Immigrants accuse Trump administration of betraying them

They grew up in America and are working or going to school here. Some are building businesses or raising families of their own. Many have no memory of the country where they were born.

Now, almost 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children or overstayed their visas could see their lives upended after the Trump administration announced Tuesday it is ending the Obama-era program that protected them from deportation.

"We are Americans in heart, mind and soul. We just don't have the correct documentation that states we're American," said Jose Rivas, 27, who is studying for a master's in counselling at the University of Wyoming.

The news that the government is phasing out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA , was met with shock, anger and a sense of betrayal by its beneficiaries, often called "Dreamers." For opponents, many said they were pleased the Trump administration had put an end to President Barack Obama's DACA program, calling it an unconstitutional abuse of executive power.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who made Tuesday's announcement, said DACA was an "overreach" that could not be defended by the Justice Department. The Trump administration and other DACA opponents argue that it is up to Congress to decide how to deal with such immigrants.

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10 Things to Know for Wednesday

Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Wednesday:

1. TRUMP BEGINS DISMANTLING DACA

The move targeting the program that protects young immigrants sparks outrage among advocates and sends a ticking time bomb to Congress.

2. IRMA ONE FOR THE RECORD BOOKS

The hurricane bears down on islands in the northeast Caribbean — wielding the most powerful winds ever recorded for a storm in the Atlantic.

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Powerful Hurricane Irma bears down on Caribbean islands

ST. JOHN'S, Antigua (AP) — The most powerful Atlantic Ocean hurricane in recorded history bore down on the islands of the northeast Caribbean late Tuesday, following a path predicted to then rake Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba before possibly heading for Florida over the weekend.

At the far northeastern edge of the Caribbean, authorities on the Leeward Islands of Antigua and Barbuda cut power and urged residents to shelter indoors as they braced for Hurricane Irma's first contact with land early Wednesday.

Officials warned people to seek protection from Irma's "onslaught" in a statement that closed with: "May God protect us all."

The Category 5 storm had maximum sustained winds of 185 mph (295 kph), according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

"I hear it's a Cat 5 now and I'm terrified," Antigua resident Carol Joseph said as she finished her last trip to the supermarket before seeking shelter. "I had to come back for more batteries because I don't know how long the current will be off."

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Analysis: US options on NKorea narrow further after test

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sanctions on North Korea have been tried, and failed. Serious negotiations seem like a pipedream. And any military strike would almost surely bring mass devastation and horrific civilian casualties.

The Trump administration's options are going from bad to worse as Kim Jong Un's military marches ever closer to being able to strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear weapons. Just as President Donald Trump seeks to show global resolve after the North's most powerful nuclear test, his leverage is limited even further by new tensions he's stoked with South Korea, plus continued opposition from China and Russia.

With South Korea, the country most directly threatened, Trump has taken the unusual step of highlighting disagreements between the U.S. and its treaty ally, including by floating the possibility he could pull out of a trade deal with South Korea to protest trade imbalances. He also suggested on Twitter the two countries lacked unanimity on North Korea, faulting new South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has been more conciliatory to the North, for his government's "talk of appeasement."

It's an inopportune time for grievances to be aired, and on Monday the two leaders sought to show they were confronting North Korea together — and with might. The White House said that in a phone call with Moon, Trump gave approval "in principle" to lifting restrictions on South Korean missile payloads and to approving "many billions" in weapons sales to South Korea.

In an early morning tweet Tuesday, Trump said, "I am allowing Japan & South Korea to buy a substantially increased amount of highly sophisticated military equipment from the United States." Though no details were released, the idea was to show the countries were collaborating to bolster defences against Kim's government.

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AP FACT CHECK: What the Trump administration said about DACA

The White House took a firm stance on Tuesday in outlining why an immigration program created by President Barack Obama needs to be eliminated.

President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions described the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as an unconstitutional action that contributed to a surge in immigration and gang violence in recent years. They also said it hurt the economy by taking jobs away from Americans.

Here is a look at the claims made by the administration and the facts:

TRUMP: "The temporary implementation of DACA by the Obama administration, after Congress repeatedly rejected this amnesty-first approach, also helped spur a humanitarian crisis — the massive surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America including, in some cases, young people who would become members of violent gangs throughout our country, such as MS-13."

THE FACTS: Some DACA critics contend that the program signalled to Central American children that they would get similar treatment if they came to the U.S., but there is scant evidence to support the claim.

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Two Houstons emerge from Harvey aftermath: one wet, one dry

HOUSTON (AP) — In a quest to help Harvey victims, Kelli Shofstall and her son set out on a 165-mile drive from Austin to Houston that led them through neighbourhood after neighbourhood where the streets were dry and no one seemed to need assistance.

It took more than a day of driving around, following outdated flood maps, before they found a water-filled road where they could ferry tenants to and from a marooned apartment complex using an inflatable yellow raft.

"My son and I joked that we sucked at relief efforts," Shofstall said. Christian Carr, 17, waded in his jeans into knee-deep water pulling the raft to see if anyone else wanted to float out of the Heights Park Row apartments.

More than a week after Harvey swamped the greater Houston area, the metropolis is divided into two cities: one still covered with water and flood debris, the other largely unblemished by the storm.

Some subdivisions remain submerged, and many streets are piled high with ruined belongings. More than 10 per cent of the county's dwellings were flooded, and several prominent theatre and concert halls were damaged, though major sports stadiums escaped unharmed.

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Congress to speed up Harvey aid, tackle debt limit

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers returned to Washington Tuesday facing a daunting to-do list and three months left in the year to show that Republicans can actually get things done. President Donald Trump immediately added a huge complication by rescinding immigration protections for younger immigrants and ordering Congress to come up with a fix.

The immigration issue has defeated Congress' best efforts in the past and proven enormously divisive for the GOP. But for now there's not even room for it on the front burner as lawmakers, just back from a five-week summer recess, face a series of more immediate tasks.

First up: Speeding relief aid to Texas and Louisiana in the wake of the Harvey storm. A first $7.9 billion installment was set for House passage on Wednesday, with leaders hoping for a big bipartisan vote to demonstrate Congress' support for Harvey's victims.

That will be the easy part.

GOP leaders are also wrestling with how to raise the government's $19.9 trillion debt limit, something that must happen by month's end, at the latest, to avoid a first-ever default on U.S. payments. The administration and GOP leaders were making plans to add the debt limit increase to the Harvey relief bill in the Senate and send it back to the House, a plan that quickly provoked conservative ire and a familiar intramural GOP dispute.

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Cousin who saw Emmett Till being kidnapped dies at age 74

CHICAGO (AP) — Simeon Wright, who was with his cousin Emmett Till when the Chicago boy was kidnapped in 1955 after whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, has died. He was 74.

Till, who was 14, spent the summer of 1955 visiting relatives in Mississippi and was kidnapped, tortured and killed after whistling at a white woman working at a store in the rural hamlet of Money. His death galvanized the civil rights movement when his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago to show the world her son's mutilated body.

Wright's cousin, Airickca Gordon-Taylor, said Tuesday that Wright died of cancer Monday at his Chicago-area home. Wright described Till as a "fun-loving guy," and said he witnessed his cousin whistle at Carolyn Bryant as a group of boys left Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market after buying snacks on Aug. 24, 1955.

"It scared us half to death," Wright recalled at the University of Mississippi in October 2010. "Some said, 'Why'd he do it?' I said, I think he just wanted us to laugh. He wasn't trying to be fresh. He just wanted to let the boys in Mississippi know, 'Hey, I'm from Chicago. I can do this. I'm not afraid.' He had no idea what was going to happen."

Wright, who was 12, was sharing a bed with Till on Aug. 28, 1955, when he saw J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant come into his family's home with pistols and kidnap Till. Roy Bryant was married to Carolyn Bryant, and Milam was his half brother. An all-white Mississippi jury acquitted the two men in Till's death, but they later confessed in a magazine interview.

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Report: Red Sox used Apple Watch to steal Yankees' signs

BOSTON (AP) — Looking for any edge in an age-old rivalry, the Boston Red Sox got called out in a high-tech sign-stealing scheme they ran on the New York Yankees.

The first-place Red Sox admitted to Major League Baseball that they used an Apple Watch to relay signals from opposing catchers to Boston players, The New York Times reported Tuesday. Sign stealing has long been a part of the game, but employing electronic gadgets to do it is against the rules.

MLB is looking into allegations levied by the Yankees after a series between the teams last month in Boston. The Times said the Red Sox told MLB investigators that Boston manager John Farrell, general Dave Dombrowski and other team executives were not aware of the operation, which had been going on for weeks.

Commissioner Rob Manfred, who was at Fenway Park on Tuesday night as part of a previously planned visit, said he wanted to get the matter resolved quickly. He didn't comment about possible penalties.

"The only thing that I can tell you about repercussions is that to the extent that there was a violation on either side — and I'm not saying that there was — to the extent that there was a violation on either side, we are 100 per cent comfortable that it is not an ongoing issue — that if it happened, it is no longer happening," he said.

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Myanmar's Rohingya beat a perilous path in search of safety

TEKNAF, Bangladesh (AP) — As far as the eye can see, they trudge through treacherously deep mud, across rice paddy fields and past rain-swollen creeks into Bangladesh.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims, fleeing the latest round of violence to engulf their homes in Myanmar, have been walking for days or handing over their meagre savings to Burmese and Bangladeshi smugglers to escape what they describe as certain death.

Exhausted mothers clutched listless infants. Catatonically terrified children clung to bone-weary fathers. Young children with blank eyes carried even younger siblings.

"Oh Allah, Oh Allah," one family moaned as they waded Tuesday through the chin-high waters of the Naf River dividing the two countries. One panicking woman handed a 3-month-old infant to a taller man before she slipped momentarily beneath the murky water. For a terrifying moment, the man held the baby aloft with one hand as he steadied himself. Then as the woman remerged, the group moved on to the safety of Bangladesh on the opposite bank.

The Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar's western Rakhine state has faced systematic persecution at the hands of the Buddhist majority for decades. The military junta that ruled the nation for decades stripped them of their citizenship. The democratically elected government under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi has looked the other way as the Rohingya were pushed into squalid camps in their own home towns and villages.

News from © The Associated Press, 2017