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SAN DIEGO (AP) — United States-Mexico border arrests have plummeted about 30% in July to a new low for Joe Biden’s presidency, U.S. authorities said, raising prospects that a temporary ban on asylum may be lifted soon.

The U.S. Border Patrol is expected to arrest migrants about 57,000 times during the month, down from 83,536 arrests in June, the previous low mark of Biden’s presidency, according to two U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials who spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday on the condition of anonymity because the figures had not been released publicly. It would be the lowest monthly tally since 40,507 arrests in September 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic slowed movement across borders in many countries, including to the United States.

Even before Biden’s Democratic administration invoked powers to suspend asylum on June 5, border arrests had fallen by about half from a record-high of 250,000 in December amid increased Mexican enforcement. Since June 5, arrests have fallen by half again, helping the White House fend off attacks by former President Donald Trump and other Republicans that Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have allowed the border to spiral out of control.

The asylum halt would end if daily arrests drop below 1,500 over a seven-day average, a scenario that Customs and Border Protection officials are preparing for with arrests now hovering 1,600 to 1,700 day. The halt would be reinstated if arrests reach a seven-day daily average of 2,500, a threshold of “emergency border circumstances” that was immediately met when the restrictions took effect in June. Immigrant advocacy groups are challenging the asylum measures in court.

Under the halt, U.S. authorities deny a chance at asylum to anyone who crosses the border illegally. Unaccompanied children are exempt, and others may seek asylum-like forms of protection that allow them to stay in the United States with a higher bar and fewer benefits, like the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

Asked to comment on July numbers, the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday referred to a statement last week that arrests had dropped 55% since asylum restrictions took effect.

San Diego was again the busiest corridor for illegal crossings in July, followed by Tucson, Arizona, an official said.

The biggest declines have been nationalities that are easiest to deport, including Mexicans, but people from other countries are also showing up less as other travel restrictions take hold, officials said. Chinese migration appears to have been slowed by Ecuador’s new visa requirements and more U.S. deportations to China.

GALVESTON (AP) — A lawsuit accusing the parents of a former Texas high school student of negligence for not securing weapons he allegedly used in a 2018 shooting at his campus that killed 10 people was set to go before a jury on Wednesday.

Opening statements were expected in Galveston, Texas, in the civil trial over the lawsuit filed by family members of seven of those killed and four of the 13 people wounded in the attack at Santa Fe High School in May 2018.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis was charged with capital murder for the shooting. Pagourtzis was a 17-year-old student when authorities said he killed eight students and two teachers at the school, located about 35 miles (55 kilometers) southeast of Houston.

The now 23-year-old’s criminal trial has been on hold as he’s been declared incompetent to stand trial and has remained at the North Texas State Hospital in Vernon since December 2019.

The lawsuit is seeking to hold Pagourtzis and his parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, financially liable for the shooting. The families are pursuing at least $1 million in damages.

The lawsuit accuses Pagourtzis’ parents of knowing their son was at risk of harming himself or others. It alleges Pagourtzis had been exhibiting signs of emotional distress and violent fantasies but his parents did nothing to get him help or secure a handgun and shotgun kept at their home that he allegedly ended up using during the shooting.

“We look forward to obtaining justice for the victims of the senseless tragedy,” said Clint McGuire, an attorney representing the families of five students who were killed and two others who were injured.

Lori Laird, an attorney for Pagourtzis’ parents, did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment.

In a court filing, Roberto Torres, who is representing Pagourtzis in the lawsuit, denied the allegations against his client, saying that “due to mental impairment or illness, (Pagourtzis) did not have sufficient capacity to have a reasonable degree of rational understanding of or control over his actions.”

The trial could last up to three weeks.

Family members of those killed or wounded have welcomed the start of the civil trial as they have expressed frustration that Pagourtzis’ criminal trial has been on hold for years, preventing them from having a sense of closure.

Lucky Gunner, a Tennessee-based online retailer accused of illegally selling ammunition to Pagourtzis, had also been one of the defendants in the lawsuit. But in 2023, the families settled their case against the retailer, who had been accused of failing to verify Pagourtzis’ age when he bought more than 100 rounds of ammunition on two occasions before the shooting.

Other similar lawsuits have been filed following a mass shooting.

In 2022, a jury awarded over $200 million to the mother of one of four people killed in a shooting at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee. The lawsuit had been filed against the shooter and his father, who was accused of giving back a rifle to his son before the shooting despite his son’s mental health issues.

In April, Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison by a Michigan judge after becoming the first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting.

FORT WORTH(AP) — A Texas woman who prosecutors said helped a radio show host bilk elderly listeners out of millions of dollars was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison.

Debra Mae Carter, 65, received the sentence for her July 8 money laundering conviction, according to a statement by Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells.

Carter, who represented herself and pleaded innocent, was jailed in Tarrant County, according to jail records.

Sorrells said Carter was former Texas radio host William “Doc” Gallagher’s lover. Gallagher is serving three life terms for operating what the prosecutor called a Ponzi scheme.

“Gallagher’s main role in the scheme was to bring in money, Carter’s role was to make sure it was not recovered by the victims,” Sorrells said.

Gallagher, 83, and his Gallagher Financial Group advertised on Christian radio with the tagline, “See you in church on Sunday.” He promoted his investment business in books and on Christian radio broadcasts.

Gallagher was convicted in Tarrant County in 2021 after being convicted in 2019 in Dallas County on similar charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The scheme cost more than 170 investors, most of whom were retired, more than $31 million, Sorrells said.

AUSTIN (AP) — Describing Texas prisons as so hot that inmates cool off by splashing themselves with toilet water or faking suicide attempts to get moved to cooler medical areas, advocates on Tuesday asked a federal judge to declare the state prison system’s lack of air conditioning as unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

Tuesday began a multi-day hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to force Texas to fully air condition a prison system that houses more than 130,000 inmates, but has full AC in only about a third of its 100 prison units. The rest have partial or no air-conditioning.

Inmate advocacy groups allege that temperatures inside can push above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48.9 Celsius), and that the extreme heat has led to hundreds of inmate deaths in recent years. They want U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman to require Texas to maintain temperatures in prison housing and occupied areas between 65 and 85 degrees F (18 and 29 degrees Celsius), the same temperature range required by law in county jails.

Texas is not alone in facing lawsuits over dangerously hot prisons. Cases also have been filed in Louisiana and New Mexico. One filed last week in Georgia alleged an inmate died in July 2023 after he was left in an outdoor cell for hours without water, shade or ice.

The Texas lawsuit was initially filed in 2023 by Bernie Tiede, the former mortician whose murder case inspired the movie “Bernie.” Tiede, who is serving a life sentence for killing Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow in 1996, has diabetes and hypertension and alleged his life was in danger because he was being housed in a stifling prison cell without air conditioning.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Marci Marie Simmons, who moved between three Texas prisons while serving 10 years for felony theft, described “oppressive, suffocating” conditions as temperatures rose from spring through summer. She was released in 2021.

“In summer, I was in complete survival mode. I felt like a caged animal,” said Simmons, who is now the community outreach coordinator for Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She said the organization represents about 700 current and former inmates.

Simmons testified she once watched a kitchen worker bring an egg back to her cell and cook it on the concrete floor. In 2020, a hallway thermometer in one unit reached 136 degrees when Simmons and two other inmates peeled off the tape that was meant to hide the reading, she said.

“I was shocked. It frightened me,” Simmons said.

Assistant State Attorney General Marlayne Ellis said the state would like to provide more air conditioning but is constrained by the Legislature’s budget.

And she insisted conditions in Texas prisons do not meet a standard for being cruel and unusual. The agency defended its alternative protocols for extreme heat, which include providing fans, towels and access to cooler “respite” areas. In 2018, Texas agreed to install air conditioning at a prison for older and medically vulnerable inmates.

But Simmons said access to respite areas was limited to short periods of time, coolers of ice water didn’t hold enough to serve an entire prison dorm, and up to 100 women would wait to use a single shower head that was changed from hot to cold water.

Desperate women would fake suicide attempts, or “commit some harm” to themselves to get placed in a cooler medical unit, Simmons said.

A November 2022 study by researchers at Brown, Boston and Harvard universities found that 13%, or 271, of the deaths in Texas prisons without universal air conditioning between 2001 and 2019 may be attributed to extreme heat. Prisoner advocates say those numbers are only likely to increase as the state faces more extreme weather and heat due to climate change.

According to a report by KUT Radio in Austin, autopsy reports on at least three inmates deaths in 2023 mentioned heat a possible contributing factor. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, however, has said there have been no heat-related deaths in the state’s prisons since 2012.

Since filing his lawsuit, Tiede has been moved to an air conditioned cell. But several prisoners’ rights group asked to join his legal fight and expand it to encompass all Texas prisoners.

Tiede attended Tuesday’s court hearing and was expected to testify.

CHICAGO (AP) — Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of notorious drug kingpin “El Chapo,” pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges Tuesday, days after an astonishing capture in the U.S.

Guzmán López, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, stood with feet shackled as federal prosecutors in Chicago detailed a five-count indictment that also includes money laundering, conspiracy and weapons charges. He declined a Spanish interpreter and answered most of U.S. District Judge Sharon Coleman’s questions designed to assess his health and determine whether he understood the proceedings with a simple, “Yes, your honor.”

Guzmán López and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel were arrested by U.S. authorities in the El Paso, Texas-area last week, according to the Justice Department. Both men, who face multiple charges in the U.S., oversaw the trafficking of “tens of thousands of pounds of drugs into the United States, along with related violence,” according to the FBI.

Zambada has eluded U.S. authorities for years. He was thought to be more involved in day-to-day operations of the cartel than his better-known and flashier boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in 2019 and is the father of Guzmán López, 38.

In recent years, Guzmán’s sons have led a faction of the cartel known as the little Chapos, or “Chapitos,” that has been identified as a main exporter of fentanyl to the U.S. market. Last year, U.S. prosecutors unsealed sprawling indictments against more than two dozen members of the Sinaloa cartel, Guzmán López and his brothers, in a fentanyl-trafficking investigation.

At Tuesday’s brief hearing, security was tight, with cellphones, laptops and other electronics barred from the courtroom. Guzmán López remained standing, leaning into the microphone to answer the judge, often with his arms folded behind him.

Guzmán López remained jailed in Chicago and was due back in court on Sept. 30.

Zambada pleaded not guilty last week to various drug trafficking charges and was being held without bond. He’s due back in court later this week.

The men’s mysterious capture fueled theories about how federal authorities pulled it off and prompted Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to take the unusual step of issuing a public appeal to drug cartels not to fight each other.

Zambada’s attorney, Frank Perez, alleged his client was kidnapped by Guzmán López and brought to the U.S. aboard a private plane that landed near El Paso. Perez pushed back against claims that his client was tricked into flying into the country.

But Guzmán López’s attorney Jeffrey Lichtman, who has represented other family members, rejected those ideas without going into specifics.

“There’s been massive amount of rumors and things printed in the press. I don’t know what’s real. I don’t know what’s not real,” he said. “But it shouldn’t really surprise anybody that there’s a story that seems to be changing every few minutes, which means that much of what’s being leaked to the press is inaccurate.”

He added that there “is no cooperation with the government and there never has been.”

The U.S. government had offered a reward of up to $15 million for leading to Zambada’s capture.

His detention follows arrests of other Sinaloa cartel figures, including one of his sons and another “El Chapo” son, Ovidio Guzmán López, who pleaded not guilty to drug-trafficking charges in Chicago last year. Zambada’s son pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court in San Diego in 2021 to being a leader in the Sinaloa cartel.

AUSTIN (AP) — Meta has agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over allegations that the tech giant used biometric data of users without their permission, officials said Tuesday.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the settlement is the largest secured by a single state. In 2021, a judge approved a $650 million settlement with the company, formerly known as Facebook, over similar allegations of users in Illinois.

“This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights,” Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement.

Meta said in a statement: “We are pleased to resolve this matter, and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers.”

Filed in 2022, the Texas lawsuit said that Meta was in violation of a state law that prohibits capturing or selling a resident’s biometric information, such as their face or fingerprint, without their consent.

The company announced in 2021 that it was shutting down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

At the time, more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users had opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade earlier but gradually made it easier to opt out of the feature as it faced scrutiny from courts and regulators.

Facebook in 2019 stopped automatically recognizing people in photos and suggesting people “tag” them, and instead of making that the default, asked users to choose if they wanted to use its facial recognition feature.

Texas filed a similar lawsuit against Google in 2022. Paxton’s lawsuit says the search giant collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through its products and services like Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max. That lawsuit is still pending.

The $1.4 billion is unlikely to make a dent in Meta’s business. The Menlo Park, California-based tech made a profit of $12.37 billion in the first three months of this year, Its revenue was $36.46 billion, an increase of 27% from a year earlier. Meta is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings results on Wednesday.

Meta’s stock slipped $4.06 to $461.65 Tuesday, a decline of less than 1%.

TEXAS – Bloomberg reports that crude oil pipelines connecting the busiest Texas oil fields to a critical export hub across the state are nearly out of space, threatening to cap US oil exports at a time when the world needs more. Key pipelines that transport barrels produced in the Permian Basin to the Port of Corpus Christi are more than 90% full, and companies that operate some of these lines say the congestion is likely to get worse. By the second half of 2025, the pipes could be 94% or 95% full, estimates researcher East Daley Analytics. Demand for the limited pipeline space comes at a time when the US is producing more crude oil than any other nation, with output set to hit a new record next year. The Permian region, one of the top producing shale basins in the world, accounts for nearly half of all US oil production. While output is set to keep growing, it will be difficult for that incremental output to reach international buyers without ample pipeline space.

If growth in the US’s crude exports stalls, it threatens to create pockets of oversupply domestically and exacerbate supply tightness in other regions of the world, which have come to rely on US barrels more than ever after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and OPEC+ supply curbs. Demand from China and the price of Brent crude will all play a role as well in the medium-term supply-demand balance, said Kristy Oleszek, East Daley’s director of energy analytics. To be sure, some of the oil may be rerouted to the Houston area instead, alleviating some congestion. OneOK’s Longhorn and BridgeTex pipelines in particular could offer alternative options to get barrels down to the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, a plan to expand Enbridge Inc.’s Gray Oak pipeline system will likely reduce some bottlenecks to Corpus Christi. Still, East Daley estimates even the company’s goal of increasing capacity on the line by 120,000 barrels per day won’t bring overall regional utilization below 90%. When asked about the expansion, Enbridge pointed to its upcoming earnings call on Friday that might provide more information.

AUSTIN -The Houston Chronicle reports that a state lawmaker said Monday he was considering pushing legislation to recoup some of the $800 million CenterPoint Energy spent on massive generators that sat idle as Hurricane Beryl knocked power from more than 2 million Houston area customers. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt said the company had “defrauded” rate payers, who were now strapped with growing utility bills after state regulators allowed CenterPoint to recoup the cost of the generators — plus a 6.5% profit. The utility company has already raised the average residential customer’s bill by about $1 per month — and the rate hikes could jump another $3 per month in the coming years. “It’s a big problem, because we’ve got basically these boat anchors strapped around our rate payers for a long period of time,” the Houston Republican said during a contentious hearing where CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells testified that he took “personal responsibility” for the utility’s failings, but said he would not resign.

Bettencourt said he was considering legislation that would “claw back some of this expense,” though he did not say more about what that might entail. Bettencourt accused CenterPoint of choosing to spend money on the generators rather than clearing trees that knocked out power lines, because CenterPoint can make a profit on the generators. CenterPoint has repeatedly blamed toppled trees and broken branches for leaving over 80% of its area customers without power, some for more than a week. “Vegetation management — the utility doesn’t make profit on,” Bettencourt said. “However, they make a profit on generator expenses. If you don’t make a profit on vegetation management, you may reduce those numbers.” The comments came during the first hearing of a special committee tasked with examining the state’s hurricane preparedness and utilities’ response after Beryl. The senators used much of the hearing to air their grievances with CenterPoint, which state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst said had broken the “social contract” with its customers. Senators questioned why the utility could not keep its outage map working, why it was not doing a better job removing trees and why it had sunk so much into generators that were not usable. Bettencourt and state Sen. Charles Schwertner, who chairs the panel, questioned the contract CenterPoint struck for the generators, going so far as to suggest it amounted to “fraud.” Bettencourt said the utility passed over a competing bid with a price tag that was at least 44% lower. “It doesn’t smell good at all,” Schwertner said, noting the company appears to be raking in a roughly $30 million profit on the massive generator purchase. “There’s more to this story that I hope comes out sooner rather than later.”