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A federal judge on Thursday struck down a Biden administration policy that aimed to ease a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.

The program, lauded as one of the biggest presidential actions to help immigrant families in years, allowed undocumented spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens to apply for a green card without first having to leave the country.

The temporary relief from deportation brought a brief sense of security to some 500,000 immigrants estimated to benefit from the program before Texas-based U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker put it on hold in August, days after applicants filed their paperwork.

Barker ruled Thursday that the Biden administration had overstepped its authority by implementing the program and had stretched the legal interpretation of relevant immigration law “past its breaking point.”

The short-lived Biden administration initiative known as “Keeping Families Together” would have been unlikely to remain in place after Donald Trump took office in January. But its early termination creates greater uncertainty for immigrant families as many are bracing for Trump’s return to the White House.

Trump’s election victory this week sets the stage for a swift crackdown on undocumented individuals after the Republican ran on promises of “mass deportation.” The president-elect energized his supporters on the campaign trail with a litany of anti-immigrant statements, including that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

During his first term, Trump appointed Barker as a judge in Tyler, Texas, which lies in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a favored venue for advocates pushing conservative arguments.

Barker had placed the immigration initiative on hold after Texas and 15 other states, led by their Republican attorneys general, filed a legal challenge accusing the executive branch of bypassing Congress to help immigrant families for “blatant political purposes.”

Republicans argued the initiative created costs for their states and could draw more migrants to the U.S.

The policy would have applied to people who have been living continuously in the U.S. for at least 10 years, do not pose a security threat and have utilized the existing legal authority known as “parole in place” that offers deportation protections.

Those married to a citizen by June 17, the day before the program was announced, could pay a $580 application fee and fill out a lengthy application explaining why they deserve humanitarian parole. If approved, applicants would have three years to seek permanent residency and obtain work authorization.

It was not immediately clear Thursday whether anyone had received approval under the program, which only accepted applications for about a week before the judge placed it on hold.

Noncitizen spouses are already eligible for legal status but often have to apply from their home countries. The process typically includes a years-long wait outside of the U.S., which can separate family members with different immigration statuses.

SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio Express-News reports that a Baptist retreat operator has issued a public apology for misusing funds meant to benefit a mother whose daughter was killed in the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde. Jessica Hernandez, whose daughter Alithia Ramirez was among the 19 children and two teachers killed on May 24, 2022, had sued Alto Frio Baptist Encampment, Inc. for money it collected through a GoFundMe fundraising campaign referred to as the “Rebel Give.” Alithia’s name and image were used to promote donations that would go toward Hernandez, but the nonprofit organization used the proceeds to renovate a house on its campgrounds in Leakey, about 40 miles north of Uvalde. For about three weeks before the mass shooting, Hernandez stayed at the house as she worked as a camp housekeeper.

Attorney Javier Espinoza, who represented Hernandez for free, was referred to Hernandez by the San Antonio Legal Services Association, or SALSA. Espinoza filed the case against the non-profit in August 2023. “That money should have gone to her,” he said at the time. The lawsuit was filed seeking compensatory damages, but at the time it was not known how much money was raised. The suit said the name and image of Hernandez’s daughter, Alithia, on the GoFundMe page prompted an outpouring of support from people across the country. Even actor Matthew McConaughey, a native of Uvalde, donated. Discovery and deposition of the camp’s corporate representative since revealed that donations from the GoFundMe to the non-profit were minimal, according to a SALSA statement. Because of the ongoing trauma suffered by Hernandez, and her desire not to relive the events of the slaying in a deposition, all parties agreed to conclude the matter with a publicly filed apology, according to the SALSA statement. Alto Frio Baptist Encampment Inc., its executive director Rusty Brandon and Hernandez’s former supervisor, assistant executive director Kim St. Clair said in the court record, which was filed filed recently, that they apologize for any offense that may have been caused by the GoFundMe.

AUSTIN – KXAN reports that almost 350,000 votes have been tabulated in Austin’s mayoral election. With unofficial results fully reported, KXAN is still unable to make a projection in this race — and we want you to know why. According to the Travis County Clerk’s Office, there are three types of ballots still outstanding: Mail-in ballots that were postmarked by 7 p.m. on Tuesday and received by 5 p.m. Wednesday. Overseas and military mail-in ballots that arrive by Tuesday, Nov. 12. Provisional ballots that have not yet been processed.

Incumbent Mayor Kirk Watson currently has 50.01% of the vote. A candidate must receive more than 50% to avoid a runoff. There are still ballots left to be counted, which means Watson could win outright or be forced into a runoff with second-place Carmen Llanes Pulido. The Travis County Clerk’s Office said there are about 6,000 mail ballots that were sent out but have not yet been returned, and it’s unclear how many of those will be received by the deadline. In addition, there are about 3,200 provisional ballots that still need to be reviewed before it’s determined whether they will be counted. Late-arriving ballots are also possible in Williamson and Hays County, but those totals are expected to be much lower than in Travis County. Both Travis and Williamson County told KXAN they expect official results to be released by the end of next week, after the canvas.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle repors that despite growing up in a liberal Mexican American household in Houston’s Denver Harbor neighborhood, Tessie Kempenski hasn’t supported a Democrat in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter in 1976. For decades, the 67-year-old has been an outlier as a Republican-supporting Latina, but when she woke up to the news Wednesday that Donald Trump had regained the White House — with unprecedented levels of Latino support nationwide — she felt vindicated. “What people don’t understand is my hairdresser, my nail salon, my cleaners, they all voted for Trump because they’re small businesses and they’re taking a hit (economically),” she said as she ate breakfast at the East End staple Doña Maria on Wednesday. “(Democrats) take us for granted and assume we’re going to agree with them on everything.”

Latinos in Texas and across the country voted for President-elect Trump in striking numbers in the 2024 election, weakening the Democratic voting base and helping contribute to the Republican victory on Tuesday. Exit polling by The Washington Post indicates that 55% of Latino voters in Texas, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate, voted for Trump in this election — a 14-point swing from the 41% who voted for him in 2020. And though Vice President Kamala Harris won a slim majority of Latino voters across the country, her eight-point lead amongst Latinos nationwide is a double-digit drop from Biden’s in 2020. The results could indicate that Republicans made significant inroads into one of Democrats’ most reliable voting blocs. “The realignment continues, and it’s a phenomenon to behold,” said Orlando Sanchez, former Harris County Treasurer and president of the Texas Latino Conservatives.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — “Build the Wall” was Donald Trump’s rally cry in 2016, and he acted on his promise by tapping military budgets for hundreds of miles of border wall with Mexico. “Mass Deportation” was the buzzword that energized supporters for his White House bid in 2024.

Trump’s victory sets the stage for a swift crackdown after an AP VoteCast survey showed the president-elect’s supporters were largely focused on immigration and inflation — issues the Republican has been hammering throughout his campaign.

How and when Trump’s actions on immigration will take shape is uncertain.

While Trump and his advisers have offered outlines, many questions remain about how they would deport anywhere close to the 11 million people estimated to be in the country illegally. How would immigrants be identified? Where would they be detained? What if their countries refuse to take them back? Where would Trump find money and trained officers to carry out their deportation?

Trump has said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 1798 law that allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country the U.S. is at war with. He has spoken about deploying the National Guard, which can be activated on orders from a governor. Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser, has said troops under sympathetic Republican governors would send troops to nearby states that refuse to participate.

Trump, who repeatedly referred to immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the United States, has stricken fear in immigrant communities with words alone.

Julie Moreno, a U.S. citizen who has been married for seven years to a Mexican man who is in the country illegally, is adjusting to the idea that she may have to live separately from her husband, who came to the United States in 2004. She can move to Mexico from New Jersey but it would be nearly impossible to keep running her business importing boxing gloves.

“I don’t have words yet, too many feelings,” Moreno said, her voice breaking as she spoke Wednesday of Trump’s victory. “I am very scared for my husband’s safety. … If they detain him, what is going to happen?”

Moreno’s husband, Neftali Juarez, ran a construction business and feels he has contributed to the country, paying taxes and providing employment through his company. “Unfortunately, the sentiment of the people who voted is different,” he said. “I feel horrible losing my wife.”

Some policy experts expect Trump’s first immigration moves to be at the border. He may pressure Mexico to keep blocking migrants from reaching the U.S. border as it has since December. He may lean on Mexico to reinstate a Trump-era policy that made asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration court.

Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports immigration restrictions, highlighted campaign remarks by Vice President-elect JD Vance that deporting millions would be done one step at a time, not all at once.

“You’re not talking about a dragnet,” Arthur, a former immigration judge, told The Associated Press. “There’s no way you could do it. The first thing you have to do is seal the border and then you can address the interior. All of this is going to be guided by the resources you have available.”

Elena, a 46-year-old Nicaraguan who has been living in the United States illegally for 25 years, couldn’t sleep after Trump’s victory, crying about what to do if she and her husband, 50, are deported. They have two adult daughters, both U.S. citizens, who have had stomach pain and respiratory problems from anxiety about the election.

“It is so difficult for me to uproot myself from the country that I have seen as my home,” said Elena, who lives in South Florida and gave only her first name for fear of being deported. “I have made my roots here and it is difficult to have to abandon everything to start over.”

Advocates are looking at where deportation arrests might take place and are watching especially closely to see if authorities adhere to a longstanding policy of avoiding schools, hospitals, places of worship and disaster relief centers, said Heidi Altman, federal advocacy director for the National Immigration Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund.

“We’re taking it very seriously,” said Altman. “We all have to have our eyes wide open to the fact that this isn’t 2016. Trump and Stephen Miller learned a lot from their first administration. The courts look very different than they did four years ago.”

Trump is expected to resume other far-reaching policies from his first term and jettison key Biden moves. These include:

—Trump has harshly criticized Biden policies to create and expand legal pathways to entry, including an online app called CBP One under which nearly 1 million people have entered at land crossings with Mexico since January 2023. Another policy has allowed more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to fly into the country with financial sponsors.

— Trump slashed the number of refugees screened abroad by the United Nations and State Department for settlement in the U.S. to its lowest level since Congress established the program in 1980. Biden rebuilt it, establishing an annual cap of 125,000, up from 18,000 under Trump.

—Trump sought to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shielded people who came to the U.S. as young children from deportation. A lawsuit by Republican governors that has seemed headed for the Supreme Court challenges DACA. For now, hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients may renew their status but new applications aren’t accepted.

—Trump dramatically curtailed the use of Temporary Protected Status, created under a 1990 law to allow people already in the United States to stay if their homelands are deemed unsafe. Biden sharply expanded use of TPS, including to hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans.

Maribel Hernandez, a Venezuelan on TPS that allows her to stay in the United States until April 2025, burst into tears as her 2-year-old son slept in a stroller outside New York’s Roosevelt Hotel as migrants discussed election fallout Wednesday.

“Imagine if they end it,” she said.

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Salomon reported from Miami. AP reporter Cedar Attanasio contributed from New York.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A Texas appeals court ordered a new trial Wednesday for a Jewish man on death row — who was part of a gang of prisoners that fatally shot a police officer in 2000 after escaping — because of antisemitic bias by the judge who presided over his case.

Lawyers for Randy Halprin have contended that former Judge Vickers Cunningham in Dallas used racial slurs and antisemitic language to refer to him and some of his co-defendants.

Halprin, 47, was among the group of inmates known as the “ Texas 7,” who escaped from a South Texas prison in December 2000 and then committed numerous robberies, including the one in which they shot 29-year-old Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins 11 times, killing him.

By a vote of 6-3, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that Halprin’s conviction be overturned and that he be given a new trial after concluding that Cunningham was biased against him at the time of his trial because he is Jewish.

The appeals court found evidence showed that during his life, Cunningham repeated unsupported antisemitic narratives. When Cunningham became a judge, he continued to use derogatory language about Jewish people outside the courtroom “with ‘great hatred, (and) disgust’ and increasing intensity as the years passed,” the court said.

It also said that during Halprin’s trial, Cunningham made offensive antisemitic remarks outside the courtroom about Halprin in particular and Jews in general.

“The uncontradicted evidence supports a finding that Cunningham formed an opinion about Halprin that derived from an extrajudicial factor — Cunningham’s poisonous antisemitism,” the appeals court wrote in its ruling.

The court previously halted Halprin’s execution in 2019.

“Today, the Court of Criminal Appeals took a step towards broader trust in the criminal law by throwing out a hopelessly tainted death judgment handed down by a bigoted and biased judge,” Tivon Schardl, one of Halprin’s attorneys, said in a statement. “It also reminded Texans that religious bigotry has no place in our courts.”

The order for a new trial came after state District Judge Lela Mays in Dallas said in a December 2022 ruling that Cunningham did not or could not curb the influence of his antisemitic bias in his judicial decision-making during the trial.

Mays wrote that Cunningham used racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs to refer to Halprin and the other escaped inmates.

Cunningham stepped down from the bench in 2005 and is now an attorney in private practice in Dallas. His office said Wednesday that he would not be commenting on Halprin’s case.

Cunningham previously denied allegations of bigotry after telling the Dallas Morning News in 2018 that he has a living trust that rewards his children for marrying straight, white Christians. He had opposed interracial marriages but later told the newspaper that his views evolved.

The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office was appointed to handle legal issues related to Halprin’s allegations after the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, was disqualified.

In September 2022, Tarrant County prosecutors filed court documents in which they said Halprin should get a new trial because Cunningham showed “actual bias” against him.

Of the seven inmates who escaped, one killed himself before the group was arrested. Four have been executed. Another, Patrick Murphy, awaits execution.

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Follow Juan A. Lozano on X at https://x.com/juanlozano70.