By JEFF MARTIN and JACK BROOK, Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Powerful storms that killed two people in Mississippi and ripped roofs from buildings in a small Oklahoma town charged across the nation, threatening more communities Wednesday in the central to eastern United States with wide-ranging weather.

Meanwhile, forecasters warned that a Pacific storm was expected to bring widespread rain and mountain snow across California and other parts of the West from Wednesday into Friday.

A tornado watch was issued Wednesday morning for parts of North and South Carolina until early afternoon. Tornado warnings were issued in Florida and South Carolina on Wednesday morning.

Snow blows during a blizzard warning in Omaha, Neb., Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via AP)

On Tuesday, high winds forced some changes to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which moved up and shortened the two biggest parades to wrap them up ahead of the bad weather. Tornadoes touched down Tuesday in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, according to preliminary information from the National Weather Service.

In Mississippi, two people died due to the severe weather, Gov. Tate Reeves said Tuesday in a social media post without going into detail. WAPT-TV reported that one person died from a falling power line in Madison County, while a driver in the same county was killed by a tree falling on his car.

On Wednesday morning, Nebraska officials warned that travel was not advised in the eastern part of the state, where high winds were limiting visibility. A 130-mile (209-kilometer) stretch of Interstate 80 was closed from Greenwood to Grand Island, according to the Nebraska Department of Transportation.

Blizzard conditions in parts of southern Minnesota made travel there dangerous Wednesday morning, the weather service office in the Twin Cities warned on social media. Heavy snow and strong northerly winds slowed travel across much of the Twin Cities, southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, the weather service said.

The storms have left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity service on Wednesday morning across the central and southeastern United States, including more than 111,000 customers in Texas, about 54,000 in Tennessee and about 53,000 in Alabama, according to PowerOutage.us.

After more than 850 flights were canceled nationwide on Tuesday, the storm was beginning to snarl traffic at some of the nation’s busiest airports on the East Coast, which typically causes ripple effects throughout the nation’s commercial aviation system. Nearly 500 flights scheduled to fly into or out of U.S. airports on Wednesday have been canceled, according to FlightAware.com, which tracks cancelations and delays nationwide.

Martin reported from Atlanta. Associated Press journalists from across the country contributed.

PANAMA CITY (AP) — Panama President José Raúl Mulino on Wednesday accused U.S. President Donald Trump of lying when he said in his address to Congress that his administration was “reclaiming” the Panama Canal.

Trump was referencing a deal announced Tuesday for a consortium led by the U.S. investment management company BlackRock Inc. to buy a controlling stake in the company held by a Chinese group that operates ports at both ends of the Panama Canal.

Panama maintains that it has full control over the canal and that the Hong Kong-based group’s operation of the ports did not amount to Chinese control over the waterway, and that therefore the sale to a U.S.-based company would not represent any U.S. “reclaiming” of the canal. Panama’s government on Tuesday called the sale a private transaction.

Mulino in a message posted to X on Wednesday, rejected that the deal came about because of U.S. pressure. “I reject in the name of Panama and all Panamanians this new affront to the truth and our dignity as a nation,” he wrote. He accused Trump of “lying again.”

Trump has talked about retaking the Panama Canal since his campaign, arguing that the U.S. should have never turned control over to the Panamanians and that the U.S. was being overcharged for using it.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Mulino in early February and insisted that China was exerting influence over the canal’s operations. The focus was the Chinese consortium running the ports. Panama rejected that China had any influence over canal operations.

“Cooperation between our governments passes through clear understandings in terms of issues of mutual interest,” Mulino wrote. “It doesn’t have anything to do with ‘reclaiming the canal’ nor with tarnishing our national sovereignty.”

In a filing, CK Hutchison Holding said Tuesday that it would sell all shares in Hutchison Port Holdings and in Hutchison Port Group Holdings to the BlackRock consortium in a deal valued at nearly $23 billion, including $5 billion in debt.

The deal has to be approved by Panama’s government.

The United States built the canal in the early 1900s as it looked for ways to facilitate the transit of commercial and military vessels between its coasts. Washington relinquished control of the waterway to Panama on Dec. 31, 1999, under a treaty signed in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. Trump has claimed that Carter “foolishly” gave the canal away.

Frank Sixt, co-managing director of CK Hutchison, said in a statement that the transaction was “the result of a rapid, discrete but competitive process in which numerous bids and expressions of interest were received.”

“I would like to stress that the transaction is purely commercial in nature and wholly unrelated to recent political news reports concerning the Panama Ports,” Sixt said.

By WILL WEISSERT and VALERIE GONZALEZ, Associated Press

EAGLE PASS, Texas (AP) — Vice President JD Vance plans to visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday to highlight the tougher immigration policies that the Trump administration says have led to dramatically fewer arrests for illegal crossings in the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Vance will be joined in Eagle Pass, Texas, by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as the highest-ranking members of Trump’s Republican White House to visit the southern border.

Federal aviation authorities have cleared airspace for Air Force Two to make the trip, and state authorities and local activists say Vance’s itinerary includes a visit to Shelby Park, a municipal greenspace along the Rio Grande that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott seized from federal authorities last year in a feud with the Biden administration, which he accused of not doing enough to curb illegal crossings.

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Trump made a crackdown on immigration a centerpiece of his bid for a second term, as he pledged to halt the tide of migrants entering the U.S. and stop the flow of fentanyl crossing the border. As part of that effort, he imposed 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada on Tuesday, saying neither is doing enough to address drug trafficking and illegal immigration. His commerce secretary has suggested a deal to reduce the tariffs is in the works, however, and could be announced as soon as Wednesday.

“They are now strongly embedded in our country. But we are getting them out and getting them out fast,” Trump said of migrants living in the U.S. illegally as he delivered an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.

Although Trump has not made a trip to the border since his inauguration, the visit of three of his top officials is evidence of the scope of his administration’s focus on the issue. He has tasked agencies across the federal government with working to overhaul border and immigration policy, moving well beyond the Department of Homeland Security, the traditional home of most such functions.

Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico plummeted 39% in January from a month earlier, though they’ve been falling sharply since well before Trump took office on Jan. 20 from an all-time high of 250,000 in December 2023. Since then, Mexican authorities increased enforcement within their own borders and President Joe Biden, a Democrat, introduced severe asylum restrictions early last summer.

The Trump administration has showcased its new initiatives, including putting shackled immigrants on U.S. military planes for deportation fights and sending some to the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. It has also expanded federal agents’ arrests of people in the U.S. illegally and abandoned programs that gave some permission to stay.

Trump border czar Tom Homan said migrants with criminal records have been prioritized in early efforts to round up and deport people in the U.S. illegally, but he added of other migrants, “If you’re in the county illegally, you’re not off the table.”

“When we find the bad guy, many times they’re with others, others who aren’t a criminal priority, but were in the country illegally,” Homan told reporters outside the White House on Tuesday. “They’re coming, too.”

Since Trump’s second term began, about 6,500 new active duty forces have been ordered to deploy to the southern border. Before that, there were about 2,500 troops already there, largely National Guard troops on active duty orders, along with a couple of hundred active duty aviation forces.

Of those being mobilized, many are still only preparing to go. Last weekend, Hegseth approved orders to send a large portion of an Army Stryker brigade and a general support aviation battalion to the border. Totaling about 3,000 troops, they are expected to deploy in the coming weeks.

Troops are responsible for detection and monitoring along the border but don’t interact with migrants attempting to illegally cross. Instead, they alert border agents, who then take the migrants into custody.

Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with tackling the root causes of immigration during his administration, seeking to zero in on why so many migrants, particularly from Central America, were leaving their homelands and coming to the U.S. seeking asylum or trying to make it into the county illegally.

Harris made her first visit to the border in June 2021, about 3 1/2 months deeper into Biden’s term than Vance’s trip in the opening weeks of Trump’s second term. Trump has routinely joked that Harris was in charge of immigration policy but didn’t visit the border or even maintain close phone contact with federal officials.

Vance’s trip comes as the Trump administration is considering the use of the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 to detain and deport Venezuelans based on a proclamation labeling the gang Tren de Aragua an invasion force that could be acting at the behest of that country’s government. That’s according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

It is unclear how close the decisions are to being finalized. Some officials have questioned whether the gang is acting as a tool for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom the U.S. has not recognized as that country’s legitimate leader. There are some concerns that invoking the law would require the U.S. to more formally recognize Maduro.

Still, the 1798 law allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country with which the U.S. is at war, and it has been mentioned by Trump as a possible tool to speed up his mass deportations.

Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Lolita Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.