could be charged with a felony under the state’s anti-mask law. Administrators at the University of North Carolina have warned protesters that wearing masks violates the state’s anti-mask law, and University of Florida students arrested during a protest were charged with wearing masks in public.

An unresolved First Amendment question

People may want to cover their faces while protesting for a variety of reasons, including to protect their health, for religious reasons, to avoid government retaliation, to prevent surveillance and doxing, or to protect themselves from tear gas, said Tim Zick, law professor at William and Mary Law School.

“Protecting protesters’ ability to wear masks is part of protecting our First Amendment right to peacefully protest,” Zick said.

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Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, said the federal government and Republican state lawmakers assert that the laws are intended not to restrict speech but to “restrict unlawful conduct that people would be more likely to engage in if they can wear masks and that would make it more difficult for law enforcement to investigate if people are wearing masks.”

Conversely, he said, First Amendment advocates oppose such laws because they deter people from protesting if they fear retaliation.

Stone said the issue is an “unresolved First Amendment question” that has yet to be addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court “has made clear that there is a right to anonymity protected by the First Amendment.” Few of these laws have been challenged in court, Stone said. And lower-court decisions on mask bans are mixed, though several courts have struck down broader anti-mask laws for criminalizing peaceful expression.

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the right to speak anonymously has “deep roots in the nation’s founding, including when anonymous pamphlets criticizing British rule circulated in the colonies.”

Federal agents wearing masks

“The right to speak anonymously allows Americans to express dissenting or unpopular opinions without exposing themselves to retaliation or harassment from the government,” Terr said.

First Amendment advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers have called the masks an attempt by ICE agents to escape accountability and intimidate immigrants. During a June 12 congressional hearing, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, criticized ICE agents wearing masks during raids, saying: “Don’t wear masks. Identify who you are.”

Viral videos appeared to show residents of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts confronting federal agents, asking them to identify themselves and explain why they were wearing masks. U.S. Rep. Bill Keating, a Democrat who represents Cape Cod, decried “the decision to use unmarked vehicles, plain clothed officers and masks” in a June 2 letter to federal officials.

Republican federal officials, meanwhile, have maintained that masks protect agents from doxing.

“I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” ICE acting Director Todd Lyons said.

By MARY CLARE JALONICK

WASHINGTON (AP) — The massive tax and spending cuts package that President Donald Trump wants on his desk by July 4 would loosen regulations on gun silencers and certain types of rifles and shotguns, advancing a longtime priority of the gun industry as Republican leaders in the House and Senate try to win enough votes to pass the bill.

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The guns provision was first requested in the House by Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Republican gun store owner who had initially opposed the larger tax package. The House bill would remove silencers — called “suppressors” by the gun industry — from a 1930s law that regulates firearms that are considered the most dangerous, eliminating a $200 tax while removing a layer of background checks.

The Senate kept the provision on silencers in its version of the bill and expanded upon it, adding short-barreled, or sawed-off, rifles and shotguns.

Republicans who have long supported the changes, along with the gun industry, say the tax infringes on Second Amendment rights. They say silencers are mostly used by hunters and target shooters for sport.

“Burdensome regulations and unconstitutional taxes shouldn’t stand in the way of protecting American gun owners’ hearing,” said Clyde, who owns two gun stores in Georgia and often wears a pin shaped like an assault rifle on his suit lapel.

Democrats are fighting to stop the provision, which was unveiled days after two Minnesota state legislators were shot in their homes, as the bill speeds through the Senate. They argue that loosening regulations on silencers could make it easier for criminals and active shooters to conceal their weapons.

“Parents don’t want silencers on their streets, police don’t want silencers on their streets,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

The gun language has broad support among Republicans and has received little attention as House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., work to settle differences within the party on cuts to Medicaid and energy tax credits, among other issues. But it is just one of hundreds of policy and spending items included to entice members to vote for the legislation that could have broad implications if the bill is enacted within weeks, as Trump wants.

Inclusion of the provision is also a sharp turn from the climate in Washington just three years ago when Democrats, like Republicans now, controlled Congress and the White House and pushed through bipartisan gun legislation. The bill increased background checks for some buyers under the age of 21, made it easier to take firearms from potentially dangerous people and sent millions of dollars to mental health services in schools.

Passed in the summer of 2022, just weeks after the shooting of 19 children and two adults at a school in Uvalde, Texas, it was the most significant legislative response to gun violence in decades.

Three years later, as they try to take advantage of their consolidated power in Washington, Republicans are packing as many of their longtime priorities as possible, including the gun legislation, into the massive, wide-ranging bill that Trump has called “beautiful.”

“I’m glad the Senate is joining the House to stand up for the Second Amendment and our Constitution, and I will continue to fight for these priorities as the Senate works to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who was one of the lead negotiators on the bipartisan gun bill in 2022 but is now facing a primary challenge from the right in his bid for reelection next year.

If the gun provisions remain in the larger legislation and it is passed, silencers and the short-barrel rifles and shotguns would lose an extra layer of regulation that they are subject to under the National Firearms Act, passed in the 1930s in response to concerns about mafia violence. They would still be subject to the same regulations that apply to most other guns — and that includes possible loopholes that allow some gun buyers to avoid background checks when guns are sold privately or online.

Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, who supports the legislation, says changes are aimed at helping target shooters and hunters protect their hearing. He argues that the use of silencers in violent crimes is rare. “All it’s ever intended to do is to reduce the report of the firearm to hearing safe levels,” Keane says.

Speaking on the floor before the bill passed the House, Rep. Clyde said the bill restores Second Amendment rights from “over 90 years of draconian taxes.” Clyde said Johnson included his legislation in the larger bill “with the purest of motive.”

“Who asked for it? I asked,” said Clyde, who ultimately voted for the bill after the gun silencer provision was added.

Clyde was responding to Rep. Maxwell Frost, a 28-year-old Florida Democrat, who went to the floor and demanded to know who was responsible for the gun provision. Frost, who was a gun-control activist before being elected to Congress, called himself a member of the “mass shooting generation” and said the bill would help “gun manufacturers make more money off the death of children and our people.”

Among other concerns, control advocates say less regulation for silencers could make it harder for law enforcement to stop an active shooter.

“There’s a reason silencers have been regulated for nearly a century: They make it much harder for law enforcement and bystanders to react quickly to gunshots,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety.

Schumer and other Democrats are trying to convince the Senate parliamentarian to drop the language as she reviews the bill for policy provisions that aren’t budget-related.

“Senate Democrats will fight this provision at the parliamentary level and every other level with everything we’ve got,” Schumer said earlier this month.

By JACK BROOK, Associated Press/Report for America

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre doesn’t know how to tell his children where their mother went after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her last month.

When his nearly 2-year-old son Noah asks for his mother before bed, Clouatre just tells him, “Mama will be back soon.” When his 3-month-old, breastfeeding daughter Lyn is hungry, he gives her a bottle of baby formula instead. He’s worried how his newborn will bond with her mother absent skin-to-skin contact.

His wife, Paola, is one of tens of thousands of people in custody and facing deportation as the Trump administration pushes for immigration officers to arrest 3,000 people a day.

Even as Marine Corps recruiters promote enlistment as protection for families lacking legal status, directives for strict immigrant enforcement have cast away practices of deference previously afforded to military families, immigration law experts say. The federal agency tasked with helping military family members gain legal status now refers them for deportation, government memos show.

To visit his wife, Adrian Clouatre has to make an eight-hour round trip from their home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to a rural ICE detention center in Monroe. Clouatre, who qualifies as a service-disabled veteran, goes every chance he can get.

Paola Clouatre, a 25-year-old Mexican national whose mother brought her into the country seeking asylum more than a decade ago, met Adrian Clouatre, 26, at a southern California nightclub during the final months of his five years of military service in 2022. Within a year, they had tattooed each other’s names on their arms.

After they married in 2024, Paola Clouatre sought a green card to legally live and work in the U.S. Adrian Clouatre said he is “not a very political person” but believes his wife deserved to live legally in the U.S.

“I’m all for ‘get the criminals out of the country,’ right?” he said. “But the people that are here working hard, especially the ones married to Americans — I mean, that’s always been a way to secure a green card.”

Detained at a green card meeting

The process to apply for Paola Clouatre’s green card went smoothly at first, but eventually she learned ICE had issued an order for her deportation in 2018 after her mother failed to appear at an immigration hearing.

Clouatre and her mother had been estranged for years — Clouatre cycled out of homeless shelters as a teenager — and up until a couple of months ago, Clouatre had “no idea” about her mother’s missed hearing or the deportation order, her husband said.

Adrian Clouatre recalled that a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffer asked about the deportation order during a May 27 appointment as part of her green card application. After Paola Clouatre explained that she was trying to reopen her case, the staffer asked her and her husband to wait in the lobby for paperwork regarding a follow-up appointment, which her husband said he believed was a “ploy.”

Soon, officers arrived and handcuffed Paola Clouatre, who handed her wedding ring to her husband for safekeeping.

Adrian Clouatre, eyes welling with tears, said he and his wife had tried to “do the right thing” and that he felt ICE officers should have more discretion over arrests, though he understood they were trying to do their jobs.

“It’s just a hell of a way to treat a veteran,” said Carey Holliday, a former immigration judge who is now representing the couple. “You take their wives and send them back to Mexico?”

The Clouatres filed a motion for a California-based immigration judge to reopen the case on Paola’s deportation order and are waiting to hear back, Holliday said.

Less discretion for military families

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that Paola Clouatre “is in the country illegally” and that the administration is “not going to ignore the rule of law.”

“Ignoring an Immigration Judge’s order to leave the U.S. is a bad idea,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a June 9 post on X which appeared to refer to Clouatre’s case. The agency added that the government “has a long memory and no tolerance for defiance when it comes to making America safe again.”

Adrian Clouatre said the agency’s X post does not accurately reflect his wife’s situation because she entered the country as a minor with her mother, seeking asylum.

“She was not aware of the removal order, so she was not knowingly defying it,” he said. “If she had been arrested, she would have been deported long ago, and we would never have met.”

Prior to the Trump administration’s push to drive up deportations, USCIS provided much more discretion for veterans seeking legal status for a family member, said Holliday and Margaret Stock, a military immigration law expert.

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In a Feb. 28 memo, the agency said it “will no longer exempt” from deportation people in groups that had received more grace in the past. This includes the families of military personnel or veterans, Stock said. As of June 12, the agency said it has referred upward of 26,000 cases to ICE for deportation.

USCIS still offers a program allowing family members of military personnel who illegally entered the U.S. to remain in the country as they apply for a green card. But there no longer appears to be room for leeway, such as giving a veteran’s spouse like Paola Clouatre the opportunity to halt her active deportation order without facing arrest, Stock said.

But numerous Marine Corps recruiters have continued to post ads on social media, geared toward Latinos, promoting enlistment as a way to gain “protection from deportation” for family members.

“I think it’s bad for them to be advertising that people are going to get immigration benefits when it appears that the administration is no longer offering these immigration benefits,” Stock said. “It sends the wrong message to the recruits.”

Marine Corps spokesperson Master Sgt. Tyler Hlavac told The Associated Press that recruiters have now been informed they are “not the proper authority” to “imply that the Marine Corps can secure immigration relief for applicants or their families.”

Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.