Missouri
Immigrant rights groups seek to dismiss lawsuit to exclude noncitizens from U.S. census
Immigrant rights groups are seeking to toss out a Republican lawsuit that would prohibit the U.S. Census Bureau from counting people who are in the U.S. illegally during the 2030 census.
The groups said the lawsuit filed late last month by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway would violate the law and require a recount of the U.S. population from 2020, costing billions of dollars.
“That unlawful request would distort representation for millions of Americans and shake the foundations of our representative democracy,” said the motion from the immigrant rights groups, which are seeking to intervene and are being represented by several ACLU Foundation chapters.
The lawsuit is the latest effort by Republicans to exclude people who are in the U.S. illegally or other noncitizens from the census figures. Those numbers guide the distribution of federal money and determine the number of congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state receives in a process known as apportionment.
The Missouri lawsuit asks that the apportionment process that used the 2020 census figures be redone without including people in the U.S. illegally and that the process after the 2030 census be conducted in the same manner.
A similar lawsuit filed by four other GOP state attorneys general is pending in federal court in Louisiana, and Republican lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation that would accomplish the same goal.
A Republican redistricting expert had written that using only the citizen voting-age population, rather than the total population, for the purpose of redrawing congressional and state legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
The Constitution’s 14th Amendment says “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment. The Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody living in the U.S., regardless of legal status.
The Missouri lawsuit comes as President Donald Trump has been pressuring Republican-led state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts to benefit the GOP ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Last August, Trump instructed the Commerce Department to have the Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally from the head count.
Intervenors recently succeeded in getting another lawsuit against the Census Bureau tossed out. A three-judge panel in Tampa last week dismissed a challenge by Republican groups to the agency’s statistical methods during the 2020 census.
During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick acknowledged that citizenship wasn’t a factor in the apportionment process under the Constitution. When asked if a citizenship question would be included, he said the agency hadn’t determined the questions on the 2030 census form yet. The Commerce Department oversees the Census Bureau.
“What the questionnaire is, I don’t know, and we’ve not decided,” Lutnick said.
California
Late NFL star Pat Tillman’s brother pleads guilty to setting fire at post office
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — The youngest brother of late NFL star-turned-soldier Pat Tillman pleaded guilty this week to setting fire to a San Jose, California, post office last summer.
Richard Tillman, 44, was arrested on July 20 after he rammed a car into the post office in a strip mall and then set the vehicle ablaze. The lobby of the building went up in flames. Nobody was hurt.
Tillman, of San Jose, on Monday entered a guilty plea in federal court to malicious destruction of government property.
“In pleading guilty, Tillman admitted that he intentionally set the fire in order to ‘make a point to the United States government,’” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said in a statement.
Prosecutors didn’t say what point Tillman was trying to make.
U.S. Postal Inspector Shannon Roark said in July that Tillman told officers at the scene he had livestreamed the incident on YouTube.
Tillman, who remains in federal custody, faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine when he’s sentenced on April 27.
After the crash, his brother Kevin Tillman said in a statement that Richard Tillman had been suffering from “severe mental health issues” for many years, and the family was relieved no one was hurt.
Pat Tillman left the Arizona Cardinals to join the military after 9/11 and was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 at age 27. His family is from the San Jose area.
Kevin Tillman also left his Major League Baseball career with the Anaheim Angels to serve in the military.
Minnesota
Former federal prosecutor now representing Don Lemon
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A former federal prosecutor who quit amid a dispute with the Trump administration is now representing former CNN host Don Lemon, who was one of nine people indicted for their alleged roles in disrupting a service at a Minnesota church where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official was a pastor.
A court filing Tuesday shows that Lemon has hired former interim U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who had been leading the sprawling investigation and prosecution of major fraud cases for the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office until he resigned last month.
Several prosecutors have now left the office at a time of growing frustration with the administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown and the Justice Department’s response to fatal shootings of two people by federal officers in Minneapolis.
Lemon had previously said through another attorney that he planned to plead not guilty to federal civil rights charges over his coverage of the church protest. He has said he was not affiliated with the group that disrupted the church service, and that he was there in his capacity as an independent journalist. The indictment alleges various actions by the group that entered the church, including what Lemon said as he reported on the event for his livestream show.
Lemon is scheduled to be arraigned on Feb. 13 in federal court in St. Paul.
The Trump administration has cited the Minnesota fraud cases, in which most defendants have come from the state’s large Somali community, as justification for its immigration crackdown in the state. Thompson estimated in December that the losses to taxpayers from several fraud cases being prosecuted in Minnesota could total $9 billion.
Thompson recently formed his own law firm with Harry Jacobs, another former federal prosecutor who resigned amid the upheaval in the office. Jacobs had been lead prosecutor in the case of Vance Boelter, who has pleaded not guilty in last year’s assassination of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the nonfatal shootings of a state senator and his wife.
The firm’s website describes them as “battle tested and seasoned” trial lawyers.
Thompson did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment Tuesday.
Texas
Houston-area developer reaches $68M settlement with Texas, feds
The owners of Colony Ridge, a Houston-area developer accused of running a predatory lending scheme that deceived Latinos, agreed to a sweeping legal settlement that will require them to invest in law enforcement and infrastructure on their properties and tighten selling practices to address a range of accusations from Texas GOP leaders and conservative media.
Chief among the allegations was that Colony Ridge developers sold land to undocumented people, giving rise to a crime-ridden complex of subdivisions about 30 miles outside Houston allegedly being run by Mexican drug cartels.
The developers denied that their communities were unsafe, a contention backed by testimony from local officials when the Legislature held special hearings in 2023 in response to outrage and accounts from residents in the developments. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the developers soon after, accusing them of deceptive sales, marketing and lending practices in a suit that echoed claims lodged by the federal government in a separate case.
Under the settlement released Tuesday, Colony Ridge’s owners agreed to clamp down on the documentation it requires from buyers. Would-be purchasers will now have to present a Texas ID or driver’s license — which undocumented immigrants cannot obtain in Texas — or a passport or visa. The agreement did not specify that the passport has to be an American one.
The agreement resolves the state and federal lawsuits, which alleged the owners of Colony Ridge lured would-be Spanish-speaking homebuyers into seller-financed mortgages with high interests that they could not afford. By federal authorities’ estimate, roughly one in four Colony Ridge loans resulted in foreclosure. The company would then flip those properties to new unsuspecting customers eager to become homeowners, court filings allege.
The federal case, filed by the Biden administration’s Justice Department in late 2023, also accused Colony Ridge of misrepresenting facts such as guarantees of water, electricity and sewer hook-ups and whether properties had previously flooded.
The settlement seeks to address those accusations. Colony Ridge agreed to:
1. Pause seeking approvals for any new residential plats for three years.
2. Establish new criteria for approving loans and offer relief to customers facing foreclosure.
3. Ensure that its advertising and marketing is truthful.
4. Spend $48 million on infrastructure projects like roads and drainage systems.
5. Offer discounts to peace officers in an effort to encourage them to live in the development.
6. Earmark $20 million for law enforcement, including the construction of a new police station within the community and money specifically for immigration enforcement.
Spokespeople for Colony Ridge did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Paxton said the settlement had resulted in Colony Ridge’s owners paying “a steep cost for their unlawful actions.”
“My office will continue to bring the full force of the law against anyone who threatens the safety of our state or creates a safe harbor for illegals,” Paxton said.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, who oversees the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in a statement celebrated the settlement as a victory against discrimination — and the promotion of illegal immigration.
“Intentionally targeting vulnerable borrowers with the American dream of homeownership and then trapping them in a predatory scheme is not only wrong, it also violates our civil rights laws,” Dhillon said.
“This DOJ will go after all lenders, financiers, and land developers who participate in schemes which ultimately encourage illegal immigration.”
The agreement appeared to please both immigration hardliners and those who had advocated on behalf of residents for years, raising alarms about the development even before it became a conservative lightning rod.
Michael Quinn Sullivan, publisher of the right-wing Texas Scorecard, which helped draw conservatives’ attention, said that the settlement “functionally means Colony Ridge is no longer a safe haven for illegal aliens.” He called it a “huge win on a major issue” for Paxton — currently in a heated GOP primary for U.S. Senate — and Dhillon.
SuEllen Sanchez, who with her sister had filed complaints with state agencies about Colony Ridge years ago, struck an optimistic tone in a social media post.
“They won’t be able to scam more immigrants,” Sanchez said. “My heart is with them right now.”
Immigrant rights groups seek to dismiss lawsuit to exclude noncitizens from U.S. census
Immigrant rights groups are seeking to toss out a Republican lawsuit that would prohibit the U.S. Census Bureau from counting people who are in the U.S. illegally during the 2030 census.
The groups said the lawsuit filed late last month by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway would violate the law and require a recount of the U.S. population from 2020, costing billions of dollars.
“That unlawful request would distort representation for millions of Americans and shake the foundations of our representative democracy,” said the motion from the immigrant rights groups, which are seeking to intervene and are being represented by several ACLU Foundation chapters.
The lawsuit is the latest effort by Republicans to exclude people who are in the U.S. illegally or other noncitizens from the census figures. Those numbers guide the distribution of federal money and determine the number of congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state receives in a process known as apportionment.
The Missouri lawsuit asks that the apportionment process that used the 2020 census figures be redone without including people in the U.S. illegally and that the process after the 2030 census be conducted in the same manner.
A similar lawsuit filed by four other GOP state attorneys general is pending in federal court in Louisiana, and Republican lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation that would accomplish the same goal.
A Republican redistricting expert had written that using only the citizen voting-age population, rather than the total population, for the purpose of redrawing congressional and state legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
The Constitution’s 14th Amendment says “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment. The Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody living in the U.S., regardless of legal status.
The Missouri lawsuit comes as President Donald Trump has been pressuring Republican-led state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts to benefit the GOP ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Last August, Trump instructed the Commerce Department to have the Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally from the head count.
Intervenors recently succeeded in getting another lawsuit against the Census Bureau tossed out. A three-judge panel in Tampa last week dismissed a challenge by Republican groups to the agency’s statistical methods during the 2020 census.
During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick acknowledged that citizenship wasn’t a factor in the apportionment process under the Constitution. When asked if a citizenship question would be included, he said the agency hadn’t determined the questions on the 2030 census form yet. The Commerce Department oversees the Census Bureau.
“What the questionnaire is, I don’t know, and we’ve not decided,” Lutnick said.
California
Late NFL star Pat Tillman’s brother pleads guilty to setting fire at post office
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — The youngest brother of late NFL star-turned-soldier Pat Tillman pleaded guilty this week to setting fire to a San Jose, California, post office last summer.
Richard Tillman, 44, was arrested on July 20 after he rammed a car into the post office in a strip mall and then set the vehicle ablaze. The lobby of the building went up in flames. Nobody was hurt.
Tillman, of San Jose, on Monday entered a guilty plea in federal court to malicious destruction of government property.
“In pleading guilty, Tillman admitted that he intentionally set the fire in order to ‘make a point to the United States government,’” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said in a statement.
Prosecutors didn’t say what point Tillman was trying to make.
U.S. Postal Inspector Shannon Roark said in July that Tillman told officers at the scene he had livestreamed the incident on YouTube.
Tillman, who remains in federal custody, faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine when he’s sentenced on April 27.
After the crash, his brother Kevin Tillman said in a statement that Richard Tillman had been suffering from “severe mental health issues” for many years, and the family was relieved no one was hurt.
Pat Tillman left the Arizona Cardinals to join the military after 9/11 and was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 at age 27. His family is from the San Jose area.
Kevin Tillman also left his Major League Baseball career with the Anaheim Angels to serve in the military.
Minnesota
Former federal prosecutor now representing Don Lemon
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A former federal prosecutor who quit amid a dispute with the Trump administration is now representing former CNN host Don Lemon, who was one of nine people indicted for their alleged roles in disrupting a service at a Minnesota church where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official was a pastor.
A court filing Tuesday shows that Lemon has hired former interim U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who had been leading the sprawling investigation and prosecution of major fraud cases for the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office until he resigned last month.
Several prosecutors have now left the office at a time of growing frustration with the administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown and the Justice Department’s response to fatal shootings of two people by federal officers in Minneapolis.
Lemon had previously said through another attorney that he planned to plead not guilty to federal civil rights charges over his coverage of the church protest. He has said he was not affiliated with the group that disrupted the church service, and that he was there in his capacity as an independent journalist. The indictment alleges various actions by the group that entered the church, including what Lemon said as he reported on the event for his livestream show.
Lemon is scheduled to be arraigned on Feb. 13 in federal court in St. Paul.
The Trump administration has cited the Minnesota fraud cases, in which most defendants have come from the state’s large Somali community, as justification for its immigration crackdown in the state. Thompson estimated in December that the losses to taxpayers from several fraud cases being prosecuted in Minnesota could total $9 billion.
Thompson recently formed his own law firm with Harry Jacobs, another former federal prosecutor who resigned amid the upheaval in the office. Jacobs had been lead prosecutor in the case of Vance Boelter, who has pleaded not guilty in last year’s assassination of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the nonfatal shootings of a state senator and his wife.
The firm’s website describes them as “battle tested and seasoned” trial lawyers.
Thompson did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment Tuesday.
Texas
Houston-area developer reaches $68M settlement with Texas, feds
The owners of Colony Ridge, a Houston-area developer accused of running a predatory lending scheme that deceived Latinos, agreed to a sweeping legal settlement that will require them to invest in law enforcement and infrastructure on their properties and tighten selling practices to address a range of accusations from Texas GOP leaders and conservative media.
Chief among the allegations was that Colony Ridge developers sold land to undocumented people, giving rise to a crime-ridden complex of subdivisions about 30 miles outside Houston allegedly being run by Mexican drug cartels.
The developers denied that their communities were unsafe, a contention backed by testimony from local officials when the Legislature held special hearings in 2023 in response to outrage and accounts from residents in the developments. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the developers soon after, accusing them of deceptive sales, marketing and lending practices in a suit that echoed claims lodged by the federal government in a separate case.
Under the settlement released Tuesday, Colony Ridge’s owners agreed to clamp down on the documentation it requires from buyers. Would-be purchasers will now have to present a Texas ID or driver’s license — which undocumented immigrants cannot obtain in Texas — or a passport or visa. The agreement did not specify that the passport has to be an American one.
The agreement resolves the state and federal lawsuits, which alleged the owners of Colony Ridge lured would-be Spanish-speaking homebuyers into seller-financed mortgages with high interests that they could not afford. By federal authorities’ estimate, roughly one in four Colony Ridge loans resulted in foreclosure. The company would then flip those properties to new unsuspecting customers eager to become homeowners, court filings allege.
The federal case, filed by the Biden administration’s Justice Department in late 2023, also accused Colony Ridge of misrepresenting facts such as guarantees of water, electricity and sewer hook-ups and whether properties had previously flooded.
The settlement seeks to address those accusations. Colony Ridge agreed to:
1. Pause seeking approvals for any new residential plats for three years.
2. Establish new criteria for approving loans and offer relief to customers facing foreclosure.
3. Ensure that its advertising and marketing is truthful.
4. Spend $48 million on infrastructure projects like roads and drainage systems.
5. Offer discounts to peace officers in an effort to encourage them to live in the development.
6. Earmark $20 million for law enforcement, including the construction of a new police station within the community and money specifically for immigration enforcement.
Spokespeople for Colony Ridge did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Paxton said the settlement had resulted in Colony Ridge’s owners paying “a steep cost for their unlawful actions.”
“My office will continue to bring the full force of the law against anyone who threatens the safety of our state or creates a safe harbor for illegals,” Paxton said.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, who oversees the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in a statement celebrated the settlement as a victory against discrimination — and the promotion of illegal immigration.
“Intentionally targeting vulnerable borrowers with the American dream of homeownership and then trapping them in a predatory scheme is not only wrong, it also violates our civil rights laws,” Dhillon said.
“This DOJ will go after all lenders, financiers, and land developers who participate in schemes which ultimately encourage illegal immigration.”
The agreement appeared to please both immigration hardliners and those who had advocated on behalf of residents for years, raising alarms about the development even before it became a conservative lightning rod.
Michael Quinn Sullivan, publisher of the right-wing Texas Scorecard, which helped draw conservatives’ attention, said that the settlement “functionally means Colony Ridge is no longer a safe haven for illegal aliens.” He called it a “huge win on a major issue” for Paxton — currently in a heated GOP primary for U.S. Senate — and Dhillon.
SuEllen Sanchez, who with her sister had filed complaints with state agencies about Colony Ridge years ago, struck an optimistic tone in a social media post.
“They won’t be able to scam more immigrants,” Sanchez said. “My heart is with them right now.”
