Category: National News Feed

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to keep pulling over vehicles, signaling his opposition Wednesday to plans announced just a day earlier to suspend most traffic stops following another string of fatal shootings.

It’s not clear whether ICE will quickly reverse course and resume most stops, which have been a key tool in Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Ending those stops, Trump wrote, would be “playing right into the criminal’s hands.”

“We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump wrote Wednesday on his social media site.

Hours after Trump made his views known, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin issued his own statement saying people illegally in the country would be “arrested and deported wherever they are.” While Mullin didn’t directly say whether ICE officers will be allowed to carry out traffic stops, he later said in a statement that he and Trump “are on the same page,” and that they want ICE officers “to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission.”

ICE’s enforcement tactics are coming under renewed criticism after three people died during encounters with federal officers within a week. In Florida, a 28-year-old man was killed Tuesday after he was hit by a tractor trailer while running from immigration and other federal officers, authorities said.

Before that, two motorists were shot and killed by ICE officers — one in Texas last week and another in Maine on Monday.

Policy change for ICE traffic stops

After the Maine killing, Trump administration officials told ICE officers to suspend most vehicle stops, people familiar with the decision said Tuesday.

Since the immigration crackdown began, federal officers confronting drivers have opened fire several times, saying the drivers’ vehicles had posed a danger. Policing experts have long said that shooting into moving cars presents a danger of its own and should almost always be avoided.

There have been at least 10 deaths involving encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched his deportation campaign. At least four of them involved people in vehicles, a trend so troubling that Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine urged Department of Homeland Security leaders “to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

Two shootings in a week, she said Wednesday, “raise very serious questions” and warrant a halt in that approach for the time being.

ICE has been under pressure to beef up arrest and deportation numbers. It says people being sought are increasingly staying in their homes, and it often blames immigration advocates who advise immigrants to stay in homes unless ICE produces a warrant signed by an independent judge.

ICE officers say that means they’re forced to find other ways to make arrests.

DHS says the man killed in Maine came to the US illegally

More protests are planned after hundreds gathered Tuesday to remember Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the 25-year-old Colombian national who was shot in his car Monday.

Karolina Rojas, his partner and the mother of their young daughter, shared a photo on Instagram of the three hugging and smiling.

“I love you, my darling, my life. I love you. I have no words for this pain. You were my everything. Please watch over me. Help me find the strength to carry on. Stay with me always. Don’t leave me alone. I’m begging you, my love,” she wrote.

Durán Guerrero illegally entered the U.S. on Sept. 1, 2023, through the southern border, DHS said Wednesday. Advocacy groups said that when he was killed, he was authorized to work in the U.S.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said the Homeland Security secretary told him on Monday that ICE officers were in Biddeford to serve an arrest warrant but that it wasn’t for the person who was shot.

When ICE tried to stop a vehicle driven by someone who came from a home under surveillance, the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon,” the department said.

In its statement Wednesday, DHS said Guerrero was released into the U.S. after crossing the border.

The department didn’t answer questions about the agent who shot him.

Photos showed bullet holes in Durán Guerrero’s car windshield, but the officers involved didn’t have body cameras, leaving many questions.

Texas state police will investigate Houston shooting

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a staunch supporter of Trump’s immigration crackdown, said Wednesday that the state’s top law enforcement unit would investigate the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.

DHS’ account of the July 7 shooting is disputed by three other men who were riding in a van with Salgado Araujo at the time. A public viewing for Salgado Araujo, a homebuilder from Mexico, was set for Thursday in Houston.

More than a week after the shooting, new court records show the FBI is investigating if drugs were found in the van, according to a search warrant application signed by a federal judge Tuesday.

FBI special agent David McNeilly stated in an affidavit that he observed four plastic bags of a white substance appearing to be meth inside the van. DHS has not stated that suspected drugs were the reason why ICE officers engaged in the traffic stop. The FBI referred questions about the search warrant to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ACLU of Texas, which is providing legal representation for Salgado Araujo’s family, said the Trump administration “lacks credibility” to investigate itself.

Maine shooting puts a spotlight on ICE

Outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the shooting of Durán Guerrero in Maine a targeted killing “at the hands of the U.S. government.”

In Wednesday’s social media post, Trump told ICE to be “judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”

Border czar Tom Homan told reporters that the investigation needs to play out and that officers will be held accountable if they are found to have acted inappropriately or illegally.

Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, said ICE should be scrapped as a federal agency if it can’t be fixed.

Mills, who has criticized ICE before, said Wednesday that the agency needs changes “before more families are robbed of a loved one.”

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Whittle reported from Biddeford, Maine. Associated Press reporters Jack Brook in New Orleans, Michael R. Sisak in New York, John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, Isabel DeBre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Elliot Spagat in Park City, Utah, Anna Wilder in Austin, Texas, and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — One person died, three people were missing and 16 were rescued from the waters off San Francisco after a pontoon boat sank Tuesday afternoon while carrying mostly family members as part of a memorial service, authorities said.

Crews arriving on the scene near Alcatraz Island found a three-deck pontoon vessel almost fully under water with the motor still running and leaking fuel, San Francisco Fire Chief Dean Crispen said.

By Tuesday evening, authorities were searching for the missing in open ocean on the western side of the Golden Gate Bridge. The search, which involved divers, helicopters and vessels, was expected to continue all night, officials said.

Authorities updated the initial number of missing people from two to three after hearing from witnesses.

“Right now we are in full rescue mode,” Crispen said, adding that three people who suffered injuries falling from the boat were taken to a hospital and expected to be released Tuesday night.

Alcatraz Island, once a federal prison infamously inescapable due to the strong ocean currents and cold Pacific waters that surround it, is now a tourist destination. It is located in San Francisco Bay about a mile (about 1.6 kilometers) north of the city’s shoreline, in an often windy area that attracts sailboats and other recreational vessels.

Videos of the scene showed boats deployed to rescue people who had been on the vessel, which was largely submerged with objects floating nearby.

The boating mishap was initially reported as a fire, “but we now don’t have any evidence of that,” Crispen said.

The person who died was alive when plucked from the frigid waters by rescue crews but later died. A dog onboard also died.

All those rescued were taken to Gashouse Cove Marina, a small craft harbor in San Francisco.

Aaron Anfinson, captain of the Bass-Tub, told the San Francisco Chronicle his boat was carrying guests toward the Golden Gate Bridge in “pretty windy, a little choppy” waters when a man on a smaller vessel flagged them down and pointed to a pontoon boat in the middle of the bay that appeared to be on fire.

By the time the Bass-Tub reached it, the flames were out, but the pontoon was sinking. Some people were already in the water while others remained aboard, Anfinson said, adding that they tried to hand out life jackets to the passengers.

One woman’s head was injured.

“We figured we would get her first,” Anfinson said. A deckhand lowered a swim ladder and threw a life ring into the water to help pull her aboard.

“It was scary,” Anfinson said. “I don’t want to see anybody in that situation.”

Fire Lt. Mariano Elias said the vessel, described as a “pontoon pleasure boat,” was about 600 yards (about 550 meters) from Alcatraz and the emergency call came in just after 3:30 p.m.

Crispen said the vessel was believed to have launched near the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco. A person who answered the phone there said the club did not have any information on what happened.

Live video from the scene showed a man and a woman wrapped in blankets and sitting on a curb before walking to a nearby ambulance. A yellow tarp covered a body on the dock.

The Coast Guard and Oakland police also helped in the rescue, Elias said.

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Associated Press writers Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon, and Hallie Golden in Seattle, and photographer Noah Berger in San Francisco contributed to this story.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks ticked higher Wednesday following strong profit reports from BlackRock and other big companies. The tentative gains came as oil prices swung to their highest levels in a month because of the war with Iran.

The S&P 500 rose 0.4% after flipping between modest gains and losses through the day, and it’s back within 0.5% of its all-time high set last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 150 points, or 0.3%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.6%.

BlackRock helped lead the market with a rise of 6.6% after the company behind some of the most popular investment funds reported stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. CEO Laurence Fink said its iShares funds topped $6 trillion in assets under management during the quarter, roughly doubling in three years.

Bank of New York Mellon rose 5.1% after adding to the spate of strong earnings reports from many of the biggest U.S. banks a day earlier. Cintas climbed 4.4% after the provider of office uniforms, restroom supplies and other products likewise delivered a better profit for the latest quarter than analysts forecast.

They helped offset a drop for Elevance Health, which fell 8.5% even though it reported stronger profit and revenue than analysts expected.

Expectations are high for U.S. companies’ profit growth during the spring. They’ll need to beat them to justify the big moves their stock prices have made, with indexes near their records.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 28.81 points to 7,572.40 and is within 0.5% of its record set early last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 150.37 to 52,658.64, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 162.22 to 26,269.23.

The broad U.S. stock market got a lift from another report showing inflation slowed last month. It said inflation at the wholesale level slowed to 5.5% from 6% in May, and it was much better than the acceleration that economists expected.

The day before, a separate report said inflation that U.S. consumers are feeling was also not as bad as economists expected last month.

Such numbers take pressure off the Federal Reserve, which is considering raising interest rates. Higher rates would keep a lid on inflation, but they also slow the economy and hurt prices for all kinds of investments.

Following the inflation report, traders see just a 10% chance that the Fed will raise its main interest rate at its next meeting in a couple weeks. That’s down from the nearly 42% probability they saw on Monday, before the inflation reports, according to data from CME Group.

Also helping to pull down expectations was a speech from John Williams, president of the New York Fed. He said that “there are encouraging reasons to expect that inflation has peaked and should edge down in coming quarters.”

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, meanwhile, gave few clues on what to expect in testimony before a Senate committee. “Any central banker would be happy to have data going in the right direction,” he said about this week’s encouraging inflation reports, but “these are all imperfect measures of the state of underlying inflation.”

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.55% from 4.58% late Tuesday and from 4.62% the day before.

Upward pressure on inflation remains because of the war with Iran, which has seen days of back-and-forth strikes by the United States and Iran across the Middle East.

The price for a barrel of Brent crude briefly topped $86 in the morning before falling back to settle at $84.95 per barrel, up 0.3% from the day before.

In stock markets abroad, South Korea’s Kospi index jumped 6.2%.

Seoul’s market is dominated by two huge tech companies, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and its main index has already had drops of 8.9%, 7.9% and 5.3% so far this month because of sharp swings for stocks caught up in the artificial-intelligence boom.

In Amsterdam, ASML reported stronger revenue growth for the latest quarter than it had forecast. CEO Christophe Fouquet said continuing progress in AI has customers accelerating their expansions, and the maker of chipmaking machinery gave a forecast for upcoming revenue growth that topped analysts’ expectations.

ASML’s stock in Amsterdam slipped 0.4%, but its stock that trades in the United States rose 2.2%.

Its strong forecast helped calm some of the worries that have sent AI-related stocks spinning recently. Chief among them is the possibility that their prices shot too high in the euphoria around AI.

In China, stocks rose 1.4% in Hong Kong but fell 0.3% in Shanghai after the government said the world’s second-largest economy expanded at a 4.3% annualized pace last quarter, down from the 5% growth rate at the start of the year.

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AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed to this report.

Thousands of visitors were told to evacuate a remote Minnesota wilderness area accessible only by boat as wildfires send dangerously heavy smoke over the U.S. Midwest and Northeast this week.

More than 100 wildfires are burning in Canada, where a train crew in northern Ontario filmed themselves surrounded by flames before being safely evacuated. Winds are carrying the smoke southeast.

Warnings about unhealthy air conditions Wednesday extended from Minnesota through Toronto and into New York. Unusually hot summer temperatures were expected, too.

The best advice is to stay indoors to avoid both the smoke and the extreme heat, said Tyler Hasenstein, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

“Those two things coinciding with each other is not good from a health perspective,” he said.

Rangers try to get thousands of campers out of remote Minnesota wilderness

In far northeastern Minnesota, rangers were trying to warn people that the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness was closed Tuesday because about 17 fires caused by lightning more than a week ago were spreading through the vast wilderness accessible primarily by canoe.

Rangers estimated anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 people were inside the 1.1-million-acre (445,000-hectare) wilderness, which is almost the size of Delaware, Superior National Forest spokesperson Joy VanDrie said.

“It’s an arduous job,” VanDrie said of rangers and campers having to canoe for hours or even carry their boats over land to evacuate.

No injuries or deaths have been reported. Rangers were going through every lake and waterway and officials estimated they had about 90% of the people out Wednesday.

Campers rescued this week said skies quickly darkened from smoke and they could feel the heat as they paddled or were taken by boat to safety.

Jan Bailey was camping with her husband, daughter, son-in-law, two grandchildren and three dogs when they noticed wispy smoke on the horizon. Two hours later, they could see a raging firestorm. A paddleboarder with a satellite phone fled to their campsite and they called forestry rangers who sent a boat to rescue them and others.

“We had fire on both sides of us at that time,” Bailey told Minnesota Public Radio. “So we’re just weaving between the lakes. It’s a little smoky. Campsites are going up.”

Even authorities in Canada pitched in. They rescued two groups of youth campers Wednesday who had crossed the border. One group was stuck on an isolated sandbar, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said.

VanDrie didn’t know when the area might reopen. Minnesota officials said some fires in the Boundary Waters will be allowed to burn indefinitely but will be monitored to ensure they don’t threaten people or property.

Severe drought and heat have led to a busy wildfire season

Dan Westervelt, associate professor at Columbia University’s Climate School, said severe drought conditions combined with heat in Canada and the U.S. have created “a perfect storm for really dry conditions to provide a lot of fuel for these wildfires to burn.” Research shows warming temperatures from burning coal, oil and gas are making fires more frequent and intense.

High levels of fine particulate matter in the air from wildfire smoke may be unhealthy for sensitive groups, such as children and people with heart or lung conditions. The particulates can cause shortness of breath, coughing, dizziness or fatigue and aggravate heart and lung diseases and other chronic health issues.

Experts suggest wearing a N95 mask if you have to be outside and keeping your indoor air cleaner by closing windows and running an air purifier or air conditioner.

It’s been a particularly busy and deadly fire season in the U.S. About four dozen large fires are currently burning across 15 states, from Minnesota and North Carolina to Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon and California, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Prolonged drought and record low snowpack levels combined to make conditions ripe for rapid fire growth.

Smoke spreads as officials warn wildfires could burn for months

In Minnesota, officials warned large fires could burn for months. In Minneapolis, the high Wednesday was expected to be 96 degrees F (36 C) and temperatures above 90 F (32 C) were expected the rest of the week.

“It could well be we’re having significant fires throughout the summer until we have snow. Snow would be a good thing,” said Patty Thielen, director of the state Department of Natural Resources.

The smoke was so thick that the sky turned orange like Mars in northern Minnesota, said Matt Taraldsen, supervisory meteorologist with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Part of the danger of the heat and smoke there is that only about half the buildings have air conditioning, Taraldsen said. Residents usually would open windows to keep cool “but when there’s dense smoke, you can’t do that,” he said.

Taraldsen’s mother said she woke up in her Duluth, Minnesota, home Wednesday morning and everything smelled like a campfire. When she opened her door, her eyes watered and she had to use her inhaler to ease her asthma.

Typically, Theresa Taraldsen said, she can see the St. Louis River from her yard but it was all a white wall of smoke Wednesday.

“You literally couldn’t see nothing,” she said.

Officials in Michigan and Wisconsin warned residents about air quality issues that could last for days. People in New York reported smelling smoke Wednesday afternoon and the problems extended even to Maine, where residents were reporting a yellowish and brownish color in the sky.

The most intense smoke could spread as far south as Washington, D.C., by midday Thursday.

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Associated Press writers Susan Montoya Bryan and Jeffrey Collins contributed to this report.

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Heavy downpours in South Texas washed out highways and stranded motorists Tuesday as forecasters warned that a threat of more severe weather could bring dangerous flooding to already drenched counties near the border with Mexico.

Storms dumped up to a foot of rain in some rural areas of Texas, leading to dozens of high-water rescues across the region and officials shutting down portions of a busy highway for hours near Uvalde, about 80 miles (129 kilometers) west of San Antonio. A flood watch also included Kerr County, where catastrophic flooding last year along the Guadalupe River killed more than 100 people.

No deaths or injuries Tuesday were immediately reported.

The National Weather Service warned that storms overnight could dump more than a foot of additional rain to some places into Wednesday, creating potentially catastrophic impacts from flash flooding in areas west of San Antonio. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for dozens of counties.

“Intense rain rates and compounding effects from multiple rounds of storms will result in a dangerous flash flooding threat through Thursday,” the National Weather Service said.

Authorities on Tuesday posted videos of a rescue crew in a boat down flooded streets and one vehicle being swept away by fast-moving waters. Five people were rescued by members of the Texas Game Warden Search and Rescue Team and four were rescued by a local game warden, said Maggie Berger, a spokesperson for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

In Uvalde, officials said there had been at least two dozen water rescues. They opened a local event center for anyone displaced by flooding. In Sabinal, officials were also making plans for a shelter.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico formally requested that U.S. state attorneys general criminally investigate cases of migrants who have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody or during raids, the Mexican government said Tuesday.

The request follows the death of Mexican immigrant Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston. Since the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, 17 Mexican migrants have died during immigration enforcement, 14 in ICE custody and three in agency operations.

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry had previously said it would make the request, which was formalized on Tuesday, according to the ministry. It said a similar request will be also sent to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The United States is not legally obliged to act on the requests.

Also, the Mexican government said it has started sending letters to U.S. detention centers where Mexican migrants have died, demanding they “immediately cease the actions or omissions that resulted in these deaths, such as preventing access to prompt and expedited medical care, as well as the application of policies incompatible with medical and penitentiary standards.”

The first center to receive the letter was Adelanto, in California, where four Mexican migrants died.

The letters are a first step toward “the eventual filing of civil lawsuits” against the companies that operate the detention centers to stop human rights violations, according to the ministry.

Last week, Mexican Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco said his country would go directly to U.S. authorities to request criminal investigations in cases of Mexicans killed in ICE custody or enforcement operations.

Salgado Araujo, who had no criminal record and had lived in the U.S. for 35 years, was shot last Tuesday while driving his construction crew to a job site in Houston. His death sparked protests in Houston and demands for an independent investigation from Democrats and Salgado Araujo’s family.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said the 52-year-old Araujo had rammed an ICE vehicle, and that a federal agent fired a weapon in self-defense.

Velasco also sent a letter to Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, requesting that U.S. authorities gather information on the deaths of the Mexican migrants in ICE custody and analyze the “compatibility of these events with international human rights obligations.”

The foreign minister also asked Türk to seek the opinion of the Human Rights Council, a U.N. intergovernmental body that promotes human rights, on the cases and offer recommendations.

The developments mark an escalation in Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s response to Trump’s immigration crackdown. Sheinbaum earlier this year ordered Mexico’s diplomatic missions across the U.S. to regularly check in with ICE detainees, and her government even lodged a complaint with Türk.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump will deliver a primetime address this week that he says will include a focus on elections, suggesting he could revisit long-debunked conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat to Democrat Joe Biden. The speech comes as he’s escalated calls for Republicans to pass tighter federal voting rules for November’s midterm elections.

The Republican president has been guarded about what he plans to say in the 9 p.m. Thursday speech, scheduled as he confronts a collapsing deal to end the war with Iran. He also faces numerous domestic issues, including recent deadly shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Asked for a preview of the speech on Tuesday, Trump offered scant detail but said he has “really big news.”

“It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” Trump said in the Oval Office. He refused to go further, saying he wanted to “save it” for the moment, though he also hinted he would be talking about a hodgepodge of issues.

“We’ll be discussing other things, too,” Trump said, without elaborating. “It’s going to be a very big announcement.”

Trump has used the power of the primetime presidential address — typically reserved for milestones — to deliver politically charged speeches before, including one in December when he sought to blame the challenging economic climate on Democrats. But Thursday’s address seems poised to go even further, using the moment to amplify election lies before an audience of millions in an effort to boost Republican prospects before midterms that threaten to hobble Trump for the remainder of his term.

On Monday, when asked about the speech, Trump repeated baseless claims of voter fraud in the Los Angeles primary race for mayor. During the interview with conservative outlet Newsmax, Trump said Republican Spencer Pratt lost his primary bid because of fraud, citing in part California’s slow vote count.

Federal prosecutors said they were opening fraud investigations in the state last month after Trump drew attention to the claim.

The president’s preoccupation with voting fraud and election security dates back at least to 2016, when he refused to say whether he would accept defeat to Democrat Hillary Clinton. After he won, he convened a voting integrity commission to support his claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote, though the commission disbanded without uncovering any such evidence.

Four years later, after he lost the 2020 election to Biden, Trump again claimed cheating and zeroed in on the Democrat’s narrow win in Georgia. Trump called the state’s secretary of state and pressured him to “find 11,780 votes,” just enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. He, along with than a dozen allies, was indicted in the state though the charges were later dropped.

Repeated audits and reviews — manyrun by Republicans, including Trump’s own then-attorney general — have found no significant fraud occurred in 2020.

Before winning in 2024, Trump was again laying the groundwork to claim cheating if he lost. After returning to office, he stocked his administration with officials who back his false claims of 2020 election fraud.

Trump made voting regulation central in this term

Frequently declaring that he won the White House “three times,” Trump has made voting regulation a core issue during his second term, demanding legislation that would require voter ID and sharply limit mail-in voting. Facing midterm races that will decide control of Capitol Hill, Trump has stirred new claims to cast doubt on election results that could challenge his power in Washington.

Earlier this year, FBI agents raided elections offices in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing materials from the 2020 election. Tulsi Gabbard, then Trump’s director of national intelligence, traveled to Atlanta to oversee the execution of the search warrant.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, campaigning in Georgia for Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and governor’s candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms, smiled Tuesday when asked about Trump potentially rehashing the 2020 election in his national address.

He called it a strategy “for losers.”

“I think people are exhausted by having conversations about elections that happened six years ago, that we have the answer to,” Moore said. “He continues to bring this up because he cannot get out of his mind that he actually could have lost.”

Beyond Georgia, Trump has widely taken aim at states that allow voters to submit ballots by mail. Trump said he called a U.S. attorney in California and demanded scrutiny of the governor’s primary last month as votes were being counted.

Last week, Trump ousted the remaining members of the federal Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan panel that resisted his efforts to require would-be voters to document their U.S. citizenship before registering.

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Barrow reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.