Mike Wintz was nearly 4 miles away and in the thick of fighting the Morrill Fire when he heard over the radio that the flames were headed for his home.

“I didn’t leave. I just basically fought my way back towards my ranch,” Wintz said. “A couple of the other outfits were headed to the house to kind of head it off … I just put my trust in the neighbors and the other firefighters.”

The group stopped the fire near Wintz’s front door, but the next day, the winds shifted, the fire flared and Wintz’s home was threatened a second time.

WASHINGTON — New Hampshire’s Republican governor, frustrated with little information about the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to put a new detention facility in her state, joined local Democrats to oppose the move and disclosed DHS plans to retrofit warehouses across the nation to expand immigrant detention.

Two Republican members of the U.S. Senate, one who chairs the Armed Services Committee and another running for governor, personally lobbied DHS to find other locations for planned large-scale detention centers in rural Byhalia, Mississippi, and Lebanon, Tennessee. 

Small counties in the coastal Southeast had some of the largest population gains between mid-2024 and mid-2025 in estimates being released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau, mostly because of people moving from larger areas.