Trump deportations near 1M and more news from the states

Good morning! We’re starting our Thursday edition of Daybreak with news out of Washington, D.C.

A federal judge blocked the Department of Homeland Security from conducting election-related field operations that could sweep up U.S. citizens in nine states, States Newsroom’s D.C. Bureau reports. 

In Nashville, a judge temporarily blocked Tennessee health officials from requiring immigration status checks of HIV-positive individuals enrolled in a healthcare safety-net program. 

And as President Donald Trump continues his tour of Republican strongholds, he stopped in South Carolina to boost GOP support for U.S. Sen. Darline Graham’s campaign, while discounting polls suggesting the seat her late brother held for almost 24 years could flip blue. 

Keep reading for more news on immigration enforcement, political campaigns, education funds and more. We’ll see you back here tomorrow.

National: The price health insurance companies charge for employer-sponsored plans increased again this year, as did the deductible many people must pay before those plans begin covering most healthcare costs, according to a survey from a nonpartisan health organization.

Maine: With no clear definition for “environmental justice,” a Penobscot County Superior Court justice said he can only consider state lawmakers’ intentions for the standard. He has also ruled that the state’s initial approval of the Juniper Ridge Landfill expansion will hold, despite concerns raised by neighboring Penobscot Nation. 

Oregon: Democratic U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum, the congresswoman who represents Bend, is calling on federal officials to stop nonemergency immigration enforcement in the wake of last week’s elementary school shooting. 

Tennessee: Republican lawmakers are ready to change the state’s death penalty laws in the wake of two botched executions by lethal injection, including a renewed look at electrocution and firing squads.

Kentucky: Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman says it is constitutional to use public, county funding to pay for the placement of school resource officers at private schools, according to a legal opinion published earlier this month. 

Louisiana: Black voters made up a larger share of participants on the state’s first day of early voting than they have in almost every other election over the past 18 years, making Democrats cautiously optimistic about the U.S. Senate race. 

See the rest of the news of the day from all 50 states, plus our D.C. Bureau and Stateline, on News From The States.

The current Trump administration claims its mass deportation efforts have expelled nearly a million people through July of this year, but those include both voluntary returns and people turned around at the border, according to a new analysis by the former chief statistician for the Department of Homeland Security, Stateline reports.

The level of deportations is sharply higher than during the Biden and first Trump administrations but well below the level of the 2000s. Deportations peaked at about 1.9 million in fiscal year 2000 as border enforcement ramped up under a sweeping immigration enforcement law in 1996.

Former DHS official Marc Rosenblum did the analysis, using only public records, for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank for immigration research. Rosenblum resigned in protest in July against what he called the Trump administration’s “war on immigrants.” He had been with DHS since 2016 and executive director of the statistics office since 2023. 

Rosenblum emphasized in his analysis how many noncriminals have been either forcibly deported or pressured to leave voluntarily. Only 20% overall — and 28% of those in the U.S. for at least two years — have a criminal conviction.

Even among convicted criminals, he added, the records were more likely to be immigration or traffic infractions rather than violent or other more serious crimes. 

More than $5 million in restoration projects and forthcoming interpretive exhibits are being designed to preserve the history and lessons from southern Idaho’s Minidoka National Historic Site, Idaho Capital Sun reports. 

Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson joined National Park Service personnel, local elected officials and the Friends of Minidoka to highlight three restoration projects at Minidoka that are being funded by $5 million from the federal Great American Outdoors Act, which Trump signed into law in 2020. 

Funding will help restore a root cellar, a mess hall and a barracks from the camp.

In alignment with those projects, leaders of the nonprofit organization Friends of Minidoka announced that it had secured $650,000 in grants to develop and install interpretative exhibits at the buildings that are being restored and complete a digital mapping project that will map Minidoka’s barracks and individual living units. 

Friends of Minidoka officials announced it is launching a fundraiser to generate the final $100,000 for those projects.

During World War II, from 1942 to 1945, more than 13,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated — after being forcibly removed from their homes without due process and without being charged with a crime — at the Minidoka War Relocation Center. 

*Editor’s note: An emailed version of this newsletter contained the wrong state name in the headline. This version has been updated.