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New Mexico’s attorney general on Friday opened a criminal investigation to determine whether U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents broke state law by allowing hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach the streets of Albuquerque.

The extraordinary inquiry comes less than a week after The Associated Press reported that DEA agents repeatedly monitored — but did not seize — shipments of the synthetic opioid in a bid to build bigger criminal cases between 2023 and 2025.

Current and former DEA agents, including whistleblower David Howell, told AP the strategy amounted to a gamble with public safety and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules intended to safeguard the public.

The fentanyl went unseized amid the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history and as the DEA led a public awareness campaign — “One Pill Can Kill” — emphasizing that even a few milligrams of the substance can be lethal.

The criminal investigation turns a debate over enforcement tactics into a question of whether federal agents crossed legal lines while pursuing larger trafficking organizations.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, said federal agents “are not above the law,” but they enjoy substantial legal protections when carrying out official duties.

Still, Torrez said he would start “demanding documents and information about the DEA’s conduct, in New Mexico and nationally, to determine whether what occurred here reflects a broader pattern of reckless or unlawful behavior.”

“If those allegations are accurate, the consequences for New Mexicans were not abstract. They were fatal,” Torrez wrote in a letter to Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who earlier this week called for the inquiry.

“New Mexico already ranks among the states hardest hit by fentanyl overdose deaths,” he added, “and the families who have lost children, siblings and parents to this crisis deserve a full accounting of what the federal government knew, what it did and what it failed to do.”

The DEA initially denied Howell’s allegations in a statement to AP. But the agency later called upon the Justice Department’s independent watchdog to conduct its own investigation.

“Should that review identify areas of improvement, the DEA will of course implement changes to better their practices,” the Justice Department said in a statement. “We welcome a partnership with Governor Lujan Grisham, as well as New Mexico state and local leaders, to fight the scourge of fentanyl and keep her constituents safe.”

A growing number of local and state leaders in New Mexico have expressed outrage in the wake of Howell’s allegations. But those sentiments are not widely held by family members of overdose victims, said Paul E. Martin, founder of United Against Fentanyl, a nonprofit organization fighting the epidemic that represents 5,000 family members of victims.

“Law enforcement makes mistakes,” Martin said. “But the DEA are the men and women putting their lives on the line. Their entire business is the removal of illegal and toxic drugs from our streets.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio joined Israel and Lebanon’s ambassadors to the U.S. Friday to announce a framework agreement that was described as a first step toward peace following months of conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The agreement does not include Hezbollah and prompted one of the group’s officials in Lebanon to warn of civil war. The U.S. State Department said the framework establishes a process for dismantling Hezbollah and for Lebanon to regain territory that was taken by Israeli forces as they battled the militant group.

The U.S. will facilitate a newly created “Military Coordination Group for Lebanon” to implement the framework, the State Department said, while committing $100 million in humanitarian assistance.

“For Lebanon, this Framework provides a genuine pathway out of a long crisis,” the State Department said. “For Israel, it creates a verifiable path to removing the persistent threat on its northern border.”

Friday’s agreement was signed in front of Rubio in Washington by Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, and Nada Hamadeh Moawad, the Lebanese ambassador to the United States.

Leiter said the final destination of the framework is peace between the two countries.

“Our language is we want to embrace Lebanon,” he said. “Our language is we want to get in our car in Tel Aviv and take a drive up to Beirut, and we want Beirut to come down and take a drive to Tel Aviv. That’s where we’re going. That’s where we want to go.”

Leiter said that will depend on Hezbollah being disarmed and dismantled, which will allow Israel to withdraw and Lebanon to “regain its full sovereignty.”

“So it really depends on the Lebanese army,” Leiter said. “It depends on the support the Lebanese army gets from the U.S. And we think it’s going to be solid.”

Moawad said the framework “is a first step on the road to restoring Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity, securing a permanent and final cessation of hostilities, enabling our people to go back to their land and allowing all Lebanese to live in peace, security and prosperity.”

Hezbollah official says group won’t give up weapons

The latest conflict began when Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel days after Israel and the U.S. launched their war on Iran on Feb. 28. Israel invaded Lebanon and has expanded its control.

More than 4,000 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli strikes since March. At least 37 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Lebanon or northern Israel during the fighting.

Lebanese officials have said that securing a withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon is a top priority for them in the negotiations, while Israeli officials have prioritized the disarmament of the Iran-backed Hezbollah.

The talks between Israel and Lebanon were separate from the interim deal that was signed last week by the leaders of the U.S. and Iran to end the fighting in the Islamic Republic. That agreement set a 60-day period for negotiations on key issues, including the future of Tehran’s nuclear program amid concerns that Iran wants to use it for military purposes, a claim the country denies.

The Lebanese government had been wary of having Iran negotiate on its behalf, and Lebanon launched its own direct negotiations with Israel after the outbreak of the latest Israel-Hezbollah war. Hezbollah was not part of the talks, which resulted in several ceasefire agreements that were never implemented on the ground.

Hezbollah is unlikely to agree to any plan that would include its disarmament throughout the country. The group has maintained that it is only required by previous agreements and U.N. resolutions to disarm in the area south of the Litani River, near Lebanon’s border with Israel.

Hassan Fadlallah, a member of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, reiterated the group’s stance on Beirut-based pan-Arab Al-Mayadeen TV that it rejects Lebanon’s direct negotiations with Israel and that it will not give up its weapons.

Fadlallah said Lebanese authorities “will not be able to enforce the agreement signed in Washington unless they go, with American support, to civil war.” He also called the agreement in Washington “an attempt to derail the Islamabad process,” referring to the U.S.-Iran negotiations.

Israel establishes ‘pilot zones’ for Lebanon

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said in a statement that the agreement “aims to achieve an Israeli withdrawal from all Lebanese territory, restore state sovereignty over it, and facilitate the return of its citizens” and that under it Lebanon is obligated to “extend the authority of the Lebanese state, through its armed forces, over all its territory.”

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun had told a visiting British parliamentary delegation on Wednesday that a proposal for “pilot zones” where the Lebanese army is supposed to take exclusive control of the territory as Israeli troops will withdraw was “under discussion pending approval from the Israeli side.”

Israel’s direct negotiations with Lebanon include discussions about the redeployment of Israeli forces after southern Lebanon is cleared of Hezbollah infrastructure and Hezbollah has disarmed, said an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video on Friday that the framework is a “great achievement” for Israel.

“The most important thing, first and foremost, is that Israel will remain in the security zone in southern Lebanon,” he said. “This is a major achievement, and we will maintain it as long as Hezbollah has not been disarmed and as long as it continues to pose a threat to the State of Israel.”

Netanyahu said that Israel is allowing the Lebanese army to begin preparing to take control of territory, while the Israeli military is establishing two pilot zones.

“A small part of it is within the expanded security zone that we secured over the past two weeks and which, the IDF has made absolutely clear, it does not need,” Netanyahu said. “In other words, we are maintaining the original security zone at all times, outside the range of anti-tank missiles.”

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This story has been corrected to include Nada Hamadeh Moawad’s full name. It’s Nada Hamadeh Moawad, not Nada Hamadeh.

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Sewell reported from Beirut. Lidman reported from Tel Aviv. Associated Press writers Koral Saeed in Herzliya, Israel, and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed to this report.

MIAMI (AP) — A 35-year-old nurse in Kentucky prepared her will. The single mother named a legal guardian for her four children and transferred her properties into their names.

She felt like she needed to prepare for death — in case she gets deported back to Haiti, a country she fled at 9 years old.

After the Supreme Court decided Thursday to allow the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disasters in Haiti and Syria, fear ricocheted through those communities across the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people now face the prospect of deportation.

“I have been living with this internal fear, it’s like preparing for a funeral, just in case I die when going to another country,” said the nurse, who asked not to be identified for fear of being targeted for deportation.

She is among about 350,000 Haitians granted Temporary Protected Status, many of whom have legally lived and worked in the U.S. for decades and have children who are U.S. citizens. Thursday’s decision, which is expected to take effect July 27, also applied to around 6,000 Syrians. It could also open the door to the administration unwinding protections for 1.3 million people from 17 countries.

Temporary Protected Status allows people to live and work in the US

Congress created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries deemed dangerous, because of disasters, civil war or other violence or instability. It permits people to work legally in the U.S. but does not provide a path to citizenship. It can be renewed in increments of up to 18 months if the homeland security secretary deems conditions unsafe for return.

The Biden administration roughly doubled the number of people covered by TPS. The Trump administration ended those protections, insisting it was meant to be temporary, the countries are now safe and that President Joe Biden’s administration expanded the destination and poorly vetted its recipients.

TPS beneficiaries have, by definition, been living in limbo and their futures have been especially precarious under President Donald Trump, but the Supreme Court ruling delivered what could be a crushing blow to living and working legally in the United States.

Haitians in Ohio have been in the spotlight before

The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, became a particular target of the administration during the 2024 campaign, when Trump spread fictional rumors that Haitians there were eating people’s cats and dogs. There is no evidence to support those claims.

Still, the community has been under intense pressure ever since, said Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield.

Thursday’s ruling added to the panic and chaos. People don’t know if they should withdraw all their money from the bank, Dorsainvil said. They don’t know if they can work, if their kids can go to school. Many are making preparations to leave their children who are U.S. citizens behind if they are sent away.

“As a Haitian, I always say that life has not been easy for us, nothing has been easy for us and this is another chapter in our life. And we’ve been in that type of situation since after the presidential campaign when they came up with that type of conspiracy theory of us eating cats and dogs,” he said. “We’ve been targeted. We’ve been in the spotlight for their political agenda.”

Dorsainvil said he’s focused on trying to keep people calm, telling them not to panic, not to feel hopeless or make desperate decisions that could further jeopardize them and their children.

Many TPS holders work in caregiving roles

On Thursday morning, a Haitian mother of a 17-month-old baby boy who lives in Florida woke up to the news.

“I was reading it and I just for a moment there I just felt like I couldn’t breathe, like as if something was just sitting on my chest, like my lungs couldn’t extend,” the 37-year-old said, her voice breaking.

She asked not to be identified for fears of being detained and deported.

“I did not expect this. It is so hard to accept. Maybe I am in denial but I think this can’t be real,” she said. “I had so much hope.”

She arrived in the U.S. in 1995 when she was 7 years old and graduated from high school here. But she could not go to college because she did not have legal status.

But in 2010 everything changed, when the U.S. granted Haitians protection after a catastrophic earthquake. The U.S. repeatedly extended that amid the gang violence that has consumed the country and displaced more than a million people.

The Florida woman applied, and she was able to go to school and become a nurse.

She was supposed to begin a new job in two weeks. Now she doesn’t know if she’s authorized to work.

TPS holders are overrepresented in caregiving roles, and the long-term care industry, like nursing homes and facilities for disabled people, industry groups said, could be hit particularly hard as fear and uncertainty ripples across America.

The nurse in Kentucky said she’s trying to focus on her work taking care of disabled people. But it’s hard to not think of the worst-case scenario, imagining being separated from her children, who are ages 13, 12, 8, and 2, and being sent to her home country that she left more than two decades ago. She reads in the news that there are gang wars, kidnappings, killings.

“I don’t want to go there. I am very Americanized,” she said. “It’s like someone saying, hey, do you want to go live in a horror movie? Like, you know, no, I don’t.”

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Aftoora-Orsagos reported from Springfield, Ohio, and Galofaro contributed from Louisville, Kentucky.

DALLAS (AP) — Texas’ education board on Friday approved a required reading list for more than 5 million public school students that includes Bible stories, widening conservative efforts to bring Christian teachings into U.S. classrooms.

The state-mandated list of assigned reading — which includes Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” and excerpts from the New Testament — appeared to be among the first of its kind of the nation and will take effect starting in 2030.

The State Board of Education, which is controlled by Republicans, approved the list on a 9-5 vote following weeks of contentious debate that again put Texas at the center of wrangling over the role of religion in public schools. Last year, Texas became the largest state to require teachers to hang the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

The board this week was also considering new social studies curriculum that draws lines between Bible stories and American history.

Beyond objections over Bible readings, the mandate drew backlash from teachers who criticized losing the ability to decide what their students will read, although they are still allowed to assign additional books during the school year.

“I don’t have a problem reading about David and Goliath because I believe in those stories,” said Alyse Dent, a high school English teacher in the Dallas area. “But if I’m reading to one of my students — they’re Muslim or they’re atheist — I can say all day long, ‘Well, we’re teaching a theme, we’re teaching symbolism,’ but they’re hearing, ‘This is a Bible story. We’re talking about God.’”

Supporters of the changes have argued that Judeo-Christian traditions were fundamental to the nation’s founding and that should be reflected in the public school curriculum.

“These timeless works, including biblical passages, have shaped American culture and history, and have influenced generations of thinkers, leaders, and citizens, and they continue to offer valuable lessons about human nature, virtue, liberty, and civic responsibility,” said Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Texas has brought more religion into classrooms

Texas, which educates roughly 1 in 10 of the nation’s public school students, has been at the forefront of a charge by conservatives to incorporate more religion into classrooms. The state also allows public schools to hire chaplains to counsel students and has approved an optional Bible-infused curriculum.

Brooke Mazel, a retiree from Lubbock, was among a large crowd that packed a meeting of the education board this week in Austin, saying her children and grandchildren grew up with “strong faith and family values” and backed the required titles.

“America should celebrate our 250 years that started as a nation of unwavering Christian values,” Mazel said.

A state law passed in 2023 required a mandatory list of at least one literary work be taught in each grade level. The new list contains around 200 texts, including Bible passages, essays and books, far in excess of that requirement.

Antero Garcia, president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a Stanford University professor, said he doesn’t know of any other state with a mandatory reading list that includes religious texts. Educators at the district and school level usually choose the texts their students will read, Garcia said.

Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, agreed the move was “unique” to Texas.

Popular literary works are also on Texas’ required list

Picture-book stories for elementary students including “David and Goliath” and “Daniel and the Lion’s Den” are on the required reading list. By fourth grade, students will encounter passages about Jesus in the New Testament. E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” would be assigned to third-graders.

In middle school, students will be expected to read passages about Jesus, including his most famous sermon and another where he instructs people to cast aside earthly anxiety and seek the kingdom of God.

For high schoolers, the list requires the reading of specific Bible passages as supportive materials for literary works, including works by Dickens and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Texas law does let parents remove a child from a class or activity that conflicts with their religious or moral beliefs.

Critics say list isn’t diverse enough

The list mandates that students reading Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” also read a eulogy for President Ronald Reagan written by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a staunch conservative.

Chanea Bond, who teaches college and advanced high school English courses in Fort Worth, said having a state reading list can close the gap between what students learn in different areas. Although the list for high schoolers is “pretty solid” for a study of classics, she said, the list is “very old and very white.”

“It is very narrow and does not represent what classrooms in Texas look like,” she said. “Going through most of high school without ever having much value put into voices that sound like yours kind of sends a message that your voices aren’t valuable.”

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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas. Associated Press reporter Jim Vertuno contributed to this report from Austin, Texas.