A Hmong woman living in St. Paul was not detained during a Tuesday appointment at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office, as she feared, but her case remains unresolved.

Nou uses her walker at her St. Paul home on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. Nou, who asked to be referred to by only her first name due to safety concerns, fears that, given the current surge in immigration enforcement in Minnesota, she will be taken into custody. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

She was married to a man around three times her age when she was 15 and living in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1992. Her uncle sponsored her as a refugee and she came to California to live with her husband the next year.

Nou, who asked to be referred to by her first name for her safety, says her husband physically abused her for years, as well as controlling her emotionally and financially. In what she describes as an act of self defense, she fatally stabbed him in 2003 and stabbed herself in a suicide attempt.

She pleaded no contest to manslaughter and served nearly seven years in prison. Immigration officials were waiting when she was released. Her green card was taken and she was given a removal order, which was not carried out. She is required to have regular check-ins with immigration officials.

With the surge in immigration enforcement in Minnesota, Nou was worried she could be detained at Tuesday’s appointment.

She can’t walk on her own and is disabled — as a result of her husband’s abuse and the suicide attempt, she says — and believes she couldn’t survive detention or being deported to Laos. She and her family fled the country when she was 2, and she has no relatives there.

Nou’s brother, who is her caretaker, brought her to Tuesday’s appointment in her wheelchair. Under her jacket, Nou wore a shirt that said, “America the Beautiful.”

Two advocates also were present and one accompanied Nou into the building.

It was a short appointment at the St. Paul office, during which Nou’s fingerprints and photo were taken. Nou said afterward she was relieved, but had “a renewed sense of worry” because her next appointment is scheduled for June.

Xay Yang, the advocate who accompanied Nou, is executive director of Transforming Generations, a St. Paul nonprofit that provides support services to victims and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault in the Hmong and Southeast Asian communities.

KaYing Yang, senior advisor for the Southeast Asian Freedom Network and Southeast Asian Action, also was there to support Nou.

“Individuals like her have already served their time, so it’s really double punishment,” KaYing Yang said of the removal order.

Xay Yang said they will try to help Nou with navigating resources and getting her the legal support she needs, which is anticipated to be expensive. Former St. Paul City Council Member Dai Thao has set up a GoFundMe (gofund.me/fd04d955f) for Nou’s legal and medical needs.

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By BILL BARROW, Associated Press

U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s team posted and then deleted a message on social media about the Republican’s visit to a memorial paying tribute to early 20th century Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire.

The issue was the post using the term “Armenian genocide,” a designation the U.S. government historically has not used for what happened, with a notable exception by the Biden administration. The White House blamed a staff mistake.

Here are some questions and answers about what that means, what Vance himself did and didn’t say, and why it matters.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance takes part in the wreath-laying ceremony during a visit to the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (Kevin Lamarque/Pool Photo via AP)

What did Vance go see in Armenia?

Vance visited a site called the Armenian Genocide Memorial, Armenia’s official national monument, remembering its citizens who died under the Ottoman Empire’s brutal control during World War I.

The initial post on Vance’s official X account stated that he was visiting the memorial “to honor the victims of the Armenian genocide.” It was replaced with a second post that showed what he wrote in the guest book as well as a clip of the vice president and Usha Vance laying flowers at the memorial.

Vance, the first U.S. vice president to visit Armenia, was in the country as part of the Trump administration’s follow-up to a U.S.-brokered deal aimed at ending a decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where Vance traveled later Tuesday.

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance gets out of a car before boarding Air Force Two upon departure for Azerbaijan, at Zvartnots International Airport in Yerevan, Armenia, Tuesday Feb. 10, 2026. (Kevin Lamarque/Pool Photo via AP)

Why does the word choice matter?

“Genocide” is a fraught and legally distinct term that national governments, international bodies and media organizations use carefully.

The United Nations in 1948 defined genocide “to mean certain acts, enumerated in Article II, committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” according to the U.S. State Department’s long-held understanding.

It is not questioned that many thousands of Armenian citizens, most of them Christians, died at the direction of the Committee of Union and Progress that led the Muslim government in Constantinople, now the Turkish capital of Istanbul.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that “at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million” died.

But the U.S. government has historically not recognized what happened as a “genocide” out of fear of alienating Turkey, a key U.S. ally in the region. In 2021, then-President Joe Biden formally recognized that the systematic killings and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces were a part of a “genocide.”

Turkey reacted with fury at the time. The foreign minister said his country “will not be given lessons on our history from anyone.”

People of Armenian descent recall the victims with memorials and an annual day of remembrance observed around the world, including in the U.S.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance hold flowers as they walk toward the eternal flame at the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (Kevin Lamarque/Pool Photo via AP)

What did Vance himself say?

Vance was asked specifically on Tuesday about his visit to the memorial and whether he was “recognizing” genocide.

He avoided using the word and said he went to “pay my respects” at the invitation of his host, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and his government.

“They said this is a very important site for us, and obviously I’m the first (U.S.) vice president to ever visit Armenia,” Vance said. “They asked us to visit the site. Obviously, it’s a very terrible thing that happened a little over a hundred years ago and something that’s very, very important to them culturally.”

Vance added that it was “a sign of respect, both for the victims but also for the Armenian government that’s been a very important partner for us in the region.”

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What did the White House say?

The White House blamed the original post on a staff member. It’s the second time in less than a week that the West Wing has blamed an unnamed aide for a controversy over a social media post. Last Friday, it was a racist video that Trump had shared on his Truth Social account that depicted former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as jungle primates.

The White House defended that post initially before deleting it after a cascade of criticism.

What happens next?

It’s not yet clear whether there will be any diplomatic consequences. Vance, for his part, seemed determined to keep the focus on the original mission of his trip.

“I think the president struck a great peace deal. I think the administration is really making it stick,” Vance said.

Still, there is the political question of whether Armenian Americans react, with the rhetorical boomerang offering one more reminder of how reluctant the U.S. has been to use the word “genocide” to describe what Armenians remember that way.

White House reporter Michelle Price contributed reporting from Baku, Azerbaijan.

By JONATHAN MATTISE, Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The nation’s largest public utility says it now would prefer to keep operating two coal-fired power plants it had planned to shutter, changing course before a meeting of its board, which has a majority of members picked by the coal-friendly Trump administration.

In new filings, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s signaled that it wants to ditch closure dates for the Kingston Fossil Plant and Cumberland Fossil Plant in Tennessee, which would require further action from its board. The new plan would still include introducing natural gas-fired plants at both locations.

TVA had intended to shutter its remaining, aging coal plants by 2035 in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change. But the utility, which partners with local power companies to serve roughly 10 million people in seven states, said it is rethinking the coal plant closures because of regulatory changes and increasing demand for electricity.

“As power demand grows, TVA is looking at every option to bolster our generating fleet to continue providing affordable, reliable electricity to our 10 million customers, create jobs and help communities thrive,” TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in a statement Tuesday.

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But several clean energy groups said extending the coal plants would raise serious questions about TVA’s decision-making process, since the utility has said more natural gas plants were needed to retire polluting coal plants.

“Without even a public meeting, TVA is telling the people who live near these coal plants that they will breathe in toxic pollution from not one, but two major power plants for the foreseeable future,” Gabi Lichtenstein, Tennessee Program Coordinator for Appalachian Voices, said in a news release. “This decision is salt in the wound after ignoring widespread calls for cleaner, cheaper replacements for the Kingston and Cumberland coal plants.”

President Donald Trump fired enough TVA board members picked by his predecessor to leave the utility without a quorum. Without one, the board could only take actions needed for ongoing operations, not to jump into new areas of activity, start new programs or change the utility’s existing direction.

Trump then signed executive orders aimed at helping the coal industry. Last May, TVA’s president and CEO, Don Moul, told investors that the utility would reevaluate the lifespan of its coal plants, saying officials were evaluating Trump’s executive orders.

The U.S. Senate confirmed four Trump board nominees in December. With the quorum restored, TVA’s board is scheduled to meet Wednesday in Kentucky.

TVA had already faced advocates’ criticisms for planning to open more natural gas plants as the utility was winding down its fleet of coal plants, instead of more quickly moving away from fossil fuels and into solar and other renewables.

TVA’s goal for years has been an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2035 over 2005 levels, and net-zero emissions by 2050, with a heavy emphasis on nuclear power and hopes for next-generation reactors. Biden had gone further, calling for a carbon-pollution-free energy sector by 2035.

Clean energy groups have noted that the rapid building of data centers that support artificial intelligence is partly to blame for growing power demand. In an investors call last week, TVA President and CEO Don Moul said data center demand grew to 18% of its industrial load in 2025, and by 2030, the utility expects it to double across the service region. Moul said the fairness of new data center pay rates is a priority for TVA.

Under a 2024 final decision, TVA planned for a 1,500-megawatt natural gas facility with 4 megawatts of solar and 100 megawatts of battery storage at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a 2,470-megawatt coal plant finished in 1955, and the site of a massive 2008 coal ash spill. The coal plant was slated to close and the gas plant to come online by the end of 2027.

The new proposal would keep the coal, gas and battery, but drop the solar.

In a 2023 decision, TVA planned to mothball its two-unit Cumberland coal plant in two stages — one, by the end of 2026, to be replaced this year by the 1,450-megawatt natural gas plant; and the second, shuttered by the end of 2028, with options open on its replacement. The 2,470-megawatt Cumberland coal plant, completed in 1973, is the largest generating asset in TVA’s fleet.

Trump tussled with TVA during his first term, including when he opposed a coal plant closure. Ultimately, in 2019 the board still voted to close the Paradise Fossil Plant in Kentucky. Its last towers were demolished in 2024.

In 2020, Trump fired the former TVA board chairman and another board member and drove TVA to reverse course on hiring foreign labor for information technology jobs. He also criticized the pay scale for the CEO at the time, which was $7.3 million for the 2020 budget year and topped $10.5 million for 2024. TVA stressed that it doesn’t receive federal taxpayer money and instead is funded by electricity customers, and that the CEO pay fell in the bottom quartile of the power industry.

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican lawmakers decried Tuesday what they said were invasive tactics in the investigation of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, pressing representatives from leading telecommunications companies about their role in providing prosecutors with phone records of certain sitting members of Congress.

“I think what you’ve done here is outrageous. And I think the implications for the privacy of the American people are absolutely appalling,” said Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who was among the Republicans in Congress whose records were accessed by prosecutors as they examined contacts between the president and allies on Capitol Hill.

Lawyers for the companies defended their actions at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, stressing they had followed the law by turning over records under a subpoena even as they also acknowledged that more could be done to respect lawmakers’ expectations of privacy.

“We were compelled to provide this information under the law, and we complied. No matter who is the target of a subpoena Verizon cannot ignore a valid legal demand or a court order,” said Chris Miller, the senior vice president and general counsel of Verizon’s consumer group. “But our processes could have been better suited to meet what was a new and unique set of circumstances for us, and for other companies.”

David R. McAtee, right, senior executive vice president and general counsel for AT&T, testifies during a Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law hearing to examine Arctic Frost accountability, focusing on oversight of telecommunications carriers on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

Fallout from the subpoenas

The hearing afforded Republican lawmakers their first opportunity to confront phone company representatives over the revelation that special counsel Jack Smith’s team obtained the records of Republican lawmakers whom Trump was imploring on Jan. 6, 2021 to halt the congressional certification of his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The records showed when the calls were placed and how long they lasted but did not capture the content of the conversations.

All told, subpoenas were issued for phone records of 20 current or former Republican members of Congress, said Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Democrats called the Republican outrage misplaced in light of the violence of Jan. 6, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, and noted that the tactic used by Smith was standard in criminal investigations and was understandable in this instance given Trump’s efforts to reach lawmakers.

“Let me start by rejecting the notion that the Department of Justice’s investigation into the attack on the Capitol was worse than the attack on the Capitol,” said Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

That point was echoed by Mike Romano, a former Justice Department prosecutor who helped oversee prosecutions of Capitol rioters.

“When I first first learned of this hearing, I was surprised. I was surprised because from my perspective as a long-serving federal prosecutor, there is nothing remotely scandalous or controversial about the collection of toll records,” Romano said.

He added: “I understand that some of you had your records collected and are unhappy about that, and that’s understandable. Nobody enjoys having the government collect their information. But apart from that, I’m happy to say you were not harmed.”

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Companies defend their actions

Lawyers for the telecommunications companies stressed that the Smith subpoenas were treated like the hundreds of thousands of similar demands they receive from law enforcement each year. They also noted that the subpoenas from Smith’s team offered limited information and context.

Miller, the Verizon representative, testified that the subpoenas his company received “did not include any names or any other information identifying these numbers as belonging” to members of Congress and that a non-disclosure order from a judge barred the company from alerting the targeted lawmakers.

A representative for T-Mobile similarly said none of the subpoenas the company fielded sought records from Senate business lines.

Two subpoenas in January 2023 to AT&T sought records about a personal account, listed only a phone number and gave no indication that the requested information involved members of Congress, said David McAtee, a senior executive vice president and general counsel. The records were provided.

In a separate instance, the company’s legal team responded to a subpoena from prosecutors by demanding information from Smith’s team about how a legal protection afformed to lawmakers, known as the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, might apply, McAtee said.

“The special counsel’s office never responded to that email — at least not substantively — and ultimately the office abandoned the subpoena and no records were produced,” he said.

He said the company was working on a process that it would allow it to identify all phone numbers associated with a given member of Congress and not just the official numbers.

And Miller said Verizon was instituting a series of changes, including ensuring that senior company of leadership is notified before information on members of Congress is disclosed. The company will also notify a lawmaker, when possible, that their information is being sought — and will challenge any non-disclosure order that prevents them doing so, Miller said.