By SARA CLINE, Associated Press

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A woman detained at a citizenship appointment in May will not be deported following a judge’s ruling this week barring her removal, but her Marine Corps veteran husband said she remains in custody at immigration detention center in Louisiana.

For two months, Paola Clouatre, 25, has been held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement complex in Monroe, waiting to learn whether she will be allowed to remain in the country. Once a week she is allowed to see her husband, who makes the eight-hour roundtrip trek from Baton Rouge so the mother can breastfeed their 4-month-old baby and see their 2-year-old son.

Clouatre, a Mexican national, entered the U.S. seeking asylum with her mother more than a decade ago. After marrying her husband in 2024 and applying for her green card to legally live and work in the U.S., she learned that ICE had issued an order for her deportation in 2018 after her mother failed to appear at an immigration hearing.

In May, during a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services appointment in New Orleans, a staffer asked about the deportation order. Clouatre explained that she was trying to reopen her case, with her husband telling The Associated Press that he and his wife were trying “to do the right thing.” Soon after, officers arrived and handcuffed Clouatre.

Adrian Clouatre has spent nearly eight weeks fighting for his wife’s release, remaining optimistic that their family would soon be reunited outside the detention facility located nearly 180 miles from their south Louisiana home.

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On Wednesday, they got word that a judge in California — the original jurisdiction for Paola Clouatre’s case — had stayed the order for her removal.

Adrian Clouatre welcomed the decision. He said their lawyer is preparing paperwork seeking his wife’s release, though it’s not guaranteed and could take weeks even in the best of scenarios.

“I just keep telling our son, “‘Mom’s coming home soon,’” Adrian Clouatre said.

Meanwhile, the couple’s lawyer is working to get the Baton Rouge mother’s green card process back on track, The New Orleans Advocate/The Times-Picayune reported. While the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has already ruled that the couple has a valid marriage, the process has been held up amid the legal battle.

The Baton Rouge mother is one of tens of thousands of people in custody as part of President Donald Trump’s pledge to remove millions of people who are in the country without legal permission.

Clouatre said GOP U.S. Sen. John Kennedy has also requested that the Department of Homeland Security release his wife from custody. Kennedy’s office did not return AP’s emailed request for comment.

Kennedy is not the first Louisiana Republican to get involved in an immigration case in the reliably red state. Earlier this month, An Iranian mother, who was detained by ICE after living in the U.S. for nearly five decades, was released following advocacy from Republican U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.

By TODD RICHMOND, Associated Press

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The father of a Wisconsin school shooter must stand trial on charges he allowed her access to the guns she used in the deadly attack, a court commissioner ruled Thursday, rejecting arguments that he didn’t know she was considering violence and didn’t physically hand her the weapons at the school.

Dane County Court Commissioner John Rome issued the order in Jeffrey Rupnow’s case following a preliminary hearing, a routine step in the criminal justice process in which a court official decides whether enough evidence exists to order a trial.

Rupnow, 43, faces two counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a minor and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The charges carry a combined maximum sentence of 18 years in prison.

Jeffrey Rupnow, father of Abundant Life Christian School shooter Natalie Rupnow, looks towards the state prosecutors during a preliminary hearing on Thursday, July 24, 2025, at Dane County Courthouse in Madison, Wis. (Owen Ziliak/Wisconsin State Journal via AP, Pool)

Deadly attack at Madison school

Rupnow’s 15-year-old daughter, Natalie Rupnow, opened fire in December at Abundant Life Christian School, a religious school she attended in Madison. She killed teacher Erin Michelle West and 14-year-old old student Rubi Bergara and wounded six others before she shot herself in the head.

Investigators recovered a 9 mm Glock handgun from the room where Natalie Rupnow died as well as a .22-caliber Sig Sauer pistol from a bag the girl was carrying. Also in the bag were three magazines loaded with .22 ammunition and a 50-round box of 9 mm ammunition.

Prosecutors charged Jeffery Rupnow this past May, alleging in a criminal complaint that he told investigators his daughter was struggling to cope with her parents’ divorce and he bought her the guns as way to connect with her.

He also told investigators that he kept the guns in a safe but told her the code to unlock it, according to the complaint. The day before the school attack, the complaint says he took the Sig Sauer out of the safe so she could clean it, but he wasn’t sure if he put the weapon back in the safe or locked it.

Jeffrey Rupnow, father of Abundant Life Christian School shooter Natalie Rupnow, appears for a preliminary hearing on Thursday, July 24, 2025, at Dane County Courthouse in Madison, Wis. (Owen Ziliak/Wisconsin State Journal via AP, Pool)

Shooter declared a ‘War Against Humanity’

A search of Natalie’s room netted a six-page document the girl had written entitled “War Against Humanity,” the complaint said. She started the piece by describing humanity as “filth” and saying she hated people who don’t care and “smoke their lungs out with weed or drink as much as they can like my own father.”

She wrote about how she admired school shooters, how her mother was not in her life and how she obtained her weapons “by lies and manipulation, and my fathers stupidity.”

Rupnow looked on in silence Thursday as his attorney, Lisa Goldman, argued that he acted like a reasonable parent. He kept all their guns in a safe, which isn’t required under Wisconsin law. Many Wisconsin parents teach their children how to shoot and Natalie passed a gun safety course, Goldman added.

Even though he told investigators that Natalie was struggling over the divorce, he had no reason to think giving her guns would cause more problems, Goldman said. He didn’t know how to access her social media accounts, Natalie rarely let him into her room and her therapy records from 2021 to the spring of 2024 showed no indication of suicidal thoughts, Goldman added.

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Rupnow told Natalie that the gun safe code was his Social Security number in reverse but never gave her the actual number, Goldman continued. She questioned whether Natalie’s mother may have given her the number, pointing out that police never checked her mother’s electronic devices.

Goldman also argued that the school attack took place outside of Rupnow’s parental supervision — he was at his job as a recycling truck driver when Natalie opened fire — and he would have had to hand Natalie the guns at Abundant Life to be criminally liable.

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne countered that Goldman should make her arguments at trial, not during a preliminary hearing.

Rome said in his order sending Rupnow to trial that giving his daughter guns could amount to giving her the pass code and giving her the Sig Sauer the night before the attack.

Parents charged in school shootings across the country

Rupnow is another in a line of parents to face charges in connection with a school shooting.

Last year, the mother and father of a school shooter in Michigan who killed four students in 2021 were each convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The mother was the first parent in the U.S. to be held responsible for a child carrying out a mass school attack.

The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school was arrested in September and faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon.

In 2023, the father of a man charged in a deadly Fourth of July parade shooting in suburban Chicago pleaded guilty to seven misdemeanors related to how his son obtained a gun license.

By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump signed a bill Thursday canceling about $9 billion that had been approved for public broadcasting and foreign aid as Republicans look to lock in cuts to programs targeted by the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The bulk of the spending being clawed back is for foreign assistance programs. About $1.1 billion was destined for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which finances NPR and PBS, though most of that money is distributed to more than 1,500 local public radio and television stations around the country.

The White House had billed the legislation as a test case for Congress and said more such rescission packages would be on the way.

Some Republicans were uncomfortable with the cuts, yet supported them anyway, wary of crossing Trump or upsetting his agenda. Democrats unanimously rejected the cuts but were powerless to stop them.

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The White House says the public media system is politically biased and an unnecessary expense. Conservatives particularly directed their ire at NPR and PBS. Lawmakers with large rural constituencies voiced grave concern about what the cuts to public broadcasting could mean for some local public stations in their state. Some stations will have to close, they warned.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the stations are “not just your news — it is your tsunami alert, it is your landslide alert, it is your volcano alert.”

On the foreign aid cuts, the White House argued that they would incentivize other nations to step up and do more to respond to humanitarian crises and that the rescissions best served the American taxpayer.

Democrats argued that the Republican administration’s animus toward foreign aid programs would hurt America’s standing in the world and create a vacuum for China to fill. They also expressed concerns that the cuts would have deadly consequences for many of the world’s most impoverished people.

“With these cuts, we will cause death, spread disease and deepen starvation across the planet,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.

By MARK SHERMAN and JACK DURA, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked a lower-court ruling in a redistricting dispute in North Dakota that would gut a landmark federal civil rights law for millions of people.

The justices indicated in an unsigned order that they are likely to take up a federal appeals court ruling that would eliminate the most common path people and civil rights groups use to sue under a key provision of the 60-year-old Voting Rights Act.

The case could be argued as early as 2026 and decided by next summer.

Three conservative justices, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, would have rejected the appeal.

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The court also has a separate redistricting case over a second majority Black congressional district in Louisiana. The justices heard arguments in March, but took the rare step of calling for a new round of arguments in their term that begins in October. They have yet to spell out what issues they want discussed.

In the North Dakota case, the Spirit Lake Tribe and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, with reservations 60 miles apart, argued that the state’s 2021 legislative map violated the act by diluting their voting strength and ability to elect their own candidates.

The case went to trial in 2023, and a federal judge later ordered the use of a map of the area, including the reservations that led to the election last year of three Native Americans, all Democrats, to the Republican-supermajority Legislature.

But in a 2-1 ruling issued in May, a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that only the Justice Department can bring such lawsuits under the law’s Section 2.

The 8th Circuit also had ruled in an Arkansas case in 2023 that private individuals can’t sue under the same provision.

More than 90 percent of Section 2 cases have been brought through private enforcement, UCLA law professor Richard Hasen wrote on the Election Law blog.

The 8th Circuit rulings conflict with decades of decisions by appellate courts that have affirmed the rights of private individuals to sue under Section 2.

The Supreme Court often will step in when appeals courts around the country come to different decisions on the same legal issue.

The 8th Circuit covers seven states: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. In the wake of the Arkansas decision, Minnesota and other states moved to shore up voting rights with state-level protections.

Dura reported from Bismarck, North Dakota.