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TRAVIS COUNTY (TEXAS TRIBUNE) – For the time being, a Travis County district judge has permitted the sale of naturally smokeable hemp products like rolled joints and flower buds.

The ban that was granted earlier this month is still on hold as a result of Judge Daniella DeSeta Lyttle’s Friday decision. The Texas Hemp Business Council, Hemp Industry & Farmers of America, and a number of dispensaries and manufacturers in Texas were granted a temporary injunction by Lyttle against new testing regulations that establish a 0.3% total THC threshold, thereby prohibiting the sale of natural smokeable hemp products. Additionally, a 3,000% increase in hemp retailers’ licensing fees is temporarily halted by the ruling.

The ban will be temporarily suspended until the next hearing, which is currently set for July 27. However, if the state appeals the most recent decision and the court consents to hear the appeal, the suspension may end sooner. The state’s regulations will resume once the court grants the appeal, necessitating the removal of smokeable hemp from store shelves.

Attorneys representing the hemp industry contended during a three-day hearing this week that the Texas Department of State Health Services had overreached its constitutional authority by amending the statutory definitions of hemp that were created by legislators in 2019.

State attorneys contended in court that Texas law permits the health agency to enact new hemp regulations by requiring them to give Texans’ welfare top priority when making rules. The judge disagreed, claiming that the regulations were causing the industry irreversible harm.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — The next bishop for West Virginia Catholics will be an El Salvador-born advocate for immigrants who has opposed U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown policies.

Pope Leo XIV announced Friday the appointment of the Most Rev. Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, an auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C., as the new leader of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, which comprises West Virginia, one of the nation’s least racially diverse states.

Menjivar-Ayala, 55, fled El Salvador’s civil war as a teen in the late 1980s, eventually crossing illegally into the United States in 1990, he told The Associated Press in an interview last year. But within “a couple of weeks” he gained humanitarian protection, later was granted a visa as a religious worker, and became a U.S. citizen two decades ago.

Nonetheless, he feels close to immigrants who have been caught up by raids, including last year’s federal law enforcement surge in Washington, because “that could have been me,” he said in 2025.

The Catholic Church has long advocated for humane treatment of migrants and refugees in the United States and around the world. Menjivar-Ayala and other U.S. church leaders have strongly condemned the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies while also affirming a nation’s right to control its borders and urging reconciliation.
New bishop to prioritize those on the margins

Menjivar-Ayala did not mention immigration policies nor Trump is his speech Friday, instead focusing on his desire to be accepted by West Virginians and his willingness to listen to the community. A portion of his speech was in Spanish.

“I have much to learn, but my heart is ready and wide-open,” he said. “Above all, I want to listen to the poor. Those in the margins of the church and society. To workers, to the immigrants, because as Matthew 25 says, the way we treat the least is the way we treat Jesus.”

In the Washington archdiocese, which includes the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland, more than 40% of parishioners are Latino. In West Virginia — all of which is covered by the Wheeling-Charleston diocese — only 2.4% of the population is Latino and 92.6% of its 1.77 million residents identify as white, according to the U.S. Census.

Menjivar-Ayala replaces the Most Rev. Mark Brennan, 79, who has served as West Virginia’s bishop since 2019. Brennan had taken over after a scandal over a former bishop’s sexual harassment of adults and lavish spending of church money. In a shared news conference in Wheeling on Friday, Brennan reminded West Virginians that many in America come from somewhere else.

“But he loves all the people here. He’s not going to be bishop just for one group within the diocese. He’ll be bishop for all the people. I can assure you of that.”

The new bishop, who has spent his ministerial career in the nation’s capital and surrounding communities, will work in a less Catholic and more rural region, overseeing the diocese’s 61,000 Catholics and 92 parishes throughout West Virginia.

While acknowledging the beauty of West Virginia mountains and natural resources, he said many people in one of the nation’s poorest states “continue to endure hardship, marginalization and inequality.”
Lauded for his immigration advocacy

Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington praised Menjivar-Ayala’s advocacy for migrants during his tenure in the capital, saying in a statement that “his passion for justice and sensitive care for the Hispanic and immigrant communities of our Archdiocese have planted seeds of grace that will yield a harvest here for decades to come.”

In an article he wrote last year for the Catholic Standard, the official newspaper of the Washington archdiocese, Menjivar-Ayala spoke out against the treatment of immigrants by Trump’s administration.

“Each day this situation is getting worse and more ominous,” Menjivar-Ayala wrote. “For weeks now, the federal government has pursued a ‘shock and awe’ campaign of aggressive threats and highly visible operations of questionable legality that go far beyond mere immigration ‘enforcement.’”

Menjivar-Ayala, whose appointment comes a few weeks after the pope’s disagreement with Trump over the U.S. war against Iran, will be installed as bishop at a ceremony on July 2. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Menjivar-Ayala’s appointment.

Another Latin America-born priest was also named a U.S. bishop on Friday. The Rev. John Gomez will start his tenure in the Diocese of Laredo, Texas, on June 30. Gomez was born in Colombia, came to the United States on a student visa in 2002 and became a U.S. citizen in 2021, according to his current diocese in Tyler, Texas. In a statement, Bishop Gregory Kelly of Tyler praised his “commitment to Hispanic Ministry.”

Pope Leo’s first American bishop appointment, two weeks after his own election in May 2025, was a former refugee: Michael Pham, who was born in Vietnam and became bishop of San Diego, California.

The number of priestly ordinations in the United States has been declining for decades, making foreign-born clergy essential to many parishes nationwide.

CASS COUNTY (KETK) — An East Texas special education teacher is in custody following an anonymous tip of continuous sexual abuse of a disabled person, the Texarkana Police Department said on Friday. Pleasant Grove ISD’s Police Department reached out to the Texarkana PD after receiving an anonymous tip on Monday. Texarkana PD said evidence supported the allegation and law enforcement obtained an arrest warrant for 63-year-old Jeffrey Parker of Queen City.

Parker was identified by law enforcement as a special education teacher at Pleasant Grove ISD. He was arrested in Cass County for continuous sexual abuse of a disabled person and three counts of improper relationship between an educator and student, the police department said. The school district released a statement following the arrest, saying they are aware of the allegations connected to Parker:

” Upon receiving an anonymous report on Monday, April 27, 2026, the District began investigating and took appropriate steps to ensure the matter was promptly referred to Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Texarkana Texas Police Department and the Texas Education Agency. The District is fully cooperating with all investigative authorities. In addition, the employee was removed from the campus and will not return to PGISD.

The safety and well-being of our students is our highest priority. We want our students, families and community to know that we take allegations of this nature with the utmost seriousness, and we will continue to support our students and families during this time.

Due to student privacy protections under federal and state law, as well as the sensitive nature of this matter, the District is limited in what it can share publicly. Additionally, under Texas law, including Texas Penal Code § 21.12(d-1), the District is prohibited from releasing the name of the accused unless and until an indictment is returned.

The District understands the serious nature of this situation and remains committed to maintaining a safe and secure environment for all students and staff.”

Pleasant Grove ISD

When asked if Parker remains an employee of the district, Pleasant Grove ISD said they could not comment at the moment. Parker is expected to be transferred to the Bi-State Jail and the case remains under investigation.

WASHINGTON (AP) — When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was questioned by senators during his confirmation hearing about his vision for implementing President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, he said his goal was to keep his department off the front pages of the news.

To some degree, he has. Gone are the social media video clips of now-retired Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino clashing with protesters. Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, made her first trip as secretary to New York City to make arrests with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In contrast, Mullin went to North Carolina to review hurricane recovery efforts.

The Republican administration appears to be recalibrating its approach to a centerpiece policy that helped bring Trump back to the White House, moving in many ways away from aggressive, public-facing tactics toward a quieter approach to enforcement. Despite that shift, the administration insists it is not backing down from its lofty deportation goals.

“Clearly they’ve stepped back from the, for want of a better word, the Bovinoist tactics of before,” said Mark Krikorian, the president of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions. “But it’s not clear this means they’re actually stepping back from immigration.”

The Trump administration launched a series of immigration enforcement operations last year in mostly Democratic-led cities, which drove up arrests in large-scale sweeps. The crackdown sparked clashes between protesters and enforcement officers and led to the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two U.S. citizens.

Since then, the president’s hard-line anti-immigration agenda has lost popularity with voters and there have been no new high-profile city-based operations launched, raising questions about the administration’s strategy.

“We’re still enforcing immigration laws. We’re still deporting illegals that shouldn’t be here. We’re still going after the worst of the worst — but we’re doing it in a more quiet way,” Mullin said in an interview April 16 with CNBC.

Immigration arrests have dropped, but deportation goals remain

ICE arrests have fallen in recent months, and the number of people in immigration detention has dropped from a high of roughly 72,000 in January to 58,000 this week, according to data obtained by The Associated Press.

But in a sign of its continued determination, ICE in budget documents says it plans to remove 1 million people this fiscal year and the next compared with roughly 442,000 people last year. The agency also has plenty of money to carry out its mission, with Congress granting the Department of Homeland Security more than $170 billion for Trump’s immigration agenda last year.

The administration aims to have enough space to detain roughly 100,000 people this fiscal year, which would more than double the average daily number held in ICE detention last year. The administration has already expanded its detention capacity with the purchase of 11 warehouses across the country.

“They are working really on building a juggernaut of a system,” said Doris Meissner, who headed the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, a predecessor to ICE, during President Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said there had been no change to Trump’s strategy.

“President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities,” Jackson said.

ICE did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Stripping away legal protections to ramp up deportations

Advocates for immigrants are bracing for the Trump administration to turn its attention more intently to stripping away protections for migrants with temporary legal status to remain in the U.S. while their cases are being adjudicated.

In one example of this, the number of green cards approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services dropped by half over the course of a year under the Trump administration, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute, which supports immigration into the U.S. Humanitarian visas for refugees or people who qualified for asylum saw the biggest declines.

USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said the drop was due to increased vetting of applicants by the administration.

The Trump administration has also pushed to strip Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of people, with a key case weighing whether it’s overstepped its power to do so being heard at the Supreme Court this week.

Advocates see it as a way to send a chilling message to immigrant communities and make more people vulnerable to deportation. It also enables the department to operate without the public spectacle of workplace raids or home arrests.

ICE has also focused over the past year on creating agreements with jurisdictions around the country that allow local and state law enforcement to carry out an expanding array of immigration enforcement tasks, ranging from checking the immigration status of people in their jails to incorporating immigration checks during routine traffic stops.

These agreements, known as 287g, have grown from 135 in 20 states before Trump took office to more than 1,400 in 41 states and territories now.

Some states, most noticeably Florida and Texas, have mandated various forms of cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE.

Meissner, from MPI, said Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, is likely to prioritize further discussions about how cities and states can cooperate with ICE.

“At the end of the day, some of this may very well succeed in increasing the numbers,” Meissner said.

Calls to enforce work restrictions

Conservatives who want more deportations say the only way to truly crack down on illegal immigration is to make it so difficult for the migrants to work that they’ll leave on their own.

The Trump administration has already taken steps to make life harder for people in the country illegally including limiting who can live in public housing by immigration status, sharing Medicaid information with ICE and requiring people in the country illegally to register with the federal government.

Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Social Security Administration could send out letters alerting employers when an employee’s name doesn’t match their Social Security number. Authorities could repeatedly and consistently carry out audits of I-9 forms, which companies are supposed to fill out and submit to the federal government showing that new hires are legally able to work. And they could require banks to collect citizenship information on customers.

Whatever the strategy going forward, the administration is facing heavy pressure not to back away from its goals.

“The numbers are too low,” said Mike Howell, part of the Mass Deportation Coalition, which launched a playbook for how the administration can actually get to a million deportations a year by using tactics such as worksite enforcement.

“The deportation numbers are just too low,” Howell said, “and they need to be much higher, and they can be much higher.”

HOUSTON (AP) – Profit for the two largest oil companies in the U.S. tumbled during the first quarter, a three-month period in which the price of crude and gasoline rocketed higher. It’s a setback on paper only, however, the result of financial hedges that backfired after the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran in late February.

Exxon Mobil and Chevron reported quarterly results on Friday, with adjusted profits for both companies topping Wall Street expectations. The shares of both companies, up sharply this week, ticked higher before the opening bell.

With energy prices depressed at the start of the year, Exxon Mobil and Chevron had arranged hedges to offset volatility, a standard practice in the industry.

In the aftermath of an attack by the U.S. and Israel on Iran, however, the physical delivery of oil became impossible with the Strait of Hormuz essentially closed. Exxon and Chevron cannot book gains on those hedges until the crude is physically delivered.

The near closure of the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran is a flashpoint in the war and the source of much of the economic pain being felt globally. About 20% of the world’s oil passes through the strait on a typical day, but the passage has been choked off since the war began in late February.

Exxon earned $4.18 billion, or $1 per share, for the period ended March 31. A year earlier it earned $7.7 billion, or $1.76 per share. The company lost almost $4 billion in the quarter on what it called “unfavorable estimated timing effects” of its hedges.

Removing such one-time impacts, Exxon earned $1.16 per share, easily topping the $1.07 per share analyst surveyed by Zacks Investment Research predicted. Exxon does not adjust its reported results based on one-time events such as asset sales.

Revenue totaled $85.14 billion, breezing past Wall Street’s expectation of $81.49 billion.

First-quarter net production was 4.6 million oil-equivalent barrels per day. That’s down from 5 million oil-equivalent barrels per day in the previous quarter.

Chevron reported a first-quarter profit of $2.21 billion, or $1.11 per share. It earned $3.5 billion, or $2 per share, a year earlier.

The company said that its quarter included a $360 million net loss related to a legal reserve and that foreign currency effects lowered earnings by $223 million.

Chevron’s adjusted profit was $1.41 per share, easily beating the 92 cents per share Wall Street was calling for. Like Exxon, Chevron does not adjust its reported results based on one-time events such as asset sales.

The company’s revenue totaled $48.61 billion, also better than expected.

Exxon and Chevron are among the big drillers reporting earnings this week. On Tuesday BP said that its first-quarter profit more than doubled.

The oil companies’ results come at a time when gasoline prices in the U.S. hit new multiyear highs, a point of increasing agitation for travelers, households and also businesses that are particularly sensitive to higher energy prices.

The average price of gasoline in the U.S. hit $4.39 on Friday, according to motor club AAA. up more than 8% this week.

Inflation in the U.S. rose sharply last month during largest monthly jump in gas prices in six decades, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. The surge in gas prices has squeezed the budgets of lower- and middle-income families, making it more difficult to pay for necessities.

But it’s disrupting businesses as well, particularly those sensitive to higher fuel costs. Airlines worldwide have begun canceling flights as the war in the Middle East strains jet fuel supplies and pushes up ticket prices.

TYLER, Texas (KETK) – AAA Texas said the statewide average gas price spiked by 25 cents since last week amid continued uncertainty over the Strait of Hormuz.

“Drivers had been seeing some minor relief at the pump, but that trend has quickly reversed as crude oil prices climb and uncertainty continues around the Strait of Hormuz,” AAA Texas spokesperson Daniel Armbruster said. “Because crude oil is the main driver of gasoline prices, continued volatility in the global oil market could keep upward pressure on pump prices in the days ahead.”

Oil prices surged above $100 this week, prompting Texas’s average regular unleaded gas price to reach $3.85 per gallon, well below the nationwide average of $4.30 per gallon.

According to AAA Texas, fuel prices haven’t been this high since 2022, as the world continues to wait and see whether the Strait of Hormuz will reopen.