Federal immigration agents detained a volunteer food shelf delivery driver on Wednesday in the parking lot of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center on St. Paul’s Kent Street, city-owned property that adjoins a city rec center and is temporarily hosting public library services.

Over the objections of community center staffers and legal observers, federal agents approached, handcuffed and detained Thao Xiong around 7:30 a.m. in the center parking lot, where they can be seen on video forcing him into one of three black sport utility vehicles they had driven onto the property.

“I showed them my documents already,” Xiong can be heard on video explaining to a center staffer who recorded him being led away. “He volunteers here,” the staffer tells the agents, pleadingly.

It was unclear on Wednesday evening where Thao was being held.

Volunteered at center

St. Paul City Council Member Anika Bowie and others later shared news of Thao’s detainment on Facebook.

Officials with St. Paul Parks and Recreation and the St. Paul Public Library system directed a reporter’s questions on Wednesday to Benny Roberts, director of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, who issued a brief written statement.

Roberts, who did not identify Xiong by name, confirmed a volunteer had been detained and said “we are in contact with his family and community partners and are working to ensure the family receives all possible supports and resources from HQB.”

Roberts added later, “A lot of info is spreading but we’re still working on getting accurate info.”

City-owned property

While the nonprofit Hallie Q. Brown community organization operates the building, the structure itself is city-owned, and adjoins the city’s Martin Luther King Recreation Center. In addition to a food shelf, it hosts a childcare operation, and has housed the books and staff of the city library system’s Rondo Community Library since December, when the Dale Street location closed for a year-long renovation.

Xiong’s detainment flies in the face of recent city-driven efforts to keep ICE out of city properties, including Parks and Rec lots, during Operation Metro Surge, which has drawn some 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota.

The mayor’s office issued a formal cease and desist letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 19, with the goal of preventing ICE agents from using city-owned parking lots for immigration enforcement.

On Wednesday, the St. Paul City Council held a public hearing on a proposed ordinance amendment that would codify the ban against ICE staging in city-owned lots, enshrining it in city law.

Neither effort has apparently stopped ICE agents from doing exactly that.

Community organizer

Jennifer Nguyen Moore, a 2018 candidate for the Ramsey County Board, said Xiong is the father of a young girl and has lent his voice and support to various campaigns for public office, including her own.

“He’s extremely passionate, and is very serious about justice and human rights,” said Nguyen Moore, recalling how he rode around on an adult tricycle-style bike carrying her campaign banner and spoke to neighbors on her behalf. “He just really loves the community, and he likes to amplify people.”

In interviews and presentations to the city council, Xiong, who is Hmong, has spoken openly about his experiences as a teen drug dealer, gang member and petty criminal and his subsequent incarceration, which ended a decade ago. He’s described himself as a community organizer in Frogtown and the North End and a voice for change.

“I got released from prison in November 2016 and I literally woke up one morning and I remember thinking ‘I’m gonna become somebody that will champion my community,’” said Xiong, in a written testimonial on the website of In Progress, a St. Paul-based arts nonprofit he became active with around 2018.

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“Every morning I wake up I have to challenge — challenge the police, challenge the district council, challenge our local government officials…. all these people,” he wrote. “But every morning I wake up and the only person I have to challenge is the person I’m staring at in the mirror. Every day I challenge that person to be better than the person yesterday.”

By REBECCA BOONE

Shirley Raines, a social media creator and nonprofit founder who dedicated her life to caring for people experiencing homelessness, has died, her organization Beauty 2 The Streetz said Wednesday. She was 58.

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Raines was known as “Ms. Shirley,” to her more than 5 million TikTok followers and to the people who regularly lined up for the food, beauty treatments and hygiene supplies she brought to Los Angeles’ Skid Row and other homeless communities in California and Nevada.

Raines’ life made an “immeasurable impact,” Beauty 2 The Streetz wrote on social media.

“Through her tireless advocacy, deep compassion, and unwavering commitment, she used her powerful media platform to amplify the voices of those in need and to bring dignity, resources, and hope to some of the most underserved populations,” the organization said.

Raines’ cause of death was not released, but the organization said it would share additional information when it is available.

Raines had six children. One son died as a toddler — an experience that left her a “very broken woman,” Raines said in 2021 when she was named CNN’s Hero of the Year.

“It’s important you know that broken people are still very much useful,” she said during the CNN award ceremony.

That deep grief led her to begin helping the homeless.

“I would rather have him back than anything in the world, but I am a mother without a son, and there are a lot of people in the street that are without a mother,” she said. “And I feel like it’s a fair exchange — I’m here for them.”

Raines began working with homeless communities in 2017. On Monday, Raines posted a video shot from inside her car as she handed out lunches to a line of people standing outside her passenger window. She greeted her clients with warm enthusiasm and respect, calling them “King,” or “Queen.”

One man told her he was able to get into an apartment.

“God is good! Look at you!” Raines replied, her usual cheerfulness stepping up a notch. In a video posted two weeks earlier, she handed her shoes to a barefoot child who was waiting for a meal, protecting the girl’s feet from the chilly asphalt.

California’s homelessness crisis is especially visible in downtown Los Angeles, where hundreds of people live in makeshift shanties that line entire blocks in the notorious neighborhood known as Skid Row. Tents regularly pop up on the pavement outside City Hall. Encampments are increasingly found in suburban areas under freeway overpasses. A 2025 survey found that about 72,000 people were homeless on any given night across Los Angeles County.

Crushow Herring, the art director of the Sidewalk Project, said Raines was both sentimental and protective of the homeless community. The Sidewalk Project uses art and peer empowerment programs to help people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles.

“I’ve been getting calls all morning from people, not just who live in Skid Row but Angelenos who are shocked” by Raines’ death, Herring said. “To see the work she did, and how people couldn’t wait to see her come out? It was a great mission. What most people need is just feeling dignity about themselves, because if they look better, they feel better.”

Raines would often give people on the street a position working with her as she provided haircuts or handed out goods, Herring said.

“By the time a year or two goes by, they’re part of the organization — they have responsibility, they have something to look forward to,” he said. “She always had people around her that were motivational, and generous and polite to community members.”

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 21: Shirley Raines poses in the press room during the 56th NAACP Image Awards Creative Honors on February 21, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images for NAACP)

In 2025, Raines was named the NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Social Media Personality. Other social media creators lauded her work and shared their own grief online Wednesday.

“Ms. Shirley was truly the best of us, love incarnate,” wrote Alexis Nikole Nelson, a foraging educator and social media creator known as “blackforager.”

“In shock,” wrote Upworthy. “Thank you for lifting so many up. May you rest in peace and power.”

By DIDI TANG

WASHINGTON (AP) — An immigration judge on Wednesday granted asylum to a Chinese national who he said had a “well founded fear” of persecution if sent back to China after exposing human rights abuses there.

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Guan Heng, 38, applied for asylum after arriving in the U.S. illegally in 2021. He has been in custody since being swept up in an immigration enforcement operation in August as part of a mass deportation campaign by the Trump administration.

The Department of Homeland Security initially sought to deport Guan to Uganda, but dropped the plan in December after his plight raised public concerns and attracted attention on Capitol Hill.

Guan in 2020 secretly filmed detention facilities in Xinjiang, adding to a body of evidence of what activists say are widespread rights abuses in the Chinese region, where as many as 1 million members of ethnic minorities, especially the Uyghurs, have been locked up.

During Wednesday’s hearing in Napanoch, New York, Guan was asked if his intention in filming the detention facilities and then releasing the video a few days before arriving in the U.S. was to give him grounds to apply for asylum. He said that was not his goal.

“I sympathized with the Uyghurs who were persecuted,” Guan, speaking by video link from the Broome County Correctional Facility, told the court through a translator.

Guan knew he had to leave China if he wanted to publish the footage, he told The Associated Press in a recent interview. He went first to Hong Kong and from there to Ecuador, where Chinese tourists could travel without a visa, and then to the Bahamas. He released most of his video footage on YouTube before taking a boat to Florida in October 2021.

Guan told the judge he didn’t know whether he would survive the boat trip and wanted to make sure the footage would be seen. After the video was released, police in China questioned his father three times, Guan said.

The Chinese government has denied allegations of rights abuses in Xinjiang, saying it runs vocational training programs to help local residents learn employable skills while rooting out radical thoughts, and has silenced dissenting views through a range of coercive means.

Guan’s lawyer, Chen Chuangchuang, said in his closing statement that the case is a “textbook example of why asylum should exist” and that the U.S. has both a “moral and legal responsibility” to grant Guan asylum.

In making his ruling, Judge Charles Ouslander told Guan the court found him to be a credible witness and that he had established his legal eligibility for asylum. He said Guan was right to fear retaliation if sent back, noting that the Chinese government had questioned his family and inquired about Guan’s whereabouts and his past activities.

It was an increasingly rare successful outcome for an asylum seeker since President Donald Trump returned to office. The asylum approval rate dropped to 10% in 2025, down from 28% between 2010 and 2024, according to federal data compiled by Mobile Pathways, a California-based nonprofit that helps immigrants navigate the U.S. legal system.

Guan, however, was not immediately released because the lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security said the department reserves the right to appeal. It has 30 days to do so, but Ouslander urged DHS to make its decision soon, noting that Guan has already been detained for about five months.

By MATTHEW DALY

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Wednesday took a step toward rolling back a rule that limits smokestack emissions that burden downwind areas in neighboring states.

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The so-called “good neighbor” rule is one of dozens of regulations that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted for reconsideration or repeal. The Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that the EPA could not enforce the rule, which is intended to block coal-fired power plants and other industrial sites from adding significantly to air pollution across state lines.

The EPA said Wednesday it is proposing to approve plans by eight states to regulate ozone air pollution as they see fit. If finalized, the states “would no longer need to worry about another ‘Good Neighbor Plan’” subject to approval by the federal government, the agency said.

The affected states are Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico and Tennessee. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA disapproved or proposed disapproval of ozone plans submitted by all those states. The state-specific plans did not sufficiently control ozone emissions that travel across state lines, the Biden-era agency said.

Zeldin said Wednesday that under President Donald Trump, the EPA is committed to advancing what Zeldin called “cooperative federalism” that allows states to decide for themselves how to attain air pollution goals.

“Today, we are taking an important step to undo a Biden administration rule that treated our state partners unfairly,” Zeldin said in a statement. If finalized, the EPA plan will ensure that “these states will be able to advance cleaner air now for their communities, instead of waiting for overly burdensome federal requirements years from now,” he said.

Zeldin criticized what he said was the Biden-era agency’s “heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all, federal mandate” to address air pollution from smog-forming ozone.

Under the proposal announced Wednesday, “EPA finds that the eight (state plans) have adequate data demonstrating these states are not interfering with ozone attainment” required by National Ambient Air Quality Standards, the agency said. The action also indicates EPA’s intent to withdraw proposed error corrections for state plans submitted by Iowa and Kansas.

In the near future, EPA intends to take a separate action to address “interstate transport” obligations for the remaining states covered in the final, Biden-era “Good Neighbor Plan,” the agency said.

Environmental groups said the EPA proposal would reward states for being bad neighbors. Air pollution from heavily industrialized Midwestern states such as Indiana and Ohio frequently reaches East Coast states such as Connecticut and Delaware.

“Once again, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin are choosing to protect aging, dirty and expensive coal plants and other industrial polluters over strong federal clean air protections that address interstate pollution problems,” said Zachary Fabish, a Sierra Club lawyer.

“Letting states off the hook while their pollution continues harming air quality in neighboring states is dangerous,” Fabish said, and will make “Americans sicker and pay more for energy while doing so.”

EPA will accept public comment for at least 30 days after the rule is published in the Federal Register.