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EL PASO (AP) – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is terminating the contractor running its largest detention facility and replacing it with a more experienced firm that will work to improve medical care and other services, the agency said Friday.

The contractor switch at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, comes as it faces scrutiny over living conditions that detainees have described as inhumane since its hasty construction and opening last year.

With an average of nearly 3,000 detainees in six long tent encampments, evidence has mounted to support claims of overcrowding, medical neglect, malnutrition and emotional distress. An outbreak of measles also recently hit the camp, which several Democratic members of Congress have called for closing.

Detainees say they struggle to obtain medication and health care, have lost significant amounts of weight because of a lack of food, and live in fear of security guards known to use force. At least 130 calls to 911 were made in the camp’s first five months, which included two deaths, several suicide attempts, fights and medical emergencies, The Associated Press reported last week.

Acquisition Logistics, LLC, the ousted prime contractor, had been awarded a deal last year worth up to $1.3 billion to build and manage the camp at U.S. Army base Fort Bliss. It had no prior experience running an ICE detention facility, had never won a federal contract worth more than $16 million and lacked a functioning website.

ICE has selected Amentum Services, Inc., which has worked as a subcontractor at Camp East Montana, as the new prime contractor, according to a federal notice published Wednesday and an agency spokesperson who did not provide their name. The Washington Post reported the switch of contractors on Wednesday.

The spokesperson did not say what prompted the termination of Acquisition Logistics’ contract, which records show had been set to run until Sept. 30, 2027, and has caused the government to commit nearly $600 million so far.

ICE has said it recently completed an inspection of conditions at Camp East Montana, but the findings have not been made public. Acquisition Logistics and its president and CEO Ken Wagner didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.

ICE said Amentum, known for its work with the military and intelligence agencies, was best suited to take over and improve operations.

“Amentum’s size, maturity and pedigree make them the right partner at the right time,” the spokesperson said. “We will work closely with them in their implementation of higher standards of medical care, more thorough case processing and intake procedures, and delivery of performance requirements according to well-defined accountability measures.”

Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat whose district includes the camp, expressed relief Friday that Acquisition Logistics had been replaced. She reiterated her calls for the facility to be shut down and for the contractors involved to be investigated for “the fraud they’ve perpetrated on the American taxpayer.”

“Whether the new contractor is an improvement remains to be seen, and I remain deeply concerned about the chronic substandard conditions that exist at Camp East Montana,” said Escobar, who has toured the facility seven times.

Based in Chantilly, Virginia, Amentum’s parent company describes itself as a “global advanced engineering and technology solutions provider” serving U.S. government agencies and other customers. The company has provided services for ICE and other Department of Homeland Security divisions in the past.

The notice published in a contracting database said ICE was negotiating a no-bid contract with Amentum to run Camp East Montana, including providing secure housing, medical care and transportation. It indicated the contract would last 180 days, and it’s unclear what would happen to Camp East Montana after that period.

“The contractor must demonstrate the capacity for rapid operational transition and sustained adherence to all regulatory and performance requirements, thereby safeguarding public safety and supporting national enforcement priorities,” the notice said.

Citing the “proprietary nature” of the camp’s infrastructure, the notice said no vendor other than Amentum could provide uninterrupted services there.

The facility is intended for short-term stays before detainees are shipped out, and the average stay has been nine days, according to ICE data. But some detainees have been kept for weeks or months while they challenge their detention or experience logistical problems related to their pending deportations.

The switch comes as ICE plans to operate warehouses across the country to hold far more detainees at single locations than Camp East Montana, with plans calling for some sites to have up to 8,500. Escobar called on ICE not to open the warehouses, including one planned near El Paso, that she said would “serve only as tools for the administration’s inhumanity.”

ANGELINA COUNTY (KETK) — A Lufkin man found guilty of causing severe burns to a child was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday.

In the 159th Judicial District Court, Judge Todd Kassaw sentenced Miguel Gonzalez, 28, to life in prison starting Thursday for his charge of injury to a child in an incident that occurred in September 2022.

According to law enforcement, Gonzalez intentionally put a female child younger than 14-years-old in a bathtub with hot water on Sept. 26 2022, causing severe burns that made parts of her skin allegedly peel off.

At the time of the incident, Gonzalez was dating the victim’s mother and was watching the child. The victim’s mother first told officers that her daughter had fallen into the bathtub, but upon further questioning, she said Gonzalez had pushed her.

Gonzalez later told officials that the water in the tub was lukewarm, but he allowed her to play while he spoke with his roommate for a couple of minutes. According to law enforcement, Gonzales said the child turned on the hot water.

Officials determined the water temperature was up to 143 degrees, due to the condition of the child’s skin after she left the bathtub.

Gonzalez was arrested on a warrant for an unrelated charge by the Lufkin Police Department and was later charged with two counts of injury to child, a first degree felony.

ABBEVILLE, La. (AP) — Jacob Sagrera unrolls an alligator skin and lays it flat on a metal table, brushing off flecks of salt. He holds it up to the light, looking for blemishes, and gives it a score. That score will help a tannery an ocean away prepare it to be used by a luxury designer — for items like boots, watch bands and handbags destined for fashion runways and posh shops.

Then he adds it to a pile of hides, each with a yellow tracking tag that allows authorities to enforce legal trade.

Advocates say commercial alligator farming has helped preserve a species often seen as scary, bothersome or good only for their skins. Not all conservationists think that’s a good thing, but for the farmers and luxury brands seeking to market their products as sustainable, it’s made sense to tie conservation to capitalism.

Some of the scientists who study them agree.

“These wetlands, these alligators … it has to have some kind of monetary value,” said George Melancon, alligator research biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “Otherwise, people just forget about them.”

How alligator farming works

Sagrera’s grading work at his family’s operation, Vermilion Gator Farm, is just one step in a decades-old system.

American alligators were once in peril of being hunted to extinction, and went on the Endangered Species List decades ago. Their numbers weren’t too depleted to rebound in the wild if their habitat was maintained, say some experts, including Grahame Webb, director of Wildlife Management International and an adjunct professor at Charles Darwin University in Australia who has worked on reptile and crocodilian conservation since the 1960s.

But scientists with the state of Louisiana proposed a different way to boost their numbers: farmers would pay landowners for eggs, raise the gators to sell their meat locally and their skins on the luxury market and then release some back into the wild every year.

Now, Louisiana produces around 400,000 farmed alligators every year, according to the state’s wildlife & fisheries department, which valued farmed skins in 2024 at over $56 million. The state decides how many young alligators to release annually on data from nest surveys and hunting tags, and estimates around 3 million alligators now in the wild in Louisiana. As wild numbers have grown, they’ve dropped the percentage of farmed gators returned each year, from almost 20% in the early 2000s to about 5% now.

American alligators were delisted as endangered in 1987 but are now a species of “Least Concern” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, though their trade is still regulated because of how similar they look to other, more vulnerable crocodilian species. Alligators can be found across the Southern U.S., but Louisiana is by far the largest producer, with farms also in Georgia, Florida and Texas.

Farmers and state officials say the trackers help ensure every product came from a legal operation. One company that sells alligator leather goods, Col. Littleton in Lynnville, Tennessee, keeps records of all its tracking tags, said Hayley Holt, their director of corporate and specialty sales. They mostly sell within the U.S., but many retailers log where they sourced their materials in case they want to ship products internationally, Holt said.

Alligator farming benefits from a large legal market and strong regulation, said Oliver Tallowin, senior program officer on wildlife use and trade for the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

Some animal rights advocates question the ethics of raising alligators on farms. Beyond welfare concerns, some think the practice perpetuates demand for skins that can fuel poaching.

“That shadow trafficking industry is going to be there because you’ve rooted your system in profit,” said Sarah Veatch, principal for wildlife policy for the nonprofit Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the United States. “Trade not only meets the existing demand, but it normalizes it, it legitimizes it and it grows that demand for wild animal skins.”

The alligator program and the future of luxury fashion

When brands market high-end items, sustainability is often part of the pitch.

Brands have taken a more active role in sourcing alligator leather by buying shares in or acquiring family-operated farms, tanneries and manufacturers, said Christy Gilmore, a consultant who communicates between Louisiana alligator officials and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a trade agreement among global governments.

“The brands started asking questions and digging deeper and quite honestly, just doing things that those of us who were small family businesses didn’t think about,” said Gilmore, whose family has been in the hide business for over a century and owns an alligator and crocodile tannery in Georgia. “We’re not sitting around thinking about what our carbon footprint has been.”

Meanwhile, the state wildlife and fisheries agency has increased its marketing budget over the years, from a cap of $300,000 to $500,000. That money comes from the industry, including sales of hunting tags each year, and goes into a fund dedicated to alligator programs.

The budget has gone up as they’ve had more money to spend and because of competition with hides from other crocodilian species entering the market, said Jeb Linscombe, alligator program manager for Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. But there’s also been concern that animal rights groups could push the luxury market away from alligator hides, Linscombe said.

A related industry, fur, has seen significant declines in recent years. Last year, Poland passed a law to end fur farming by the end of 2033 and New York Fashion Week announced it would ban fur for its fall 2026 shows.

Some animal rights groups think hides like gator and python could be the next target. Some smaller venues like London Fashion Week have already banned exotic skins.

New research on alligators, including role in climate change

The alligator program also drives research on a species that has long been a mystery.

Melancon, the alligator biologist, wants to better understand their biology to help ranchers — for instance, developing a vaccine against West Nile virus, which can cause skin lesions that damage the valuable hides.

Other researchers want to investigate whether alligators are a climate benefit. A study in the journal Scientific Reports last year found a strong correlation between the abundance of alligators in a wetland and how much carbon that wetland stores. That’s important because when released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide is a main cause of global warming. That team is developing another study to see whether gators directly contribute to carbon storage, possibly by eating animals that nibble carbon-storing vegetation, said lead author Chris Murray, an adjunct professor of biology at Southeastern Louisiana University.

“Alligators can’t stop climate change,” Murray said, but “there’s the chance they are participating in the global challenge of climate change for the good and not the bad.”

Murray said he’s not doing the research to help the industry, but for conservation in general. He sees value in gators beyond luxury bags and he wants others to see it, too.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA cleared its moon rocket on Thursday for an April launch with four astronauts after completing the latest round of repairs.

The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket will roll out of the hangar and back to the pad next week at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, leading to a launch attempt as early as April 1. It will mark humanity’s first trip to the moon in more than 50 years.

The Artemis II crew should have blasted off on a lunar flyaround earlier this year, but fuel leaks and other problems with the Space Launch System rocket interfered.

Although NASA managed to plug the hydrogen fuel leaks at the pad in February, a helium-flow issue forced the space agency to return the rocket to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs, bumping the mission to April.

The space agency has only six days at the beginning of April to launch before standing down until April 30 into early May.

“It’s a test flight and it is not without risk, but our team and our hardware are ready,” NASA’s Lori Glaze told reporters at the end of the two-day flight readiness review.

Glaze and other NASA officials declined to provide the risk probabilities for the upcoming mission.

History has shown that a new rocket has essentially a 50% chance of success, said John Honeycutt, chair of the mission management team.

There’s so much gap since the only other SLS flight — more than three years ago without anyone on board — that it’s difficult to understand any risk assessment numbers, Honeycutt said.

“It’s not the first flight,” Glaze said. “But we’re also not in a regular cadence. So we definitely have significantly more risk than a flight system that’s flying all the time.”

Late last month NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, announced a major overhaul of the Artemis program to speed things up and, by doing so, reduce risk.

Dissatisfied with the slow pace and lengthy gaps between lunar missions, he added an extra practice flight in orbit around Earth for next year. That is now the new Artemis III, with the moon landing by two astronauts shifted to Artemis IV. Isaacman is targeting one and maybe even two lunar landings in 2028.

NASA’s Office of Inspector General warned in an audit this week that the space agency needs to come up with a rescue plan for its lunar crews. Landing near the moon’s south pole will be riskier than it was for the Apollo astronauts closer to the equator given the rough polar terrain, according to the report.

The report cited the lunar landers as the top contributor for potential loss of crew during the first few Artemis moon landings. It listed the space agency’s loss-of-crew threshold at 1-in-40 for lunar operations and 1-in-30 for Artemis missions overall.

Contracted by NASA to provide the moon landers for astronauts, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have accelerated work in order to meet the new 2028 target date. The inspector general’s office said many technical challenges remain including refueling their landers in orbit around Earth before flying to the moon.

NASA sent 24 astronauts to the moon during Apollo, 12 of whom landed on it. All but one of the moonshots — Apollo 13 — achieved their prime objectives. The program ended with Apollo 17 in 1972.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

UPDATE: The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said Friday that Taylor has been located.
UPDATE: The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said Taylor has been spotted in Tenaha and has shaved his head.

The sheriff’s office said Jayden Taylor is 6 feet, 5 inches tall and weighs around 175 pounds. Taylor was last seen at his parents’ home, seven miles northwest of Center, wearing a black Carhartt sweatshirt, black Nike pants and black, square-toed alligator boots.

Anyone with information about Taylor’s whereabouts is asked to contact the sheriff’s office at 936-598-5601.

JASPER COUNTY (KETK) — Four people have been arrested after they exploited an elderly man with a medical condition and used his financial information to make fraudulent purchases in Jasper County.

According to the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office, the investigation began after the victim’s family contacted deputies with concerns that several caretakers were using the man’s credit card and forging financial documents and checks without his permission.

Investigators launched what the sheriff’s office described as an in-depth investigation. During the process, they uncovered numerous fraudulent charges, forged checks and other unauthorized transactions.

Authorities said some of the stolen money was used for personal expenses, including car payments for one of the suspects and kitchen-related purchases for another suspect’s catering business.

Officials estimate that approximately $50,000 was fraudulently taken from the victim, though investigators said additional unauthorized transactions are still being discovered.

The following suspects have been arrested so far:

Brandy Cooper, 47, charged with exploitation of the elderly, forgery and credit card abuse of an elderly person.
Dameyen Cooper, 46, charged with exploitation of an elderly person and credit card abuse.
Jameica Rhodes, 46, charged with credit card abuse of an elderly person.
Annie Isom, 69, charged with credit card abuse of an elderly person.

The sheriff’s office said investigators believe multiple caretakers who were entrusted with the victim’s care and health may have been involved in the scheme.

Authorities said the investigation remains ongoing as they work to identify additional evidence and potential suspects.