The PWHL’s first expansion team will be based in Vancouver with an announcement scheduled for next week, a person with knowledge of the decision confirmed to The Associated Press on Friday.

The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the league has not revealed its plans. The Province newspaper in Vancouver first reported the city being selected for PWHL expansion.

On hold for now is the league announcing a second expansion city, with Seattle being considered, the person said. The league has other candidates for expansion if discussions break down with officials in Seattle, the person added.

The Vancouver expansion announcement is expected to be made Wednesday, with media invited to attend a press conference billed as being an “historic announcement for sport in Vancouver and British Columbia.” The new team is expected to be based out of the Pacific Coliseum, the former home of the NHL Canucks.

The PWHL declined to verify any details, saying, “We’re continuing to finalize decisions related to expansion and look forward to sharing more details soon.”

The six-team league has spent the past six months evaluating more than 20 markets for the potential to expand by as many as two franchises. The decision to select Vancouver meets several key criteria for the women’s pro league founded by Dodgers owner Mark Walter, who serves as the PWHL’s financial backer, and tennis icon Billie Jean King in June 2023.

Aside from being a large market, the region has a growing girls’ hockey base, which was evident in January, when a PWHL neutral site game in Vancouver drew a sellout crowd of 19,038 — the fourth-largest turnout for a league game.

Geography also plays a factor with the league seeking to broaden its reach across North America. The league currently has five teams — New York, Boston, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto — based in the northeast, and the Minnesota Frost in St. Paul.

PWHL officials have privately expressed concern of a start-up pro women’s league being launched on the west coast. Adding an expansion team in Seattle would make the most sense in part because of its proximity to Vancouver, while also already home to two pro women’s teams, the WNBA Storm and NWSL Reign FC.

The PWHL’s neutral site game in Seattle in January drew a crowd of 12,608.

Other potential markets include Denver, Detroit and Quebec City, though it’s more likely the PWHL would desire a second expansion team based in the U.S.

The PWHL’s nine-city Takeover Tour of neutral games this season drew a combined 123,601 fans in helping the league top the 1 million mark in attendance last month.

The PWHL’s regular season resumes next week — with each team having three games left — following a three-week break coinciding with the IIHF women’s world championships in the Czech Republic. The Frost have nine players there, including Team USA members Taylor Heise, Kendall Coyne Schofield, Britta Curl-Salemme, Grace Zumwinkle, Lee Stecklein and Kelly Pannek.

The Frost next play April 27 against New York at Xcel Energy Center. The four-team playoffs are set to open in the first week of May.

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By MARY CLARE JALONICK

WASHINGTON (AP) — Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen was flying home from El Salvador on Friday after meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported there by the Trump administration. It’s unclear what will happen next in the case.

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More Democrats have said they will fly to El Salvador to push for his release, but the partisan pressure hasn’t yielded any results. President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele have dug in on keeping Abrego Garcia out of the United States, even as officials in Trump’s Republican administration have called his deportation a mistake and the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.

Bukele posted images of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday and said that the prisoner in the country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, “gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said he will “never live in the United States of America again.”

The fight over Abrego Garcia is the latest partisan flashpoint as Democrats have struggled to break through and push back during the opening few months of Trump’s second time in office.

Democrats say the fight isn’t just about one man’s immigration status but about Trump’s defiance of the courts that have repeatedly weighed in on the case. A federal appeals court said Thursday in a blistering order that the Trump administration’s claim that it can’t do anything to free Abrego Garcia from the prison in El Salvador and return him to the United States “should be shocking.”

Republicans aren’t budging

But Republicans appear to have only become more determined to keep Abrego Garcia out of the country. They have sharply criticized Van Hollen’s trip and claimed that Abrego Garcia has ties to the MS-13 gang. His attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of gang involvement and he has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.

Democrats “have time and again prioritized politics over the safety and security of Americans,” Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said in a statement Friday. “It is utterly divorced from reality.”

Van Hollen, who will talk to reporters after landing in the Washington area later Friday, has said he won’t stop fighting for the release of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland.

“This is about bringing home a man they ADMIT should’ve never been abducted,” Van Hollen posted on X.

The Democratic senator posted a photo of his meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday evening but did not provide an update on his status. He said he had called Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, “to pass on a message of love” and would provide a full update upon his return.

It’s unclear how the meeting was arranged, where they met or what will happen to Abrego Garcia. Vasquez Sura said in a statement released by an advocacy group that “we still have so many questions, hopes, and fears.”

After days of denying that he knew much about Abrego Garcia, Trump on Friday said he knew Abrego Garcia was “unbelievably bad” and called him an “illegal alien” and a “foreign terrorist.”

The president also responded Friday with a social media post saying Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention.”

Lots of Congress members are visiting the prison, or trying

Several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Rep. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Abrego Garcia is being held. “I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials acknowledged in a court filing earlier this month that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error.” The government’s acknowledgment sparked immediate uproar from immigration advocates, but White House officials have dug in on the allegation that he’s a gang member.

The fight has also played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him. The three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously refused Thursday to suspend the judge’s decision to order sworn testimony by Trump administration officials and said the judiciary will be hurt by the “constant intimations of its illegitimacy” while the executive branch “will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness.”

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, nominated by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, wrote that he and his two colleagues “cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”

Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the U.S. more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants — whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes — and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside San Salvador.

SANTA TERESA, N.M. (AP) — Military officials have identified the two Marines from California who were killed when their vehicle crashed as a convoy was traveling along the U.S.-Mexico border near Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

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They were Lance Cpl. Albert Aguilera, 22, of Riverside and Lance Cpl. Marcelino Gamino, 28, of Fresno. Both were members of the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion based at Camp Pendleton.

Another Marine with the battalion remains in critical condition.

The investigation into Tuesday’s crash is ongoing, military officials said in a statement.

The region where the accident took place is just over the state line and west of Fort Bliss, a major Army installation in West Texas that has played a critical role in dispatching military deportation flights and served as a touchpoint for thousands of soldiers and pieces of equipment now deployed along the border.

The troops are deployed there in support of President Donald Trump’s executive order to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

By MARK SHERMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal judiciary is warning that Congress is not providing enough money for judges’ security, at a time of escalating threats and chilling efforts at intimidation.

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More than five dozen judges handling lawsuits against the Trump administration are receiving “enhanced online security screening” that typically includes scrubbing their personal information from the internet, two federal judges appointed by Republican presidents wrote on behalf of the judiciary in a letter to congressional appropriators.

President Donald Trump, senior aide Stephen Miller and billionaire Elon Musk have railed at judges who have blocked parts of Trump’s agenda, threatening impeachment and launching personal attacks. Trump’s call to impeach the judge who temporarily halted deportations using an 18th century wartime law prompted a rare quick response from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Roughly 50 people have been charged with crimes in connection with the threats, U.S. Circuit Judge Amy J. St. Eve and U.S. District Robert J. Conrad Jr. said. Trump appointed St. Eve to the federal appeals court in Chicago during his first term.

“In extreme cases, the U.S. Marshals Service has been required to take extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of judges,” St. Eve and Conrad wrote.

Authorities have yet to make any arrests in hundreds of increasingly unsettling and unwanted pizza deliveries to the homes of judges and their children, U.S. District Judge Esther Salas said during an online forum on Tuesday.

The most recent deliveries, this week, have been sent in the name of Salas’ late son, Daniel Anderl, who was shot dead at the family home by a disgruntled lawyer in 2020.

The message is unmistakable, Salas said. “’I know where you live, I know where your kids live, and do you want end up like Judge Salas. Do you want to end up like her son?’” she said.

Last month, a sister of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the victim of a bomb threat in Charleston, South Carolina, police said. No bomb was found, police said.

The judges’ letter was sent last week, but posted online Friday by the judiciary. It calls the current funding levels unsustainable, nearly $50 million less than what the courts requested just for security.