Over the weekend, Trump accused other countries of “stealing the movie-making capabilities” of the U.S. and said that he had authorized the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative to immediately begin the process of implementing this new import tax on all foreign-made films. But further specifics or dates weren’t provided. And the White House confirmed that no final decisions had been made as of Monday.

Trump later said that he would meet with industry executives about the proposal but a lot remains unclear about how an import tax on complex, international productions could even be implemented.

If imposed, experts warn that such a tariff would dramatically hike the costs of making movies today. That uncertainty could put filmmakers in limbo, much like other industries that have recently been caught in the crosshairs of today’s ongoing trade wars.

Unlike other sectors that have recently been targeted by tariffs, however, movies go beyond physical goods, bringing larger intellectual property ramifications into question. Here’s what we know.

Why is Trump threatening this steep movie tariff?

Trump is citing national security concerns, a justification he’s similarly used to impose import taxes on certain countries and a range of sector-specific goods.

In a Sunday night post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump claimed that the American movie industry is “DYING to a very fast death” as other countries offer “all sorts of incentives” to draw filmmaking away from the U.S.

Trump has previously voiced concern about movie production moving overseas. And in recent years, U.S. film and television production has been hampered between setbacks from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hollywood guild strikes of 2023 and the recent wildfires in the Los Angeles area. Incentive programs have also long-influenced where movies are shot both abroad and within the U.S., with more production leaving California to states like Georgia and New Mexico — as well as countries like Canada.

But unlike other sectors targeted by Trump’s recently-imposed tariffs, the American film industry currently holds a trade deficit that’s in the U.S.’s favor.

In movie theaters, American-produced movies overwhelmingly dominate the domestic marketplace. Data from the Motion Picture Association also shows that American films made $22.6 billion in exports and $15.3 billion in trade surplus in 2023 — with a recent report noting that these films “generated a positive balance of trade in every major market in the world” for the U.S.

Last year, international markets accounted for over 70% of Hollywood’s total box office revenue, notes Heeyon Kim, an assistant professor of strategy at Cornell University. She warns that tariffs and potential retaliation from other countries impacting this industry could result in billions of dollars in lost earnings and thousands of jobs.

“To me, (this) makes just no sense,” she said, adding that such tariffs could “undermine otherwise a thriving part of the U.S. economy.”

The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents behind-the-scenes entertainment workers across the U.S. and Canada, said in a statement Monday that Trump had “correctly recognized” the “urgent threat from international competition” that the American film and television industry faces today. But the union said it instead recommended the administration implement a federal production tax incentive and other provisions to “level the playing field” while not harming the industry overall.

How could a tax on foreign-made movies work?

That’s anyone’s guess.

“Traditional tariffs apply to physical imports crossing borders, but film production primarily involves digital services — shooting, editing and post-production work that happens electronically,” notes Ann Koppuzha, a lawyer and business law lecturer at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business.

Koppuzha said that film production is more like an applied service that can be taxed, not tariffed. But taxes require Congressional approval, which could be a challenge even with a Republican majority.

Making a movie is also an incredibly complex — and international — process. It’s common for both large and small films to include production in the U.S. and in other countries. Big-budget movies like the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” for instance, are shot around the world.

U.S. studios frequently shoot abroad because tax incentives can aid production costs. But a blanket tariff across the board could discourage that or limit options, Kim said — hurting both Hollywood films and the global industry that helps create them.

“When you make these sort of blanket rules, you’re missing some of the nuance of how production works,” added Steven Schiffman, a longtime industry veteran and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. “Sometimes you just need to go to the location, because frankly it’s way too expensive just to try to create in a soundstage”

Schiffman points to popular titles filmed outside the U.S. — such as Warner Bros’ “Harry Potter” series, which was almost entirely shot in the U.K. “The cost to have done that would have like literally double to produce those movies under this proposed tariff,” he said.

Could movie tariffs have repercussions on other intellectual property?

Overall, experts warn that the prospect of tariffing foreign-made movies ventures into uncharted waters.

“There’s simply no precedent or sense for applying tariffs to these types of creative services,” Koppuzha said. And while the Trump administration could extend similar threats to other forms of intellectual property, like music, “they’d encounter the same practical hurdles.”

But if successful, some also warn of potential retaliation. Kim points to “quotas” that some countries have had to help boost their domestic films by ensuring they get a portion of theater screens, for example. Many have reduced or suspended such quotas over the years in the name of open trade — but if the U.S. places a sweeping tariff on all foreign-made films, these kinds of quotas could come back, “which would hurt Hollywood film or any of the U.S.-made intellectual property,” Kim said.

And while U.S. dominance in film means “there are fewer substitutes” for retaliation, Schiffman notes that other forms of entertainment — like game development — could see related impacts down the road.

Others stress the potential consequences of hampering international collaboration overall.

“Creative content distribution requires thoughtful economic approaches that recognize how modern storytelling flows across borders,” notes Frank Albarella, U.S. media and telecommunications sector leader at KPMG. “The question hanging over every screen: Might we better nurture American storytelling through smart, targeted incentives, or could we inadvertently force audiences to pay more for what could become a narrower creative landscape?”

AP Writers Jake Coyle and Jill Colvin in New York, Aamer Madhani in Palm Beach, Florida and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

Two cases were identified in Missouri, and one each in Florida, Illinois, South Dakota, Utah and Wisconsin, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

People got sick in February and March of this year, the CDC said. They all had the same strain of salmonella — a version that has been traced to hatcheries in the past. The investigation is continuing, health officials said.

Salmonella bacteria cause about 1.35 million infections in the United States every year, and recent outbreaks have been tied to sources such as cucumbers, eggs, unpasteurized milk, fresh basil, geckos and pet bearded dragons.

But one concern is that chickens and other backyard poultry can carry salmonella bacteria even if they look healthy and clean. A backyard poultry-associated outbreak that ended last year was tied to 470 cases spread across 48 states, including one death.

The commander of the 12th Aviation Battalion directed the unit to pause helicopter flight operations around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport following Thursday’s close calls, two Army officials confirmed to The Associated Press on Monday. One official said the flights have been paused since Friday.

The pause comes after 67 people died in January when a passenger jet collided in midair with a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan airport.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details that were not publicly announced. The unit is continuing to fly in the greater Washington, D.C., region.

The unit had begun a return to flight within the last week, with plans to gradually increase the number of flights over the next four weeks, according to an Army document viewed by the AP.

Thursday’s close call involved a Delta Air Lines Airbus A319 and a Republic Airways Embraer E170, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

They were instructed by air traffic control to “perform go-arounds” because of a “priority air transport” helicopter, according to an emailed statement from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The priority air transport helicopters of the 12th battalion provide transport service to top Pentagon officials. It was a Black Hawk priority air transport known as PAT25 that collided with the passenger jet in midair in January.

That crash was the worst U.S. midair disaster in more than two decades. In March, the FAA announced that helicopters would be prohibited from flying in the same airspace as planes near Reagan airport.

The NTSB and FAA are both investigating the latest close call with an Army helicopter.

The Army said after the latest incident that the UH-60 Blackhawk was following published FAA flight routes and air traffic control from Reagan airport when it was “directed by Pentagon Air Traffic Control to conduct a ‘go-around,’ overflying the Pentagon helipad in accordance with approved flight procedures.”

But helicopter traffic remains a concern around that busy airport. The FAA said that three flights that had been cleared for landing Sunday at Reagan were ordered to go around because a police helicopter was on an urgent mission in the area. All three flights landed safely on their second approaches.

The NTSB said after the January crash that there had been an alarming number of close calls near Reagan in recent years, and the FAA should have acted sooner.

Investigators have highlighted 85 close calls around Reagan airport in the three years before the crash that should have signaled a growing safety problem. FAA officials said they did analyze every close call but missed the alarming trend.

Since then, the FAA launched a review of data at airports nationwide with heavy helicopter traffic that identified safety concerns at the Las Vegas airport related to all the helicopter tours there. That review is ongoing.

Reuters first reported the pause in Army helicopter flights.

In New Jersey on Monday, flight delays and cancellations persisted at Newark Liberty International Airport. The FAA attributed arriving flight delays of nearly four hours to a combination of an air traffic controller shortage, thick cloud cover and antiquated air traffic control equipment that needs to be upgraded.

Associated Press writer Josh Funk contributed to this report from Omaha, Nebraska.

The Pulitzers’ prestigious public service medal went to ProPublica for the second straight year. Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, Cassandra Jaramillo and Stacy Kranitz were honored for reporting on pregnant women who died after doctors delayed urgent care in states with strict abortion laws.

The Washington Post won for “urgent and illuminating” breaking news coverage of the Trump assassination attempt. The Pulitzers honored Ann Telnaes, who quit the Post in January after the news outlet refused to run her editorial cartoon lampooning tech chiefs — including Post owner Jeff Bezos — cozying up to Trump. The Pulitzers praised her “fearlessness.”

The Pulitzers honored the best in journalism from 2024 in 15 categories, along with eight arts categories including books, music and theater. The public service winner receives a gold medal. All other winners receive $15,000.

The New York Times showed its breadth with awards honoring reporting from Afghanistan, Sudan, Baltimore and Butler, Pennsylvania. Doug Mills won in breaking news photography for his pictures of the Trump assassination attempt, including one that captured a bullet in the air near the GOP candidate.

The Times’ Azam Ahmed and Christina Goldbaum and contributing writer Matthieu Aikins won an explanatory reporting prize for examining U.S. policy failures in Afghanistan. Declan Walsh and the Times’ staff won for an investigation into the Sudan conflict.

A big milestone for a new local news outlet

The Times was also part of a collaboration with The Baltimore Banner, whose reporters Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher won in local reporting for stories on that city’s fentanyl crisis and its disproportionate effect on Black men. The Banner was created three years ago, with several staffers who had left the Baltimore Sun.

“This is a huge milestone for us,” editor in chief Kimi Yoshino said in an interview. “I told the newsroom today that never in my wildest dreams did I think we would be here at this moment. It is a testament to the power of local news, the need for local news and what journalists can do when they focus on important stories in our community.”

The Banner created a statistical model that it shared with journalists in cities like Boston, Chicago and San Francisco for stories there, she said.

Reuters won for its own investigative series on fentanyl, showing how lax regulation both inside and outside the United States makes the drug inexpensive and widely available. inewsource.org in San Diego was a finalist in the illustrated reporting and commentary category for its stories on fentanyl.

The New Yorker’s Mosab Abu Toha won for his commentaries on Gaza. The magazine also won for its “In the Dark” podcast about the killing of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and in feature photography for Moises Saman’s pictures of the Sednaya prison in Syria.

The Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer for its reporting on Elon Musk, “including his turn to conservative politics, his use of legal and illegal drugs and his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the Pulitzer board said. The Journal was also a finalist for its “cool-headed” reporting on the plight of Evan Gershkovich, who was imprisoned in Russia.

A special citation for a career covering civil rights

The Pulitzers also gave a special citation to the late Chuck Stone for his work covering the civil rights movement. The pioneering journalist was the first Black columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News and founded the National Association of Black Journalists.

Mark Warren of Esquire won the feature writing prize for his portrait of a Baptist pastor and small-town mayor who died by suicide after his secret online life was exposed by a right-wing news site.

Alexandra Lange, a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab won an award in criticism for “graceful and genre-expanding” writing about public spaces for families.

The Houston Chronicle Raj Mankad, Sharon Steinmann, Lisa Falkenberg and Leah Binkovitz won the Pulitzer in editorial writing for its series on dangerous train crossings.

The Associated Press was a finalist in breaking news reporting for its own coverage of the Trump assassination attempt, and in investigative reporting for its partnership with PBS FRONTLINE and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and at Arizona State University for stories documenting more than 1,000 deaths at the hands of police using methods of subduing people that were supposed to be non-lethal.

On Sunday, the president announced in a social media post that he would direct the Bureau of Prisons and the FBI to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz to “house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”

But if Trump is to get his prison, the bureau will have to first pass a number of environmental reviews, including the National Environmental Protection Act, and the California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA.

President Donald Trump says he’s going to reopen Alcatraz prison. Doing so would be difficult and costly

CEQA requires developers to measure how a proposed project might hurt the environment — from wildlife to impacting water resources — and show how it will mitigate those impacts. Often, groups looking to block a project will sue under CEQA, claiming that an agency’s environmental report hasn’t met the mark.

There are a few major environmental hurdles any prison on Alcatraz would have to clear.

First, the birds.

Several species of waterfowl nest on Alcatraz throughout the year. These include the Western gull, cormorants, and the pigeon guillemot, which are legally protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Parts of the island are closed during seabird breeding season.

Contractors doing rehab work to the historic Alcatraz prison regularly have to pause construction or work around breeding season for these birds, historian John Martini said. Some parts of the island are closed much of the year to the public so the birds can roost. (Even the Escape from Alcatraz triathalon organizers are required to note in their permit that the swim won’t have a significant impact on birds.)

Alcatraz also has historic status. The island was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and was designated a National Historic Landmark — an even more elusive status — in 1986. The National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to minimize harm to National Historic Landmarks when taking on projects that would impact them. Historic resources are also recognized as part of the environment under CEQA.

If the project does receive its environmental clearance, it might not be until Trump is out of office.

Consider how long other Alcatraz projects have taken.

The National Park Service started planning for a new ferry landing on Alcatraz for visitors in 2015. It took nearly two years for NPS to get environmental clearance — in part because the city of Sausalito appealed the project under CEQA, holding the appeal over NPS as leverage to ensure the agency designed it such that new ferries wouldn’t increase traffic around downtown Sausalito. It took another few years to get approvals from the city and Port of San Francisco. The project is finally set to be complete this winter — a decade later.

Even if the project were to pass environmental clearances, a new prison on Alcatraz would be extraordinarily difficult to build, Martini said.

“It’s a rock,” he said of the island. “There’s no soil out there. There’s no source of fresh water. When they built the prison back in the 1910s, they had to bring out everything — huge amounts of water for mixing concrete, let alone what was needed to support the people living on the island.”

The Department of Homeland Security said in a news release that it would also pay for travel assistance — and that people who use an app called CBP Home to tell the government they plan to return home will be “deprioritized” for detention and removal by immigration enforcement.

“If you are here illegally, self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” Secretary Kristi Noem said. “DHS is now offering illegal aliens financial travel assistance and a stipend to return to their home country through the CBP Home App.”

The department said it had already paid for a plane ticket for one migrant to return home to Honduras from Chicago and said more tickets have been booked for this week and next.

It’s a major part of Trump’s administration

Trump made immigration enforcement and the mass deportation of immigrants in the United States illegally a centerpiece of his campaign, and he is following through during the first months of his administration. But it is a costly, resource-intensive endeavor.

While the Republican administration is asking Congress for a massive increase in resources for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department responsible for removing people from the country, it’s also pushing people in the country illegally to “self-deport.”

It has coupled this self-deportation push with television ads threatening action against people in the U.S. illegally and social media images showing immigration enforcement arrests and migrants being sent to a prison in El Salvador.

The Trump administration has often portrayed self-deportation as a way for migrants to preserve their ability to return to the United States someday, and the president himself suggested it on Monday while speaking to reporters at the White House. He said immigrants who “self-deport” and leave the U.S. might have a chance to return legally eventually “if they’re good people” and “love our country.”

“And if they aren’t, they won’t,” Trump said.

But Aaron Reichlen-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which advocates for immigrants, said there’s a lot for migrants to be cautious about in the latest offer from Homeland Security.

He said it’s often worse for people to leave the country and not fight their case in immigration court, especially if they’re already in removal proceedings. He said if migrants are in removal proceedings and don’t show up in court they can automatically get a deportation order and leaving the country usually counts as abandoning many applications for relief including asylum applications.

It can be an intricate process

And Homeland Security is not indicating that it is closely coordinating with the immigration courts so that there are no repercussions for people in immigration court if they leave, he said.

“People’s immigration status is not as simple as this makes it out to be,” Reichlen-Melnick said.

He questioned where Homeland Security would get the money and the authorization to make the payments — and he suggested they are necessary because the administration can’t arrest and remove as many people as it has promised so it has to encourage people to do it on their own.

“They’re not getting their numbers,” he said.

As part of its self-deportation effort, the Trump administration has transformed an app that had been used by the Biden administration to allow nearly 1 million migrants to schedule appointments to enter the country into a tool to help migrants return home. Under the Biden administration, it was called CBP One; now it’s dubbed CBP Home.

Homeland Security said “thousands” of migrants have used the app to self-deport.

But Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, said he doesn’t see the offer of paying people to go home as an admission that something in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda isn’t working.

Considering the millions of people who are in the country illegally, he said, it’s impossible to deport all of them so the administration has to combine its own enforcement efforts with encouraging people to go home voluntarily.

Krikorian said he supports the idea of paying migrants to leave although he questioned how it would work in reality.

“How do you make sure that they’ve actually gone home? Do you make them sign an agreement where they agree not to challenge their removal if they were to come back?” he questioned. “The execution matters, but the concept is sound.”

This has been tried before

Other countries have tried various iterations of paying migrants to return home.

There’s a reason it’s attractive to governments wanting to encourage migrants to go. It costs less to buy someone a plane ticket and some incentive money than it does to pay to find them, detain them if necessary, wait for the courts to rule on their case and then send them home.

The Department of Homeland Security said that it costs $17,121 to arrest, detain and remove someone in the U.S. illegally.

Voluntary returns also don’t require extensive government-to-government negotiations to get a country to take back its citizens, which can be a major benefit. There are a number of countries that either don’t take back their own citizens who are being returned by U.S. immigration enforcement officials or make that process challenging.

A 2011 study by the Migration Policy Institute and the European University Institute found that there were about 128 programs — often referred to as pay-to-go programs — around the world.

But the study found that, with a few exceptions such as one program to return people in the 1990s from Germany to Bosnia, these voluntary return programs generally failed at encouraging large numbers of people to go home.

It is not clear whether these programs resulted in migrants who took the payments actually staying in their home countries and not trying to emigrate again.

Several dozen prospective jurors got a brief description of the sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges against Combs from the judge, Arun Subramanian, who reminded them that Combs had pleaded not guilty and was presumed innocent.

As the judge spoke, Combs sat with his lawyers. He wore a sweater over a white collared shirt and gray slacks, which the judge had allowed rather than jail clothing. Combs, 55, has been held in a grim federal lockup in Brooklyn since his arrest last September. His hair and goatee were almost fully gray because dye isn’t allowed in jail.

Unlike other recent high-profile celebrity trials, Combs’ court case won’t be broadcast live because federal courtrooms don’t allow electronic recordings inside — meaning courtroom sketch artists serve as the public’s eyes in the courtroom.

The trial is expected to take at least eight weeks. If convicted, he faces the possibility of decades in prison.

Several prospective jurors indicated they had seen news reports featuring a key piece of evidence in the case: a video of the hip-hop mogul hitting and kicking one of his accusers in a Los Angeles hotel hallway in 2016. One prospective juror described a still image she saw from the video as “damning evidence.” That woman was rejected from consideration.

After another juror was dismissed, Combs asked for a bathroom break, telling the judge, “I’m sorry your honor I’m a little nervous today.”

The 17-page indictment against Combs — which reads like a charging document filed against a Mafia leader or the head of a drug gang — alleges that Combs engaged in a two-decade pattern of abusive behavior against women and others, with the help of people in his entourage and employees from his network of businesses.

Combs and his lawyers say he’s innocent and any group sex was consensual. They say there was no effort to coerce people into things they didn’t want to do, and nothing that happened amounted to a criminal racket.

Prosecutors say women were manipulated into drug-fueled sexual performances with male sex workers that Combs called “Freak Offs.” To keep women in line, prosecutors say Combs used a mix of influence and violence: He offered to boost their entertainment careers if they did what he asked — or cut them off if they didn’t.

And when he wasn’t getting what he wanted, the indictment says Combs and his associates resorted to violent acts including beatings, kidnapping and arson. Once, the indictment alleges, he even dangled someone from a balcony.

Combs has acknowledged one episode of violence that is likely to be featured in the trial. In 2016, a security camera recorded him beating up his former girlfriend, the R&B singer Cassie, in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel. Cassie filed a lawsuit in late 2023 saying Combs had subjected her to years of abuse, including beatings and rape.

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Cassie, whose legal name is Casandra Ventura, did.

Combs’ attorney, Marc Agnifilo, has said Combs was “not a perfect person” and that there had been drug use and toxic relationships, but said all sexual activity between Combs, Cassie and other people was consensual.

The trial is the most serious in a long string of legal problems for Combs.

In 1999 he was charged with bursting into the offices of an Interscope Records executive with his bodyguards and beating him with a champagne bottle and a chair. The executive, Steve Stoute, later asked prosecutors to go easy on Combs, who pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and took an anger management class.

Later that same year, Combs was stopped by police after he and his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, fled a nightclub where three people were wounded by gunfire. Combs was acquitted of all charges related to the episode at a 2001 trial, but a rapper in his entourage, Jamal “Shyne” Barrow, was convicted in the shooting and served nearly nine years in prison.

Then in 2015, Combs was charged with assaulting someone with a weight-room kettlebell at the University of California, Los Angeles, where one of his sons played football. Combs said he was defending himself and prosecutors dropped the case.

In recent months, HUD has been targeting the Obama-era Equal Access Rule that expanded protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Also in the bull’s-eye are fair-housing complaint investigations and federally funded homeless shelters.

“This administration wants to pretend trans people don’t exist,” said Hannah Adams, a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project. “Whatever they’re doing is not in line with HUD’s supposed mission to provide a safety net for families that are struggling in this country.”

HUD said in a statement that it is upholding the landmark Fair Housing Act that guarantees equal access to housing for all Americans, as well as implementing what it called Trump’s executive order “restoring biological truth to the federal government.”

Here are key takeaways about how HUD is taking on the battle over transgender rights.

Defining LGBTQ+ rights in the Fair Housing Act

The Fair Housing Act identifies sex as one of seven protected classes for housing discrimination. But it wasn’t until the Obama administration established the Equal Access Rule in 2012 that those protections were extended to cover sexual orientation, gender identity and marital status.

In 2016, the rule was expanded to include transgender people seeking help at federally funded emergency shelters.

Four years later, a 2020 Supreme Court ruling established that a landmark civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender people from discrimination in employment. Housing advocates and HUD in 2021 under the Biden administration interpreted that as broader affirmation that LGBTQ+ people were also protected in the fair housing law.

Kim Johnson, public policy manager at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said transgender people experience homelessness at a disproportionately higher rate despite being less than 1% of the general population. The spirit of the Fair Housing Act is to protect everyone who is vulnerable to discrimination, she said, even if the text of the law does not explicitly include gender identity as a protected class.

“We really need to ensure we’re upholding what the law means, and the fact is that transgender people are some of the most marginalized people in this country,” Johnson said.

HUD drops housing discrimination cases

Since President Donald Trump appointed Scott Turner to take the helm at HUD, the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has instructed staff to pause investigations of all gender identity discrimination cases, according to two HUD attorneys who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs or benefits.

One said letters were then issued closing the cases for lack of jurisdiction.

HUD has not disclosed how many cases have been dropped. A National Fair Housing Alliance report identified at least 195 discrimination complaints involving gender identity in 2023, though HUD has not specified how many cases are still outstanding.

With changes to the Equal Access rule and other guidance still unclear, what happens now often depends on where a case is filed. In blue states with laws offering protections beyond federal law, HUD can direct tenants facing LGBTQ+ discrimination to state-run offices still taking cases, said a HUD employee who spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss the hot-button topic.

To Sasha Samberg-Champion, HUD deputy general counsel in the Biden administration and now special counsel for civil rights at the National Fair Housing Alliance, “There is no public policy justification for permitting discrimination in the housing market against people because they are transgender. None.”

Homeless shelters struggle to comply with Trump’s directives

Community leaders say they’re facing seemingly contradictory requirements in new HUD contracts with nonprofits that find permanent housing for the homeless and run shelters.

One section stipulates that nonprofits can’t promote “gender ideology” while at the same time another requires compliance with anti-discrimination law, according to a copy provided to the AP.

In Memphis, Tennessee, a nonprofit that provides emergency shelter for transgender people is looking to increase capacity because of the uncertainty.

Kayla Gore, executive director of My Sistah’s House, said it can do that because it doesn’t take federal funding. But other shelters are removing information from their websites about serving the LGBTQ+ community, fearful that federal funding will be stripped if they don’t, she said.

“People are confused,” Gore said. “They don’t know what to do because they want to protect their bottom line.”

Uncertain future for the Equal Access Rule

Soon after being sworn in as HUD secretary in February, Turner announced he was halting enforcement of the Equal Access Rule and quietly filed a proposal to revise the policy. HUD officials have declined to say what the proposed changes are.

In 2020, the first Trump administration unsuccessfully moved to relieve shelters of any obligation to accommodate transgender people.

With Trump back for a second term, advocates fear his administration will feel even more emboldened to go further and forbid shelters from accommodating gender identity altogether.

“Unfortunately, it’s making an already vulnerable class of people more vulnerable,” said Seran Gee, an attorney for Advocates for Trans Equality.

“Our protections can’t be a pingpong ball that changes every four years.”

Today in history:

On May 5, 1862, Mexican troops repelled French attacks on the city of Puebla de los Ángeles in the Battle of Puebla, also known as the Battle of Cinco de Mayo.

Also on this date:

In 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte, 51, died in exile on the island of St. Helena.

In 1925, schoolteacher John T. Scopes was charged in Tennessee with violating a state law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution. (Scopes was found guilty, but his conviction was later set aside.)

In 1945, in the only fatal attack on the U.S. mainland during World War II, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon, killing a pregnant woman and five children.

In 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became America’s first space traveler as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury capsule Freedom 7.

In 1973, Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby, the first of his Triple Crown victories, in a time of 1:59.4 — a record that still stands.

In 1981, Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands died at age 27 at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland on his 66th day without food.

In 1994, Singapore caned American teenager Michael Fay for vandalism, a day after the sentence was reduced from six lashes to four in response to an appeal by President Bill Clinton.

In 2016, Lonnie Franklin Jr. was convicted of 10 counts of murder in the “Grim Sleeper” serial killings in Los Angeles that targeted poor, young Black women over two decades.

Today’s Birthdays: Actor Lance Henriksen is 85. Comedian-actor Michael Palin is 82. Actor Richard E. Grant is 68. R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn is 50. Actor Vincent Kartheiser is 46. Actor Danielle Fishel is 44. Actor Henry Cavill is 42. Singer-songwriter Adele is 37. R&B singer Chris Brown is 36. Tennis player Aryna Sabalenka is 27. Olympic figure skating gold medalist Nathan Chen is 26. Tennis player Carlos Alcaraz is 22.

In a post on his Truth Social site Sunday evening, Trump wrote that, “For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“That is why, today,” he said, “I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”

Trump’s directive to rebuild and reopen the long-shuttered penitentiary was the latest salvo in his effort to overhaul how and where federal prisoners and immigration detainees are locked up. But such a move would likely be an expensive and challenging proposition. The prison was closed in 1963 due to crumbling infrastructure and the high costs of repairing and supplying the island facility, because everything from fuel to food had to be brought by boat.

Bringing the facility up to modern-day standards would require massive investments at a time when the Bureau of Prisons has been shuttering prisons for similar infrastructure issues.

The prison — infamously inescapable due to the strong ocean currents and cold Pacific waters that surround it — was known as the “The Rock” and housed some of the nation’s most notorious criminals, including gangster Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.

It has long been part of the cultural imagination and has been the subject of numerous movies, including “The Rock” starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.

Still in the 29 years it was open, 36 men attempted 14 separate escapes, according to the FBI. Nearly all were caught or didn’t survive the attempt.

The fate of three particular inmates — John Anglin, his brother Clarence and Frank Morris — is of some debate and was dramatized in the 1979 film “Escape from Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood.

Alcatraz Island is now a major tourist site that is operate by the National Park Service and is a designated National Historic Landmark.

Trump, returning to the White House on Sunday night after a weekend in Florida, said he’d come up with the idea because of frustrations with “radicalized judges” who have insisted those being deported receive due process. Alcatraz, he said, has long been a “symbol of law and order. You know, it’s got quite a history.”

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that the agency “will comply with all Presidential Orders.” The spokesperson did not immediately answer questions from The Associated Press regarding the practicality and feasibility of reopening Alcatraz or the agency’s role in the future of the former prison given the National Park Service’s control of the island.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat whose district includes the island, questioned the feasibility of reopening the prison after so many years. “It is now a very popular national park and major tourist attraction. The President’s proposal is not a serious one,” she wrote on X.

The island serves as a veritable time machine to a bygone era of corrections. The Bureau of Prisons currently has 16 penitentiaries performing the same high-security functions as Alcatraz, including its maximum security facility in Florence, Colorado, and the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, which is home to the federal death chamber.

The order comes as Trump has been clashing with the courts as he tries to send accused gang members to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, without due process. Trump has also floated the legally dubious idea of sending some federal U.S. prisoners to the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.

Trump has also directed the opening of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold up to 30,000 of what he has labeled the “worst criminal aliens.”

The Bureau of Prisons has faced myriad crises in recent years and has been subjected to increased scrutiny after Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide at a federal jail in New York City in 2019. An AP investigation uncovered deep, previously unreported flaws within the Bureau of Prisons. AP reporting has disclosed widespread criminal activity by employees, dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and severe staffing shortages that have hampered responses to emergencies, including assaults and suicides.

The AP’s investigation also exposed rampant sexual abuse at a federal women’s prison in Dublin, California. Last year, President Joe Biden signed a law strengthening oversight of the agency after AP reporting spotlighted its many flaws.

At the same time, the Bureau of Prisons is operating in a state of flux — with a recently installed new director and a redefined mission that includes taking in thousands of immigration detainees at some of its prisons and jails under an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. The agency last year closed several facilities, in part to cut costs, but is also in the process of building a new prison in Kentucky.