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WASHINGTON (AP) — Jon Sacker was near death, too sick for doctors to attempt the double lung transplant he so desperately needed. His only chance: An experimental machine that essentially works like dialysis for the lungs.

But the device has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and there were none in the country. It would take an overnight race into Canada to retrieve a Hemolung.

Sacker rapidly improved as the device cleansed his blood of carbon dioxide — so much so that in mid-March, 20 days later, he got a transplant after all.

"That machine is a lifesaver," Sacker said from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Sacker's struggle highlights a critical void: There is no fully functioning artificial lung to buy time for someone awaiting a transplant, like patients who need a new heart can stay alive with an implanted heart pump or those with failing kidneys can turn to dialysis.

"It seems like it should be possible for the lung as well," said Dr. Andrea Harabin of the National Institutes of Health.

NIH-funded researchers are working to develop wearable "respiratory assist devices" that could do the lungs' two jobs — supplying oxygen and getting rid of carbon dioxide — without tethering patients to a bulky bedside machine.

It has proven challenging.

"The lung is an amazing organ for gas exchange. It's not so easy to develop a mechanical device that can essentially replace the function of a lung," said bioengineer William Federspiel of Pitt's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who helped invent the bedside Hemolung and is working on these next-step devices.

So when Sacker needed an emergency fix, Dr. Christian Bermudez, UPMC's chief of cardiothoracic transplants, gambled on the unapproved Hemolung. "We had no other options," he said.

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Cystic fibrosis destroyed Sacker's own lungs. The Moore, Oklahoma, man received his first double lung transplant in 2012. He thrived until a severe infection last fall damaged his new lungs, spurring rejection. By February, he needed another transplant.

The odds were long. Donated lungs are in such short supply that only 1,923 transplants were performed last year, just 80 of them repeats, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

Still, the Pittsburgh hospital, known for tackling tough cases, agreed to try — only to have Sacker, 33, arrive too debilitated for an operation. A ventilator was providing adequate oxygen. But carbon dioxide had built to toxic levels in his body.

When a ventilator isn't enough, today's recourse is a decades-old technology so difficult that only certain hospitals, including Pittsburgh, offer it. Called ECMO, it rests the lungs by draining blood from the body, oxygenating it and removing carbon dioxide, and then returning it. Sacker was too sick to try.

"I didn't see any other alternative other than withdrawing support from this young man," Bermudez said.

Then he remembered the Hemolung, invented by Pittsburgh engineering colleagues as an alternative to ECMO. It was designed to treat patients with a different lung disease, called COPD, during crises when their stiffened lungs retain too much carbon dioxide, Federspiel said.

The Hemolung recently was approved in Europe and Canada; its maker is planning the stricter U.S. testing required by FDA. For Sacker to become the first U.S. Hemolung patient, hospital safety officials would have to agree and notify FDA.

"We had actually just almost decided to turn the ventilator off, because we were putting him through suffering," Sacker's wife, Sallie, recalled. Then the phone rang: The experiment was on.

But Pittsburgh-based ALung Technologies Inc. couldn't get a device shipped for a few days. Doctors feared Sacker wouldn't live that long. Late at night, ALung CEO Peter DeComo tracked down a device in Toronto, and started driving. It took some explaining to get the unapproved medical device past U.S. border officials. But the next day, Sacker was hooked up, and quickly improved.

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Federspiel, also an ALung co-founder, said researchers' ultimate goal is a fully functioning, portable artificial lung.

Varieties under development consist of small bundles of hollow, permeable fibers. As blood pumps over the fibers, oxygen flows outside to the blood and carbon dioxide returns, explained Dr. Bartley Griffith of the University of Maryland. He has reported success in sheep, and hopes to begin the first human tests within three years.

The idea: Small tubes would connect the fiber device, worn around the waist, to blood vessels, so that patients could move around, keeping up their muscle strength instead of being restricted to bed.

There's "at the least the inkling that we can dream of sending somebody home with an artificial lung," Griffith said.

A bridge to transplant isn't the only need, said Harabin of NIH's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which is funding work by Griffith, Federspiel and others.

Thousands each year suffer acute lung failure from trauma or disease that hits too suddenly to even consider transplant. Researchers like Griffith want to test if these experimental technologies could offer them a better chance to heal than ventilators, which can further damage lungs.

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Back in Pittsburgh, Sacker is slowly gaining strength with his second set of transplanted lungs. He doesn't remember the fight for his life; he was sedated through it. But his wife has told him how touch and go it was.

"You get a call at the last second about a device that has never been used here in the United States — that's a miracle," he said.

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AP Video Journalist Joseph Frederick contributed to this report.

MURRIETA, Calif. (AP) — A flight carrying migrants from overcrowded facilities on the Texas border with Mexico arrived Tuesday in Southern California but protesters blocked immigration authorities from taking the group to a suburban Border Patrol facility for processing.

Several dozen protesters, some waving U.S. flags and signs denouncing illegal immigration, converged outside the site in Murrieta. The buses finally backed away from the facility. Their next destination was not immediately known.

Earlier in the day, the chartered plane landed in San Diego with 136 migrants on board, a Department of Homeland Security official who was not authorized to be named when speaking on the issue told The Associated Press. Murrieta is about an hour north of San Diego.

A day earlier, Murrieta Mayor Alan Long urged residents in the suburb of 107,000 people to call their elected officials and voice opposition to the plan. He said police in the city were ready for any security issues, though he acknowledged migrants were not to be released locally and do not have criminal records.

The flight was part of a federal government effort to deal with a flood of Central American children and families fleeing to the United States to escape violence and extortion from gangs in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Last week, U.S. authorities announced the plan to fly migrants from the Rio Grande Valley to Texas cities and Southern California.

More than 52,000 unaccompanied children have been detained after crossing the Texas-Mexico border since October in what President Barack Obama has called a humanitarian crisis. Many of the migrants are under the impression that they will receive leniency from U.S. authorities.

The facility in Murrieta has no showers or beds and is designed only for temporary holds, said Gabe Pacheco, a spokesman for the San Diego chapter of the border patrol agents' union.

Another flight was expected to take 140 migrants to a facility in El Centro, California, on Wednesday, said Lombardo Amaya, president of the El Centro chapter of the Border Patrol union. The Border Patrol would not confirm that arrival date.

The federal government is also flying migrants to the Texas border cities of Laredo and El Paso and to Arizona for processing.

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Associated Press writer Julie Watson in San Diego and Amy Taxin in Santa Ana contributed to this report.

PARIS (AP) — Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was in police custody Tuesday, apparently under questioning in an investigation linked to allegations that he took 50 million euros ($67 million) in illegal campaign funds from Libya's Moammar Gadhafi.

But will the shocking detention and sordid case torpedo Sarkozy's chances at a presidential comeback?

Maybe not.

Sarkozy, a political survivor who's been touring the world with his pop singer wife, is still among the most popular politicians in France despite a pile of investigations that target him.

The 59-year-old hasn't been convicted of anything and remains well-known on the international stage. And he may be his troubled conservative party's best chance to regain the presidency in 2017, after losing it to Socialist Francois Hollande in 2012.

A judicial official said Sarkozy was detained for questioning Tuesday at the headquarters of the judicial police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. The official, who was not authorized to be publicly named while discussing an ongoing investigation, would not elaborate. French police, prosecutors and other judicial officials would not provide any details.

BFM television said late Tuesday night that Sarkozy was transferred to an investigating judge, who could charge him, name him as a witness, or release him.

French media reports say Sarkozy is being questioned in an investigation linked to financing for his 2007 presidential campaign, notably allegations that late Libyan leader Gadhafi gave Sarkozy illegal campaign donations.

Sarkozy has vigorously denied wrongdoing.

The French daily Le Monde, which has covered the case closely, says the questioning centers around whether Sarkozy and his lawyer, Thierry Herzog, were kept informed about the investigation by a friendly magistrate, Gilbert Azibert.

Herzog was released but handed preliminary charges Tuesday night, his lawyer Paul-Albert Iweins told reporters. He insisted that there was no proof of wrongdoing.

Investigators are basing suspicions at least in part on taped phone conversations between Sarkozy and his lawyer. The taping raised questions about the limits between investigative needs and individual privacy, particularly lawyer-client privilege. Sarkozy has compared the situation to actions by the secret police in the old East Germany.

Allies from Sarkozy's conservative UMP party — which has been in a leadership crisis — jumped to the former president's defense.

"They have never imposed such treatment on a former president, with such a surge of hate," lawmaker Christian Estrosi tweeted.

Former French President Jacques Chirac was convicted in a corruption case in 2011 after he left office, but when he was questioned he was not held in police custody.

The Socialist government tried to stay above the fray.

"Justice officials are investigating, they should carry out the task to the end. Nicolas Sarkozy is a citizen answerable to justice like any other," government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said on i-Tele television.

Political scientist Thomas Guenole said it's too early to draw conclusions about Sarkozy's political future.

"Nicolas Sarkozy has often been pronounced politically dead over the last two years because he was implicated in political-judicial affairs ... And he has always emerged," Guenole said.

He described an "immense love" for Sarkozy amid hard-core members of his party, who view the investigations against Sarkozy as politically driven.

Sarkozy was handed preliminary charges in another investigation into whether he illegally took campaign donations from France's richest woman, L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. Those charges were later dropped.

In a separate case, relatives of French victims of a deadly 2002 bombing in Pakistan filed a complaint in Paris last year against Sarkozy and two former advisers for allegedly violating a duty to secrecy in the investigation of the case.

Judges are also investigating funding for his failed 2012 election bid, amid reports that false accounting was used to cover campaign expenses that had surpassed the legal limit. Sarkozy's camp says he was unaware of any wrongdoing.

Despite all this, opinion polls show him in a strong potential position for 2017 election. Hollande won the presidency in 2012 on so far unfulfilled promises to boost jobs and the economy, but his popularity has lagged at record lows for much of his term.

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Sohrab Monemi and Louise Dewast in Nanterre contributed to this report.

LONDON (AP) — Serena Williams pulled out of her Wimbledon doubles match with sister Venus after only three games Tuesday.

Serena, who lost in singles Saturday, was checked by medical staff before the doubles match even began. Sitting in her sideline chair, Serena covered her face with her hands.

Eventually, the match against Kristina Barrois and Stefanie Voegele began. With Serena serving in the third game, she was broken at love, hitting faults that bounced before reaching the net.

At love-40, chair umpire Kader Nouni took the unusual step of climbing down and walking over to speak to Serena. She then served another double-fault to trail 3-0.

Serena and Venus walked to the sideline holding hands, and Nouni announced to the crowd: "Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately, Miss Williams has to retire."