MIAMI — If you’ve driven in Florida recently, you may have seen the speed cameras springing up in school zones across the state.

Carlos Acosta wishes he hadn’t.

“I think it’s a money grab,” Acosta said. “That’s what irks me the most. It’s all about making money.”

Millions of drivers across the country are encountering automated speed cameras for the first time, or they will soon. Safety advocates say there’s clear evidence that these cameras work to make roads safer. But there’s also a growing backlash from drivers in Florida and beyond.

Drivers like Acosta, who worked in the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office for 27 years before retiring. This spring, Acosta says he got two speed camera tickets in school zones near his house in a suburb of Miami.

“I’m all for protecting the kids coming and going from school,” Acosta said.

But he says both of his tickets were issued during the middle of the day, when those kids were inside the school. “So they’re basically giving you a citation for going over the regular speed limit,” he said. “That’s where you get popped.”

Florida recently joined the growing list of states where speed cameras are allowed. So have California, Hawaii, Michigan and Minnesota. They’re now legal in more than two dozen states, with each taking a different approach in terms of where the cameras are located, and where the money goes.

In general, safety advocates say these cameras are working, and saving lives by forcing drivers to slow down.

“The whole point of the cameras is reducing the speeds, which leads to crashes at lower speeds when they happen, so there’s fewer people dying,” said Raul Avelar, an engineer with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit research organization funded by the auto insurance industry.

Avelar points to multiple studies in the U.S. that show cameras can cut speeding by 70% or more. One study in Maryland found speed cameras reduced the likelihood of serious injury by 39%.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Federal agents launched a sweeping undercover surveillance operation earlier this year targeting progressive organizations, labor unions and other groups protesting the immigration crackdown then raging through Minneapolis, according to court documents filed Thursday.

The program, dubbed Operation Puppet Master, was aimed at what officials called a network of conspirators helping “violent opportunists and agitators.” The documents were filed in a case involving 15 people charged by federal prosecutors in June with impeding the crackdown, accusing them of conspiring against the federal government through a range of actions, from throwing ice chunks to setting up blockades.

The government documents were released Thursday in connection with a motion from a defense lawyer in the case, Kevin Riach, who requested that officials disclose more material collected during the investigations.

The reality, according to government documents revealed in court motions, was Department of Homeland Security officers infiltrating meetings in churches, schools and parks that were often simply discussions of constitutionally protected protests.

A statement from the department said Homeland Security Investigations doesn’t comment on the existence or status of on-going investigations or investigative methods. The statement referred questions to the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, which didn’t immediately respond to an after-hours email from The Associated Press.

Puppet Master, and a later operation called Project Whipple Shield, were a “broad and irrational investigation” driven by politics and not criminal conduct, Riach said in a motion filed Thursday.

Take, for example, a Jan. 31 meeting in a Minneapolis library, when a Homeland Security report says an undercover officer identified as “UCA 9833” listened as supporters of a progressive climate group, the Sunrise Movement, discussed sit-ins, de-escalation tactics and “having a police liaison and safety marshal present during events.”

“During the Action meeting, it was made clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused on ‘peaceful’ protests,” the agent reported.

Dozens of pages of documents describe agents secretly infiltrating meetings, monitoring activist chat groups and using license plate numbers to compile names of people who attended gatherings.

A slide created by Homeland Security’s investigative branch titled “The Conspiracy” shows 18 organizations, from a small Minneapolis bicycle repair collective to the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor groups in the U.S.

The government also obtained years of certain financial records for groups ranging from the Sunrise Movement to major unions, including the Service Employees International Union and the Communications Workers of America.

“You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time,” warned a DHS request to FedWire, a money transfer system operated by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

“It’s very disturbing,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Over time, it could deter people from expressing their beliefs, he said.

Many people don’t want to live in a world where expressing their beliefs gives federal agencies the right to investigate them, he said.

“It’s that fear of that creeping police state,” he said.

Groups that the government investigated were furious at the news.

“Our union has become the latest target of a corrupt administration that weaponizes the legal process against law-abiding Americans exercising our Constitutional rights,” CWA President Claude Cummings Jr. said in a statement. “We will not be intimidated, and we will not be silenced.”

The AP News Guild, the union that represents many Associated Press employees, is part of the CWA.

On Thursday, a coalition of Minneapolis-area civil society groups defended the protests and criticized the investigations.

The government is “lashing out desperately in hopes of intimidating people and organizations that have shown the power of communities acting together,” said a statement distributed by Unidos MN, a local human rights group.

DHS deployed about 3,000 federal officers to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area for roughly three months starting late last year in what the department called its “ largest immigration enforcement operation ever.” It led to thousands of arrests, angry mass protests and the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.

Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel N. Rosen said the 15 were part of two groups that he characterized as “antifa,” an umbrella term for a diffuse movement of militant left-wing activists.

Defense attorney Riach said at the time that his client, Isaac Sant, had no affiliation with antifa, which he called “a boogeyman invented by the far-right.”

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Kelleher reported from Honolulu.

On Thursday, the board of the Kennedy Center voted a second time to shut down most of the Washington, D.C., arts complex for what is being described as a two-year major renovation plan, according to a person briefed on the vote.

In March, the center’s board approved a full shutdown of the complex for major renovations, but a federal judge later ruled to temporarily block the planned closure, saying that no board members had “sufficient information” to make such a decision.

In a test of both the same judge’s previous ruling and a related appeals court ruling, the board also voted on Thursday to put President Trump’s name back on the center’s entry, calling the complex, “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”

In this most recent vote, the board elected to close the center’s main building, while keeping The REACH, a 2019 addition, open for limited programming and as a memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy. According to the plan approved by the board, the $250 million project includes structural repairs, new marble floors, nearly $12 million in “acoustical improvements” and a plan to temporarily move the famed, eight-foot, bronze bust of Kennedy that sits in the center’s main foyer. Under this plan, the main campus would reopen in the summer of 2028. The details of the proposal and the potential name change were first reported by The New York Times. The individual who was briefed on the vote spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The board’s decisions will be subject to the federal judge’s approval. Thursday’s board meeting was held by Zoom, and was not public.

In the days leading up to Thursday’s vote, Democratic legislators who serve as ex-officio Kennedy Center trustees told the Washington Post that they had still not been given access to any assessments of what such a closure would mean for the long-term wellbeing of the institution. The arts complex is chaired by President Trump, and the majority of its current board are Trump allies appointed by the president.