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WASHINGTON (AP) — In a Monday evening announcement, President-elect Donald Trump railed against Mexico and Canada, accusing them of allowing thousands of people to enter the U.S.

Hitting a familiar theme from the campaign trail and his first term in office, Trump portrayed the country’s borders as insecure and immigrants as contributing to crime and the fentanyl crisis. In an announcement that could have stark repercussions, he threatened to impose 25% tariffs on everything coming into the country from those two countries.

Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric has resonated with voters concerned about immigration and crime. Yet there’s more to the story than Trump’s short statement suggested.

A look at what the numbers and studies say about border crossings, fentanyl smuggling and whether there’s a connection between immigration and crime:

Border crossings

The number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is a key metric watched intensely by both Republicans and Democrats.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, releases monthly statistics that track everything from drug seizures to cross-border trade. One of the metrics tracked is the number of Border Patrol arrests or encounters each month with people entering the country between the official border crossings — known as the ports of entry.

The vast majority of those arrests happen at the southern border.

Those numbers have actually been falling this year under the Biden administration. The Border Patrol made 56,530 arrests in October, which is about a four-year low.

It hasn’t always been like that. The Biden administration struggled to bring down the growing number of migrants coming to the southern border. A little less than a year ago, in December 2023, the Border Patrol made about a quarter of a million arrests along the southern border — an all-time high. Cross-border trade was damaged as border agents were reassigned to help process migrants and train traffic was temporarily shut down.

Since then, the numbers of people encountered at the southern border have dropped and stayed down through a combination of stricter enforcement on the Mexican side and asylum restrictions announced earlier this year by the Biden administration.

Republicans put a caveat on those numbers.

They have frequently accused the Biden administration of using an app called CBP One to let hundreds of thousands of people into the country who otherwise wouldn’t be allowed in. They’ve described the program where 1,450 people a day can schedule an appointment to come into the U.S. as essentially a way to keep the border encounter numbers artificially low.

On the northern border, the numbers are much smaller. Border Patrol made 23,721 arrests between October 2023 and September 2024, compared with 10,021 the previous 12 months.

Trump also struggled to get a handle on illegal border crossings. Arrests topped 850,000 in 2019, nearly triple the amount two years earlier, though still far below the tally of more than 2 million for two different years under Biden.

Drug smuggling

Trump and many Republicans have often portrayed the U.S.’s southern border as wide open to drug smuggling. They have also linked immigrants to drug smuggling and accused Mexico of doing little to stop it.

Much of America’s fentanyl is smuggled from Mexico.

The fentanyl scourge began well before Biden took office. Border seizures have jumped sharply under Biden, which may partly reflect improved detection. About 27,000 pounds (12,247 kilograms) of fentanyl was seized by U.S. authorities in the 2023 government budget year, compared with 2,545 pounds (1,154 kilograms) in 2019, when Trump was president.

Cooperation between the Mexican and U.S. governments on fighting drug smuggling undoubtedly suffered under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office at the end of September.

Before López Obrador took office in December 2018, the U.S. worked closely with Mexico’s military to take down drug capos.

But López Obrador, a nationalist and folksy populist, railed against the violence set off by the drug war waged by his predecessors and the Americans. He proposed addressing the root societal causes of violence found in poverty and a lack of opportunity for young people, in what he called “hugs, not bullets.”

For years, López Obrador denied that Mexico made fentanyl, despite evidence to the contrary, including statements from his own security officials. He blamed U.S. society, where he said families push children out of home too early, for cultivating addicts.

It’s only two months into the term of President Claudia Sheinbaum but there are signs that she appears more willing to let the military go after the cartels than her predecessor.

But while most of the fentanyl comes from Mexico, statistics show that it is Americans who are doing the smuggling across the border. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 86.4% of people sentenced for fentanyl trafficking crimes in a 12-month period ending September 2023 were American citizens.

Crime and immigration

Trump also has argued that the influx of immigrants is causing a crime surge in the U.S., although statistics show violent crime is on the way down.

Texas is the only state that tracks crime by immigration status. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences, based on Texas Department of Public Safety data from 2012 to 2016, found people in the U.S. illegally had “substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses.”

While FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, there is no evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York. Studies have found that people living in the U.S. illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.

Some crime is inevitable given the large population of immigrants. There were an estimated 11 million people in the country illegally in January 2022, according to the latest estimate by U.S. Homeland Security Department. In 2022, the Census Bureau estimated the foreign-born population at 46.2 million, or nearly 14% of the total, with most states seeing double-digit percentage increases in the last dozen years.

Republicans have highlighted high-profile crimes by immigrants such as the February killing of 22-year-old Laken Riley in Georgia and argued that any crime committed by someone in the country illegally is a crime that shouldn’t have happened.

A Venezuelan man who entered the country illegally was convicted and sentenced to life in prison this month in Riley’s killing.

DALLAS – D Magazine reports that this week, the Washington Post examined how climate change could affect how people choose safe places to live. Using data from climate modeling firm AlphaGeo, the publication delivers an interactive look at how climate events like hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, floods, and more would impact cities and regions. It also looks at the types of events those regions are most at risk for encountering. AlphaGeo looked at 28 factors in each city or region to assess its vulnerability, including life expectancy, infrastructure spending, the economy, how tightly knit the community is, income inequality, and household debt. “Overlaying risk and resilience is a road map to a community’s future. It paints a picture of why a place is positioned to thrive or struggle because climate change won’t be a singular disaster,” the Post says. “It’s a succession of stresses, some small, others devastating.” Dallas-Fort Worth ranked high for resilience, partly thanks to its use of renewable energy and its economy. It scored low on energy reliability, as did most cities in Texas covered in the piece, due to the potential for extended power outages. The region ranked medium for risk, with the biggest risks coming from the heat, drought, and wildfires. Overall, the area is more resilient than risky—for now.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — Calvin Green paced around the table again and again.

Green was reenacting his response to getting his first smartphone after nearly 26 years in prison for a group of inmates at the John M. Wynne Unit in Huntsville.

“I was so scared. … The phone rings. I don’t know how to click open. I don’t know how,” he said. “I was going to literally take this phone and smash it because I was so frustrated.”

Alone in the living room of his first apartment after leaving prison, Green said he played Fred Hammond worship music and walked in circles for an hour.

Green turned back to his students to explain, his hands tucked in his pockets. “In my mind —”

One student nodded; he already understood. “You’re in your cell,” the student said.

“ — I’m in my cell,” Green repeated back. In that moment of peak anxiety, he said, he told himself, “I’m good, I’m good,” until he calmed down.

Green told the story as part of a class this summer to prepare inmates to encounter technology before they are released. But the lesson wasn’t just about that. It was about the barriers that incarcerated Texans face when they reenter society and how they can cope with them.

Green, a reentry specialist at Baytown-based Lee College, leads the only class in the state that helps prepare incarcerated Texans for life after prison. Over six weeks, students in the class will talk about the effects of prison on their mental health, set tangible goals for life after they leave and learn how to find employment.

“We do real talk,” Green said. “What you say in this classroom changes the trajectory of their future.”
A class in demand

On a desk Green shares with other reentry specialists sits a two-inch stack of papers with requests from inmates wanting to enroll in the school’s reentry course.

“Would you allow me to start this class immediately. I really want to help to get my life back on track for reentry to society,” one inmate, Mark Thompson, wrote in neat cursive.

More than 250 people were on the waitlist this month alone across the nine prison units that Lee College services, nearly all of which circle the town of Huntsville. Inmates in Texas’ other prison units want in, too: Many make requests to transfer to a unit where they can take the class.

For 365 days a year, Thompson and the nearly 140,000 inmates in Texas follow a regimented timetable for when to sleep, eat and work. They have little contact with the world beyond the prison walls. Texas prisons restrict access to the internet and libraries, limiting how much research inmates can do about the jobs they want to pursue when they finish their sentences, school programs they might want to enroll in or the housing they will need.

When incarcerated people leave prison, the transition is often daunting. Many will see employers and landlords turn down their applications because of their criminal record. Others will have to navigate strained family relationships.

Reentry programs aim to help prisoners make positive life choices during the transition. Research shows these programs can reduce recidivism and help former inmates join the workforce. The classes’ structured group settings can also help them create social networks and find mentors at a time when many will struggle to rebuild relationships or start new ones.

Funding for reentry services has increased in recent years, signaling support for these kinds of programs. Texas lawmakers in 2019 set aside $500,000 for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the city of Houston to help prisoners with the transition. The U.S. Department of Education reinstated federal Pell Grants for incarcerated students last year, giving them an extra hand to pay for college and allowing schools to play a larger role in supporting prisoners when they’re released.

Community colleges are often best positioned to run reentry programs inside prisons since many of them already offer degrees to incarcerated people. Comprehensive reentry support is bare bones beyond the Lee College class, though there are plans to expand it. The school has proposed teaming up with the TDCJ to launch a pilot project that would deliver podcasts and videos with content from its reentry classes directly to tablets that inmates can use.

When Roderick Jackson was in prison, he got little to no support planning his life back in society. TDCJ assigns reentry specialists to inmates about to get out. But the conversations Jackson had with his reentry specialist were limited to when he would be released and how he was expected to meet with his parole officer.

“It wasn’t anything about, ‘These are jobs you can look at; if you’re thinking about school, these are the scholarships that you can apply for.’ It was none of that,” said Jackson, who is now studying to become an attorney for incarcerated people. “From what I experienced, there were none, absolutely none, just nothing.”
Practical steps

Nearly all the students in Green’s class are close to leaving prison. Many have a date set for their release or are scheduled to meet with the parole board to ask for an early release.

Most of them completed an associate’s degree with Lee College during their incarceration. Green told them they’re already a step ahead of where he was when he left prison.

“I spent too much time playing dominoes, too much time lifting weights. You can’t tell now,” Green joked. “Education, certifications. Those are the ingredients of a solid foundation.”

In Green’s class, the students learn about some of the things they can do while they are still in prison to set themselves up for success. Find clerical jobs, Green tells them, which will give them a chance to get familiar with computers and keyboards, tools they will likely need to use when they get out. He also reminds them to look for flyers in the parole office about resources and benefits, such as free cell phones and food stamps.

When these students leave Huntsville, they’ll scatter across the state to rebuild their lives. Some will go back to the towns their families live in. Others will choose big cities to get a fresh start. Wherever they settle, there’s help out there, Green said. The class gives them information about where to look.

Texas Workforce Solutions has regional satellite offices that can connect them to local employers. Those who are leaving prison with little support from family members and nowhere to stay can find transitional housing in the state’s larger cities.

“This programming is to give people the hope to continue, to give them the tools that they need, said Tracy Williams, Lee College’s director of reentry services. “Batman, he’s got that utility belt. Well, our students have those different tools where they can pull something out of there that can help them be successful in society.”
A mental test

I often feel tense and jittery: Strongly Agree.

Sometimes things look pretty bleak and hopeless to me: Strongly Agree.

My first reaction is to trust people: Strongly Disagree.

Those are common answers students will give to a personality test Lee College reentry specialist Michelle Banewski gives them during the class’ first activity. The test measured students’ emotional stability in prison, which the instructor used to gauge the emotional and psychological hurdles they’ll likely face when they leave.

Anxiety, depression and lack of trust are often high among incarcerated students, Banewski said.

“They’re in survival mode.” she said. “They’ll have to rebuild those parts of their personality.”

Research shows the longer an inmate is incarcerated, the more damaging it can be to their mental health. People experience painful conditions while in prison and when they leave, many of them experience symptoms that resemble post-traumatic stress disorder, such as nightmares, dissociative events, crippling anxiety and substance abuse.

“We are exposed to things that most people can only imagine seeing on the internet. So it can affect your psychological development,” said Rudy Resendez, a student in the class.

The psychological distress that persists after prison can spiral into social isolation and make it difficult for former inmates to find and maintain a job, which then can feed into a cycle of poverty, social marginalization and recidivism.

Talking about the mental health challenges they may experience before they leave prison can encourage them to get help — and keep them from coming back. The recidivism rates of formerly incarcerated people who have participated in Lee College programs was about 11%, according to 2020 data from the school, compared to the state’s overall rate of about 14% within three years of release.

In the seven years Resendez has been in prison, he has taken business classes with the goal of opening his own business when he gets out. He’s also gotten certified in welding.

Many of his family members have been incarcerated at one point in their lives. He’s determined to get on a different path and not end back up in prison. It’s about breaking that cycle for his children, he said.

“I’m trying to do everything in my power to make sure that I do not have to be in that spot,” Resendez said.

TEXAS BORDER (AP) – President-elect Donald Trump will return to power next year with a raft of technological tools at his disposal that would help deliver his campaign promise of cracking down on immigration — among them, surveillance and artificial intelligence technology that the Biden administration already uses to help make crucial decisions in tracking, detaining and ultimately deporting immigrants lacking permanent legal status.

While immigration officials have used the tech for years, an October letter from the Department of Homeland Security obtained exclusively by The Associated Press details how those tools — some of them powered by AI — help make life-altering decisions for immigrants, including whether they should be detained or surveilled.

One algorithm, for example, ranks immigrants with a “Hurricane Score,” ranging from 1-5, to assess whether someone will “abscond” from the agency’s supervision.

The letter, sent by DHS Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Eric Hysen to the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law, revealed that the score calculates the potential risk that an immigrant — with a pending case — will fail to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The algorithm relies on several factors, he said, including an immigrant’s number of violations and length of time in the program, and whether the person has a travel document. Hysen wrote that ICE officers consider the score, among other information, when making decisions about an immigrant’s case.

“The Hurricane Score does not make decisions on detention, deportation, or surveillance; instead, it is used to inform human decision-making,” Hysen wrote.

Also included in the government’s tool kit is a mobile app called SmartLINK that uses facial matching and can track an immigrant’s specific location.

Nearly 200,000 people without legal status who are in removal proceedings are enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, under which certain immigrants can live in the U.S. while their immigration cases are pending.

In exchange, SmartLINK and GPS trackers used by ICE rigorously surveil them and their movements. The phone application draws on facial matching technology and geolocation data, which has been used before to find and arrest those using the app.

Just Futures Law wrote to Hysen earlier this year, questioning the fairness of using an algorithm to assess whether someone is a flight risk and raising concerns over how much data SmartLINK collects. Such AI systems, which score or screen people, are used widely but remain largely unregulated even though some have been found to discriminate on race, gender or other protected traits.

DHS said in an email that it is committed to ensuring that its use of AI is transparent and safeguards privacy and civil rights while avoiding biases. The agency said it is working to implement the Biden administration’s requirements on using AI, but Hysen said in his letter that security officials may waive those requirements for certain uses. Trump has publicly vowed to repeal Biden’s AI policy when he returns to the White House in January.

“DHS uses AI to assist our personnel in their work, but DHS does not use the outputs of AI systems as the sole basis for any law enforcement action or denial of benefits,” a spokesperson for DHS told the AP.

Trump has not revealed how he plans to carry out his promised deportation of an estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally. Although he has proposed invoking wartime powers, as well as military involvement, the plan would face major logistical challenges — such as where to keep those who have been detained and how to find people spread across the country — that AI-powered surveillance tools could potentially address.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, did not answer questions about how they plan to use DHS’ tech, but said in a statement that “President Trump will marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation” in American history.

Over 100 civil society groups sent a letter on Friday urging the Office of Management and Budget to require DHS to comply with the Biden administration’s guidelines. OMB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Just Futures Law’s executive director, Paromita Shah, said if immigrants are scored as flight risks, they are more likely to remain in detention, “limiting their ability to prepare a defense in their case in immigration court, which is already difficult enough as it is.”

SmartLINK, part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, is run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of the private prison company The GEO Group. The GEO Group also contracts with ICE to run detention centers.

ICE is tight-lipped about how it uses SmartLINK’s location feature to find and arrest immigrants. Still, public records show that during Trump’s first term in 2018, Manassas, Virginia-based employees of BI Inc. relayed immigrants’ GPS locations to federal authorities, who then arrested over 40 people.

In a report last year to address privacy issues and concerns, DHS said that the mobile app includes security features that “prohibit access to information on the participant’s mobile device, with the exception of location data points when the app is open.”

But the report notes that there remains a risk that data collected from people “may be misused for unauthorized persistent monitoring.”

Such information could also be stored in other ICE and DHS databases and used for other DHS mission purposes, the report said.

On investor calls earlier this month, private prison companies were clear-eyed about the opportunities ahead.

The GEO Group’s executive chairman George Christopher Zoley said that he expects the incoming Trump administration to “take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.”

“In GEO’s ISAP program, we can scale up from the present 182,500 participants to several hundreds of thousands, or even millions of participants,” Zoley said.

That same day, the head of another private prison company told investors he would be watching closely to see how the new administration may change immigrant monitoring programs.

“It’s an opportunity for multiple vendors to engage ICE about the program going forward and think about creative and innovative solutions to not only get better outcomes, but also scale up the program as necessary,” Damon Hininger, CEO of the private prison company CoreCivic Inc. said on an earnings call.

GEO did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, CoreCivic said that it has played “a valued but limited role in America’s immigration system” for both Democrats and Republicans for over 40 years.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas public schools could be guarded by drones armed with pepper spray or Tasers under a new bill filed in the Texas Legislature meant to beef up school security. The measure would boost funding for safety upgrades and let schools deploy drones in place of the armed guards that lawmakers required on every campus in response to the Uvalde school shooting. Districts have said they don’t have the money to make those hires, and Hearst Newspaper previously found many haven’t complied or have instead armed teachers. Rep. Ryan Guillen, a Rio Grande City Republican who filed the legislation, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The bill will be taken up in the legislative session that begins in January. Defense and security companies have promoted drones as a possible solution for stopping or mitigating school shootings in recent years, though school safety experts question the efficacy. At least one Texas company appears to be interested in marketing drones for schools.

In an online job posting, Mithril Defense said it was planning to launch an advocacy campaign aimed at getting state lawmakers to greenlight and fund the use of drones to stop school shootings. The defense company, founded last year, said it expects to pilot the technology “in several top 10 Texas school districts” starting in January but did not identify them by name. The CEO, Justin Marston, said in an email that the company is still formulating its plans and would not have more to share until sometime early next year. Employees for the company, which appears to be named after a magical silver-colored metal from “Lord of the Rings,” are said to include “a former Navy SEAL team SIX Command Master Chief, a serial tech entrepreneur, the #1 American drone pilot on ESPN, and various technical teams.” State ethics filings show they’ve employed former Texas Secretary of State David Whitley as a lobbyist, who previously served as a top aide to Gov. Greg Abbott, and the job posting says the company is also “considering forming a PAC to support the initiative.” Guillen’s bill says the drones would be armed with “less lethal interdiction capability by means of air-based irritant delivery or other mechanisms,” and it would require one drone for every 200 students. The bill would also increase the state’s funding for school safety tenfold — raising the allotment from $10 per-student to $100. Schools could spend that money on school safety expenses, including hardening their campuses, hiring security guards or starting a drone program.

GREENVILLE (AP) — A police officer was killed and a suspect wounded during a shooting in North Texas on Tuesday, according to police.

Police Chief Chris Smith said Officer Cooper Dawson died in a hospital following the shooting Monday night in Greenville, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) northeast of Dallas. Dawson was ambushed during a foot chase following an attempted traffic stop, Smith said. Dawson returned fire and hit the suspect, who was hospitalized.

“We are heartbroken over the loss of Officer Cooper Dawson, who selflessly put his life on the line to serve and protect our community,” Smith said in a statement. “We ask that you keep Officer Dawson’s family, our department, and the Greenville community in your thoughts and prayers during this incredibly difficult time,” Smith said.

Authorities have not released the suspect’s name or details about the suspect’s condition.

A bankruptcy judge on Monday delayed a hearing in conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ effort to stop the satirical news outlet The Onion from buying Infowars, keeping the auction sale up in the air for at least another few weeks.

Jones alleges fraud and collusion marred the bankruptcy auction that resulted in The Onion being named the winning bidder over a company affiliated with him. A trustee overseeing the auction denies the allegations and accuses Jones of launching a smear campaign because he didn’t like the outcome.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez had been scheduled to hear an emergency motion to disqualify The Onion’s bid on Monday, but put it off until either Dec. 9 or Dec. 17. That’s also when the judge will hear arguments on the trustee’s request to approve the sale of Infowars to The Onion. Lopez said it made sense to have one hearing on both requests.

“I want a fair and transparent process and let’s just see where the process goes,” Lopez said.

Lopez could ultimately allow The Onion to move forward with its purchase, order a new auction or name the other bidder as the winner. At stake is whether Jones gets to stay at Infowars’ studio in Austin, Texas, under a new owner friendly to him, or whether he gets kicked out by The Onion.

The other bidder, First United American Companies, runs a website in Jones’ name that sells nutritional supplements.

Jones continues to broadcast his show from the Infowars studio, but he has set up a new location, websites and social media accounts as a precaution. The trustee shut down the Austin studio and Infowars’ websites for about 24 hours last week after The Onion was announced as the winning bidder, but allowed them to resume the next day, drawing more complaints from Jones.

Jones declared bankruptcy and liquidated his assets after he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion to relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. He was ordered to pay damages for defamation and emotional distress in lawsuits in Connecticut and Texas after he repeatedly said the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators was a hoax staged by actors to increase gun control.

Proceeds from the liquidation are to go to Jones’ creditors, including the Sandy Hook families who sued him.

Last year, Lopez ruled that $1.1 billion of the Sandy Hook judgments could not be discharged in the bankruptcy. On Monday, he denied a request from Sandy Hook families to make the full $1.5 billion not dischargeable, meaning the debt cannot be wiped clean.

Also Monday, lawyers for the social media platform X objected to any sale of the accounts of both Jones and Infowars, saying X is the owner of the accounts and it has not given consent for them to be sold or transferred. Jones’ personal X account, with 3.3 million followers, was not part of the auction, but Lopez will be deciding if it should be included in the liquidation.

Jones has praised X owner Elon Musk on his show and suggested that Musk should buy Infowars. Musk has not responded publicly to that suggestion and was not among the bidders.

Jones was permanently banned from Twitter in 2018 for abusive behavior, but Musk restored Jones’ account on the platform he has since renamed X in December last year.

Jones alleges The Onion’s bid was the result of fraud and collusion involving many of the Sandy Hook families, the humor site and the court-appointed trustee.

First United American Companies submitted a $3.5 million sealed bid, while The Onion offered $1.75 million in cash. But The Onion’s bid also included a pledge by Sandy Hook families to forgo some or all of the auction proceeds due to them to give other creditors a total of $100,000 more than they would receive under other bids.

The trustee, Christopher Murray, said that made The Onion’s proposal better for creditors and he named it the winning bid.

Jones and First United American Companies claimed that the bid violated Lopez’s rules for the auction by including multiple entities and lacking a valid dollar amount. Jones also alleged Murray improperly canceled an expected round of live bidding and only selected from among the two sealed bids that were submitted.

Jones called the auction “rigged” and a “fraud” on his show, which airs on the Infowars website, radio stations and Jones’ X account. He filed a counter lawsuit last week against Murray, The Onion’s parent company and the Sandy Hook families in the bankruptcy court.

In a court filing on Sunday, Murray called the allegations a “desperate attempt” to delay the sale of Infowars to The Onion and accused Jones, his lawyers and attorneys for First United American Companies of a “vicious smear campaign lobbing patently false accusations.” He also alleged Jones collaborated with First United American Companies to try to buy Infowars.

Lopez’s September order on the auction procedures made a live bidding round optional. And it gave broad authority to Murray to conduct the sale, including the power to reject any bid, no matter how high, that was “contrary to the best interests” of Jones, his company and their creditors.

The assets of Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, that were up for sale included the Austin studio, Infowars’ video archive, video production equipment, product trademarks, and Infowars’ websites and social media accounts. Another auction of remaining assets is set for Dec. 10.

Jones is appealing the $1.5 billion in judgments citing free speech rights, but has acknowledged that the school shooting happened.

Many of Jones’ personal assets, including real estate, guns and other belongings, also are being sold as part of the bankruptcy.

Documents filed in court this year say Jones had about $9 million in personal assets, while Free Speech Systems had about $6 million in cash and more than $1 million worth of inventory.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Married couples across the U.S. have had access to no-fault divorce for more than 50 years, an option many call crucial to supporting domestic abuse victims and key to preventing already crowded family courts from drowning in complicated divorce proceedings.

But some advocates for women worried as old comments from now Vice President-elect JD Vance circulated during the presidential campaign opposing no-fault divorce. And after President-elect Donald Trump and Vance won the election, warnings began popping up on social media urging women who might be considering divorce to “pull the trigger” while they still could. Some attorneys posted saying they were seeing a spike in calls from women seeking divorce consultations.

Trump — who is twice-divorced — hasn’t championed overhauling the country’s divorce laws, but in 2021 Vance lamented that divorce is too easily accessible, as have conservative podcasters and others.

“We’ve run this experiment in real time and what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy,” Vance said during a speech at a Christian high school in California, where he criticized people being able to “shift spouses like they change their underwear.”

Despite concerns, even those who want to make divorces harder to get say they don’t expect big, swift changes. There is not a national coordinated effort underway. And states determine their own divorce laws, so national leaders can’t change policy.

“Even in some of the so-called red states, it hasn’t gotten anywhere,” said Beverly Willett, co-chair of the Coalition for Divorce Reform, whose group has unsuccessfully attempted to convince states to repeal their no-fault divorce laws.

Mark A. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Washington, said that while many Americans have become accustomed to no-fault divorce being an option, Vance’s previous comments on making it more difficult to separate from a spouse could help jumpstart that effort.

“Even though he’s not directly proposing a policy, it’s a topic that hasn’t gotten a ton of discussion in the last 15 years,” Smith said. “And so to have a national profile politician talk that way is noteworthy.”

Meanwhile, Republican Party platforms in Texas and Nebraska were amended in 2022 to call for the removal of no-fault divorce. Louisiana’s Republican Party considered something similar earlier this year but ultimately declined to do so.

A handful of proposals have been introduced in conservative-led statehouses over the years, but all immediately stalled after they were filed.

In January, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Dusty Deevers introduced legislation that would have removed married couples from filing for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Deevers backed the bill after writing a piece declaring no-fault divorce was an “abolition of marital obligation.”

Similarly, in South Carolina, two Republican lawmakers in 2023 filed a bill that would have required both spouses to file for a no-fault divorce application rather than just one. And in South Dakota, a Republican lawmaker has attempted to remove irreconcilable difference as grounds for divorce since 2020.

None of the sponsors of these bills responded to interview requests from The Associated Press. All are members of their state’s conservative Freedom Caucus.

Nevertheless, some Democratic lawmakers say they remain worried about the future of no-fault divorce. They point to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to abortion in 2022 as an example of a long-accepted option that was revoked through a decades-long effort.

“When you choose to be silent, you allow for this to creep in,” said Democratic South Dakota Rep. Linda Duba. “These are the bills that gain a foothold because you choose to be silent.”

Before California became the first state to adopt a no-fault divorce option in 1969, married couples had to prove their spouse had violated one of the approved “faults” outlined in their state’s divorce law or risk a judge denying their divorce, said Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Qualified reasons varied from state to state, but largely included infidelity, incarceration or abandonment.

The system was a particular burden on domestic violence victims, often times women, who could be stuck in dangerous marriages while they try to prove their partner’s abuse in court through expensive and lengthy legal proceedings.

“If there was any evidence that the couple both wanted to get divorced that was supposed to be denied because divorce was not something you got because you wanted it, it was something you got because you’ve been wronged in a way that the state thought was significant,” Grossman said.

To date, every state in the U.S. has adopted a no-fault divorce option. However, 33 states still have a list of approved “faults” to file as grounds for divorce — ranging from adultery to felony conviction. In 17 states, married people only have the option of choosing no-fault divorce to end their marriages.

Calls to reform no-fault divorce have remained fairly silent until the late 1990s, when concern pushed by former President George Bush’s administration over the country’s divorce rate sparked a brief movement for states to adopt “covenant marriages.” The option didn’t replace a state’s no-fault divorce law, but provided an option for couples that carried counseling requirements and strict exceptions for divorce.

Louisiana was the first state to embrace covenant marriage options, but the effort largely stopped after Arizona and Arkansas followed suit.

Christian F. Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women, said she is “extremely worried” about the possibility of no-fault divorce being removed with the incoming Trump administration, Republican-controlled Congress and wide range of conservative state leaders.

“With so many states focusing on a misogynistic legislative agenda, this will turn back the clocks on women’s rights even more,” Nunes said in a statement. “This is why removing ‘no fault’ divorce is another way for the government to control women, their bodies, and their lives. Eliminating no-fault divorce is also a backdoor way of eliminating gay marriage, since this implies that a marriage is only between a man and a woman.”

With Trump’s reelection, Willett, whose group opposes no-fault divorce, said she’s cautiously optimistic that the political tide could change.

“Was what he said an indication of things to come? I don’t know,” Willett said. “It’s a good thing but it’s certainly not anything that has been really discussed other than a few high profile conservatives who talk about it.”