A New Jersey resident’s path through ICE detention and more news from the states

Good evening. Tonight we begin with a series of stories about immigration enforcement in New Jersey, including a detailed look at one woman’s harrowing path through detention: from her workplace, to a Louisiana prison, and back to an apartment that now feels like its own jail. 

In Oklahoma, rural school districts are coping with the announced end to a school meal program that provided students with an early dinner. In Virginia, a family worries over their potential new neighbor: a massive power transmission line to help support data centers. 

In Pennsylvania, hundreds of thousands of people visit the site of the Flight 93 memorial each year to pay respects to those aboard the plane who sacrificed their lives on Sept. 11, 2001. 

President Donald Trump has escalated his trade war with Canada, while more than 250 current and former members of Congress argued to the Supreme Court that he doesn’t have the power to limit mail-in voting. 

New Hampshire residents hit the polls today in the state’s primary elections. We’ll have coverage at News From The States tonight, in Daybreak in the morning, and right here tomorrow. Thanks for reading. 

On a brisk October morning nearly a year ago, Lourdes Rosero was one of dozens of immigrants arrested in a federal raid at the New Jersey warehouse where they worked.

Rosero, who had a valid work permit and pending asylum case, spent the next several months at the Elizabeth Detention Center and then at a migrant jail in Louisiana before she managed to win temporary freedom. She now awaits potential deportation back in her Elizabeth apartment, where she feels nervous to walk outside, New Jersey Monitor reports.

“That tranquility, the feeling of being able to go anywhere, knowing you’re not doing anything wrong, of feeling truly free, it’s totally gone,” she said. 

Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said one of the defining features of President Donald Trump’s second term — which has included numerous raids in the Garden State — is the widening of who Immigration and Customs Enforcement targets.

“It actually doesn’t matter if you were undocumented or not,” she said. “We’re seeing even people with valid work visas, student visas — we’re even seeing green card holders — being detained and arrested by ICE. Things that used to be a safeguard, like a green card, that’s no longer the case.”

Related coverage: 

Social media giant Meta settled claims by 47 states that its platforms were harmful to children by agreeing last month to pay up to $17.1 billion and place strict controls on how teens can use its apps.

Now, those states are facing questions about where and how to use the money, which generally should be distributed to mitigate the impacts of social media saturation on children’s mental health, Pennsylvania Capital-Star reports. 

There are lessons to be learned from earlier multibillion-dollar nationwide settlements — over the pharmaceutical industry’s sales of opioid painkillers and the harms from tobacco products — that could guide states’ decisions, said Dennis P. Scanlon, director of Center for Health Care Policy Research at Penn State University.

A spokesperson said Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday, a Republican, is already reaching out to stakeholders to direct the “sudden influx of funds.”

For eight years, Hartshorne Public Schools in southeast Oklahoma has designed its bus schedules, personnel contracts, lunch times and school hours around serving a late-afternoon supper, funded through a federal grant, to students, Oklahoma Voice reports. 

But two weeks into Hartshorne’s school year, the Oklahoma State Department of Education shocked districts statewide when it announced it would discontinue the extended-day third meal option on Oct. 1, when the next federal fiscal year begins. 

State Superintendent Lindel Fields encouraged districts to continue feeding students by switching to a similar federal program that provides snacks during after-school activities. He said his administration decided to discontinue the Expanded Learning Time option at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recommendation. 

The timing of the Aug. 18 announcement — after the start of school and only weeks before the program’s cancellation — has prompted frustration from district leaders, state lawmakers and anti-hunger advocates. State records show 132 school sites, all in rural areas, were approved for the meal option last school year.

West Virginia: Facing a school closure, Mingo County parents filed a lawsuit to block universal expansion of the state’s education voucher program. The state has spent around $155 million on vouchers so far this school year.

Louisiana: A high-profile college athletics lawsuit led to an unusual showdown between two well-known prosecutors and shed light on a fact not often talked about outside of legal circles: most state district attorneys practice law on a private basis on top of their public jobs.

New Jersey: A federal appeals panel vacated a key permit an energy developer needs to build a controversial $1 billion underwater natural gas pipeline between New Jersey and New York.

Florida: Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier called for legislation imposing criminal penalties for corporations running chatbots that engage in criminal activity.

Oregon: Complaints to the state’s workplace safety and health agency have reached an all-time high since it introduced rules protecting employees from extreme heat and wildfire smoke four years ago.

Nebraska: In less than a year-and-a-half, at least 61 employees — nearly half of the Department of Economic Development — have left the agency following budget cuts and other new policies. 

Indiana: Greg Ballard, who served as Indianapolis mayor as a Republican, hopes his run for secretary of state under the new Lincoln Party banner can create an easier path for other independent-minded candidates to make future ballots.

New Mexico: Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, a Democrat, signed an executive order that bans all new uranium mining projects on the more than 13 million acres of state trust lands she oversees.

Michael Carter Jr. stands next to the marker where his great-uncle, Lewis Carter, died in a farming accident on his family’s farmland in Orange County, Virginia. (Photo by Shannon Heckt/Virginia Mercury)

As insects chirp in the grass and cows mull around the pasture, Carter points to the tree line at the back of the property, on the other side of the creek that separates the property from his neighbor. That is where a portion of the proposed 115-mile, 765 kilovolt Valley Link transmission line will slice through, if state regulators approve the project. 

While the final route preferred by the company is yet to be determined, all three of the current iterations of the route all converge on this spot bordering Carter’s family’s land. The line will send surges of power to Northern Virginia, where most of the state’s data centers are clustered.

“You know, births, deaths, joys, and pains have all been experienced here, and you’re trying to rob me of that because you want to provide more electricity to the data centers,” Carter said.

Others are also opposing the power line, with grassroots efforts to reject the project mobilizing across the nine impacted counties. 

Read more from Virginia Mercury. 

On a rural stretch of land in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, an open meadow filled with bright wildflowers, a memorial grove of trees and a giant boulder marks the spot where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001.

States Newsroom’s Pennsylvania Capital-Star Editor-in-Chief Tim Lambert recently revisited the national memorial on this field — where he happened to own a piece of land that was part of more than three dozen acres that made up the crash site, Stateline reports.

“It’s always hard to come back here, but it’s always a chance to remember the sacrifices made by the passengers and crew of Flight 93 on that day,” Lambert said. “I think it’s important 25 years later to remember what they did and why they did it. They decided to act on a day that America was under attack.”

The 40 passengers and crew sacrificed their lives when they tried to wrest control of the plane from the hijackers and stop them from hitting what was believed to be their intended target: the U.S. Capitol.

They are now remembered at the Flight 93 National Memorial, which includes a museum with details about their lives and memorabilia, including photographs, jewelry and uniforms. “Families say they want their loved one to be remembered as an individual person, as more than just this one day,” said Betsy Keene, curator for the National Parks for Western Pennsylvania.

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on American goods kicked in Tuesday, escalating a trade war with one of the largest U.S. trading partners that President Donald Trump continued to antagonize over the holiday weekend, States Newsroom’s D.C. Bureau reports. 

Trump posted an AI-generated cartoon image of himself Sunday evening in which he is depicted as a hockey player striking Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is shown down on the ice, with a hockey stick. “Get up, governor,” a speech bubble from Trump’s mouth reads, apparently referring to Canada as a U.S. state rather than a sovereign country. 

Nearly $28 billion in U.S. exports crossing the border to Canada now carry up to 50% tariffs, a dollar-for-dollar match on Trump’s taxes on Canadian goods imposed last month, according to Canadian officials. 

More from the D.C. Bureau: Trump doesn’t have the power to limit mail-in voting, lawmakers tell US Supreme Court

The country’s two largest school districts banned most student use of artificial intelligence in classrooms for this school year as anxiety over AI’s effect on learning intensifies, Stateline reports. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District announced last week that it is barring student use of generative AI on school-issued devices for the current school year. New York City Public Schools last week announced a similar but less broad approach. The district put in place a one-year moratorium on generative AI for children from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

Nestled in the oldest armory in Maryland is a set of Civil War-era photographs vexing a small team of military historians.

So they’re asking for help, Maryland Matters reports. 

The historians at the Maryland Museum of Military History​ hope that genealogy whizzes or military history buffs might be able to identify the 45 Union soldiers pictured in a set of individual tintypes, each ensconced in its own intricate metal frame.

The museum’s curators say that the framed collection is rare, in that it depicts an entire Civil War regiment.

The curators know who was in the regiment — Company B, 2nd Regiment of the Maryland Eastern Shore Volunteers — based on military records. But they have no idea who’s who in the pictures.

They range in age from 16 to 44 years old, and historians believe they all enlisted in Chestertown within the same two-week period. They would go on to fight in battles at Falling Waters in Maryland, along with Lynchburg and Snicker’s Gap in Virginia.

Reed, a curator at the museum for the past four years, said the large frame has been hanging on the wall in the museum’s Civil War exhibit throughout her tenure. But another project, focused on the Iraq War, inspired her to seek more information about the roughly 165-year-old photographs.