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President Donald Trump told reporters he didn't see the entire video before it was shared on his social media platform late Thursday night that included a racist animation of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama depicted with the bodies of apes and suggested he won't apologize for it.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday evening, Trump said he only saw the first part of the since-deleted video that focused on debunked claims about the 2020 election.

"I guess during the end of it, there was some kind of picture people don't like. I wouldn't like it either, but I didn't see it," Trump said. "I just, I looked at the first part, and it was really about voter fraud."

At the end of the video, the Obamas' faces appear abruptly on the bodies of apes without explanation with the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" playing over it. The video then ends back on imagery of the election conspiracy video footage.

Asked if he would apologize for the video, Trump said, "No, I didn't make a mistake. I mean ... I look at a lot of, thousands of, things, and I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine."

Asked if he condemned the racist portion of the video, Trump said, "Of course I do."

The video was shared on the president's social media account at 11:44 p.m. ET on Thursday. Following the backlash after the video was posted, the White House at about noon Friday said the post had been taken down from the president's page.

The Obamas had no comment when ABC News reached out to their representatives for a response. They have not publicly commented on the post, but later Friday night, they did make their first comments since the incident -- wishing team USA good luck at the Winter Olympics in a social media post.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, when first asked for comment early Friday, had said, "This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public."

Later Friday afternoon, a White House official told ABC News that a "staffer erroneously made the post."

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Asked by reporters Fridays who posted the video, Trump said he saw the video first -- but not the racist portion at the end, he claimed -- and then gave it to "the people" to have it posted to his account.

The meme video referenced by Leavitt was shared in October by the Hardin County Republican Party of Kentucky on Facebook, which led the chairman to issue an apology and deleted the post after swift backlash noting the long history of racist tropes depicting Black people as apes or monkeys -- a tool of slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize them.

The video reposted by Trump overnight included only imagery of the Obamas.

Trump's overnight repost was condemned by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, some of whom had called for it to be taken down and for the president to apologize.

Republican Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate and also the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, posted on X: "Praying it was fake because it's the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House. The President should remove it."

Trump told reporters he later spoke with Scott over the phone on Friday.

During the conversation, Trump told Scott that the video had been posted by a staffer by mistake and that he would take it down, according to a source familiar with the call. The post was later removed.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the first Black leader of a party in Congress, wrote on X: "President Obama and Michelle Obama are brilliant, compassionate and patriotic Americans. They represent the best of this country. Donald Trump is a vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder."

"Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump's disgusting bigotry," Jeffries wrote.

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker wrote in a post: "This is totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, wrote in a post: "Racist. Vile. Abhorrent. This is dangerous and degrades our country -- where are Senate Republicans? The President must immediately delete the post and apologize to Barack and Michelle Obama, two great Americans who make Donald Trump look like a small, envious man."

Before she arrived at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center last fall, Kelly Vargas said, her 6-year-old daughter was thriving. Maria loved school and spent her afternoons drawing and playing with her cat.

But Vargas said that within days of the family's being detained and sent to the prisonlike facility in South Texas — where guards patrol the halls and the lights never turn off — her daughter began to unravel.

After years without accidents, Maria started wetting her pants and her bed. She cried through the night, asking when she and her parents would return to their apartment in New York. She begged to start breastfeeding again.

Vargas, who was deported to Colombia with her family in November after having spent nearly two months at Dilley, said she never imagined the United States could act so callously.

"How are they going to do this to a child?" Vargas told NBC News, speaking in Spanish. "How could this happen here?"

Accounts from detained families, their lawyers and court filings describe the federal detention center in Dilley as a place where hundreds of children languish as they're served contaminated food, receive little education and struggle to obtain basic medical care.

The center was thrust into the national spotlight last month after Immigration and Customs Enforcementtook Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy, to the facility following his father's arrest in Minneapolis — an encounter captured in a photograph showing the boy in a blue bunny hat as he was taken into federal custody.

The image ricocheted across the country, igniting outrage from lawmakers and the public. To many Americans, it was a sudden introduction to the harsh realities of ICE'sincreasing reliance on family detention. But to Vargas and the lawyers who have spent months tracking conditions at Dilley, Liam's fearful expression — andhis father's accountof the child falling ill while detained — captured something painfully familiar.

"Liam is all the kids there," said Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, which monitors conditions at the facility under a long-standing federal court settlement. "Just like Liam, we've had families tell us how their children have been horribly sick and throwing up repeatedly, refusing to eat and becoming despondent and listless."

Those concerns have taken on new urgency in recent days after health officials confirmedtwo measles cases among people detainedat Dilley. Advocates and medical experts warn that a highly contagious disease spreading inside a crowded facility housing young children — some already medically vulnerable — poses an acute public-health risk.

Lawyers representing families at Dilley say they have struggled to get clear answers from the Department of Homeland Security about the outbreak, including any steps being taken to limit its spread or verify whether children are vaccinated.

DHS defended its use of family detention in a statement to NBC News after this article was published. The agency said detainees at Dilley are provided "comprehensive medical care" and other basic necessities and that it was taking action to contain the spread of measles.

"Medical staff is continuing to monitor the detainees' conditions and will take appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection," the agency said Friday.

Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, whichhas a contractto run the facility that's expected to bring in $180 million annually, referred questions about Dilley to DHS and said in a statement that "the health and safety of those entrusted to our care" is the company's top priority.

Since April, when the federal governmentresumed large-scale family detentionas part of the Trump administration's vow to dramatically escalate immigration arrests and deportations, an estimated 1,800 children had passed through Dilley as of December, according to figures provided by court-appointed monitors. About 345 children were being held there with parents that month, Wolozin said. Some families remain for a few weeks; others have been detained for more than six months.

Family detention was common during the Obama administration, and it expanded in President Donald Trump's first term, before being largely halted under President Joe Biden. Unlike earlier iterations of family detention, many of the children now held at Dilley are U.S. residents, apprehended not at the border but at their homes, outside schools, in courthouses and during routine immigration check-ins.

The Trump administration has argued the practice allows parents and children to remain together while removal proceedings are pending. But advocates and human rights groups say detaining children is harmful and never warranted, noting that families with pending immigration cases have historically been allowed to remain together outside detention, including through the use of ankle monitors.

The overwhelming majority of parents detained with children are sent to Dilley, a sprawling complex set amid scrubland an hour south of San Antonio, far from the communities where the families had been living.

As immigration lawyers began sounding the alarm about conditions at the facility, the Trump administrationfiled a motion last springtooverturn a decades-old legal settlementrequiring basic rights for immigrant children in federal custody — safeguards that advocates say DHS is already violating. The protections, known as the Flores Settlement Agreement,trace back to a 1985 class-action lawsuitagainst the federal government alleging that immigrant children were being held in unsafe conditions.

Interviews with immigration lawyers, Liam's father and the Vargas family and dozens of sworn declarations from detained familiesfiled as part of the recent Flores litigationdescribe a facility that functions far more like a prison than a child care center: constant surveillance, rigid schedules, overnight bed checks. Parents report that many children stop eating, lose weight and become withdrawn.

Families describe sleeping in crowded, dorm-style rooms with little privacy and filthy shared bathrooms. Outdoor areas are largely concrete and tightly supervised, parents say, and there are few toys or activities to occupy children indoors.

"It is a prison where we are keeping children as young as 1 year old," said Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School and director of its Immigrants' Rights Clinic, who has represented several detained families. "We're keeping children there who are currently breastfeeding. It's unconscionable."

Food is a recurring source of distress. Court filings describe meals that are greasy, heavily seasoned or inappropriate for preschoolers and infants. Several parents said they found worms or mold. Some children survive largely on crackers and juice. One mother said she resorted to sucking pasta sauce off noodles for her child, hoping he would eat.

"My younger son does not eat the food here, he is hungry all the time," another mother wrote in a sworn declaration submitted to federal court. "He will only accept breastmilk and it is not enough for him. He is growing. He is two and a half, and he needs to eat."

Parents of children too young to grasp what was happening said they struggled to keep up a facade of normality. Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, Liam's father,told Noticias Telemundohepassed the time by retelling storiesfrom episodes of "Bluey," the popular children's show about a family of blue heeler dogs, and recounting happy memories. He could do little else "except hug him and tell him everything would be OK," Conejo said.

Education is an afterthought at Dilley, parents and lawyers say. Children get no more than an hour of daily instruction, and overcrowding means some are turned away. The work consists largely of worksheets and coloring pages, parents say. Older children say they're bored, falling behind and missing their teachers and classmates.

"Inside the classroom, there are two women laughing in English and watching YouTube," a 14-year-old detainee wrote in a sworn declaration. "I was in 9th grade before I came here. If I had to go back to my country now, I'd have to repeat the grade because of all the school I've lost."

Medical care also is often cursory, families report, even when children show signs of serious illness or injury. In several cases described in court declarations, children — including some with developmental delays or chronic conditions — regressed while they were detained, losing language skills, wetting themselves or engaging in self-harm. Some parents said their complaints were dismissed until their children's conditions worsened significantly.

Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who has represented families at Dilley, described a child suffering from appendicitis who collapsed in pain after having been denied meaningful medical attention. The child passed out in a hallway vomiting and writhing, Lee said, only to be offered Tylenol.

The psychological toll can be just as severe. During a recent visit, Lee said, a 5-year-old girl described a recurring nightmare: A large animal chases her, but she can't outrun it because she's trapped in a cage.

She and her siblings "wake up crying for their mom every night because they're worried they're going to get separated from her," Lee said.

Lawyers representing detainees argue that prolonged confinement in harsh conditions — coupled with repeated warnings about family separation — is meant to coerce parents into abandoning pending asylum claims that could allow them to remain in the U.S.

DHS tells detained families, "Well, if you want this to stop, agree to give up your case," said Javier Hidalgo, legal director for RAICES, which provides legal support for immigrant families in Texas, including at Dilley. "We've heard that time and time again."

Kelly Vargas said she and her husband felt that pressure from the moment they arrived at Dilley with their daughter, Maria.

The family came to the U.S. in 2022 after having fled Colombia and settled in New York, where they checked in regularly with immigration officials. They had applied for special visas for human trafficking victims,saying they were subjected to forced laborand death threats while they were traveling through Mexico.

After they were arrested during a September check-in and sent to Dilley, Vargas said, officers repeatedly pressured her and her husband to drop their visa applications.

"He told us that if we didn't deport ourselves, they were going to take our daughter from us," she said. "Our daughter would be left in the custody of the state, where not even our lawyers would know where she was."

At first, Vargas said, she and her husband resisted, determined to fight for the life they had built in New York, where he worked in construction during the day and she worked as a waitress and cleaner overnight. They initially told Maria they were on vacation in Texas, but the girl knew better. She would drop to her knees and beg to go home to see her cat, Milo. At times, Vargas said, she screamed so intensely that even staff members appeared shaken.

"Get me out of here," she would cry. "I want to leave."

Maria's health quickly declined, Vargas said. She developed a persistent cough and struggled to eat, losing weight as the days passed. Then, Vargas said, a staff member who was cleaning accidentally struck her daughter in the eye with a mop, drawing blood.

Despite her daughter's continued complaints of blurred vision, sensitivity to light and hearing problems, Vargas said, doctors dismissed her concerns and delayed further evaluation.

In a statement, DHS said Maria received appropriate medical care for her eye injury, which it said was the result of the girl striking her own eye with a broom handle. At a follow-up appointment two days later, a pediatrician "observed no redness, swelling and no vision problems," the agency said.

With her daughter ailing, Vargas said, she and her husband finally agreed to leave the country.

They were deported to Colombia in November. The family received "full due process" before their removal, the DHS statement said.

Vargas worries they'll never fully heal from their two months at Dilley. Maria still has vision problems and headaches. The sweet girl who loved her teacher and played with Barbies is now fearful and withdrawn, talking often about her weeks in Texas and the workers who watched over her.

Whenever she sees a police officer, she tenses.

"It's the bad men," she says.

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — Nearly two weeks after anice stormknocked out power to her home, Barbara Bishop still finds herself trying to flip the lights on and looking in her fridge for food that has since spoiled.

Winter Weather Mississippi

Bishop, 79, and her 85-year-old husband, George Bishop, live in a rural area near Oxford, Mississippi, where ice-coated trees snapped in half, bringing down power lines and making roads nearly impassable.

After the storm hit, the Bishops took in their son, granddaughter and two children, whose homes lost both power and water.

The family endured days of bitter cold with nothing but a gas heater to keep them warm. For a few days, they lost water.

"It's just been one of those times you just have to grit, grit your teeth and bare it," Bishop said.

Nearly 20,000 customers remained without power in northern Mississippi on Friday, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide. That is down from about 180,000 homes and businesses without power in Mississippi shortly after the storm struck late last month.

Lafayette County, where Oxford is located, had the most remaining outages of any county on Friday, with about 4,200 customers without power, followed by Tippah County with about 3,500. Panola, Yalobusha and Tishomingo counties all had more than 2,000 customers without power.

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After days of bitter cold, temperatures in Oxford reached 70 degrees on Friday, but the chunks of ice still littered the ground in shaded areas.

Downed trees had been gathered into large piles on the sides of roads, some burned and still smoldering. While much of the worst damage had been cleared, in some places, power lines still hung low over roads and laid strewn about in parking lots. Everywhere, tree limbs dangled precariously.

Across the street from the Bishops, Russ Jones and his wife have no electricity or water. For days, they used five-gallon buckets filled with water to flush toilets, cooked on their gas stove and stayed warm by their fireplace.

"It's been a shock to the system," Jones said, adding that he and his wife began staying with friends who have power a few days ago.

On Friday, Jones' yard was teaming with volunteers from Eight Days of Hope, a nonprofit that responds to natural disasters. The volunteers cleared snapped tree limbs and hauled away a large tree that had fallen in Jones' backyard.

The organization arrived days after the storm and has helped dozens of homeowners clean up their yards and patch damaged roofs. It has also served more than 16,000 free meals.

Jones said it was a relief to know he had one less thing on his plate. When a volunteer handed him a free T-shirt and a blanket for his wife, he held back tears.

"It's just beyond anything I could ever imagine," he said.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The NFL is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game.

The league announced on Friday at an innovation summit for the Super Bowl the next round in theHealthTECH Challenge series, a crowdsourced competition designed to accelerate the development of cutting-edge football helmets and new standards for player safety.

The challenge invites inventors, engineers, startups, academic teams and established companies to improve the impact protection and design of football helmets through improvements to how facemasks absorb and reduce the effects of contact on the field.

"We're trying to get this out through all the channels we typically do to try to engage, not necessarily the helmet industry alone, but engineers, engineering schools, people involved in material science and others," Jeff Miller, the NFL's executive vice president overseeing player health and safety, said at the innovation summit. "They might have different ideas around architecture, might have different idea around materials. Participate in this, make your ideas win a prize. I hope, like we've done in the past, that this is going to advance the thinking."

Most progress on helmet safety has come from improvements to the shell and padding, helping to reduce the overall rate of concussions. Working with the helmet industry, the league has brought in position-specific helmets, with those for quarterbacks, for example, having more padding in the back after data showed most concussions for QBs came when the back of the head slammed to the turf.

But the facemask has mostly remained the same. This past season, 44% of in-game concussions resulted from impact to the player's facemask, up from 29% in 2015, according to data gathered by the NFL.

"What we haven't seen over that period of time are any changes of any note to the facemask," Miller said. "As a football fan, if you look back five or seven years ago, it looks exactly the same as it was before. It's made up of the same materials. ... Now we see, given the changes in our concussion numbers and injuries to players, that as changes are made to the helmet, fewer and fewer concussions are caused by hits to the shell, and more and more concussions as a percentage are by hits to the facemask."

Arik Armstead, an 11-year veteran defensive lineman, was also part of the panel and said he welcomed change. Armstead recently changed helmets to a model deemed safer by testing.

"This is awesome," he said. "I think a lot is happening in our approach to improving these things. A challenge like this is amazing because you're bringing solicited, new creative minds into the process. ... Let's bring some different brains and minds into the equation and see what could be possible. I think it's really cool."

Selected winners will receive up to $100,000 in aggregate funding, as well as expert development support to help move their concepts from the lab to the playing field.

The winner will be picked in August and Miller said he expected helmet manufacturers to start implementing any improvements into helmets soon after that.

AP NFL:https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

The Pro Football Hall of Fame will consider making changes to the voting panel and process of choosing Hall of Famers following a year whenBill Belichick's omissionfromthe 2026 classgenerated outrage.

Hall of Fame Football

Hall of Fame President Jim Porter said in an interview Thursday night after the five-player class was announced that there are several possible tweaks that could be made, adding that those changes aren't specific to Belichick's perceived snub.

But Porter seemed less inclined to alter a recent rule change that grouped coaches and contributors with old-time players that played a role in Belichick missing out despite winning a record six Super Bowls as a head coach.

Porter said that the Hall plans to return to in-person voting and discussion for the 50-member committee after moving to a virtual meeting room following the COVID pandemic. He also said the vote will likely happen closer to the annual reveal at NFL Honors to reduce the chances of leaks and said the Hall would consider releasing vote totals and individual ballots in the future but won't do it for this year's class.

Porter said the Hall will also look at replacing any voters who might have violated the rules either by publicly discussing the off-record debate about the candidates or by not voting for the "most deserving" candidates in each category.

"I'm not here to tell them who the most deserving is," Porter said. "If the Hall was to tell who the most deserving is, we wouldn't need them to vote. We understand that. We just want the rules followed."

Voter Vahe Gregorian of the Kansas City Starwrote a columnexplaining his reasoning for choosing seniors players Ken Anderson, Roger Craig and L.C. Greenwood instead of Belichick even though he believed Belichick shouldn't have had to wait for induction.

"In the end, though, I felt more compelled by what I perceive to be last chances and looming lost causes within the system as we have it — a system I hope the Hall will see fit to change now," Gregorian wrote.

But Porter said picking seniors players over a coach because the players might not be guaranteed another chance as a finalist was not allowed.

"That's not an option," Porter said. "You have to pick the most deserving. Those are the instructions that were read four times."

Some voters have expressed frustration over rule changes put in place last year that have grouped players in the seniors category who have been retired for at least 25 years, along with coaches and contributors. The new rules also made it harder for anyone to reach the 80% threshold.

In this year's vote, Belichick andNew England Patriots owner Robert Kraftwere grouped with the three seniors players. Instead of an up-or-down vote on each candidate, voters got to choose three of the five with the leading vote-getter and anyone else above 80% getting into the Hall. Craig was the only one of the five to get in this year after Sterling Sharpe was the lone one last year with coach Mike Holmgren not getting enough support.

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This is the third straight year no coach got the honor, leading to calls from some people — including voters — to separate coaches and contributors from the seniors.

Porter didn't seem inclined to change that process, saying that for more than 50 years coaches and contributors were grouped with players before changes about 10 years ago.

"The question is, what changed?" Porter asked. "What was it that the selectors could do that for the 50-some years but now can't. They could get the right person in that didn't require a category. I don't know. We'll find it out. We'll talk to a lot of people. .. But there's a responsibility there. The responsibility is to pick the most deserving. They got down to where that number was. So my question is, is everybody picking the most deserving."

This was also the second straight year with fewer than five modern-era candidates getting in after a rule change. Instead of an up-or-down vote on five players, seven made it to the final stage with voters allowed to pick five. The top three and anyone else above 80% gets into the Hall.

Last year, only three players reached that threshold and there were four this year: Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald, Luke Kuechly and Adam Vinatieri. Willie Anderson, Terrell Suggs and Marshal Yanda fell short and will automatically be in the final 15 next year.

After 12 straight years of at least seven people getting inducted, there have been only four and five the past two years.

"The number got really high," Porter said.

Porter said he hopes shortening the time between the vote and announcement — it was more than three weeks this year — will reduce leaks but he still wants enough time for the tradition of Hall of Famers delivering the news in person to the new class in what is known as "The Knock."

He is open to changes overall but doesn't see the need for an overhaul of the process.

"We'll do some tweaks and we'll take a look," he said. "We're going to do what's best for the Hall of Fame. My job is to protect the integrity of the Hall, protect the integrity of the process."

AP NFL:https://apnews.com/hub/NFL