The Republican Kemp said he will mobilize the roughly 300 troops in mid-September to take part in Trump’s D.C. operation to relieve soldiers from elsewhere who deployed earlier.

“Georgia is proud to stand with the Trump administration in its mission to ensure the security and beauty of our nation’s capital,” Kemp said in a statement.

Trump initially called up 800 members of the District of Columbia National Guard to assist federal law enforcement in his bid to crack down on crime, homelessness and illegal immigration. Since then, seven other Republican-led states have sent troops — Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia.

Kemp said Georgia’s soldiers may be armed and will support law enforcement. Kemp said he already sent 16 soldiers this week to Washington in support roles that won’t involve policing.

Trump last month took over the district’s local police department and deployed the National Guard in what he said was meant to fight crime. Earlier this week, members of the D.C. National Guard had their orders extended through December, another sign that their role will not wind down soon.

The District of Columbia on Thursday challenged President Donald Trump’s use of the National Guard in Washington, asking a federal court to intervene even as he plans to send troops to other cities in the name of driving down crime.

Brian Schwalb, the district’s elected attorney general, said in a lawsuit that the deployment, which now involves more than 1,000 troops, is an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

“No American jurisdiction should be involuntarily subjected to military occupation,” Schwalb wrote.

The White House said deploying the Guard to protect federal assets and assist law enforcement is within Trump’s authority as president.

Kemp announced last month that he would mobilize 75 Georgia National Guard soldiers and airmen to provide administrative and logistical support to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at locations in Georgia, although those soldiers won’t be conducting law enforcement or making arrests. Georgia is one of 11 states where the Guard will be helping ICE.

Kemp, the current chair of the Republican Governors Association, has for years been sending Georgia Guard members to the Mexican border in Texas to support border enforcement there.

Isakson’s son John Isakson told The Associated Press that his father died in his sleep before dawn at his home in Atlanta. John Isakson said that although his father had Parkinson’s disease, the cause of death was not immediately apparent.

“He was a great man and I will miss him,” John Isakson said.

Johnny Isakson, whose real estate business made him a millionaire, spent more than four decades in Georgia political life. In the Senate, he was the architect of a popular tax credit for first-time home buyers that he said would help invigorate the struggling housing market. As chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, he worked to expand programs offering more private health care choices for veterans.

Isakson’s famous motto was, “There are two types of people in this world: friends and future friends.” That approach made him exceedingly popular among colleagues.

“Johnny was one of my very best friends in the Senate,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said Sunday. “But the amazing thing about him was that at any given time, approximately 98 other Senators felt the same way. His infectious warmth and charisma, his generosity, and his integrity made Johnny one of the most admired and beloved people in the Capitol.”

In 2015, while gearing up to seek a third term in the Senate, Isakson disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a chronic and progressive movement disorder that had left him with a noticeably slower, shuffling gait. Soon after winning reelection in 2016, he underwent a scheduled surgery on his back to address spinal deterioration. He frequently depended on a cane or wheelchair in later years.

In August 2019, not long after fracturing four ribs in a fall at his Washington apartment, Isakson announced he would retire at year’s end with two years remaining in his term.

In a farewell Senate speech, he pleaded for bipartisanship at a time of bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats. He cited his long friendship with U.S. Rep. John Lewis, an Atlanta Democrat and civil rights hero, as an example of two men willing to put party aside to work on common problems.

“Let’s solve the problem and then see what happens,” Isakson said. “Most people who call people names and point fingers are people who don’t have a solution themselves.”

Lewis, who died last year, saluted Isakson on the House floor in 2019, saying, “We always found a way to get along and do the work the people deserve.”

After the speech, Lewis walked over to hug a hobbling Isakson, saying, “I will come over to meet you, brother.”

An Atlanta native, Isakson failed in his first bid for elected office: a seat on the Cobb County Commission in 1974. Two years later, he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, becoming the only Republican to beat a Democratic incumbent in Georgia the same year Jimmy Carter was elected president. Isakson served 17 years in the state House and Senate. Always in the minority in Georgia’s General Assembly, he helped blaze the path toward the GOP ascendancy of the 2000s, fueled by Atlanta’s suburban boom. By the end of Isakson’s career, some of those same suburbs were swinging back toward Democrats.

“As a businessman and a gifted retail politician, Johnny paved the way for the modern Republican Party in Georgia, but he never let partisan politics get in the way of doing what was right,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement.

Isakson suffered humbling setbacks before ascending to the Senate. In 1990, he lost the race for governor to Democrat Zell Miller. In 1996, Guy Millner defeated him in a Republican primary for Senate before Millner lost to Democrat Max Cleland.

Many observers chalked up the loss to Isakson not being tough enough on abortion. In the primary race, Isakson ran a television advertisement in which he said that while he was against the government funding or promoting abortion, he would “not vote to amend the Constitution to make criminals of women and their doctors.”

“I trust my wife, my daughter and the women of Georgia to make the right choice,” he said.

He later changed his mind on the contentious issue.

Isakson’s jump to Congress came about in 1998, when U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich decided not to seek reelection. Isakson won a 1999 special election to fill the suburban Atlanta seat.

He finally made it to the U.S. Senate in 2004 when he defeated Democrat Denise Majette with 58% of the vote. He served with Georgia senior Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a close friend and classmate from the University of Georgia.

Isakson was viewed as a prohibitive early favorite to succeed Republican Sonny Perdue in the governor’s mansion in 2010. But he opted instead to seek a second term in the Senate. While there, he developed a reputation as a moderate, although he rarely split with his party on key votes.

He was a lead negotiator in 2007 on immigration legislation that President George W. Bush backed but ultimately abandoned after it met strong resistance from the right. Chambliss and Isakson were booed at a Georgia Republican Party convention that year over their immigration stance.

Isakson supported limited school vouchers and played a major role in crafting Bush’s signature education plan, the No Child Left Behind Act. He also pushed an unsuccessful compromise bill on the politically charged issue of stem cell research that would have expanded research funding while also ensuring that human embryos weren’t harmed.

That deal-making approach has fallen out of favor for many voters, but Isakson’s lineage remains a presence in Georgia politics. State Attorney General Chris Carr was the former senator’s chief of staff. “When I was a young man just getting started in politics, I wanted to be like Johnny Isakson,” Carr said Sunday.

Democratic Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock said “all of Georgia” grieves Isakson’s death. Warnock, who took over Isakson’s old seat after defeating Republican Kelly Loeffler in a January runoff, had a special connection to Isakson, who attended an annual service in honor of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The church’s pulpit was King’s and later became Warnock’s. Warnock also has continued Isakson’s tradition of an annual barbecue lunch for all senators.

Isakson’s “model of public service is an example to future generations of leaders on how to stand on principle and make progress while also governing with compassion and a heart for compromise,” Warnock said Sunday.

Isakson graduated from the University of Georgia in 1966 and joined his family-owned company, Northside Realty in Cobb County, a year later. It grew to one of the largest independent residential real estate brokerage companies in the country during his more than 20 years at the helm. Isakson also served in the Georgia Air National Guard from 1966 to 1972.

He is survived by his wife, Diane, whom he married in 1968; three children and nine grandchildren.

Coast Guard Lt. Lloyd Heflin told The Associated Press in a text message that the South Korean crew member was rescued just before 6 p.m. Monday.

He says the crew member appears to be in good medical condition but is being evaluated.

Three other crew members were rescued earlier Monday from the Golden Ray, more than a day after the vessel overturned while leaving a port on the Georgia coast.

Coast Guard leaders had vowed to save the fourth mariner at an earlier news conference in nearby Brunswick.

“The same experts who got us to where we are right now are going to find a way to extract him,” Coast Guard Sector Charleston commander Capt. John Reed said.

The rescue followed nearly 36 hours of work after the Golden Ray, a giant ship that carries automobiles, rolled onto its side early Sunday as it was leaving Brunswick, bound for Baltimore.

In the hours immediately after the accident, the Coast Guard lifted 20 crew members into helicopters before determining that smoke and flames and unstable cargo made it too risky to venture further inside the vessel. Officials were also concerned about the stability of the ship, which was carrying 4,000 vehicles, some of which may have broken loose.

That left responders looking for the remaining four crew members. At first, Reed said, rescuers were not sure whether the noises they were hearing inside were some of the vehicles crashing around. But by dawn Monday, they had grown confident that the taps were responses to their own taps, indicating someone was alive inside.

“It was outstanding when I heard the news this morning that we had taps back throughout the night,” Reed said, saying it helped lead rescuers to the right place on the 656-foot (200 meter) vessel, and provided motivation.

“They were charged up knowing the people were alive,” Reed said.

On Monday morning, rescuers landed on the side of the Golden Ray and rappelled down the hull.

Lt. Heflin, who was coordinating the search, said they found three men in a room close to the propeller shaft, near the bottom of the stern.

Responders began drilling, starting with a 3-inch (7.5-centimeter) hole. Coast Guard officials brought the ship’s chief engineer, who was rescued Sunday, out to the ship to translate, and found the three men were “on board and OK,” as Heflin put it.

Reed said rescuers passed food and water through the hole to the men. It also provided fresh air to the propeller room, which Reed said was even hotter than outside, where the high was 93 degrees (34 Celsius).

Responders set up a tent on the hull and began drilling additional holes, eventually making an opening large enough to insert a ladder and help the men climb out.

“It was like connect-the-dots,” Reed said of the hole, which grew to 2 feet by 3 feet (0.6 meters by 1 meter).

The Golden Ray is now stuck in the shipping channel, closing one of the busiest U.S. seaports for shipping automobiles. One ship is unable to leave port and four more are lined up outside waiting to come in, according to ship-tracking website Marine Traffic.

A statement issued Monday by the South Korea foreign ministry said the crew members were isolated in an engine room. It said 10 South Koreans and 13 Filipinos had been on board, along with a U.S. harbor pilot, when the ship began tilting.

Position records for the Golden Ray show the ship arrived in port in Brunswick Saturday evening after making the short sail from a prior stop in Jacksonville, Florida. The ship then departed the dock in Brunswick shortly after midnight and was underway only 23 minutes before its movement stopped in the mouth of the harbor where it capsized, according to satellite data recorded by Marine Traffic.

The Coast Guard said it was notified of the capsized vessel by a 911 call at about 2 a.m. Sunday.

The cause of the capsizing remains under investigation. Marine Traffic shows the Golden Ray overturned as it was passed by another car carrier entering St. Simons Sound.

At the time, the skies were clear and the weather calm, with a southerly breeze of only 5 miles per hour, according to National Weather Service records.

Many of those rescued were taken to the International Seafarers’ Center in Brunswick. Sailors arrived with only what they were wearing when rescued.

A restaurant donated a meal, and the volunteer-run center provided the seamen with clothes, toiletries and Bibles. A priest said Mass for the sailors Sunday afternoon before they were taken to a hotel.

“They were all in relatively good spirits,” said the center’s executive director, Vicki West. “We just do anything we can to be their little respite in the storm.”

The ship channel is currently closed to vessel traffic, with a safety zone of a half mile around the Golden Ray in the sound.

The vessel is owned by Hyundai Glovis, which carries cars for automakers Hyundai and Kia as well as others.

Nearly 614,000 vehicles and heavy machinery units moved across Brunswick’s docks in the 2019 fiscal year that ended June 30, according to the Georgia Ports Authority.

Amy reported from Atlanta. Associated Press Writer Michael Biesecker contributed from Washington.

Navy Times editor’s note: This story has been altered with updated news that the fourth crew member has been rescued. BZ, Coast Guard.

Birmingham, Alabama-based Education Corp. of America said it was closing schools operating as Virginia College, Brightwood College, Brightwood Career Institute, Ecotech Institute and Golf Academy of America in more than 70 locations in 21 states. The company said in October that it had more than 20,000 students, although more recent documents indicate the number may be closer to 15,000.

ECA schools enrolled about 4,000 students using the Post-9/11 GI Bill in fiscal 2017, the latest year for which federal data is available. A Military Times analysis of Department of Veterans Affairs data shows more than $41 million went to pay for the education of veterans at these schools.

The company, backed by investors including private equity firm Willis Stein & Partners of Chicago, is the latest in a series of for-profit colleges to close after allegations that they were loading students up with debt while not providing them with marketable skills.

In some cases, students told local news outlets Wednesday that operations ceased immediately, while in other cases students said they were told to return for meetings later.

ECA spokeswoman Diane Worthington said that at most locations, Friday would be the last day of classes, and students would get academic credit for this term. One ECA institution, New England College of Business, is not closing. The company mostly offers professional certificates in subjects like cosmetology, culinary arts and medical and dental assisting.

In a letter to students, ECA CEO Stuart Reed said the company’s impending loss of accreditation, along with added requirements from the U.S. Department of Education, made the company unable to raise more money to operate the schools while it sought to reorganize.

“It is with extreme regret that this series of recent circumstances has forced us to discontinue the operation of our schools,” Reed wrote.

In October, the company sued the U.S. Education Department seeking to maintain its federal funding, which was in jeopardy over its dire financial situation. A judge later dismissed the suit.

Court documents filed by the company said its lagging revenue left it unable to make payments on its debt or rental fees, and that it faced eviction at several campuses. ECA estimated it owed $66 million at the time. Even before then, ECA was planning to shutter 26 campuses to cut costs. Another federal judge in Georgia later granted a bankruptcy-like receivership meant to protect the company from creditors.

ECA largely blamed falling enrollment on an upswing in the economy, which left fewer adults heading to school for job skills, and on increased federal regulation of the for-profit college industry.

The sudden closure drew criticism from the U.S. Education Department, which said it had been working with the company to arrange a shut-down that gave students time to transfer.

“Instead of taking the next few months to close in an orderly fashion, ECA took the easy way out and left 19,000 students scrambling to find a way to finish the education program they started,” Liz Hill, an Education Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Like the recently shuttered Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute chains, Education Corporation of America was overseen by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, one of the watchdog groups the federal government appoints to ensure colleges offer a quality education.

The council, known as ACICS, wrote a Tuesday letter to Reed saying it was suspending accreditation immediately at all the institutions, citing “rapidly deteriorating financial conditions,” a failure to make required payments to the council and a wide variety of academic concerns.

ACICS was shut down by the Obama administration over allegations of lax oversight, but was later reinstated on Nov. 21 by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who found it was “substantially in compliance” with federal standards.

Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, urged DeVos to rethink her decision on ACICS after the Wednesday closure.

“We have repeatedly warned about the risks low-quality, for-profit education companies and irresponsible accreditors pose to students and taxpayers across the country,” Scott said in a statement. “Today’s announcement is another painful reminder of those risks.”

Corinthian and ITT Tech educated thousands of student veterans when they closed in 2015 and 2016, respectively, and became the impetus for a provision in the Forever GI Bill law passed last year that restores GI Bill benefits to victims of abrupt school closures.

In many cases, students and teachers were in class when they got the news about the ECA closures Wednesday. Melissa Zavala, who was studying to be a medical assistant at a San Antonio, Texas, campus of Brightwood, told KSAT-TV students were taken to an auditorium.

“The director was there and she was like, ‘I have bad news. The school is closing down,’” Zavala said. “Everyone was like, ‘What about our student loans? We’re almost done.’”

Zavala said campus officials couldn’t provide additional information and told them to look online for other colleges they could attend.

“They took our money, they shut the school down and that’s it for us,” Zavala said.

Toby Merrill, who directs the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, said students can ask the U.S. Department of Education to cancel loans if a school closes. However, that opportunity doesn’t apply if a student transfers credits or if a school hires a successor to offer students classes to complete their programs.

(Military Times reporter Natalie Gross contributed to this story.)

Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula announced the USS Fitzgerald’s arrival Thursday, inviting area residents to wave flags as the ship is carried up the Pascagoula River aboard a transport ship.

Colleen O’Rourke, a spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command, which is overseeing the Fitzgerald’s repair, wrote in an email Thursday that the Navy will have more information once the ship arrives.

The ship’s arrival comes only days after the Navy announced Tuesday that it was seeking negligent homicide charges against four officers of the Fitzgerald at the time of the collision, including the then-commanding officer, Cmdr. Bryce Benson. A hearing has not yet been held to determine whether there’s enough evidence for those and other charges to go to a trial by court-martial. Other charges could include dereliction of duty and endangering a ship.

The June 17 collision with a Philippine-flagged container ship off Japan caved in parts of the Fitzgerald above and below the waterline. Water gushed into berthing compartments, killing the sailors. Its hull was punctured twice more in November as it was loaded aboard a transport ship. The transport ship sailed Dec. 9.

Ingalls, a unit of Virginia-based Huntington Ingalls Industries, was chosen by the Navy to repair the ship in August and awarded an initial $63 million contract in December.

The Navy said it chose Ingalls because it determined that it was the only shipyard that builds destroyers and also has available capacity to fix the damage. Only Ingalls and the Bath Iron Works unit of General Dynamics Corp. in Maine build American destroyers.

The Navy has said it will use the opportunity to modernize the Fitzgerald, which was built in 1995 at Bath and had been scheduled for an overhaul in the 2019 budget year. Repairs are likely to cost far more than the initial $63 million, which covers ripping out damaged areas.

The Navy conducted a series of investigations and reviews into the collision involving the Fitzgerald and a second collision between the USS John S. McCain and an oil tanker near Singapore in August, which killed 10 U.S. sailors,

Those reviews concluded that the incidents resulted from poor judgment, bad decision-making and widespread training and leadership failures by the commanders and crew who didn’t quickly recognize and respond to unfolding emergencies. The Navy also seeks charges against the commanding officer of the John S. McCain.

In the meantime, the Marine Corps’ fleet of KC130T transport planes remains grounded. That plane is similar to the one that crashed near Itta Bena on July 10.

April Phillips, a spokeswoman for the Naval Safety Center, said Monday that final reports often don’t become public for 12 to 18 months following a crash. Even then, much of the information in the reports is often withheld from public view.

“Ours are done solely to ensure what happened doesn’t happen again,” Phillips said, saying that various military commanders must endorse the report before it’s finished.

Marines and other investigators finished collecting debris Aug. 3, recovering all of the plane’s major components, said Marine Forces Reserve spokeswoman Lt. Stephanie L. Leguizamon. She said last week that there’s still work going on to clean up the crash area.

Naval Safety Center investigators are both reconstructing the wreckage and interviewing witnesses. Their report will ultimately include recommendations to enhance safety.

Victims included nine Marines based at Stewart Air National Guard base in Newburgh, New York, who flew and crewed the plane, plus six Marines and a Navy Corpsman from an elite Marine Raider battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The passengers were headed for pre-deployment training in Yuma, Arizona. Cargo included at least some ammunition.

Brig. Gen. Bradley S. James has told reporters that whatever went wrong began when the plane was at cruising altitude. Most of the plane pancaked upside down into a field, but part of it, including the cockpit, broke off and landed far from the fuselage and wings. Debris was scattered for miles over fields, woods and ponds.

Witnesses said they saw the plane descend from high altitude with an engine smoking, with some describing what pilots call a “flat spin,” where a plane twirls around like a boomerang.

Phillips said the plane didn’t have an in-flight data recorder. That, plus the lack of survivors, could make the debris crucial to determining what happened.

“A lot it, in this case, is likely to come from forensic evidence,” she said.

Phillips said the C-130 and its variants have historically been one of the safest planes operated by the Marine Corps. The Navy classifies its most serious incidents as Class A mishaps, involving death, permanent disability or more than $2 million in damage. Only two in-flight Class A mishaps were recorded before the Mississippi crash, both in 2002. A KC-130R experienced a flash fire and crashed into a mountain in Pakistan while nearing an airfield, killing seven people. A KC130F crash landed shortly after taking off in California, causing injuries but no deaths.

The New York squadron is the last Marine unit flying the KC-130T version and is scheduled to upgrade to a newer version in 2019. Only the remaining 12 KC-130Ts are affected by the grounding.

An earlier version of this story was corrected to show 15 Marines died in the plane crash, not 16.

The U.S. Justice Department announced the settlement Tuesday with Huntington Ingalls Industries. The Newport News, Virginia, company operates the 11,000-employee Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula. Spokeswoman Beci Brenton said Huntington Ingalls cooperated with the government and has strengthened compliance efforts.

The settlement resolves allegations that Huntington Ingalls charged labor costs to contracts for which work wasn’t actually done, and charged the government as if supervisors had dived to work on ship hulls, or even for dives that never happened. The company charged the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard on various ships it was building.

“Corruption, fraud and bribery are not victimless crimes,” Mike Wiest, special agent in charge of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service Southeast Field Office, said in a statement. “Overcharging for work not done is not only criminal on its face, investigating those crimes siphoned resources and time which would have been better invested in protecting the nation.”

The allegations were originally brought on behalf of the government by a former Huntington Ingalls employee named Byron Faulkner. Under the federal False Claims Act, which allows a private individual to bring suit on behalf of the government, he’ll get $1.6 million of the settlement.

Faulkner, a Vancleave resident, said in his lawsuit that he started work in at Ingalls in 1998 and became a foreman in 2012. Faulkner’s lawsuit states he discovered that supervisors were falsifying records to assign work-hours to ships others than the ones employees were actually building. If Ingalls completed work in less than a specified number of man-hours, it would get incentive payments from the Navy and Coast Guard, and supervisors would share in those bonuses.

Federal prosecutors say problems ran at least from 2003 to 2015.

“Ingalls throughout all such years organized and allocated its supervisory and other personnel based on Ingalls’s corporate purpose of receiving the maximum dollars in periodic incentive payments,” Faulkner’s 2013 lawsuit states.

The lawsuit claims Ingalls fired 20 supervisors over the practice in 2013. At least three of those have been convicted of federal crimes. Neil Holden and Robert Gardner pleaded guilty to failing to report a felony in 2015, agreeing they had pressured subordinates to falsify hours. Holden was sentenced to three years of probation, eight months of home confinement and a $17,500 fine. Gardner was sentenced to 6 months in prison, 6 months home confinement and a $20,000 fine.

Randy Wilson was sentenced to two years’ probation and a $4,000.00 fine for making false statements.

Huntington Ingalls admitted some mischarges already in 2012, 2013 and 2015, acknowledging it had billed the Navy and Coast Guard for dives that did not occur, as well as upcharging for supervisors diving when supervisors did not. The company already paid back $400,000 related to dives and $1.3 million for other allegations.

The settlement also says the Navy held back $4.7 million and Coast Guard held back $3.6 million in payments.