Tennessee Said Yes to ICE—and Turned Into a Deportation State

On a rainy evening in early May, several armed ICE agents in tactical vests closed in on a small red sedan at a gas station in South Nashville. The driver, a frightened 55-year-old Salvadoran man named Edgardo David Campos, gripped the steering wheel while bystanders took out their phones and began recording video. As agents pulled the driver side door open, one of them placed his hand on his holstered pistol. An onlooker yelled, “Do you have a warrant? Let him go!”

The agents soon dragged Campos from his vehicle, handcuffed him, and forced him into the back of an unmarked black SUV. He remained silent, with an expression of bewilderment and terror, as the growing crowd called out to him and the arresting officers.

Dash cam footage of ICE officers arresting a person from their car outside of a gas station; one officer holds a rifle.

Tennessee Highway Patrol dashcam footage from the May operation in Nashville.Tennessee Immigrant Rights and Refugee Coalition

Nearby, the Tennessee state trooper who had pulled him over stood watching, his squad car parked behind the red sedan. One of the bystanders shouted questions at him, wondering why he had stopped Campos in the first place. Another woman demanded the trooper’s name and badge number, before asking, “Where are you taking him?”

The trooper remained silent. “I don’t have to give you anything,” an ICE agent responded to the crowd. Within minutes, the agents and state trooper drove off, leaving Campos’ car abandoned at the gas station.

By now, the scene has become familiar in communities across the country. The federal siege of Minneapolis—in which masked deportation forces from multiple agencies terrorized immigrants, clashed in the streets with community members, and killed observers Renée Good and Alex Pretti—was the latest in a series of attacks on blue states, including previous high-profile campaigns in Los Angeles and Chicago. Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ JB Pritzker have lashed out at President Donald Trump and his administration, claiming that it is illegally occupying states and violating the Constitution.

For nearly a week in early May, state troopers roved the city’s Latino neighborhoods at night, with ICE officers riding shotgun and undercover vehicles following behind.

But in Tennessee, where Republicans hold a supermajority in both state legislative chambers, many elected officials have welcomed ICE with open arms. GOP Gov. Bill Lee and other state leaders have touted their close working relationship with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s deportation campaign. As part of this collaboration, they have paired state police with ICE agents, deployed national guard, and green-lighted the federal occupation of Memphis under the “Memphis Safe Task Force,” which, as Mother Jones’ Samantha Michaels reported, residents compared to living in “a war zone, with helicopters circling over neighborhoods, National Guard officers patrolling downtown, and unmarked law enforcement vehicles in the streets.”

Campos’ arrest was part of a May operation in Nashville, dubbed “Operation Flood the Zone,” that could become a template for future incursions into Democrat-run cities in Republican-controlled states. For nearly a week in early May, state troopers roved the city’s Latino neighborhoods at night, with ICE officers riding shotgun and undercover vehicles following behind, leaving fear and panic in their wake. During the operation more than 600 vehicles were stopped, and ICE claimed that nearly 200 residents were arrested.

State troopers used pretexts such as bent license plates, unlit temporary tags, and dark window tints to pull people over, so that ICE, which can’t make routine traffic stops, could check their immigration status—and bypass constitutional and legal protections in the process. During the stops, some ICE agents carried assault rifles and “window punches,” in case a driver refused to roll down their window.

“I’ve Never Seen So Many Police Cars”

As the operation unfolded, Nashville’s Democratic city leaders, who had not been notified in advance, scrambled to understand what was happening. Anguished families searched for missing loved ones, children were left alone at home because their parents never returned, and terrified families went hungry for fear of leaving the house and being targeted. Businesses watched their sales plummet and clients disappear.

Zulfat Suara, a Nashville council member at large, said that as the operation unfolded, “lives were thrown into shambles. There was no due process; people weren’t allowed to see their attorneys. And we didn’t know what was going on.” An immigrant herself from Nigeria, Suara was the first Muslim to be elected to Nashville’s city council in 2019. Since the May ICE operation, she said, she now carries her US passport with her wherever she goes because Black and brown people are being deliberately targeted. “You just have to fit the profile,” she said.

Nine months after the state and federal operation, Nashville residents are still searching for answers about who was taken, and the role that Tennessee played in targeting residents. Meanwhile, across the state, Memphis is still occupied by more than 1,500 federal agents who are working alongside hundreds of state troopers and National Guard. City leaders and residents in both Democratic-led cities said they have been stonewalled by the state and the White House.

To investigate the toll ICE’s operations had in Tennessee, Mother Jones joined forces with Lighthouse Reports, the Nashville Banner, NewsChannel 5, Nashville Noticias, and the Institute for Public Service Reporting in Memphis. We analyzed hundreds of Tennessee Highway Patrol reports and dozens of hours of dashcam and bodycam footage; examined thousands of pages of ICE deportation data, criminal court documents, and school enrollment data; and spoke with deported immigrants and their families. We set out to reveal for the first time what happened to the people picked up in the May dragnet in Nashville and to learn more about how ICE collaborated with state troopers. (The Nashville police department does not currently collaborate with ICE.)

State leaders and ICE claimed the operation was about public safety, but, according to our analysis, only one-quarter of those arrested had any type of criminal record.

We found that more than 90 percent of the drivers stopped on the first night in Nashville—the heaviest day of arrests during the operation—were either Black, Latino, or Middle Eastern. We also found that state police and ICE mainly targeted South Nashville, the most ethnically diverse area in the city, and made traffic stops based on racial profiling. State leaders and ICE also claimed that the operation was for public safety reasons, but, according to our own analysis, only one-quarter of those arrested had any type of criminal record. Additionally, troopers ignored drivers breaking traffic laws, choosing to help ICE identify people to stop instead. Our analysis also showed that ICE arrested fewer people than it claimed after the operation.

During some traffic stops, people protested that they already had appointments with ICE to adjust their immigration status but were arrested anyway. In one case, an ICE agent told the husband of a woman who had an upcoming appointment that the reason for her arrest during the traffic stop was that “people didn’t show up for their appointments,” and that appointments were how “the previous administration did things.” At least 18 people arrested in Nashville were released, including several who were first sent to detention facilities in Louisiana and had to pay expensive immigration bonds. In the wake of the operation, we also heard stories of declining school enrollments and economic losses for immigrant-owned businesses in South Nashville.

“It felt like we were being hunted.”

ICE did not respond to our requests for comment. In a statement, Tennessee Highway Patrol responded that it “conducts lawful traffic stops based on observed violations of Tennessee law and does not engage in enforcement actions based on race, ethnicity, language, or national origin.”

“They kept claiming that this operation was about getting criminals off the street,” said Suara of THP and ICE. “Instead they were picking up people involved in churches, people that had never committed any crime. Good people just trying to make ends meet.”

Nearly every night from May 3 to May 10, at least eight state police vehicles would exit highway patrol headquarters near the Nashville airport with an ICE agent in the passenger seat—and ICE agents in undercover vehicles trailing behind—to trawl Nashville’s immigrant communities until dawn.

“It felt like we were being hunted,” said Jazmin Ramirez, a community organizer with the nonprofit Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC). “If you look Latino, you run the risk of being pulled over.”

Dash cam footage of ICE officers arresting a person from their van at night.

Tennessee Highway Patrol dashcam footage from the May operation in Nashville.Tennessee Immigrant Rights and Refugee Coalition

We watched more than 50 hours of Tennessee Highway Patrol dashcam and bodycam footage taken from the first night, when approximately 47 arrests were made. The footage, much of it previously unviewed, was obtained through a public information lawsuit filed by TIRRC. Much of the released footage is redacted, with the faces of the troopers and ICE agents blurred and segments of their conversations muted. Despite the redactions, which are being challenged in court by TIRRC, ICE agents and state police can be heard on multiple occasions racially profiling drivers to target for stops. In one instance, a trooper pulling over a car with four Latino men in it says to the ICE agent next to him, “This might fill us up. They’re definitely not English speakers.” On a separate occasion, a trooper runs a license before immediately handing it to an ICE agent. “Check him, he doesn’t speak any English,” he says. Yet another trooper tells an ICE agent in a different video, “Nolensville’s always gonna be good,” referring to a road that runs through an area with immigrant-owned businesses. There’s also footage of a highway trooper and ICE agent commandeering a Nashville police officer’s traffic stop after noticing that the driver is Latino. When the ICE agent asks whether Nashville police are aware of the operation, the trooper answers, “They have no idea.”

After finding the man’s ID, one agent notes that he’s the manager of a local Mexican restaurant. “The guacamole is never going to taste the same,” the agent laughs.

The footage captures troopers and agents competitively tallying up the number of people they could detain. “There’s six,” a trooper says of a traffic stop. “Another six,” the ICE agent sitting next to him says jubilantly. “Two juveniles…the driver doesn’t speak English,” the trooper says, handing him the driver’s license to check. The ICE agent responds, “The good news is we have MVM, which they’ll remove family units,” referring to a controversial private security firm that transported children during family separation in the first Trump administration.

In nearly every traffic stop we reviewed, a state trooper was accompanied by at least five ICE agents. During one stop, an ICE agent walks up to a car holding an assault rifle; in another traffic stop with a middle-aged woman alone in a minivan, an agent places his hand on the pistol in his holster. In some cases, agents would not allow drivers to call relatives to notify them they were being detained. “We’re not letting anyone know they’re in immigration custody,” one agent tells a state trooper after the driver begs to call a relative to come pick up his vehicle. “You all want to help me search this car?” the trooper asks the ICE agents, after placing the driver in the back of his squad car. After finding the man’s identification, one of the agents notes that he’s the manager of a local Mexican restaurant. “The guacamole is never going to taste the same,” the agent laughs. They proceed to leave the man’s abandoned vehicle in front of a Cricket mobile phone store. In many of the arrests, ICE agents drive off in the detained people’s vehicles, only to later leave them at commercial strip malls.

Throughout the operation, administration leaders like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made claims that their “targeted enforcement” with state police had captured “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Tennessee.” In a press release, ICE said it had detained 196 people—95 of whom had a criminal conviction—during the weeklong operation.

Social media post tracking ICE sightings and locations in Nashville.

A warning to residents via the Music City MigraWatch Instagram account following the May operation.Lighthouse Reports

Our investigation found these claims to be largely false. By matching ICE data with police reports and the names provided by the agency in its May 13 press release, we determined that at most 159 people were detained by ICE in the Nashville area, not 196—and that of those 159, only 40 had been convicted of a crime, not 95, as ICE claimed. The most common reason for a past conviction was a DUI, followed by traffic offense and forgery.

And instead of the “worst of the worst,” as Noem claimed, the majority of people arrested were in the process of adjusting their immigration status, or like many of the Venezuelan immigrants caught in the operation, previously had temporary protected status, which provides recipients with a legal work visa. The Trump administration revoked protective status for Venezuelans, despite court challenges, in early 2025.

Mike Holley, an attorney with TIRRC who represented some of the people detained during the operation, said he heard from many who had pending immigration court cases but were arrested anyway. “They were deliberately taking people who were the worst candidates for deportation,” he said. “People with ties to the community who were already in the system and have no criminal record. During ordinary times they would probably have released someone like that.”

“It was incredible to watch a city that’s so vibrant and full of people come to a standstill.”

Holley said it was clear that THP was racially profiling people from the footage he viewed of the first night of the operation. Holley called them “roving immigration patrols” and said they violated the pretextual stop doctrine and the Constitution. “This all goes back to the equal protection clause of the Fifth and 14th Amendments,” he said. “Tennessee has a parallel under the Tennessee Constitution…Even if you can stop someone pretextually for not using a turn signal, it can’t be based on race. You can’t just sit out there and say, ‘I’m gonna stop every Black person that doesn’t use their signal.’ But that’s what they chose to do. And that’s not allowed.” (Following Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence to a Supreme Court ruling in September, in which the court okayed the use of race by immigration officers as a proxy for immigration status, this brand of profiling became known as a “Kavanaugh stop.”)

In this case, however, it was largely Nashville’s thriving Latino community that was targeted, not its Black residents. Analyzing the ICE deportation data for the weeklong enforcement operation, we found that the overwhelming majority of people arrested were Latin American, with most being from Mexico and Guatemala, followed by Honduras, Venezuela, and El Salvador. At least seven people from the Middle East were also arrested during the dragnet, including people originally from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

Ramirez said it was startling to see the busy streets of Nashville empty out as the enforcement operation continued in immigrant communities. “It was incredible to watch a city that’s so vibrant and full of people come to a standstill,” she said. “There was just this fear in our community, and this hyper-alertness. Every vehicle looked suspicious.”

Dash cam footage of a local sheriff and ICE officers arresting a person from their car outside of a gas station.

Tennessee Highway Patrol dashcam footage from the May operation in Nashville.Tennessee Immigrant Rights and Refugee Coalition

In late October, city council member Terry Vo pointed out the MAPCO gas station in South Nashville where she’d witnessed Campos’ arrest. “It still haunts me,” she said.

That night, Vo had been driving around with Zulfat Suara and other city council members who are members of the Metro Council Immigrant Caucus to understand whom the state troopers and ICE were targeting. Vo pulled into the gas station to discover Campos surrounded by armed agents, with volunteer monitors from Music City MigraWatch yelling at him not to open his door.

“There are probably many more Edgardos out there that nobody knows about, right?”

As we pulled into the gas station, she pointed to a parking space in front of the convenience store. “That’s where they left his car,” she said. “At the time, we didn’t know who he was, who his family was.” Vo said the police and ICE left Campos’ car unlocked, and the council members searched it for contact information. “We didn’t know his name. We didn’t know anything about him. At that point, we handed it over to community advocates, who were eventually able to notify his family.”

Vo shook her head, visibly frustrated. “It was sad,” she said. “He’s an older man in the later years of his life and a very devout person. I often think, ‘Could I have done better?’” she asked. “I think if the community had not been there that night to record and watch, we wouldn’t even know he was taken. And there are probably many more Edgardos out there that nobody knows about, right?”

Holley said lawyers at TIRRC scrambled to reach people in detention, like Campos, during the operation, but they were moved quickly from one jail to the next in Tennessee and then to Louisiana or Texas, with no way to contact legal help and limited communication with family members. “A lot of people agreed to deportation before there was even a chance to talk with them,” Holley said. “They were either gone or had already signed something.”

The question of what happened to Campos and to the dozens of other people detained over those seven days has remained an open one for city officials like Vo, advocates, and members of the community. ICE and other state authorities have refused to say. The operation and its impact have remained a black box.

To provide answers, we analyzed ICE deportation data and Tennessee Highway Patrol incident reports. In Campos’ case, according to the THP, he was marked down as a “stopping violator.” This is the only reason stated in at least 90 percent of the Tennessee Highway Patrol traffic reports we analyzed from the Nashville operation.

After being taken into ICE custody, Campos was sent to the Putnam County Jail, 80 miles east of Nashville. After three days, he was transferred further east to the Knox County Detention Center. Like many people picked up during the operation in Nashville, Campos was transferred within days from Tennessee to Louisiana. Our investigation found that as of mid-October 2025, according to the most current publicly available ICE deportation data, 121 people were deported and 15 people were bonded out after being sent to Louisiana. An additional 12 people still remain in jail.

Tired of Dystopian Sci-Fi? You Might Like Solarpunk.

I was doomscrolling again. It was a fall evening in 2023, and I found myself sucked into a stream of posts about our collapsing climate: droughts causing billions in Dust Bowl–style crop damage, Florida’s worst-ever coral bleaching, a record melt in Greenland.

To distract myself, I picked up The Lost Cause, the latest sci-fi novel from author Cory Doctorow, a friend and fellow nerd. To my deep surprise, it stirred something unexpected: a feeling of hope.

At first glance, the novel’s backdrop is an absolute bummer. It takes place in America several decades from now, when rising seas have destroyed entire coastal towns and millions of climate refugees wander around homeless. Small farmers work as sharecroppers for Big Agriculture. The West is choked with forest fires so ferocious that Californians take hits from oxygen cans.

And yet, clean tech has gotten remarkably better. Solar panels are so cheap and powerful that they can be used to heat concrete kilns and build entire buildings carbon-neutrally. A progressive president’s Green New Deal guarantees universal employment, including jobs relocating entire coastal cities inland, away from the rising, voracious oceans. The heroes—SoCal resident Brooks and his twentysomething friends—spend their days doing on-demand work (solarizing schools, building high-density housing) and chill out at night, drinking artificial bourbon they brew in a bioreactor. While clean energy is abundant, so is political strife: MAGA-esque forces, armed to the teeth, violently oppose waves of climate “refus” arriving from fire-wrecked Oregon. When Brooks and his crew decide to build refugee housing anyway, their clash with right-wing old-timers gets nasty and violent fast—complete with cross burnings.

If you want to nudge people toward a better tomorrow, start with art.

So, not exactly a utopia. But what enchanted me about the book was its vibe of possibility. Here was a world where climate change had gotten worse, but people were adapting—cleverly using tech to rebuild communities that would generate far fewer emissions and far less waste than before. It was a glimpse of a new destination.

Sci-fi has always offered this, right? Heady alternatives to everyday realities! But for the past few decades, a big chunk of sci-fi had gravitated toward dystopia. The “cyberpunk” movement imagined technology and capitalism run amok—overcrowded, skyscrapered cities; enervated populations jacking into virtual reality realms; governments sidelined or incinerated. There were some notable exceptions: Novelists Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, imagined people living in closer harmony with nature or in worlds without capitalism. But they were outliers. The aughts, which brought us a second Iraq War, the Great Recession, and increasingly volatile natural disasters, also set the scene for astoundingly bleak bestselling young-adult series such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner. Winter was coming, and as far as many sci-fi writers could prognosticate, humanity was unlikely to rise to the challenge.

Dystopic tales of the future can be valuable, showing us what might happen if we let malignant trends go unchecked. But for me, man, those warnings have long since sunk in. I wanted pointers to a path forward. Which is why I’ve become so intrigued with solarpunk.

Doctorow’s book is part of a sci-fi trend that’s gained traction in recent years, picking up on the threads Le Guin and Robinson laid down. Solarpunk poses a fascinating question: What would a world that had seriously tackled climate change look like?

Solarpunk novels envision societies that benefit from clean tech and live in tandem with nature.Tor Books; Stelliform Press; 47North

Many solarpunk thinkers told me their first encounter with the idea, though he didn’t coin the term, was a 2014 essay by Adam Flynn, an American writer and public health strategist, titled “Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto”—his contribution to the Arizona State University sci-fi collaboration Project Hieroglyph.

“We’re solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair,” Flynn wrote. Artists and activists needed to envision “ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and more importantly for the generations that follow us…Imagine permaculturists thinking in cathedral time. Consider terraced irrigation systems that also act as fluidic computers. Contemplate the life of a Department of Reclamation officer managing a sparsely populated American southwest given over to solar collection and pump storage.”

Other writers were, it turns out, having similar thoughts. They were deeply worried about climate and weary of sci-fi’s doomerist turn. They wanted art that elucidated a way forward, so they set about creating fictional glimpses of a sustainable future. In a duet of novels, Becky Chambers sketched out a world where humanity had survived climactic collapse—the robots became self-aware and politely fled into the wilderness—and then figured out how to exist in a better balance with nature: Her characters live in skyscrapers engulfed with vines, ride e-bike camper vans powered by solar panel coatings, and have abandoned swaths of their world to the wild.

In Sarena Ulibarri’s 2023 novel Another Life, a communal society runs solar desalination plants that irrigate Death Valley. The 2018 Brazilian short-story anthology Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World includes a classic hard-bitten-detective whodunit set in a world where homes have biodigesters that turn kitchen scraps into fuel.

Solarpunk often depicts technology deployed not to conquer nature, but to complement it—sometimes in deeply weird ways. In the story “Thank Geo,” whose author goes by the moniker BrightFlame, humanity has wired trees with probes that let people talk to them.

The solarpunk community’s interests extend beyond literature, though. Some of the greatest ferment is online, where everyday folks cram into themed subreddits, Tumblrs, and Substacks, posting their mood-board images of a better future. Some of it is fantasy—solar airships with grappling hooks hovering over vertical farms—but more often, the posts involve solarpunkish things already happening: people planting guerrilla wetlands in aqueducts, solar-powered root cellars, “agrivoltaic” farms where sheep graze beneath industrial photovoltaic arrays. Broadly speaking, as Ulibarri put it to me, solarpunk depicts “a future that I might actually want to live in.”

Solarpunk characters are flawed, despite the genre’s optimism: “As a society, we have not become suddenly worthy of utopia.”

I have often assumed, naively, that societal transformation depends on explicitly political discourse. People write manifestos and policy papers, and political movements and parties build on and promote those ideas. But the world of solarpunk operates on the same understanding that propels Steve Bannon: Politics is downstream of culture. If you want to nudge people toward a better tomorrow, start with art. The point, said Jay Springett, a writer who co-manages a popular solarpunk Tumblr, is to give people “permission to imagine a future.”

Another way of thinking about it, Doctorow told me, is to follow philosopher Daniel Dennett’s argument that “fiction is an intuition pump.” When reading a novel, Doctorow explained, you might “kind of mentally rehearse what you should do when bad things happen, so in that moment you’re not paralyzed—like a fire drill.”

A lot of apocalyptic literature would prime us with terrible intuition: how to survive in a Hobbesian everyone-for-themselves scenario of neighbor slaughtering neighbor for scarce fuel and food. Novels like The Lost Cause bolster a competing notion: that surviving and thriving in the face of climate-driven disruption happens only if people band together and rely on sustainable technologies.

One intriguing aspect of solarpunk culture is that it feels proximal—achievable. The tech is scaled up, but much of it involves innovations we possess now, like solar panels, wind turbines, 3D printers, passive cooling systems, and recycling (on steroids). “One of the key tenets of solarpunk is that you don’t need to wait for new technology,” explained novelist and teacher Cameron Roberson. We don’t need unobtainium or warp drives—just political will.

Indeed, solarpunk often depicts societies and groups that have strayed from capitalism—or hierarchical governments of any sort. Decision-making is often racked with the bitter internecine squabbles for which nonhierarchical groups are infamous. But things work…more or less? Doctorow jokes that part of the thought experiment in The Lost Cause is: “What would it be like to have a space program or a skyscraper that you made like you made Wikipedia? It would have all the fights; it would have all the frustrations—but also, it would be a skyscraper!”

This anti-capitalist turn is probably the most speculative aspect of solarpunk. A popular adage is that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Solarpunk flips that on its head: If you’re going to imagine the world not ending, maybe you need to imagine a new economic system.

At its weakest, solarpunk can get treacly, with societies too well adjusted to seem believable and denizens as amiable as Winnie-the-Pooh. The most interesting stories, to me, are ones in which we tackle climate change but are still terrible to one another. In 2022’s The Peacekeeper, Chippewa novelist B.L. Blanchard imagines a contemporary North America that was never colonized. Native populations have all the mod cons—smartphones, etc.—but are still so nature-oriented that they lean hard into clean tech. Emissionless public transit abounds and huge mirrors along the Great Lakes reflect sunlight onto massive solar panels. But their world isn’t free of misdeed; The Peacekeeper is a murder mystery, complete with a tormented detective.

As novelist Roberson puts it, we can save the world and still lose ourselves. In his forthcoming novel, a noir tale, the tech is clean and the souls are dirty. “Government is still government, people are still people, criminals are still criminals,” he told me. “As a society, we have not become suddenly worthy of utopia.”

Solarpunk, by now, has adopted some weary sci-fi cliches and added a few of its own. Domed cities! Grandpa explaining to the grandkids how everything fell apart! 3D printers that seem to be able to manufacture, well, anything! Even real-world corporations have picked up on the subgenre’s gauzy imagery. Yogurt-maker Chobani released an animated commercial in 2021 depicting a farm serviced by moss-covered androids and pole-mounted raincloud generators. Solarpunk forums argued hotly about whether this was a) corporate greenwashing; b) a sign that their vision could appeal to a wider public; or, more likely, c) both.

There are political crossovers, too. On an Instagram Live in 2023, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she was a big believer in solarpunk—the yet-unsuccessful Green New Deal package she championed did, in fact, contain the very blend of energy policies and economic reforms (job guarantees, universal health care, progressive taxation) that solarpunks fantasize about.

“To go, in less than 10 years, from Tumblr, where you and I found it, to having people in the halls of power endorse your cultural project, that’s pretty good,” said Andrew Dana Hudson, who penned a series of solarpunk stories. “We built an entire cultural architectural aesthetic around powering things with gasoline and coal,” he added. Now artists and writers need to make the alternative just as sexy and appealing.

The time seems ripe. Theodra Bane, a professor at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, has taught a solarpunk class for three years now. Far more students apply to get in than she can accommodate. Roughly a third, Bane said, will say something along the lines of, “I don’t know what solarpunk is, but the course description led me to believe that it is a positive, optimistic class—and I need optimism right now.”

Mother Jones9 hours, 0 minutes ago

Video: Trump Nuked a Major EPA Climate Rule. Here’s What You Need to Know.

On February 12, Donald Trump dropped the climatic equivalent of an atomic bomb. He announced the repeal of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 endangerment finding, the basis of the EPA’s ability to regulate climate-warming emissions. “This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history,” proclaimed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“This is corruption, plain and simple,” countered Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

It also will likely end up costing Americans money, reports Dharna Noor of Guardian US, who, along with Grist reporter Jake Bittle, is featured in this explainer video from our Climate Desk collaboration and the talented team at Reveal.

In short, the administration’s move is an attempt to subvert reality. The Obama-era finding established that atmospheric greenhouse gases are bad for human health and welfare, allowing them to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. In 2025, a panel of scientists affirmed the finding, writing: “The evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused [greenhouse gases] is beyond scientific dispute.”

Condemnation was swift and plentiful, and called out the administration’s baldly transactional relationships with oil and gas producers. “Put simply, this is a gift-wrapped package for the fossil fuel industry,” Manish Bapna, CEO of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, told Inside Climate News. “It is unscientific, it is bad economics, and it is illegal. So we’re gonna fight it.”

They already are, as Noor reports in this Guardian follow-up.

Legal experts say the administration may be biting off more than it can chew. “It seems to me unlikely that the [US Supreme Court] would say that the EPA has no power to regulate carbon,” Michael Lewyn, a professor of environmental law at Touro Law Center and critic of environmental regulations, told Grist.

Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, didn’t mince words when talking to Wired’sMolly Taft_._ “I don’t see any plan, any strategy, any end game…just fuck everything up as much as you can.”

Mother Jones1 day, 3 hours ago

Colbert Takes CBS to Task, Again

Late Show host Stephen Colbert once again gave his audience the inside scoop on Tuesday amid the ongoing clash involving him, network executives, and a candidate for US Senate in Texas.

The latest comes as CBS refuted Colbert’s assertion that he had been instructed not to interview Texas State Representative James Talarico and that he had been dissuaded from bringing up the situation on air.

“There’s another big story today,” Colbert said on Tuesday, as a newsy photo popped up of himself. “And it’s me.”

“I was ready to let the whole thing go,” he continued, “until a few hours ago when my groupchat blowed up. Because, without ever talking to me, the corporation put out this press release.”

Colbert read a paper copy of the statement, which challenged the claim that he had been prohibited from interviewing Talarico. “A small piece of paper considering how many butts it’s trying to cover,” Colbert quipped. CBS’ lawyers, he continued, “know damn well that every word of my script last night was approved by CBS’ lawyers, who for the record approve every script that goes on the air.”

For those just tuning in: On Monday, Colbert said that CBS’s lawyers had instructed the host “in no uncertain terms…that we could not” have Talarico as the show’s scheduled guest. According to these lawyers, Talarico’s appearance would run afoul of equal time guidelines brought about by Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. A January letter by Carr challenged long-held rules about what kind of broadcasts have to provide equal opportunity for time to political candidates in an election. Previously, talk shows and late-night hosts were excused. Carr, a key ally of President Donald Trump, laid out how he’d like to remove those exceptions.

According to Colbert, that meant CBS telling him not to interview Texas State Representative James Talarico, a rising Democratic name who is running to flip a US Senate seat blue. “We were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” the host said Monday.

Colbert still interviewed the Senate hopeful, but instead of doing it on air, The Late Show team posted the chat on YouTube, as streaming services do not fall under this FCC guideline. That video has since garnered over 5,421,000 views as of publication.

Rep. James Talarico and Stephen Colbert on the CBS series The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Rep. James Talarico and Stephen Colbert on the CBS series The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty

This whole incident comes as Colbert only has a few months left on the show after being ousted by Paramount, CBS’s parent company.

“I’m just so surprised that this giant, global corporation would not stand up to these bullies. Come on, you’re paramount!” Colbert said on Tuesday, before joking, “No. No! You’re more than that. You’re Paramount +.”

And that the lawyers would send out this statement, without discussing with Colbert first, was “really surprising.”

“I don’t even know what to do with this crap,” he said, holding the printed out release at the end of the segment. “Oh, hold on,” Colbert continued, pulling out a dog poop bag, crumbling and picking up the paper, and discarding it to the side.

Mother Jones1 day, 9 hours ago

Big Tech’s Claims That AI Can Help Fix the Climate Crisis Are “Greenwashing”

_This story was originally published b_y the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report.

Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector’s explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacentres, the analysis of 154 statements found.

The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot were leading to a “material, verifiable, and substantial” reduction in planet-heating emissions.

Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry’s tactics were “diversionary” and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to “greenwashing.”

He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. “These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business,” said Joshi. “Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it.”

One widely cited figure claim came from a consulting firm’s blog post that attributed it to “experience with clients.”

Most of the claims that were scrutinized came from an International Energy Agency (IEA) report, which was reviewed by leading tech companies, and corporate reports from Google and Microsoft.

The IEA report—which devoted two chapters to the potential climate benefits of traditional AI—had a roughly even split between claims that rested on academic publications, corporate websites, and those that had no evidence, according to the analysis. For Google and Microsoft, most claims lacked evidence.

The analysis, released during the AI Impact Summit in Delhi this week, argues the tech industry has misleadingly presented climate solutions and carbon pollution as a package deal by “muddling” types of AI.

Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform and community,who was not involved in the report, said it added nuance to a debate that often lumped very different applications together.

“When we talk about AI that’s relatively bad for the planet, it’s mostly generative AI and large language models,” said Luccioni, who has pushed the industry to be more transparent about its carbon footprint. “When we talk about AI that’s ‘good’ for the planet, it’s often predictive models, extractive models, or old-school AI models.”

Green claims even for traditional AI tended to rely on weak forms of evidence that had not been independently verified, the analysis found. Only 26 percent of the green claims that were studied cited published academic research, while 36 percent did not cite evidence at all.

One of the earliest examples identified in the report was a widespread claim that AI could help mitigate 5-10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

The figure, which Google repeated as recently as April last year, came from a report it commissioned from BCG, a consulting firm, which cited a blog post it wrote in 2021 that attributed the figure to its “experience with clients.”

Data centers consume just 1 percent of the world’s electricity but their share of US electricity is projected to more than double to 8.6 percent by 2035, according to BloombergNEF. The IEA predicts they will account for at least 20 percent of the rich world’s growth in electricity demand to the end of the decade.

While the energy consumption of a simple text query to a large language model such as ChatGPT may be as little as running a lightbulb for a minute, partial industry disclosures suggest, it rises considerably for complex functions such as video generation and deep research, and has troubled some energy researchers with the speed and scale of its growth.

A spokesperson for Google said: “Our estimated emissions reductions are based on a robust substantiation process grounded in the best available science, and we have transparently shared the principles and methodology that guide it.”

Microsoft declined to comment, while the IEA did not respond to requests for comment. Joshi said the discourse around AI’s climate benefits needed to be “brought back to reality.”

“The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted data center expansion,” he said.

Mother Jones1 day, 10 hours ago

The Man Who Taught Nonviolence to Martin Luther King Jr.

Back in February 2010, the radio show State of the Re:Union, created by Al Letson, produced an award-winning episode looking at civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. The episode was called “Who Is This Man?” because while Rustin was not well known, his work supported the likes of Martin Luther King Jr.

Rustin was a man with a number of seemingly incompatible labels: Black, gay, Quaker—identifications that served to earn him as many detractors as admirers. Although he had numerous passions and pursuits, his most transformative act, one that certainly changed the course of American history, was to counsel MLK on the use of nonviolent resistance.

Rustin also helped engineer the 1963 March on Washington and frame the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. With such lofty achievements, why isn’t Rustin considered an icon of both civil rights and humanity? How could a person who changed the course of American history not be a household name? Was he purposely kept out of the history books?

This week on More To The Story, we bring you an important piece for Black History Month, a reflection on Rustin.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Mother JonesFeb 17, 2026, 4:55 PM

CBS Didn’t Want Colbert to Talk to This Democratic Candidate. He Did It Anyway.

Executives at CBS News made it clear to Late Show host Stephen Colbert: he wasn’t to interview Texas State Representative James Talarico last night, nor was he to discuss how he wasn’t supposed to talk to the Democratic US Senate hopeful. But Colbert, who only has months left of his tenure on the show after being ousted by Paramount Global, didn’t listen.

“You know who’s not one of my guests tonight?” Colbert began on Monday night. Talarico, he continued, “was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast.” Colbert said that, “in some uncertain terms,” the network added that “I could not mention me not having him on.”

“Because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this,” he said, to cheers from the audience.

Colbert went on to explain how the directive to not interview Talarico follows January 21 regulatory guidance from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, upending longtime standards for how talk show and late-night hosts can interview politicians. For years, late-night hosts were granted an exception to the FCC’s equal opportunities requirement, which held that broadcast TV and radio must provide equal time for each candidate in a race, regardless of political affiliation.

“Let’s just call this what it is,” Colbrt said on air Monday, “Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV.”

As Colbert noted, the equal time rule doesn’t apply to streaming or cable. So, he interviewed Talarico anyway, off-air, and posted it to the show’s YouTube. According to Colbert, he wasn’t even allowed to put a URL or QR code on the screen to point viewers to the video. Still, as of publication, the interview has over 1 million views.

In his interview with Talarico, the pair discussed the unique circumstances of their chat. (Colbert would later say that the Texan is the first guest to exclusively appear on YouTube.)

“Stephen,” Talarico said, “this is the party that ran against cancel culture. And now they’re trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read. And this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture, the kind that comes from the top.”

“Corporate media executives,” he added, “are selling out the First Amendment to curry favor with corrupt politicians.”

Talarico is a rising Democratic name, maybe best known for being an outspoken man of faith who advocates for the separation of church and State. He’s hoping to flip one of Texas’ Senate seats blue.

As Colbert noted, this isn’t the first time Talarico has been on the opposing side of Carr’s FCC.

Earlier this month, the FCC launched a probe into ABC’s “The View” for having Talarico on, questioning if the hosts violated equal time rules. A situation that Colbert called “absolutely shocking” on air, before joking, “James Talarico did The View before my show? Et tu, Whoopi?”

The Late Show host asked Talarico about the probe, saying “Do you mean to cause trouble?”

Talarico laughed, stopped, and then answered with a blunt confidence: “I think Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas.”

Mother JonesFeb 17, 2026, 3:22 PM

Murdoch’s Defense in Epstein Lawsuit: Trump Is Lewd

A version of the below article first appearedin David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

Sometimes there’s no smoking gun, but there’s the smell of gunpowder.

That seems to be the case with Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump gang’s handling of the scandal looks as if it is purposefully designed to raise suspicions. Fighting the release of the Epstein files, declaring this whole subject ought to be dropped, and, of course, Trump’s contradictory statements about his relationship with Epstein—it all comes across as fishy and suggests guilt of…something. Last week, the news emerged that in 2006, when sex crime charges against Epstein in Palm Beach became public, Trump called the city’s police chief and said, “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.” Yet after Epstein was arrested on federal charges in 2019, Trump said he had known nothing of Epstein’s abuse of teenage girls: “I had no idea.”

Was he lying about what he knew back in the day? This—shall we say?—contradiction is hard to square. But it’s a good indication that nothing Trump claims about Epstein should be believed. Remember the birthday card? In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that a birthday album Ghislaine Maxwell prepared for Epstein in 2003 contained a greeting from Trump: A drawing of a naked female body with an imagined dialogue between “Jeffrey” and “Donald” that ended, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump’s signature mimicked pubic hair in the crotch of the figure.

Would Trump really sue? Perhaps he felt emboldened by the settlements he had wrung out of ABC News and CBS News for the bogus cases he filed against them.

Trump insisted this birthday message was a “fake thing.” He said, “I never wrote a picture in my life.” That was false; he had drawn sketches that were sold at auctions. And he said he was “gonna sue the Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.”

That seemed like one of his many phony-baloney threats. After all, the Journal had found this Trump drawing in an album with well wishes from dozens of Epstein associates. It seemed legit. Would Trump really sue? Perhaps he felt emboldened by the settlements he had wrung out of ABC News and CBS News for the bogus cases he filed against them.

He indeed sued the Wall Street Journal, the reporters who wrote the story, and right-wing media titan Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corps owns the newspaper. He claimed the article had defamed him.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in southern Florida, contends that no such “authentic letter or drawing exists,” and it charges that the Wall Street Journal “concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.” (This implies the birthday message was forged by someone, but the lawsuit presents no evidence of that.) Trump argues this article “resulted in overwhelming financial and reputational” harm for him. He demands at least $10 billion in damages.

The case proceeded with various motions—even after the House Government Oversight Committee released a full version of the Epstein birthday album it had received from the Epstein estate, which contained the Trump drawing. And Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal submitted a reply to Trump’s complaint with a motion to dismiss the case.

Murdoch says Trump is such a lout that an association with an affectionate note to a sex criminal cannot tarnish his public image.

This reply hasn’t received much attention. Yet it should, for in the filing, Murdoch et al. argue that Trump is too lewd a person to suffer reputational harm from this story. To prove this, Murdoch relies on the infamous Access Hollywood video in which Trump boasted that due to his celebrity status he could sexually assault women.

Yes, Murdoch, whose Fox News and New York Post provide the most prominent media platforms for slavish Trump worship, says Trump is such a lout that an association with an affectionate note to a sex criminal cannot tarnish his public image.

In this filing, Murdoch’s legal team offers several arguments to counter Trump’s claim. It notes first and foremost that the WSJ article was accurate and points to the release of the birthday album by the congressional committee as proof of that. The attorneys say there was “nothing defamatory about a person sending a bawdy note to a friend,” highlighting that three months before the birthday book was presented to Epstein, New York magazine quoted Trump saying he had known Epstein for 15 years and believed he was a “terrific” guy who was “a lot of fun to be with” and liked “beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” And the Murdoch retort states that there had been no malice—a prerequisite for winning a defamation case against a public figure—which only exists when a defendant has reason to believe the story is false.

“Bawdy” is doing a lot of work here. Murdoch’s lawyers could have gone with “sleazy” or “lecherous” or “misogynist.”

Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal’s response rips the hide off Trump’s case on many levels. For instance, it contends, rather reasonably, that reporting Trump was pals with Epstein before Epstein was busted is not defamatory. But the killer argument is that the WSJ article was “consistent with plaintiff’s reputation.” Trump, Murdoch’s lawyers maintain, “admitted to instances of using bawdy language when discussing women. Plaintiff thus cannot allege that the Article damaged his reputation.”

“Bawdy” is doing a lot of work here. Murdoch’s lawyers could have gone with “sleazy” or “lecherous” or “misogynist.” But they landed on a Benny Hill-ish description that’s less offensive in tone.

Murdoch asks the court to “take judicial notice of both the extensive public reporting of [Trump’s] past comments” and notes that Trump “has a well-documented reputation for bawdiness based on his past statements about women.” The complaint serves up examples starting with Trump’s infamous remark: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

It continues:

President Trump also has a well-documented history (over which he has never sued) of making bawdy comments in venues like The Howard Stern Show and elsewhere. In 1991, Plaintiff gave an interview with Esquire_, in which he stated, “[I]t really doesn’t matter what [the media] write[s] as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” In 2006, on_ Larry King Live_, Plaintiff referred to actress Angelina Jolie as having “been with so many guys she makes me look like a baby[.]” Any allegation that President Trump wrote a bawdy birthday note is thus consistent with his public reputation—which he has himself acknowledged—for using “locker room” talk and does not plausibly state any harm._

The filing from Trump’s lawyer requests that the court toss out all the exhibits that chronicled Trump’s lewd and misogynistic remarks, asserting that these “random instances” did not render Trump “impervious to harm.”

The complaint includes as an exhibit a list of quotes from Trump assembled by Politico in 2015 that included a remark he made in 1992: “Women, you have to treat ’em like shit.” The Murdoch response further argues that there was no reason for the reporters and the newspaper to doubt the article’s accuracy—which would be necessary for proving malice—“because it was entirely consistent with President Trump’s reputation.”

Bottom line: Trump is precisely the kind of guy who would have hobnobbed with Epstein, not been put off or alarmed by Epstein’s interest in younger women, and sent him a message like this one.

Murdoch asked the court to kick the lawsuit to the curb:

This case calls out for dismissal. In an affront to the First Amendment, the President of the United States brought this lawsuit to silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public. By its very nature, this meritless lawsuit threatens to chill the speech of those who dare to publish content that the President does not like.

In October, Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, replied. His filing requests that the court toss out all the exhibits that chronicled Trump’s lewd and misogynistic remarks, asserting that these “random instances” did not render Trump “impervious to harm.” It insists there was no evidence Trump “actually wrote and signed the letter or sent it” and claims the Journal article was “clearly calculated to subject President Trump to hatred, disgust, ridicule, contempt or disgrace.” The story, Trump’s mouthpiece maintains, was part of a “deliberate smear campaign.”

A hearing on the case was held in December. As of this week, Judge Darrin Gayles, an Obama appointee, had rendered no decision on Murdoch’s request for a dismissal.

This lawsuit could be seen as a sideshow to the ongoing Epstein mess. But it shows the length that Trump will go to in order to wipe away the Epstein stain. He might have said, “Yeah, as we all know, I did socialize with Epstein before his crimes were revealed and, like many others, contributed to an album compiled for his birthday—before I dumped him and kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago.” A stance like that would likely not have caused Trump that much trouble, given there’s already plenty of creepy images and videos of Trump hanging with Epstein at that time. Instead, Trump seems to be denying the undeniable.

His lawsuit is a case of Trump protesting too much, as well as a threat to the First Amendment. And it’s a tad ironic that Murdoch, whose media empire has done so much to elevate and protect Trump, now defends the Journal’s reporting by depicting Trump—accurately—as a vile misogynist. Or as his lawyers put it, “bawdy.”

There are still questions lingering about Trump and Epstein. What did Trump know and when did he know it? If this case isn’t derailed, there will be discovery. That means Trump will sit for a deposition, and, finally, he will have to answer those questions

Mother JonesFeb 17, 2026, 2:32 PM

Louisiana Bets Big on “Blue Ammonia.” Communities Along Cancer Alley Brace for the Cost.

This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.

From her home in Donaldsonville, La., less than three miles from the world’s largest ammonia plant, Ashley Gaignard says the air itself carries a chemical edge.

The odor, she said, is sharp and lingering. Years ago, when her son attended an elementary school about a mile from the massive CF Industries ammonia production facility, he would begin wheezing during recess, she recalled. His breathing problems eased only after he transferred to a school several miles farther away.

“I’m not against progress,” Gaignard said. “We are against development that poisons and displaces and disregards human life.”

Ashley Gaignard sit and looks directly into the camera.

DONALDSONVILLE, LOUISIANA – JANUARY 28: Ashley Gaignard on January 28, 2026 in Donaldsonville, Louisiana.(Photo for Floodlight)

Now, along Louisiana’s Mississippi River corridor, fertilizer giant CF Industries and other companies are placing multibillion-dollar bets on “blue ammonia” — a product made from fossil fuels but with extra technology to capture planet-warming gases and pipe them underground for storage.

To date, no commercial-scale blue ammonia plants are operating — but more than 20 have been proposed nationwide, according to Oil and Gas Watch. Four of the largest such plants are slated for Louisiana, in communities already saturated with petrochemical pollution.

An extensive review by Floodlight found no evidence that existing carbon capture projects anywhere in the world have achieved anything close to the emissions cuts companies like CF Industries are promising. Permit documents, meanwhile, show that the proposed plants combined could be allowed to discharge more than 2,800 tons each year of air pollutants (not greenhouse gases), including more than 400 tons of ammonia.

Ashley Gaignard stands outside pointing to pollution in the distance.

DONALDSONVILLE, LOUISIANA – JANUARY 28: Ashley Gaignard on January 28, 2026 in Donaldsonville, Louisiana.(Photo for Floodlight)

Classified as a highly hazardous chemical, ammonia can damage the lungs and hurt the skin, eyes and throat. In the air, it can form fine particles that are linked to increased risks of heart disease and stroke, and can be deadly — particularly for children, older adults and people with heart or lung disease.

The Louisiana plants would also be allowed to release carcinogens, including benzene and formaldehyde.

The companies proposing those plants — CF Industries, Air Products, Clean Hydrogen Works and St. Charles Clean Fuels — have said their operations will provide an abundant source of clean fertilizer and clean energy to global markets, including countries whose climate and trade policies favor low-carbon fuels. They’ve also said they’ll create nearly 840 permanent jobs and millions in new tax revenue for local communities while prioritizing public health and safety.

Aerial view of CF Industries, the world's largest ammonia and nitrogen plant.

The CF Industries complex in Donaldsonville, La., is the world’s largest ammonia and nitrogen plant.(Ted Auch / FracTracker Alliance, 2024; with aerial support by SouthWings)

“We are designing the facility with advanced emissions controls, robust monitoring systems, and strong operational practices to minimize impacts,” said Chandra Stacie, the director of community relations for St. Charles Clean Fuels. “Our goal is to operate responsibly and be a constructive, long-term partner.”

Environmental advocates, scientists and community members, however, say the new ammonia plants would delay the phase-out of fossil fuels — and bring substantial air pollution and safety risks to places that have long borne the health costs of America’s industrial economy.

Why Louisiana became ground zero

While the historic streets of Donaldsonville recently served as the backdrop to the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, the town’s real-life drama is far less cinematic.

Donaldsonville lies at the center of Cancer Alley, a chemical corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known for its elevated health risks and dense concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries.

Now this stretch of Louisiana is also ground zero for a new buildout: four proposed blue ammonia plants, with several more planned for Texas.

So, why the Gulf Coast?

South Louisiana has abundant natural gas for ammonia production and ports that connect to international shipping routes.

INTERACTIVE MAP

“Louisiana’s Blue Ammonia Plants”

The state offers an existing pipeline network, a seasoned chemical-industry workforce and political leaders who have consistently favored industrial development. The companies proposing ammonia plants can also tap generous state and federal incentives, including more than $2 billion in federal tax credits for carbon capture projects.

The Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, allows companies to collect up to $85 for each ton of carbon captured and permanently stored.

And the state of Louisiana is offering developers millions more in grants and tax breaks designed to spur economic development.

Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who has studied carbon capture systems for years, said there’s little to be gained — and much to lose — from making ammonia this way.

“These plants increase air pollution, they increase global warming … they increase not only energy costs, but total social costs, and so there’s zero benefit — except to the people who are taking the subsidies to implement these projects,” he said.

INTERACTIVE MAP

“Proposed Blue Ammonia Plants Across the U.S.”

The scale of subsidies for the proposed Louisiana ammonia plants is “off-the-charts outrageous” — and amounts to a bad deal for taxpayers, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks and analyzes economic development projects. The plants are unlikely to deliver anything close to $2 billion a year in public benefits, he said.

“It can only be accurately called a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers to corporate shareholders,” he said.

Ambitious pitches, tougher reality

Ammonia has long been a workhorse of the global economy, quietly underpinning modern agriculture. It’s the key ingredient in nitrogen fertilizer, and demand is expected to grow as global food production strains to keep pace with population growth.

Now, producers say it could play a far larger role — not just as fertilizer, but as a climate-friendly fuel for ships and power plants.

Researchers work inside Sandia Labs.

Researchers at Sandia Labs explore using solar power-generated heat to produce ammonia. Using renewable energy to create ammonia instead of fossil fuels can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, researchers say. (Craig Fritz / Sandia Labs Flickr)

When it’s burned as a fuel, ammonia doesn’t emit carbon dioxide (though it can produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas roughly 270 times more potent than carbon dioxide).

It can also be burned with other fuels in power plants or potentially used to store hydrogen for shipping and later conversion for use in fuel cells.

But the process commonly used to make ammonia carries a heavy climate cost.

Most production relies on hydrogen derived from natural gas, a process that releases carbon dioxide. Enormous amounts of energy — typically from fossil fuels — are then used to force hydrogen and nitrogen to combine under extreme heat and pressure.

Nitrogen fertilizer plants in the U.S. released more than 46 million tons of heat-trapping gases in 2021 — roughly the emissions of nine million cars running for a year — according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project. Globally, almost 2% of carbon dioxide emissions come from making ammonia — or as much as the energy system emissions of South Africa, according to the International Energy Agency.

That’s where carbon capture comes in. The companies planning blue ammonia plants say they will isolate most of the carbon dioxide released, piping it deep underground for permanent storage.

Texas-based Clean Hydrogen Works says its Ascension Clean Energy project, slated for Donaldsonville, will produce up to 7.2 million tons of ammonia annually and will capture “up to 98 percent” of the carbon dioxide produced.
Nearby, CF Industries and the Pennsylvania-based Air Products plan to build two plants they say will have capture rates of 95% or more.
About an hour to the east, the St. Charles Clean Fuels project would capture more than 99% of carbon dioxide generated, its developer says.

Those claims are unlikely to hold up, said Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, an expert on greenhouse gas emissions and ammonia pollution.

“Is the industry correct in saying that they can produce a really, really low emissions fuel using natural gas as their original feedstock?” he asked. “The answer is no. It’s just never been done, and I don’t think it can be done.”

Landscape view of CF Industries.

DONALDSONVILLE, LOUISIANA – JANUARY 28: CF on January 28, 2026 in Donaldsonville, Louisiana.(Photo for Floodlight)(Sean Gardner for Floodlight)/(Sean Gardner for Floodlight)

The majority of existing carbon capture facilities trap less than 60% of carbon dioxide, according to a 2023 review by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “No existing project has consistently captured more than 80% of carbon,” the institute found.

Blue hydrogen — a prerequisite for blue ammonia — “is neither clean nor low-carbon,” and pursuing it would divert time and money from more effective climate solutions, the institute concluded.

In an email to Floodlight, Air Products spokesperson Christina Stephens said the company is “very confident in our proprietary technology that allows us to capture 95 percent of the CO2 emissions.” She did not elaborate.

Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said its facility’s design will be “conducive to high capture rates.”

Experts also note that carbon capture itself is typically powered by natural gas, adding emissions and undercutting its climate benefits.

Compounding the problem are emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane is frequently emitted during drilling, processing and transport of natural gas. More escapes in the process used to extract hydrogen for ammonia production.

Total methane emissions from the fertilizer industry could be more than 140 times higher than official estimates, one 2019 study found.

Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company believes previous research related to methane leakage has flaws that led to inaccurate conclusions.

Stacie, meanwhile, said St. Charles Clean Fuels will monitor and verify methane emissions through “operations control and third-party verification consistent with emerging best practices.”

The local cost of a global fuel

Even if blue ammonia plants deliver the climate benefits their backers promise — benefits that experts dispute — their local impacts could still be substantial.

In 2024, the CF Industries Donaldsonville plant — near Gaignard’s house — released more toxic air pollutants than all but one other industrial site nationally, according to EPA data. The 7.1 million pounds of ammonia the plant released that year would more than fill the New Orleans Superdome, according to Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist for the Environmental Integrity Project.

Emissions from the planned blue ammonia plants could worsen respiratory health, Terrell said, with impacts extending far beyond the plant sites.

“I would be concerned about increasing asthma rates long term,” she said.

“We are living in a cauldron of toxic chemicals down here in Louisiana.” —Jane Patton, a campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law.

Ascension Parish, where three of the proposed blue ammonia plants would be built, hosts more than two dozen industrial facilities and already has the second highest amount of air emissions in the country, according to EPA data.

So the prospect of new ammonia plants in Ascension Parish worries Twila Collins.

She has lived her entire 55-year life in Modeste, a historic, predominantly Black community along the Mississippi River. If CF Industries gets its way, a massive ammonia plant would rise roughly a mile from her home.

Twila Collins looks directly into the camera.

Twila Collins poses for a photo inside her home in Modeste, a small Louisiana community next to the Mississippi River. She’s concerned about the potential health and safety dangers of a proposed CF Industries blue ammonia plant. (Sean Gardner for Floodlight)

Her message for the company is blunt: “Leave us alone and find somewhere else to go where there’s nobody living, so you won’t disrupt a community.”

Industrial pollution already drifts into her neighborhood, bringing smells “like a landfill,” she said, and a new ammonia plant would add another layer of pollution — and another set of health risks.

In a 2024 report, CF Industries said its employees “regularly maintain, replace, and update equipment” to reduce emissions.

But under its draft permit for the Blue Point plant, the company would be allowed to release more than 1,100 tons of air pollutants each year — equivalent to the weight of more than 27 fully loaded tractor trailers. That includes more than 140 tons of ammonia and more than 580 tons of carbon monoxide.

Collins said she can name more than 30 people in Modeste who suffer from cancer or respiratory problems. The issue is deeply personal. She herself has struggled with cancer. And in 2002, her 9-year-old son died of an asthma attack. He had struggled with asthma all his life, but Collins still wonders whether the industrial pollution surrounding Modeste helped trigger the attack that killed him.

Twila Collins stands outside in her community.

Modeste, La., sits in a heavily industrialized region, and Twila Collins suspects pollution from those factories is making many residents sick. (Sean Gardner for Floodlight)

She also worries about what could go wrong if something fails — an accident, a leak or worse — because ammonia production and carbon dioxide transport involve well-documented industrial risks.

CF Industries’ Donaldsonville plant has a history of deadly accidents: a 2000 explosion and fire killed three workers and injured at least eight others, and a 2013 blast killed one worker and injured eight more.

This past November, an explosion at another CF Industries plant in Yazoo City, Miss., led to an ammonia leak and prompted the evacuation of nearby residents.

Residents push back

While supporters emphasize the economic boost and high-paying jobs the projects could bring, many local residents have turned out at public hearings to oppose them.

So many people packed a hearing room on the St. Charles project in 2024 that it had to be canceled and rescheduled in a larger venue.

Some of the public fears have centered on the carbon dioxide pipelines that would be needed to make the projects work.

Air Products, for instance, has proposed piping millions of tons of carbon dioxide 38 miles to be stored a mile underneath Lake Maurepas. The project would be “the world’s largest permanent carbon dioxide sequestration endeavor to date,” according to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development.

Several residents at an information table at a public hearing.

At a November 2025 public hearing, many Louisiana residents raised health and safety concerns about Air Products’ plan to build a large blue ammonia plant in Ascension Parish. The project would pipe carbon dioxide and store it beneath Lake Maurepas. (US Army Corps of Engineers via Wikimedia Commons)

At a November public hearing on the project, Air Products vice president Andrew Connolly said the company has an “unsurpassed safety record.”

“All pipelines will be monitored 24-7 and we will meet or exceed all pipeline regulations,” he said.

More than 300 people turned out for that public hearing, according to Dustin Renaud, a spokesperson for the environmental law group Earthjustice. Among the more than 50 people who spoke, all but three opposed the project.

Opponents have warned of what could happen if a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptures, as happened in 2020 in Satartia, Miss. That disaster sent 45 people to the hospital and left some residents unconscious in their homes and cars. Starved of oxygen, cars stalled or couldn’t start, making evacuation difficult.

Aerial photo of a pipeline leak in Mississippi.

A carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured on Feb. 22, 2020, in Satartia, Miss., leaving this crater and prompting an evacuation. (Mississippi Emergency Management Agency)

The Air Products pipeline would run within half a mile of Sorrento Primary School, an elementary school in Ascension Parish with more than 600 students. An expert hired by Earthjustice concluded that a pipeline rupture could endanger the schoolchildren, along with residents of a nearby subdivision.

Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company will run the pipeline deeper than is required by code in the school’s vicinity. The pipeline will also have more shutoff valves than required, she said.

“We have a long safe history of operating the largest hydrogen pipeline network in the world right here in Louisiana,” she wrote.

Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said the company will incorporate “detection systems, automated shutdowns, mechanical integrity programs and emergency response planning” — consistent with federal rules and “lessons learned from prior incidents.”

Still, some residents worry.

“We don’t have a good evacuation route,” said St. James Parish resident Gail LeBoeuf, who co-founded the environmental justice group Inclusive Louisiana. “If something would happen, we would just be stuck like Chuck.”

Promises of jobs, safety and economic growth

The companies behind the blue ammonia projects have said they will bring jobs and millions of dollars into the state economy — a message that has found a receptive audience in the state capital and some city halls.

CF Industries did not respond to Floodlight’s questions about its proposed plant, while Clean Hydrogen Works declined to answer questions.

Amid public opposition, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry in October announced a moratorium on new carbon capture projects. The order halted the state’s review of new permits for projects that would inject carbon dioxide underground, while allowing existing applications to continue — including the blue ammonia projects already underway.

In touting the CF Industries proposal last April, Landry noted that the company has been operating in the state for more than 50 years. “We don’t get to grow food in this country without the hard work of CF Industries and its employees,” he said.

President Donald Trump and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, to Trump’s right, speak at the White House in March 2025, alongside Hyundai executive chairman Eui Sun Chung. Landry and Louisiana’s economic development department have supported controversial blue ammonia plants proposed for the state. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

The oil and gas industry — which has strong ties to the ammonia and fertilizer industries — has for years been Landry’s largest industrial sector donor. It has contributed more than $1.1 million to his campaigns, according to data from FollowTheMoney.org.

Donaldsonville Mayor Leroy Sullivan has also spoken out in favor of the proposals by CF Industries and Clean Hydrogen Works.

“The benefits outweigh the things they’re saying,” he told WBRZ last year.

“These plants are safer, they’re better for the economy than some of the other industries that may be in the area.”

Sullivan previously worked at CF Industries for 26 years. In 2000, he was badly injured in an explosion at the Donaldsonville plant and spent more than a month recovering in a burn unit.

“It almost killed me,” he said at a public hearing last year on the Ascension Clean Energy proposal.

Neither Sullivan nor Landry responded to Floodlight’s requests for interviews.

For her part, Gaignard feels let down.

“What hurts the most is we’re watching the leaders that we elected … support these companies instead of supporting the community,” she said.

A lower-carbon alternative

There are cleaner ways to make ammonia.

Instead of extracting hydrogen from natural gas and then trying to capture the CO₂, producers can use renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. That “green hydrogen” can then be combined with nitrogen to make what’s known as “green ammonia.”

At least one large-scale green ammonia plant is already operating. In Chifeng, China, a facility powered by wind turbines and solar panels began industrial-scale production in 2025. By 2028, the plant is expected to produce 1.5 million tons of green ammonia annually.

In the U.S., developers have proposed green ammonia plants in Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington.

“Instead of making this big labyrinth of pipes and equipment and sending CO2 everywhere and using more energy, you can simply produce that hydrogen with electricity from solar and wind,” said Jacobson, the Stanford professor.

In the debate over blue ammonia, the stakes are high.

For ammonia producers, the projects promise billions in federal tax credits and a foothold in emerging energy markets. They also offer oil and gas companies a way to delay the phase-out of fossil fuels, critics say.

“It’s a great way to lock in oil and gas infrastructure. … Something that we should be getting away from, as opposed to locking in for years and years to come,” said Alexandra Shaykevich, a research manager at the Environmental Integrity Project who tracks oil and gas projects.

For residents along Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, the stakes are more immediate. They’re being asked to live with new plants, new pipelines and new risks in places that have already absorbed decades of pollution.

But Gaignard plans to keep fighting for her community.

“I don’t look at this as red and blue and the left and the right,” she said. “We need to start looking at humanity.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.

Mother JonesFeb 17, 2026, 12:31 PM

Trump’s Climate Repeal Will Kill America’s Transition From Gas Guzzlers to EVs

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

With the repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding on the dangers of greenhouse gases, the Trump administration is aiming to take out many federal actions on climate change in one blast.

The first impact of this deregulatory detonation will be on cars. The EPA packaged its withdrawal of the 17-year-old endangerment finding with elimination of the ambitious tailpipe pollution standards adopted by the Biden administration. It’s a move designed to alter the choices consumers are likely to see in showrooms, the kinds of vehicles rolling off assembly lines and the technology evolution unfolding in US manufacturing.

In fact, the change is already underway. Ford announced in December it would stop making its F-150 Lightning pickup truck and would otherwise scale back its electric vehicle plans. General Motors ended plans to build EVs at its Orion plant in Michigan, shifting the facility to production of big gas-powered models like the luxury Cadillac Escalade SUV and the Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. Stellantis has cancelled plans for a fully electric Ram 1500 truck and has scrapped several plug-in hybrids, including the Chrysler Pacifica and Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe.

“China’s EV makers will face no competition from the US to dominate the world’s clean car market.”

There’s little doubt that the auto industry is pivoting—for the time being, anyway—to a future of higher emissions in the United States. EPA’s rescission of tailpipe pollution standards wipes out what the Biden administration had calculated would be a 7.2 billion-metric-ton cut in greenhouse gas emissions, the largest single step that any nation has taken on climate change.

But there are sharply different views on what this decision means for American consumers and carmakers. President Donald Trump and his top officials on Thursday touted a cascade of benefits they see rippling throughout the economy, starting with more affordable vehicles.

“You’re going to get a better car, a car that starts easier, a car that works better, for a lot less money,” said Trump from a podium in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, as he unveiled what he described as the biggest deregulatory action in history.

Critics of the move argue, however, that US car buyers will be left with fewer choices as the pressure for automakers to expand their EV offerings ends. They contend that the automakers will be hurt in the long run as they fall further behind China in a global market that remains committed to a transition to EVs.

“American families will suffer long-term harms so that giant auto and oil companies can pocket short-term profits,” said Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign. “They’re popping champagne corks at the OPEC and GM headquarters, but also in Beijing, where China’s EV makers will face no competition from the US to dominate the world’s clean car market.”

The United States already is on a different trajectory than the rest of the world when it comes to EVs. In 2025, EV sales fell 4 percent in the United States while growing 33 percent in Europe and 20 percent worldwide, according to the UK-based research firm Rho Motion.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, appearing alongside Trump at the White House, said the Biden rules were forcing automakers to build vehicles that US consumers did not want. “No longer will automakers be pressured to shift their fleets toward electric vehicles, vehicles that are still sitting unsold on dealer lots all across America,” Zeldin said.

But EV sales in the United States had five consecutive years of growth before last year’s fall-off, which was at least partly due to the Trump administration rolling back federal support for EVs—most importantly, Congress’ repeal of the $7,500 federal consumer tax credit in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. After the tax credit expired last September 30, EV sales in the United States plummeted.

“Every other country is moving forward except us. We’re going backwards.”

In recent weeks, Ford, GM and Stellantis wrote off a collective $52 billion in investments they had made in electric vehicles. Those losses exceed the $34 billion in total profits for the “Big Three” in 2024.

Trump argues the lifting of regulations will accelerate a revival of the industry that is already underway. He talked about his January visit to Ford’s Dearborn Truck Plant in Michigan, when executive chairman Bill Ford Jr. said the plant was expanding to 24-hour shifts, six days a week to build its iconic F-150 pickup truck. “Perhaps no industry has benefited more from our historic deregulation campaign than the US auto industry,” Trump said on Thursday.

After the president announced the endangerment finding repeal, John Bozzella, president and CEO of the auto industry’s main trade group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, put out a supportive statement, saying the action will “correct some of the unachievable emissions regulations enacted under the previous administration.” Although Bozzella had appeared alongside Biden administration officials and a phalanx of EVs at the rollout of the regulations in 2024, he has been urging the Trump administration to ease the rules.

“I’ve said it before: Automotive emissions regulations finalized in the previous administration are extremely challenging for automakers to achieve given the current marketplace demand for EVs,” Bozzella said. “The auto industry in America remains focused on preserving vehicle choice for consumers, keeping the industry competitive, and staying on a long-term path of emissions reductions and cleaner vehicles.”

But in its comments to the EPA last fall on the repeal proposal, the auto industry alliance raised concerns that the Trump administration’s total repeal approach “has the potential to further amplify the severity of policy swings in future administrations.”

With US automakers ditching EVs and tariffs making cheap Chinese EVs unaffordable, “consumers are worse off.”

Joshua Linn, an economics professor at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a think tank that studies energy and the environment, said the auto industry wants “a consistent set of standards over time, because that’s going to make planning much easier.”

Linn said that the Biden administration’s tailpipe standards, which targeted a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 2026 levels by 2032, likely would have been difficult for automakers to meet, especially in the later years, when deeper greenhouse gas emissions cuts were being required. The Trump administration could have addressed those concerns by easing the rules, but this action is much more extreme, Linn said, and it goes beyond what would be best both for automakers and consumers.

Stringent standards likely would help US automakers to develop vehicles that could be sold in international markets where there are strong emissions requirements, Linn said. Instead, those markets are being dominated by Chinese competitors that are making high-tech, affordable EVs, especially BYD, which in 2025 surpassed Ford to become the world’s sixth-largest automaker, with 4.6 million vehicles sold.

Zeldin said consumers would benefit, now that US carmakers no longer were being pushed into electrification of their fleets. “If you want an electric vehicle, buy that,” he said. “If you want a diesel truck, then buy that. If you want a gas-powered vehicle or a hybrid, well, more power to you. That’s what freedom and choice look like.”

But US consumers don’t have access to low-cost EVs that are available elsewhere. The US government has long had high tariffs designed to keep Chinese EVs out of the domestic market, and now, US consumers won’t have a choice of comparable affordable EVs from US automakers any time soon, either. “Consumers are worse off,” Linn said.

Michael Berube, president and CEO of the clean vehicle advocacy group CALSTART, says the timing couldn’t be worse. “Weakening vehicle standards and undermining the endangerment finding injects uncertainty into the market at a moment when global competition for clean vehicle leadership is accelerating,” he said. “We risk ceding our leadership just as global demand for low- and zero-emission technologies continues to surge.”

Research by Rhodium Group indicates that EV sales in the United States, which were projected to be as much as 71 percent of the light-duty vehicle market in 2040 under Biden policy, will grow at about half the pace.

The Trump administration’s transportation department has a separate rulemaking underway to ease fuel economy standards for new cars. Instead of ramping up from a current average of 30.4 miles per gallon to 50.4 miles per gallon by model year 2031, as they would have had to do under the Biden pollution rules, carmakers would have a more modest goal of 34.5 miles per gallon.

As a result, the Trump team calculates the price of new vehicles will be about $2,330 less than it would have been under the Biden standards—a dramatic increase in claimed savings compared to the $1,000 they had calculated when first making the proposal last summer. The EPA detailed a number of changes in its economic projections, including the possibility of far lower gasoline prices in the future.

But even the original economic analysis acknowledged trade-offs: It said US car owners will be buying about 100 billion gallons more gasoline through 2050 as a result of the changes, costing up to $185 billion more at the gas pump. The Trump administration’s revised analysis concludes that the costs are far outweighed by other benefits, such as the lower cost of vehicles, especially in a future scenario in which oil prices are much lower.

As for the side effects, air pollution will be commensurate with that gasoline use—not only carbon dioxide but also harmful particulate matter and smog. The Biden administration had calculated that by reducing fossil fuel pollution, its car standards would have provided $13 billion in annual health benefits to Americans, especially people of color and those with low incomes who live in urban corridors. In counterpoint, the Trump administration argues its eased regulations will save lives, as consumers will be better able to afford new cars that provide more safety features.

For those who have worked for years to get cleaner vehicles on US roadways, the costs seem staggering. “To be honest with you, I’m heartbroken,” said Margo Oge, who spent 32 years at the EPA, including as director of the EPA’s office of transportation and air quality over three administrations, from 1994 to 2012. Now board chair emeritus of the International Council on Clean Transportation, Oge is worried about both the health and economic toll.

“Things are just going to get worse with air pollution, climate impacts and economic impacts…because every other country is moving forward except us. We’re going backwards,” she said. “The country is going to be an island of obsolete technologies, while everybody else is moving toward electrification.”

Mother JonesFeb 17, 2026, 12:30 PM

They Just Wanted to Grow Food. Their Suburban Neighbors Declared War.

This article is adapted from Kate Brown’s new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, which will be published February 17, 2026, Copyright W. W. Norton & Company.

In 2013, Nicole and Dan Virgil lived in a lush, affluent suburb of Chicago. Dan had a good job. Nicole home-schooled their two kids.

Sifting through channels, they happened upon a documentary about industrial food production. “That’s gross,” Dan said, “Can’t we just buy food that is food?”

Nicole asked around among her friends. “Where do you get real food?”

They stared at her, not comprehending her question.

“Whole Foods?”

Nicole drifted through the aisles of expensive, organic food. Even pricey lettuce after a few days in the fridge wilted and turned slimy. She felt trapped, confined to the industrial food distribution network that girdled the globe.

I could try to grow a head of lettuce, she thought. It can’t be that hard. She was not indentured to the corporate grocer. She was free. Free to grow a head of lettuce. Maybe more.

Nicole hesitated. Her houseplants had always died. Her parents were among the first Black families to move to Stamford, Connecticut, a corporate city. Her father broke the color line to run the city’s music education program. Like many upwardly mobile families, her parents were eager to leave physical labor behind. Nicole does not recall anyone with a vegetable garden in her upscale suburb.

Nicole decided to plant her own garden. She and her husband Dan, an engineer, don’t do things by half-measures. They watched YouTube videos on gardening, checked books out of the library and drew up plans. They built a raised bed and dug a wicking reservoir under it lined to store stormwater and drain the swampy, clay soils. They experimented with two plots. They dropped seeds directly into the spaded-up lawn and other seeds into a fertilized raised bed. Most seeds rotted in the clay soils of the lawn. Those that germinated did not thrive in the nutrient-poor earth, but the seeds in the raised bed sprang up in a few days and thrived, producing in coming months vegetables of deep vibrant colors that were delicious.

Photo collage featuring the book cover for "TINY GARDENS EVERYWHERE" on the left and a portrait of the author, Kate Brown, a smiling bespectacled woman, on the right.

Mother Jones illustration; Annette Hornischer //American Academy

I paid a visit to the Virgils in Elmhurst. The Virgil’s front yard is neatly maintained with native flowers and turf grass. From the street, I could see no sign of a vegetable plot out back. In the backyard, Nicole gave me a tour of her garden made up of three long beds stuffed with produce. She and Dan had constructed frames from electrical pipes for the tomatoes and cucumbers to climb ten feet high. Enjoying the shade beneath, potatoes spread. The leaves of bush beans, spinach, chard and kale fluttered in the breeze. Their plants had it all. Air, water, light and soil. Nicole showed me proudly her cherry tomatoes grown from seeds she saved each year. Adapted to the microbes in her soil and their micro-climate, the tomatoes were unusually large, and a rich red color. She pulled vegetables from the garden and we sat down to a delicious salad in their sunny kitchen.

In summer months, Nicole said, the garden provided 90 percent of the family’s produce. Often, they had too much.

Nicole suggested the kids set up a vegetable stand as a home-school project to sell their surplus. Nicole hoped her son would get better at doing math in his head. Before they started, Nicole and the kids made a trip to the Elmhurst Director of Zoning to make sure their vegetable stand was legal. It was. The city did not regulate children’s businesses. The kids designed a logo, got signs printed, and set up a card table on Saturday mornings.

“Did you know, lettuce grows from DIRT?!”

Neighbors asked, “Where did you get all this produce?” The kids showed them their backyard garden. Nicole recalls a woman snapping photos and calling her friend. “Did you know, lettuce grows from DIRT?!”

The vegetable stand was a success. Each child made about $40.00 in spending money. Nicole’s shy son learned how to subtract and talk to strangers.

Autumn comes swiftly to Chicagoland. The Virgils hated to stop gardening. On the web, Nicole noticed farmers in Maine extended the growing season with long, plastic tunnels called hoop houses. You can buy hoop house kits for a couple of hundred dollars, but the Virgils are DIY people. Dan drew up plans for a wood frame connected with PVC pipes. He shored up the supports so the tunnel could withstand 80 mph winds and heavy snow loads. He carefully calculated the height and width of the tunnel to maximize the buildup of passive solar heating inside. They located the hoop house in the middle of the backyard, so it was not visible from the street.

A smiling African American woman stands behind lush tomato plants outside.

Nicole Virgil in her backyard garden.Photo courtesy of Nicole Virgil

The one thing the Virgils did not think about was the city’s zoning board. Dan and Nicole had lived in Elmhurst for several decades. Elmhurst is a town of squat, white-trimmed, yellow-brick ranch houses placed in the center of spacious lots like iced pastries on a tray. Green lawns frame the houses. The lawns are largely unfenced, rolling along block after block, connecting one neighbor to another, a green communal thread. The Virgils saw neighbors build hockey rinks in their front yards and assemble trampolines and outdoor living rooms in their backyards. They figured the hoop house fell in the same category of a temporary recreational structure. They didn’t count on one neighbor calling the city, asking if the hoop house needed a permit.

One day, they came home to find a Property Maintenance Violation Notice on their front door. The city required a permit for their “greenhouse.” The Virgils stopped building. Dan went down to City Hall and explained their goal—to extend the growing season for a few months. They were not building a greenhouse. They’d take the hoop house down in the spring. He came away with the understanding that as long as the tunnel was temporary, it was ok, like the skating rinks and summer cabanas.

The Virgils loved the hoop house. Temperatures were as much as 50 degrees warmer inside. With snow all around, they worked indoors in short sleeves. The plastic frame extended the season, March was the new May. The family harvested fall crops in December and got a two-month jump on planting spring crops.

A hoop house, a structure made of wood and plastic, covers a raised bed in an urban garden.

A hoop house in urban community garden.Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty

The next fall, frosty winds blowing, they put the hoop house up. Again, the neighbor phoned city hall, this time repeatedly. The neighbor was worried about how the tunnel looked, about possible flooding, about noise from the plastic cover flapping in the wind.

Another citation followed. The Virgils were confused. The City of Chicago allowed hoop houses. They could not find any rules banning hoop houses in the Elmhurst City Code. Indeed, their citations listed no code violation at all. They asked what code or ordinance they had transgressed. City staff didn’t know. They said they would get back to them on that. A letter arrived a few weeks later stating they had violated two codes, one about occupancy of a tent or temporary structure in a residential zone and the other from the permanent building code banning membrane structures altogether. That was confusing. How could the hoop house be both a temporary and a permanent structure?

Elmhurst officials told the Virgils they could get a variance to change the municipal code, but it would cost $6,500 for their $100 structure. The Virgils asked if they could work with city council members to write a new code. That would be fun, they thought, helping to draft new laws to make their community more sustainable. The kids would get a civics lesson. Two city council members offered to sponsor the bill, but the City Manager would not entertain the idea. He told them to take the hoop house down.

The Virgils got a lawyer, had a hearing, and lost. They won on appeal but lost again when the city attorney appealed their victory.

The suggestion that she could not pursue a dream lit a fire under Nicole. Nicole is like that. When her high school music teacher told her she did not have the voice for opera, she trained even harder and became an opera singer.

Nicole called local CBS news. She talked to print reporters. Supportive neighbors formed a Facebook group. Nicole started a website, circulated a petition, and contacted urban farms and non-profits. She is articulate, funny, calm, intelligent, and informed to a granular degree. Nicole is a formidable force, but she and Dan were up against two powerful American institutions—the lawn and the suburb.

Nicole is a formidable force, but she and Dan were up against two powerful American institutions—the lawn and the suburb.

Unlike most parts of the world, Americans divide land by use—residential, commercial, agricultural, and industrial. Most suburban residential areas are zoned for single families, a category that excludes nearly everything on a lot but those defined as “basic accessories,” like garages and swimming pools. Like the rows of corn surrounding Chicago, Elmhurst is a mono-crop field with one product—bedroom communities dedicated to rest, relaxation, and consumption.

The Virgils’ hoop house confused city leaders. At city council meetings, they asked: “What are you going to do with all that food?”

“Are you growing food to sell—a commercial venture? Raising food to live on, a subsistence farm?”

A city council member speculated improbably that an (unheated) hoop house could be used to grow marijuana in Chicago in winter.

Why, they were asked, didn’t they just go to Whole Foods like everyone else? Residents in a middle-class community should be able to afford to buy their food.

The journalist and urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote that suburban communities are utopias. Utopias are great, Jacobs noted, if you have no plans of your own. “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belongs only to the planners in charge.” But the Virgils had their own dreams—to produce nutritious, organic food sustainably and affordably. They were turning their suburban lot, zoned for residence and recreation, into a space for production, toiling with their hands like working-class people, instead of consuming, often ostentatiously, as American suburbanites are encouraged to do.

An Elmhurst city council member, Steve Dunn, instructed the Virgils, “We are a sustainable community, but we are not a rural community.” Zoning chairman Michael Honquest concurred: “This is a suburban setting, not an agricultural setting.”

Nicole grew exasperated with these comments. “They tell us, ‘We are not a farming community.’ Well, okay, but I’m on two-tenths of an acre. I am not farming.”

A smiling African American woman holds harvested carrots in a covered hoop house.

Nicole Virgil harvesting carrots mid-winter in her hoop house.Photo courtesy of Nicole Virgil

Like the Virgils, I was puzzled. The Virgils do not live in a homeowner’s association or gated community. They own their property. Why can’t they do what they want on it within the parameters of the law? Despite repeated requests, no elected city official from Elmhurst would return my calls and emails. So, my confusion escalated. What harm did the hoop house cause?

It would have been easy enough for Elmhurst officials to investigate, but they didn’t. Had they done so, they might have discovered that the windblown plastic did not roar like a train, and there was no water run-off. On the contrary, the Virgils’ trenched beds absorbed 700 gallons of rainwater each. Nicole claimed that when they invited city council members to visit the hoop house, the elected officials declined. Instead, Elmhurst city officials poured thousands of dollars into judicial procedures and attorney fees to prosecute the Virgils. The case generated hundreds of hours in hearings and staff research. Why did they go to such expense and trouble?

If democratic procedure matters, then the case is even more puzzling. At city council meetings, a majority of attendees endorsed the Virgil’s hoop house and “the right to garden.” At council meetings over several years, less than a dozen people spoke against the hoop house while hundreds voiced support. Some supporters claimed racism was the underlying cause. Dan is white. Nicole is Black in a city that is 94 percent white.

There appears to be evidence to support the fact that plants, which are supposed to be apolitical, do the work of drawing abstract lines of race and class onto the American landscape. In the same years as the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, which made it illegal to discriminate in the sale, rental, or financing of housing, the vast majority of American municipalities passed laws that one way or another left homeowners little choice but to plant turf grass in their front yards. The laws were vague. Residents could have plants no higher than six or eight inches unless they were “useful” or “ornamental.” Vague laws play an important role in the history of segregation. Law enforcement can deploy them as they see fit, and neighbors, as in the Virgil’s case, can weaponize the law by phoning in complaints. Scanning legal records shows an uptick in court prosecution of vegetation laws from just a handful recorded in the 1960s, to several dozen in the 1970s and 1980s, to scores of cases in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In these cases, we found, people charged with growing vegetables in residential communities were more likely to be people of color (usually either Black or a recent immigrant), but not always. In Orlando, Florida, Jason and Jennifer Helvenston, a white couple, plowed up their front yard to grow vegetables. “A budget thing.” The city fined them $500 a day until it was replaced with “approved ground covers.” White defendants usually found it possible to shift vague lawn laws in their favor or overturn fines, but this was rarely the case for non-white homeowners. Tom Carroll and Hermine Ricketts, a mixed-race couple, cultivated a front yard garden for seventeen years. The garden produced 80 percent of their food until the Miami Shores Village Council passed a law banning front-yard gardens and forced the couple to dig up their garden. Ketha Robbins in suburban Columbus, Ohio, sought to restore a forest to her backyard and landed in court.

As anti-gardening cases multiplied, a “Gardening While Black” hashtag appeared on Twitter. In a Detroit case, a Black man was harassed by two white women and then taken to court for gardening with children in a public park. In another case, a man received a ticket for his front yard garden despite no restrictions being listed in the town codes. In Tulsa, months before a scheduled trial to discuss the legality of Denise Morrison’s medicinal plant garden, city workers ripped it out. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a white neighbor called the police on Black residents meeting in a community garden during the Covid-19 quarantine. She claimed, with no evidence, that the group had torn up plants and removed soil worth $1200.

In the Minneapolis suburb of Falcon Heights, city officials caught wind of Quentin Nguyen removing the sod from his front yard to plant a large garden as part of a neighborhood green initiative. They quickly imposed a one-year ban on front-yard gardens (although the former city mayor had just such a garden). Nguyen, a garden activist, planned to use his two-acre front yard to grow vegetables to give away. But neighbors fretted that the garden was a security issue: “I am worried about normalizing the presence of many different people in front yards during potentially all hours of the day without any kind of restrictions put on access.”

“I am worried about normalizing the presence of many different people in front yards during potentially all hours of the day without any kind of restrictions put on access.”

A neighbor and reported friend of Nguyen testified that the dispute was not “personal.” It “was not racial.” Nguyen, who came to the US from Cambodia as a boy, responded with angry disappointment. He saw his garden as a venue for reciprocal relationships. “I wanted to pay back. Help the community. I feel targeted. I feel my fundamental liberties are invaded.”

The demographics of communities with vegetable bans provide some context for these cases. During the decades of the 1990s-2000s, racial segregation continued to decline in American municipalities, but at a strikingly slowed pace, while segregation by income largely increased. Scanning the national database of municipal regulations, my research assistants found that communities with vegetable bans had 30.4 percent fewer Black, 28.5 percent fewer Asians, 7.8 percent fewer Hispanics, and 12.6 percent more white people than the population of their state. Those communities were also richer, with a 73.5 percent higher median income. This demographic profile supports what geographers call an “ecology of prestige” in which residents of higher-income communities attach greater importance to turf grass. Seeking a deep-green lawn, they apply more pesticides and fertilizer and influence neighbors to do the same. The more homogeneous the social fabric of a community, geographers found, the less likely the neighborhood would have a biodiverse range of plants. In other words, the economic and racial diversity that American communities fail to cultivate is reflected in the plant-scape. Mono-crop vegetation matches mono-crop demography.

The economic and racial diversity that American communities fail to cultivate is reflected in the plant-scape. Mono-crop vegetation matches mono-crop demography.

I asked Nicole if she thought the City of Elmhurst’s grievance about their hoop houses was racial. “I am certainly conspicuous around here,” Nicole noted. But in addition to race, she saw the controversy as circling class: “There’s just this perception that it [the hoop house] is low-brow and low class. That perception is next to impossible to chisel through.”

Ari Bargil, a senior attorney at the public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, pointed to the general mandate for suburbanites to recreate, not produce. “What a lot of these restrictions are designed to do is prevent people from sustaining themselves.” You can have a small raised bed, Bargil continued, “but they are saying that if you want to eat organic and nutritious food, you still have to go to Whole Foods like the rest of us.”

Working with Bargil and the Institute for Justice, Nicole campaigned to have her state representative draft a “Garden Act.” She made several trips to the Capitol in Springfield, lobbied legislators, and told her story over and over. Finally, six years of stubborn refusal to submit to what she considered arbitrary code enforcement paid off. The “Vegetable Garden Protection Act” passed in June 2021 gives Illinois residents the right to “cultivate vegetable gardens on their property or on the private property of another with the permission of the owner, in any county, municipality, or other political subdivision of this state.” Illinois joined Florida and Maryland in prohibiting homeowners’ associations and municipalities from requiring turf grass and restricting vegetables and native plants.

Nonetheless, Elmhurst’s City mayor vowed to continue to battle against hoop houses in his city. The city council issued a ban on all temporary structures, but finally permitted hoop houses after the Virgils spent a total of seven years fighting for them.

Dan and Nicole Virgil aspired to create a small world in concert with plants—plants attuned to their yards and to them. They are not alone. Other states are considering Right to Garden Laws, and a recent YouGov poll conducted in November 2025 showed that 16 percent of all US households are using their front yard, long a preserve for a lawn, to grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs. These households are part of a quiet movement across the United States to reclaim yards from turf grass to cultivate plants that feed humans, birds, bees, and more resilient communities.

Mother JonesFeb 16, 2026, 12:30 PM

These Utilities May Be Wildly Overestimating the AI Boom—at Public Expense

This story was originally published by Grist in partnership with WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As more and more data centers crop up throughout Georgia and the Southeast, a recent study finds they may need less energy than the industry and utilities have been predicting. That could have substantial implications for energy bills and the planet.

Data centers—especially the biggest ones, known as hyperscalers, used for high-powered computing like generative AI—use a lot of energy. And major utilities like Georgia Power have started expanding power plants and building other infrastructure to fuel them. Late last year, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a staggering 10 gigawatt expansion for Georgia Power to meet projected demand that’s mostly from data centers, after previously greenlighting new natural gas-fired turbines for the same reason.

But the level of growth that Georgia Power and other southeastern utilities are planning for only has about a 0.2 percent chance of actually happening, according to a report for the Southern Environmental Law Center written by Greenlink Analytics, a nonprofit that promotes transitioning to clean energy, and Science for Georgia, an organization that advocates for the use of science in public policy.

“We believe that this is a very aggressive forecast coming from the utilities,” said Etan Gumerman, Greenlink’s director of analytics who did the modeling for the report.

Because the data center industry is growing and changing so fast, it’s hard to predict accurately. The report finds data center energy use across the region could grow by anything from 2.2 to 8.7 gigawatts by 2031. Still, rapid improvements to technology that could make AI much more efficient in the coming years are likely to dampen the overall increase in energy demand.

But electric utilities across the region are planning for the extreme high end of data center growth, the report finds. That creates a risk that utilities will build more infrastructure than data centers actually need. “Who’s going to pay for that?” asked Gumerman. “Not the data centers that never came.”

“The idea that we’re going to add this additional capacity with gas-fired turbines is horribly depressing.”

Regular customers, he said, will likely end up paying those costs. “And I think that’s the problem in a nutshell.”

The Greenlink report is far from the first to question the projections for how much energy data centers require and how much that generation will affect individual ratepayers. Many people, from public commenters to expert consultants to the Public Service Commission’s own staff, made similar points last year during hearings over Georgia Power’s now-approved expansion. The risk of residential and small business customers paying for infrastructure built mostly for data centers was a persistent concern.

The Georgia PSC has taken several steps to protect ordinary ratepayers from data center costs. New billing terms approved last year allow Georgia Power to collect minimum payments from large power users like data centers and commit them to 15-year contracts—measures designed to ensure those customers pay for any infrastructure built to serve them and continue to pay even if they leave the state.

As part of the agreement to approve the 10 gigawatt expansion last year, the utility agreed to backstop costs if the projected demand doesn’t materialize. The commission has also stressed it can still halt the recently approved projects. Clean energy and consumer advocates are skeptical these measures are enough.

In addition to the risk of rising costs for ratepayers, the sky-high demand projections for data centers are also stalling the transition away from fossil fuels as a source of electricity. Studies have found much of the coming data center demand could be met without building new infrastructure, through improving efficiency among utilities nationwide and through flexibility by the data centers themselves. Instead, utilities and data centers alike are falling back on natural gas.

The United States now leads the world in gas-fired capacity in development, nearly tripling the total from 2024 to 2025, according to Global Energy Monitor. Much of the capacity utilities are building is to meet increased demand from data centers, and more than a third of the whopping 252 gigawatts in development is on-site power for data centers.

That latter approach—where data centers are built with their own source of power, known as “behind-the-meter” generation—addresses the concern over rising costs, but not fossil fuel emissions. While some tech companies are pursuing nuclear energy for their data centers, currently most of the power is coming from gas.

In Georgia, for instance, Georgia Power officials have said the vast majority of the projected demand driving the company’s expansion comes from data centers. The utility has already delayed plans to close coal-fired power plants and begun adding new gas-fired turbines. The 10 gigawatt expansion approved in December will come mostly from new gas turbines, which have projected lifespans of 45 years, and natural gas-generated electricity purchased from other utilities.

“I think people would be a lot less hesitant and a lot less up in arms about these 10 gigawatts if it was sustainable, smart growth,” said Amy Sharma, executive director of Science for Georgia, a nonpartisan group advocating for the use of science in public policy. “The idea that we’re going to add this additional capacity with gas-fired turbines is horribly depressing and, as my high school daughter likes to remind me, so last century.”

The state legislature in Georgia is currently considering several bills to address data center concerns. One would ensure regular customers don’t pay for power generation built for data centers. Others would require more transparency from data center developers or even impose a statewide moratorium.

There are also bills to end the tax breaks that data centers currently receive in Georgia. State lawmakers already passed a bill to suspend tax exemptions for data centers in 2024, but Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed it.

Mother JonesFeb 15, 2026, 10:09 PM

Trump Promises Billions in Aid to Gaza as Israeli Airstrikes Reportedly Kill 12 Palestinians

Donald Trump said Sunday that member states of his Board of Peace have pledged $5 billion toward reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.

Countries will also send thousands of personnel to “maintain Security and Peace for Gazans,” the president wrote on Truth Social. The pledge will be officially announced during the board’s inaugural meeting on February 19 at the United States Institute of Peace (which the State Department announced had been renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace last December).

While it remains unclear which of the more than 20 members would make the pledge, the Associated Press reported that Indonesia said up to 8,000 troops would be ready for deployment to Gaza by June.

Trump posted his message the same day Israeli forces reportedly killed at least 12 Palestinians in airstrikes. Gaza’s civil defense agency, an emergency service and rescue force, said five people were killed and several others were injured when a strike targeted a tent sheltering displaced families.

According to the Guardian, the Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals confirmed they received the bodies of at least seven people.

An Israeli military official said that the airstrikes were conducted in response to Hamas violations of the ceasefire agreement, where several armed individuals allegedly crossed a border line that went into effect last October. The “yellow line” splits Gaza in two: one under Israeli military control and one where Palestinians face fewer mobility limitations but are still threatened by displacement and airstrikes.

Since the US-brokered ceasefire was declared, Israel has killed at least 601 Palestinians and injured 1,607, according to the latest numbers from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. As Daniel Levy, the president of the US/Middle East Project, a policy institute focusing on advancing a dignified Israeli-Palestinian peace, told my colleague Noah Lanard just days after the October ceasefire agreement, there is “no actual plan” for peace.

Although Trump’s Board of Peace was initially seen as an international organization that would end the war in Gaza, the organization’s charter does not mention Gaza, instead increasingits scope worldwide to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”

And as Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief, David Corn, wrote earlier this month, the Board of Peace has since devolved into a global slush fund where countries can upgrade a three-year term to indefinite membership by paying $1 billion.

Many of the US’ top allies in Europe have declined invitations, considering the Board of Peace a way to swerve accountability to the United Nations. Many have also condemned the organization as its charter designates Trump as the sole leader, as well as the US representative.

“Nobody should be above the law,” Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign affairs chief, told US ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz on Friday regarding Trump virtually controlling all decision-making in the international organization. “If countries are treated equally, there’s less chance for war and tyranny.”

But as Trump wrote in his Sunday social media post: “The Board of Peace will prove to be the most consequential International Body in History, and it is my honor to serve as its Chairman.”

Mother JonesFeb 15, 2026, 5:17 PM

Tom Homan: Minnesota Should Say “Thank You” for DHS Operation

On Sunday morning, Border czar Tom Homan said elected officials in Minnesota “ought to be saying thank you” to the Trump administration for making the state safer.

“They were a sanctuary state,” Homan said on Fox & Friends. “Their county jails weren’t working with us across the state. So you know what? We fixed it.”

"They were a sanctuary state. Their county jails weren't working with us across the state. So you know what? We fixed it."

Border Czar @RealTomHoman responds after MN Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey call on the federal government to cover costs following recent I.C.E.… pic.twitter.com/JbndKW4f9M

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) February 15, 2026

The remarks came after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and others criticized the Trump administration for its violent campaign against immigrants and the suppression of protesters in the days following Homan’s announcement that the federal government would end Operation Metro Surge.

“They left us with deep damage, generational trauma, economic ruin. They left us with many unanswered questions,” Gov. Walz said. “Where are our children? Where and what is the process of investigations into those who were responsible for the deaths of Renee and Alex?”

Gov. Walz also stressed the economic toll on the people and businesses of Minnesota and said on Thursday that lawmakers would work to reestablish the fund the state used for Covid recovery, starting with $10 million in forgivable loans for small businesses.

Walz stated that the Trump administration has to “pay for what they broke here” and that he has been in contact with federal leadership.

Mayor Frey also highlighted the economic damage of Operation Metro Surge on Friday. Minneapolis city officials released a 38-page report that estimated the immediate impact since the start of the wave of federal agents arriving in the city in December 2025—including $47 million in lost wages for people who were afraid to leave home, which has led to an additional $15.7 million needed in rent assistance and 76,200 people experiencing food insecurity.

The assessment, which totaled immediate costs at at least $203.1 million, concludes that “significant external funding is required” for the city to recover.

“Was the chaos worth it? Was the fear worth it?” Frey asked in his press conference on Friday.

For Homan, it was. “President Trump gets another win,” he said on Sunday. “Every day he’s winning, and I’m just proud to be a small part of this administration.”

Mother JonesFeb 15, 2026, 12:30 PM

The Adorable Patients of This Special Bat Hospital Will Warm Your Heart

_This story was originally published b_y Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Australia is famously a place with some of the world’s most dangerous and frightening animals. Venomous spiders. Deadly snakes. Jellyfish with fatal stings.

But it is also home to one of the world’s cutest: the flying fox, also known as the giant fruit bat. I mean, look at this animal.

This is a baby bat taking a bubble bath. If it doesn’t melt your heart, nothing will.

A bat is washed with a toothbrush during their bubble bath.

Toothbrushes help get rid of particularly stubborn milk blobs at bath time.Harriet Spark/Vox

In northeastern Australia, not far from the coastal city of Cairns, is a place called Tolga Bat Hospital. It is, as its name suggests, a hospital for bats—one of the only such facilities on the planet. And it’s also one of the few places you can see a baby bat getting a bubble bath.

The hospital, which has just one full-time paid employee but a cadre of volunteers, has been treating bats for more than 30 years. It comprises a few small buildings with treatment rooms, cold storage for fruit, and a nursery for orphan bats, as well as several outdoor wire enclosures. The largest cage is akin to a long-term care facility; it’s for bats that can no longer fly and will live out their lives at the hospital.

Bats hang on mesh in enclosure.

A view of the large enclosure home to flying foxes that have severe injuries and cannot fly. They’ll spend their lives at the hospital.Harriet Spark/Vox

Tolga Bat Hospital cares for as many as 1,000 bats a year, the bulk of which are spectacled flying foxes, an endangered species and one of four distinct kinds of flying foxes in mainland Australia. They come in with disease, heat stress, or injuries from barbed wire. The hospital also cares for hundreds of baby spectacleds—named for the lighter fur around their eyes that makes it look like they’re wearing glasses—that have lost their mothers and can’t survive on their own.

On a warm afternoon in December, I visited the hospital with Australian photographer Harriet Spark. We met a lot of cute bats—and they were hard not to love. Flying foxes are furry with expressive eyes, large ears, and a dog-like snout. But it was the hospital founder and director, Jenny Mclean, whom I found even more endearing.

“You meet a bat, and they’re worth caring about,” Mclean, 71, told me that afternoon, as she fed a sick adult bat fruit juice from a syringe. “They have serious threats that they’re facing, all of them human-induced.”

A person with gray hair holds a fox wrapped in a blue blanket.

Jenny Mclean, Tolga Bat Hospital founder and director, holds an endangered spectacled flying fox. Harriet Spark/Vox

Mclean, who works around the clock at the hospital and doesn’t pay herself, said she feels a responsibility to help these creatures—not only because they’re suffering at our expense but because they help keep our planet healthy. Flying foxes are exceptionally good at pollinating plants and dispersing their seeds, Mclean said.

Giving back to these animals in some way, she said, is the least we can do.

The nursery is a small, two-story building with a verandah that looks out onto the lush grounds of the hospital. Most of the babies were outside when we visited, hanging with their feet on several mesh metal shelves. Spectacled flying foxes are enormous: These animals were about 2 months old and already football-sized. By the time they grow up, their wingspan could reach more than three feet.

The bats, still too young to fly, hung upside down, wrapped in their own wings, alongside stuffed animals. The stuffies, which Mclean buys from a local secondhand store, are meant to mimic mother bats, and the babies will often cling to them for comfort, Mclean told me. Some of the bats were drinking from bottles of flying fox formula attached to the shelves.

A person with dark, pulled back hair looks at bats hanging upsidedown.

Volunteer Mia Mathur stares at an orphan spectacled flying fox at the nursery at Tolga Bat Hospital.Harriet Spark/Vox

Even younger bats were in a room inside the building. Infants under one week are kept in an incubator because they have trouble regulating their body temperature. Slightly older babies are kept in plastic boxes with heating pads and socks that they can cling to. For feeding, “box babies” are swaddled in cloth around a small rectangular pillow so their wings are contained—forming baby bat burritos. A few had silicon pacifiers in their mouths.

Nearly all of these orphans lost their moms to Australian paralysis ticks: parasites that carry a potent neurotoxin in their saliva. When paralysis ticks bite bats and other animals without natural immunity, such as pet cats and dogs, the insects can, as their name suggests, cause paralysis and, eventually, heart failure.

A bat clings to pink bear.

The hospital buys used stuffed animals for the bats to cling to. Harriet Spark/Vox

During tick season, which typically runs from October to December, hospital workers search the ground below colonies, or “camps,” for infected bats, which often fall out of trees. If the infection is mild, workers treat the animal with an anti-toxin at the hospital. The babies, meanwhile, are often spared from paralysis. Mothers likely pick up ticks while they’re foraging without their young, Mclean said, and the parasites latch on before they have a chance to crawl onto the babies. That leads to an abundance of orphans in need of care.

Paralysis ticks live all across eastern Australia, but they only seem to affect spectacled flying foxes in the Atherton Tablelands, where the hospital is located, Mclean told me. The reason is still a mystery. One explanation, Mclean said, is that spectacleds in this region feed on the berries of an invasive shrub called wild tobacco, where they encounter the ticks. While the plant grows in other parts of Australia where both ticks and flying foxes are found, Mclean said, the moist climate of the Tablelands may make ticks more likely to venture out of the grass and into the branches of the invasive shrub. That’s where the flying foxes feed.

That afternoon, I followed Mclean into the main hospital building, where she treats adult bats with paralysis. Rows of small metal cages and cloth boxes sat on shelves along the wall. In some of the enclosures, large flying foxes hung calmly from the top, whereas in others, the animals—still facing the effects of paralysis—were lying down.

A bat wrapped in a yellow blanket lays in a yellow container

An infant flying fox wrapped and waiting to be fed.Harriet Spark/Vox

Using a towel, Mclean gently grabbed one of the bats from its cage to see if it would eat. The animal was having trouble swallowing, Mclean told me, as she placed a syringe with apple and mango juice in its mouth. The bat took a few sips and then pulled its head away. Mclean moved it into a small plastic bin for plan B: seeing if the animal would eat a small piece of pear instead. The bat began to chew, but then spat it out. “You have not got a good swallow, my girl,” Mclean said.

Tick paralysis is just one of the threats to Australia’s flying foxes, many of which are getting worse. Little reds, another species, get tangled in barbed wire, causing tears in their wings. Spectacleds in the Tablelands, meanwhile, are increasingly born with cleft palate syndrome (for reasons that are not yet clear), which makes it hard for them to feed. And more recently, severe heat waves tied to climate change have decimated flying fox populations. In 2018, unrelenting heat killed about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes in Far North Queensland, nearly a third of the entire population. Mclean says she received about 500 orphans that year from the heat wave alone.

Nonetheless, these animals lack support—they’re “maligned,” Mclean said—especially compared to koalas and other furry animals in Australia. “There are not that many people who will champion them,” she told me.

A sunset covered in flying bats.

Thousands of little red flying foxes leave their roost at sunset to find food near Tolga Bat Hospital in Far North Queensland. Harriet Spark/Vox

Bats have a bad rap, in part, because they can carry diseases. Flying foxes are no exception—in rare cases, they can carry Australian bat lyssavirus, a relative of rabies. What gets less attention is the fact that humans almost never contract a disease from flying foxes. “We get about a thousand sick and injured bats a year, and we get a lyssavirus bat once every three years,” Mclean said. (Workers at Tolga Bat Hospital get vaccinated before handling bats as a safety precaution.)

Ultimately, flying foxes are not a real threat to humans, she said. Disproportionately, humans harm them. “It’s this whole thing of, are we willing to share the planet or not?” she said. “If you’re not willing to share the planet, you are going to destroy the planet.”

If flying foxes continue to disappear, so will essential services like pollination and seed dispersal that keep forests alive, Mclean told me. “You can’t have a healthy person unless you’ve got healthy wildlife and a healthy environment.”

Mother JonesFeb 14, 2026, 8:26 PM

US Military Strikes Another Boat in the Caribbean Sea, Killing 3

The United States military killed three more people on Friday in their 39th boat attack in six months, according to a tracker maintained by the New York Times. All told, the strikes by US forces have killed at least 133 people in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained, often without evidence, that they are targeting the boats as an anti-drug smuggling measure. Though, even if people on these boats were confirmed to be transporting drugs, a broad array of legal specialists have held that the “strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings” because the military “cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts,” the Times reported on Saturday.

An 11-second video of the Friday strike, posted by US Southern Command, shows what appears to be a missile hitting a boat in open waters, with a caption claiming without further evidence that the three people killed were “narco-terrorists.”

The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy organization, wrote on Friday that those killed by the US military at sea “are denied any due process whatsoever,” and that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “are asserting and exercising an apparently unlimited license to kill people that the president deems to be terrorists.”

The boat attacks have been accompanied by social media posts that include videos of the strikes, including by Hegseth and Southern Command. Multiple of the previous deaths came from a secondary attack on people who were alive after initial strikes, as confirmed by the White House.

“I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water,” Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, told the Associated Press in December. “That is clearly unlawful.”

What Trump’s Venezuela Attack Means for the World

Friday’s strike follows increased US military operations in the region, including the administration’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in early January. According to Venezuela’s Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López, US forces killed 83 people during the Maduro operation, including multiple civilians. Trump subsequently claimed that his administration will run the country and control their oil.

“Just as the U.S. killings of those aboard targeted vessels are entirely premeditated and intentional,” the Washington Office on Latin America wrote on Friday, “the ongoing attacks at sea appear designed to normalize killings at President Trump’s discretion, both within the U.S. military chain of command and in the eyes of the American people.”

Mother JonesFeb 14, 2026, 6:28 PM

Judges Have Rebuked Trump’s Mass Detention of Immigrants Thousands of Times

Hundreds of judges across the nation have ruled over 4,400 times that President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement arm is detaining people unlawfully, according to a new Reuters review of court documents. And that’s just since October.

The Trump administration’s immense increase in detainments rests, in part, on their decision to detain people while their immigration cases are moving through the system—a departure from previous administrations’ interpretation of immigration law. This has led to a steep increase in immigrants petitioning the courts to be released, as Reuters reports, and the thousands of rulings finding that these prolonged detainments were unlawful.

Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, told Reuters that the increase in lawsuits came as “no surprise” because “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.” But not all of the judges challenging the Trump administration’s mass deportation mechanism were appointed by Democrats.

Just last week, a judge appointed by George W. Bush ordered the release of a Venezuelan detainee. “It is appalling that the Government insists that this Court should redefine or completely disregard the current law as it is clearly written,” wrote US District Judge Thomas Johnston of West Virginia.

Before Trump 2.0, if immigration enforcement agents detained someone without documentation who had no criminal record, they would typically be released on bond while their case went through the system. Trump officials are now often keeping those individuals locked up indefinitely.

Earlier this month, the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Trump administration a win. In a 2-1 ruling, that court held that the administration could hold people whose cases are actively going through the system. It’s a key win, as the circuit oversees Texas and Louisiana, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has some of its most populated detention centers.

The number of people kept in detainment who have no criminal record—the population petitioning the courts to be released—has increased exponentially under Trump’s second administration. According to a recent report from the American Immigration Council, the Trump administration’s arrest practices have led to a 2,450 percent increase in people with no criminal record being held in ICE detention on any given day.

This mass detention, per the new Reuters review, has spurred detainees to file “more than 20,200 federal lawsuits demanding their release since Trump took office”—an overflow that has created a “legal logjam” and has resulted in people remaining locked up even after judges have ordered their release.

The environment of fear for scores of these detained immigrants doesn’t end after a judge orders their release. That’s true for Joseph Thomas, an 18-year-old who was detained with his father in Wisconsin in December and whose case was highlighted in the Reuters investigation. The pair are both asylum seekers and were driving on the father’s Walmart delivery route. Within a month, another Bush-appointee, Chief US District Judge Patrick Schiltz, ordered that they both be released.

Even though Thomas is out of detention and can return to school, things aren’t back to normal. He’s afraid to go in person to class and is instead learning online.

Mother JonesFeb 14, 2026, 12:30 PM

Their Courses Were No Longer Relevant, so These Economics Students Went to Work

_This story was originally published b_y the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.

A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society.”

These small acts of discontent found echoes in campuses around the world in the months that followed, as normally staid economics students demanded a broader and more questioning syllabus that more accurately reflected and challenged the world as it was.

These disparate strands came together in early 2013 at the London School of Economics with the inaugural meeting of Rethinking Economics—a student-led organization that has gone on to challenge the way economics is taught at universities around the world.

“That first meeting was a bit chaotic,” recalls Yuan Yang, one of the group’s founders and a Labour MP since 2024. “It was just after our final exams and it was all a bit intense. But I was really surprised with how many students turned up not just from the LSE but from other universities as well.”

Yang, who was studying a masters in economics at the time, said the first meeting was held on a “bit of shoestring,” dependent on volunteers and “some real acts of kindness” from family and friends as well as some of the LSE’s leading academics.

“It is urgent that the economics discipline learn to understand these issues as systemic features of our capitalist economy.”

“It was very volunteer led,” she said. “My dad, bless him, helped out by doing some filming…and we had some of the leading professors helping out. [South Korean economist and academic] Ha-Joon Chang arrived early and helped us make name tags.”

Chang, now a leading author and professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, said the launch came after decades when the neoclassical school of economics had come to dominate universities “like Catholic theology in medieval Europe…a doctrine that fundamentally defines the way humanity sees the world.”

“By demanding that economics education should be more pluralist, more ethically conscientious, more historically aware, and more oriented towards the real world, Rethinking Economics has exposed the staggering deficiency in the way economists are educated and induced some significant, albeit woefully insufficient changes in economics teaching around the world,” he said.

Rethinking Economics has blossomed since the first meeting and now has thousands of members, including several eminent economists, across more than 40 countries.

According to its communications lead, Sara Mahdi, its aim is to make economics education “plural, critical, decolonised and historically grounded” rather than “dominated by a single framework presented as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective.’”

“We are building an international movement of young people who are organizing, educating and agitating for an economics that takes account of the real world we see around us,” she said. “One that portrays the economy as embedded in ecology, power, institutions, history and inequality, and treats competing economic theories and methods as legitimate, not marginal to a sort of classical, almost mathematical view, which has been dominant in many institutions for decades.”

Mahdi, a degrowth, economics and anthropology graduate from University College London and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says the group has secured tangible changes in the way economics is taught—from full program redesigns to the introduction of new core modules—at scores of institutions.

“Since 2019 alone the movement has supported and recorded more than 80 campaign wins in universities across 35 countries, including 23 major curriculum reforms, impacting tens of thousands of students,” she said. “These are the kinds of reforms that don’t just add ‘one optional lecture,’ they reshape what students learn as mainstream economics.”

Today’s economic system is “showing its most violent face…with rampant militarism and unprecedented, obscene levels of inequality.”

Among the changes highlighted are the launch of a politics, philosophy and economics course at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014, an interdisciplinary programme at the University of Lille in France in 2020, and an economics and society undergraduate programme and public sector economics masters programme at Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2023.

One of Rethinking Economics’s most active groups is based in South Africa, where the campaign grew out of a wider student protest movement calling for greater access to higher education for poorer communities.

The junior program officer at Rethinking Economics for Africa, Amaarah Garda, said what started as a protest about fees had become a broader critique of the academic system and its colonial outlook.

Initially, universities refused to change mainstream economics teaching, so the campaign changed tack. “We have had to carve out our own progressive courses and events at these universities,” Garda said. “So it is not that everyone who does economics is exposed to a more progressive vision, but those courses are now available.”

The movement was growing, she said, as students sought answers to the issues confronting them in the news and their day-to-day lives, from how war economies work to what is being discussed at UN climate talks.

“In South Africa, and perhaps globally, we can see that our students are finding these ideas not just interesting but more and more urgent given the multiple crisis that we are facing,” she said. “They are approaching us to explain topics because they can see how critical they are to society and they cannot get that information through their usual courses.”

Many academics have welcomed the space the campaign has opened up.

Clara Mattei, a professor of economics at the University of Tulsa in the US and president of the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation (Free), said her group was collaborating with students from Rethinking Economics to “improve economic education and make it a useful tool for expanding economic agency among the general public.”

She said the current economic system was “showing its most violent face…with rampant militarism and unprecedented, obscene levels of inequality with four people owning more wealth than four billion people.”

“It is urgent that the economics discipline learn to understand these issues as systemic features of our capitalist economy rather than as the result of market imperfections or crony capitalism,” she said, adding that students such as those involved in Rethinking Economics were “pushing toward more courageous frameworks within the economic tradition…to prioritize the logic of need over the logic of profit”.

Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US, said Rethinking Economics was forcing established economists to ask the basic questions that many had been trained to overlook.

She said there were still power structures within institutions, think tanks and journals that wanted to maintain a narrower, restricted view of economics, but that the campaign was making headway. “It is a battle, but what I really appreciate about this group is that they go about things in a thoughtful way, they are willing to hear people from the other side.”

She said she had spoken to Rethinking Economics groups around the world.

“They bring in all kinds of people, not just economists and students but activists and others together, and they look at the same questions in such different ways…I have actually learned a lot from them…It has made me realize that economics is too important to be left to economists.”

Mother JonesFeb 14, 2026, 8:01 AM

Taken by ICE

Cecelia Lizotte owns Suya Joint, a celebrated Nigerian restaurant in Boston. She’s a rising star in the city who was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2024 and operates two restaurants and a food truck. But last year, a key employee—who happens to be her brother—was detained by ICE.

“I’m not able to operate the establishment, basically,” Lizotte said. “It’s just, it’s crazy.”

Lizotte’s experience got us wondering what it’s like to run a restaurant, or any business, when a key employee suddenly disappears.

This week on Reveal, producer Katie Mingle and reporter Julia Lurie tell stories about the people swept up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportations and the families that are left behind. We also talk to LA Taco reporter Memo Torres about how immigration raids continue across Los Angeles almost daily, even though the national spotlight moved on months ago.

The first two stories are updates from an episode that originally aired in September 2025.

Mother JonesFeb 13, 2026, 9:05 PM

Elon Is Back? (Edit: He Never Really Left.)

Elon Musk, who formally distanced himself from the White House last year, hasn’t stopped trying to influence American politics.

Musk took a step away from the Department of Government Efficiency—the agency he crafted and wielded against long-held federal spending practices. But, contrary to what some expected, that didn’t signal indefinite distance from Republican politics for the South African-born, Texas-voting centibillionaire. To the contrary, campaign finance records and his own social media profiles indicate that he’s ready to wield power whenever, wherever.

His public clash with President Donald Trump also doesn’t appear to be sticking. Musk has dined with the president and first lady Melania Trump and, weeks ago, attended the wedding of Dan Scavino, White House deputy chief of staff, at Mar-a-Lago alongside prominent administration officials.

He’s also been ceaselessly posting political commentary and recommendations on X, which he owns. Including frequent posts about the Epstein files, which he is in but has attempted to distance himself from.

One of his main targets of late has been the SAVE Act, Republican legislation that, if both houses of Congress pass it, could disenfranchise tens of millions of potential voters and uniquely target women through new voter ID requirements.

Republicans have been taking notice.

According to Politico:

The campaign has driven a huge volume of calls to member offices, according to two aides granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, forcing Republican after Republican to publicly state their support for the legislation.

After spending more than $290 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024 cycle, Musk claimed in May that he’d be cutting back. “In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg News at the time. “If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I do not currently see a reason.”

His announcement came after pouring money into the high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court election—to no avail.

Seems like he found a reason.

Musk gave $20 million to the two political groups by the end of 2025. With the midterms revving up, Republicans are considering what an influx of money from Musk, a divisive character due to his history of slashing government funding that affected Americans across the political spectrum, could do for their campaigns.

Talking to Politico, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) worried about how midterms tend to be rough for the president’s party.

“History is not on our side,” Gimenez said. “We’ll take any and all help possible to reverse that trend in history, because I think it’s important for the Republican Party.”

Mother JonesFeb 13, 2026, 8:11 PM

The US Government Will Not Stop Sharing Nazi Propaganda

This past year, official social media accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies have adopted a distinct voice online. The posts look like memes, utilizing dramatic AI-generated art, general patriotic slogans, and cinematic language about “defending the homeland” and shaping America’s future.

But if you look closer, a pattern emerges.

Many of these phrases, images, and attached media aren’t just regular social media content. They repurpose language, symbolism, and cultural references with direct connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It’s content that experts say is instantly recognizable to those who are in the white supremacist know, but can be largely invisible to everyone else.

So, let’s look at a couple of the more egregious examples that reveal this pattern.

There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.

When reached by email for comment, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said “There are plenty of poems, books, and songs with the same title,” apparently referring to Which Way Western Man?. But a simple search across a variety of online music and literature libraries shows that isn’t necessarily true. One song by the same name did pop up with lyrics like “a war against Antifa, a war against the radical feminists, a war to take back our soul.”

“To cherry pick something of white nationalism with the same title to make a connection to DHS law enforcement. It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she continued.

Just two days after ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, DHS accounts shared a post with a song titled “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” by the Pine Tree Riots. According to a variety of reports, the track is regularly used in white nationalist circles for its evocation of a race war. And it is easy to see that some of these posts imitate slogans nearly identical to those used by Hitler and the Nazi Party. One of the more brazen examples is from the Department of Labor. It features a bust of George Washington super-imposed over a montage of images the administration regularly use to evoke white Western culture, with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” Reports have noted the resemblance to Hitler’s infamous slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,” or “One People, One Country, One Leader.” (The White House and Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment.)

Individually, each post could easily be dismissed, but taken together, they seem to form something more deliberate: a stream of repurposed Nazi propaganda for the everyday person’s feed.

Propaganda scholars say this is how it works. Suggestion, not through obvious symbols, but through repetition, emotional activation, and subtle normalization. Renee Hobbs, a communication professor who studies propaganda and founded the media literacy organization Media Education Lab, describes four pillars: stir emotion, simplify ideas, appeal to fears and hopes, and attack opponents.

It’s been reported that the purpose of these posts is to recruit specific people for specific reasons—a dogwhistle that only some can hear. But, as I point out in my latest video, whatever the actual intention or inspiration behind these posts, the result is a slow drip of extremist rhetoric that becomes familiar, official, and acceptable.

So, when officials like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem begin talking about things like checking papers, many Americans don’t recoil. They cheer.

Mother JonesFeb 13, 2026, 5:06 PM

“I Love You, So Will You Fix This for Me?”

The first time I noticed it was last month, when he asked for a hug.

And not just any hug. “I could use a HUGE MAGA hug!” he wrote. “I love you. Do you STILL love me?” The love note was adorned with little hearts—and a request that I send him some money.

I didn’t respond.

Two hours later, another email. “Did you block me?” he asked in the subject line. “Are my messages getting through?”

A screenshot of a fundraising email from Donald Trump, reading, in part, "I love you. Do you STILL love me?"

The next day, he sent me half-a-dozen more notes—from two different email addresses.

8:25 am: “I’m attaching the letter I wrote to you”

9:48 am: “Don’t reject me!”

11:53 am: “Please confirm receipt of this email!”

1:25 pm: “Do not freeze me out”

7:27 pm: “I’m asking with an open heart”

10:40 pm: “Are my messages getting through?”

A screenshot of an email inbox with 10 fundraising emails from Donald Trump

It was starting to sound kind of desperate. “Respectfully I’m asking, DO YOU STILL LOVE ME?” the president wrote. “I might be overthinking things. Here’s why: My love language is MAGA, and I need to confirm one last thing with you before I hit the hay.”

He asked me to fill out a survey and, of course, to send him money. But mostly he just wanted me to know: “I miss you.”

A screenshot of a fundraising email from Donald Trump, reading, in part, "Respectfully I'm asking, DO YOU STILL LOVE ME?"

It all began to feel a bit creepy. I started thinking through his past letters; there had been a lot. Did I miss a few red flags?

Maybe it had started the morning of January 7, when he wrote that he’d “set aside some time just for” me, then followed up two hours later with: “Happy Anniversary?” It wasn’t really our anniversary. I guess he was talking about his work anniversary, which was still a couple of weeks away.

Things started getting pretty intense after that.

January 10, 4:09 pm: “Hello? Is anyone there?”

January 12, 3:52 pm: “Ouch, this is starting to hurt…”

January 12, 7:27 pm: “I’m alone and in the dark.”

It went on like this. I don’t know why he sometimes calls me “Bronte” when he tells me he needs me. His son even reached out.

A screenshot of an email inbox with eight fundraising emails from Donald Trump

I still haven’t written back. I’m not sure what I’d say. He doesn’t seem to be taking the hint.

February 1, 1:23 pm: “I’m asking with an open heart! – Will you show that you STILL love me?”

February 2, 12:05 pm: “Did you block me?”

February 2, 2:03 pm: “Pick up the phone PLEASE!”

February 2, 4:25 pm: “I love you, so will you fix this for me?”

A screenshot of an email inbox with 14 fundraising emails from Donald Trump

Now it’s an “emergency,” and he’s quoting love songs.

A screenshot of a fundraising email sent by "EMERGENCY FROM TRUMP," with a subject line reading, "Please, Please, Please"

I hope he’s doing OK. I hope there’s someone he can talk to. Valentine’s Day can get pretty depressing when you’re historically unpopular.

Mother JonesFeb 13, 2026, 4:18 PM

Russell Vought Raided USAID Budgets He Helped Gut to Pay for His Own Security

Security detail for President Donald Trump’s budget chief and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought is being paid for by what’s left in funding for the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

There isn’t much left of USAID after Trump and Vought worked together to dismantle the agency last year. Just around 100 staff members are left to close out all operations by September.

Still, the White House Office of Management and Budget, which Vought oversees, is allocating $15 million from what remains of USAID operating expenses to pay the US. Marshals Service to protect the political appointee through the end of 2026.

Earlier this year, a man was arrested and is facing attempted murder charges after law enforcement said he showed up at Vought’s Northern Virginia home with rubber gloves and a surgical mask.

The Bureaucrat Who Could Make Trump’s Authoritarian Dreams Real

According to officials within the Trump administration, Vought has received increased threats related to his work since being picked by the president and his control over Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has influenced much of Trump’s second term.

Mother Jones has not seen or confirmed any of these threats.

As ProPublica reported in October, “Vought is the architect of Trump’s broader plan to fire civil servants, freeze government programs and dismantle entire agencies.” He’s overseen tens of thousands of federal employees losing their jobs and was tasked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “oversee the closeout” of USAID, the agency now bankrolling his security detail.

The Trump administration’s decision to cease USAID operations around the world that assist in treating and preventing diseases, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande, will contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people globally, with two-thirds of them being children.

Russ Vought Is Trump’s Shutdown Hero. His Neighbors Think His Work Is “Abhorrent.”

Vought, who said he hopes to put bureaucrats “in trauma,” has even faced protests from his own neighbors—though that pushback consisted of yard signs and messages written in sidewalk chalk and not violent threats, per reporting from Mother Jones’ Isabela Dias.

One such sidewalk read: “I was hungry and the USA fed me. Until Vought cut USAID.”

Mother JonesFeb 13, 2026, 12:30 PM

Ohio Lawmakers Consider Bill That Would Essentially Ban Solar and Wind Projects

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s not just federal headwinds that threaten to constrain renewable energy development. State and local restrictions on solar and wind are spreading across the United States, too.

Few states highlight this fact as well as Ohio does. The Buckeye State makes solar and wind farms go through extra hurdles that don’t apply to fossil-fueled or nuclear power plants, including counties’ ability to ban projects. Its siting authorities have also deferred to local opposition for renewable energy while granting opponents little say over where petroleum drilling rigs and fracking waste can go.

A bill now working its way through the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature threatens to raise even more barriers for wind power and solar farms. On Tuesday, the Ohio Senate’s Energy Committee held its third hearing on Senate Bill 294. It’s unclear whether the committee will hear additional testimony, so under state law the bill could pass out of committee as soon as its next meeting.

The bill’s primary backers are “among the most notorious climate-denial organizations out there.”

The bill would declare it to be state policy “in all cases” for new electricity-generation facilities to “employ affordable, reliable, and clean energy sources.” But the bill’s definitions not only veer from common usage in ways that would exclude renewables but also threaten to block wind and solar development altogether.

“If Senate Bill 294 were enacted, the Ohio Power Siting Board would be unable to support renewable energy projects under the bill’s restrictive definition. This would place Ohio at a disadvantage,” said Evangeline Hobbs, a deputy director at the American Clean Power Association, in joint testimony for that group and fellow industry organization MAREC Action. “At precisely the moment when Ohio needs every available energy source, this bill would tie the state’s hands.”

Based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, SB 294 is sponsored by Republicans George Lang of West Chester and Mark Romanchuk of Ontario.

Louisiana passed a similar bill last year that prioritized natural gas. A pending bill in New Hampshire says that energy sources “shall” be reliable, meaning not subject to routine daily weather variations.

Lang praised natural gas during his October 28 proponent testimony, noting the bill is designed to take advantage of the fossil fuel. In contrast, he claimed renewable energy “doesn’t meet those qualifications of being cheap. It misses the reliability…And it doesn’t really meet clean yet.” During the February 10 hearing, however, he claimed solar and wind were not really excluded and stressed that “there are definitions that have to be met.”

Those definitions, however, uniformly ding renewables.

SB 294’s definition of a reliable energy source would require it to be “readily available” with minimal interruptions during high-usage times and for it to have a 50 percent capacity factor. That’s the ratio of its actual power output to the potential maximum. This condition would exclude virtually all land-based wind and solar generation.

SB 294 “will destroy competition by declaring renewable energy unreliable, and it’s picking winners and losers.”

A high capacity factor “does not mean that an energy source will be available during extreme weather, or even generally available at peak times,” said Michelle Solomon, manager of electricity for Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank. In practice, grid operators “consider how combinations of resources on the grid can work together to meet needs.”

Instead of ensuring systemwide reliability, a single-minded focus on a high capacity factor will distort markets and raise costs for consumers, noted Brendan Pierpont, Energy Innovation’s director of electricity.

In fact, a high penetration of renewables can reduce the intensity of blackouts and vulnerability to extreme weather, according to a 2024 peer-reviewed study in Nature Energy. And, in general, a portfolio of energy-generation resources is more reliable than dependence on only a few sources.

“Reliability is really not a characteristic of a certain technology,” said Diane Cherry, MAREC Action’s deputy director. “And so taking things out of the ‘all-of-the-above’ is a problem.”

SB 294’s perspective on what counts as clean energy is even more questionable than its definition of “reliability.”

Under the legislation, natural gas is called “clean energy,” and language in the bill could potentially even count some coal plants as clean. Meanwhile, solar and wind are only implied to be clean, by way of the bill’s reference to a federal law that deems them so. Nuclear power, which is carbon-free when generated but produces radioactive wastes before and after that point, is also dubbed “clean.”

The definition of “affordable energy source” likewise diverges from the common meaning of those words.

Data released by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie last October shows land-based solar and wind having lower average lifetime costs, called their “levelized cost,” compared with those of other types of power. Storage costs have also dropped substantially since 2020, and will likely fall even more.

Yet “the bill seems to want energy that is cheaper than renewable energy, which really does not exist,” Solomon said.

Ultimately, consumers would pay under the legislation, at a time when utility bills are already rising fast. Failure to add more clean energy sources to the PJM Interconnection region will cost the average Ohio customer roughly $6,500 more by 2035 than they would otherwise pay, American Clean Power reported in a Feb. 6 fact sheet.

Overall, SB 294 adds uncertainty for the industry and investors at a time when they want to build projects, Cherry said. Many companies are under the gun to start construction by July 4 or place projects in service by the end of 2027 in order to get federal tax credits.

The bill also does not mention energy storage, which can require permits from the power siting board. Pairing storage with renewables can raise their capacity factor.

“Energy storage will be increasingly critical to grid reliability and cost control,” said Nolan Rutschilling, managing director of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund, calling for the bill to be amended to include storage so that the board “has the full toolbox to evaluate projects that can deliver reliability without increasing fuel-price volatility or long-term customer costs.”

For their part, representatives of ALEC and the Heartland Institute gave proponent testimony on the bill last fall.

Both are “among the most notorious climate-denial organizations out there that have been funded by fossil fuel interests,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute. Yet they also “claim to be totally free-market and libertarian,” he added, an ironic point given the bill’s potential to distort the market in favor of fossil fuels.

To that end, SB 294 “will destroy competition by declaring renewable energy unreliable, and it’s picking winners and losers,” said Janine Migden-Ostrander, who formerly served as the Ohio consumers’ counsel and is a fellow at the Pace Energy and Climate Center. “The legislature should not be deciding this. Let the market decide. If projects are uneconomical, they will not be built.”

Mother JonesFeb 12, 2026, 11:09 PM

How the NAACP Signed Up to Abolish ICE

In the summer of 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr. took the stage at the NAACP’s 47th annual convention in San Francisco. Speaking at the precipice of the Civil Rights Movement, King cautioned that “the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive.” Over the next decade, Black Americans’ struggle for racial justice would lead to major victories from the workplace to the ballot box. But today, as King warned, the “old order” clings on, and the civil rights gains fought for in the ’60s are under siege.

Since last January, the Trump administration has dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and shuttered civil rights offices across the federal government; rejected the legal framework used to protect marginalized groups’ access to jobs, housing, and education. Last month, Donald Trump even told the New York Times that he thought civil rights amounted to “reverse discrimination” against white people.

A year into Trump’s second term, and with months to go until the midterm elections, I spoke with NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson about Trump’s multifront attack on civil rights protections, federal agents’ violent invasion of Minneapolis, resistance to data centers in Black communities across the South, and the role of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization in this political moment.

Days before we spoke, an ICE officer shot and killed Renée Good in South Minneapolis, just blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020. Johnson, who has presided over the NAACP since 2017, called ICE’s intimidation and harassment of citizens and non-citizens alike, due process violations, and use of racial profiling (greenlighted by the Supreme Court) “something that we have not seen at this level in this country for many, many decades, if ever.”

In July, the NAACP threatened to sue xAI for its use of polluting methane turbines to power its data centers.

The NAACP of the 1950s and ’60s—after leading the charge against segregation in the 1954 landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education—paired its winning legal strategy with support for nonviolent direct action. The year after Brown overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal,” the NAACP provided legal aid to Black Alabamians boycotting segregated buses in Montgomery, and years later, to students protesting discrimination at lunch counters across the South. It even played a pivotal role in planning the 1963 March on Washington. But in the next decade, during the more militant Black Power movement, and into the Reagan years, the organization struggled with the departure of its longtime executive director Roy Wilkins, declining youth membership, and financial challenges.

At the start of the 21st century, the NAACP focused on less confrontational strategies until the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the 2010s—and Trump’s election—threw the organization into a new period of uncertainty. Promising a “systemwide refresh,” it dismissed its 18th president in May of 2017. Six months later, Johnson—the interim president and then-head of its Mississippi conference—was elected to the role.

In Trump’s first term, the NAACP took on high-profile court cases like its successful defense of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and since the start of his second, it’s taken a more offensive posture, disinviting the sitting president from last year’s annual conference for the first time in its history, and stepping up its support for more direct, localized action in Black communities resisting aggressive ICE raids and rapidly expanding data centers.

At the end of January, the NAACP launched a campaign calling on senators to block federal funding for ICE, impeach and prosecute Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and, ultimately, abolish the agency completely.

More and more Americans are calling on the government to do the same. More than six in ten respondents in a New York Times/Siena poll— after the fatal shooting of Good on January 7, but a week before federal agents killed Alex Pretti on January 24—believed that “the tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have gone too far.” (Other polls show weakening support, even among Trump’s base, for the president’s immigration agenda, which may make it increasingly difficult for the GOP to hold on to its narrow majority in Congress.)

The same poll found that voters’ primary concern is the economy, where Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted. Data centers cropping up across the country have sent electricity bills surging, contributing to voters’ anger about the cost of living. As the AI industry booms, voters across party lines are pushing back on data center construction in their communities.

Johnson told me that the NAACP has been “on the frontlines” of the data center resistance, starting with its work in Southwest Memphis, where Elon Musk’s xAI quickly built a data center in 2024, beginning construction last year on a second one on the Tennessee-Mississippi border, with talks of a third in the works. Last July, the organization threatened a lawsuit against xAI over the company’s use of polluting methane gas turbines to power those facilities, which it contends violate the Clean Air Act. Last September, the organization released resources for activists and organizers demanding increased transparency and accountability from the tech giants building this infrastructure.

After Trump’s second victory, Johnson said it was clear to the group he heads that the administration “would pursue a course of mass distraction” to achieve its goals. Trump first deployed these “distraction tactics”—“othering communities and seeking to erode protections” at home and creating conflict abroad—to push through his tax and spending megabill, Johnson said.

Now, as immigration agents swarm blue cities and tensions escalate with countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, “we believe all of these things in sum total are means by which the administration is trying to avoid the accountability around the Epstein files and releasing them, and to mask the current economic predicament”—including prices that, despite Trump’s promises, continue to rise.

In preparation for the midterms, the NAACP has been “actively engaged in the mid-cycle redistricting process, which is unprecedented,” he told me. In addition to filing lawsuits in states like Texas, the NAACP is “working with policymakers in certain targeted states” to protect Black voters’ access to the ballot box. Last fall, the NAACP also launched a mass mobilization in support of California’s redistricting ballot initiative, Prop 50, as I reported for Mother Jones in November.

Nearly 70 years after King’s speech, as the NAACP reaches its 117th anniversary—coinciding with a century of Black history commemorations and the nation’s semiquincenntinal—Johnson told me he believes “we are in a setback,” but also “at an inflection point.”

What’s at stake, he said, is “whether or not we will have a true representative democracy, or something less than that.”

Mother JonesFeb 12, 2026, 10:01 PM

Early Voting Just Began in North Carolina’s Highly Anticipated Senate Primary

Early voting in the primaries for a hotly contested North Carolina US Senate race began today, with a field that includes a moderate former Democratic governor, a January 6 rioter, and a Trump-backed Republican. Winning the battleground state’s Senate race is vital for Republicans who want to keep the seat—and the Senate—and for Democrats, who hope to flip it.

Roy Cooper, the amiable ex-North Carolina governor with a middle-of-the-road approach to politics, is the anticipated pick for the Democratic Party. Cooper spent nearly 40 years in state politics, and his campaign has raised almost $18 million since launching last summer. If he were to win the race, Cooper would be the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat in North Carolina since 2008. As I wrote last month, Cooper was elected to his first gubernatorial term in 2016 at the same time President Donald Trump won North Carolina.

Former RNC chair Michael Whatley is widely considered the frontrunner in the Republican primary. Though he enters the race with low name recognition compared to Cooper, he also has Trump’s endorsement, with the president promising that Whatley would be an “unbelievable Senator.” This is Whatley’s first time on the ticket, but he previously served as chief of staff for Sen. Elizabeth Dole and as legal counsel for former President George W. Bush during the recount for the 2000 presidential election.

If he does win the whole thing, voters shouldn’t expect Whatley to challenge the president much. At a recent rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (in Cooper’s home county), Whatley told the crowd that they “need a conservative champion, and Donald Trump needs an ally in the Senate.” He told the Washington Post, “I think if I do disagree with [Trump], it’s going to be in private.”

Whatley’s primary challengers, Don Brown and Michele Morrow, haven’t raised nearly as much money, but they could still pose a threat. Brown is a retired Navy JAG Officer who previously ran for Congress in 2024, but lost in the primary. It’s not hard to see where Brown stands on the issues, thanks to the detailed list of policies on his website. Among these policies are 12-year term limits for members of Congress, an elimination of the federal income tax, and the end of the “failure” of the Department of Education “experiment.”

Morrow previously ran for North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction in 2024, where she lost by just a 2 percent margin. She is a registered nurse and former Christian missionary who was at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and has called public schools “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers.” In the past, Morrow promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on social media. She called for the televised execution of former President Barack Obama. She asserted that the “+” in LGBTQ+ stood for pedophilia. On her campaign’s homepage, she claims that she’s “the one candidate Roy Cooper FEARS!”

A January poll from Carolina Forward still shows Cooper leading Whatley, 47 percent to 42 percent, in a potential November matchup. The poll also shows that Whatley will be the likely Republican candidate. Brown, who is his closest opponent, trails 36 percent to 6 percent. There are five other Democratic candidates and three additional Republican candidates, though none of them are likely to be factors in the race.

The start of the primaries launches what’s expected to be a tight, expensive race. Spending is expected to reach anywhere from $650 million to $800 million, according to Politico.

Mother JonesFeb 12, 2026, 9:23 PM

ICE Wanted This Kansas City Warehouse. The People Resisted and Won.

Federal officials from the Department of Homeland Security were eyeing a Kansas City warehouse for one of their next detention facilities for immigrants. The company that owns the Missouri warehouse, Platform Ventures, announced on Thursday that it is not moving forward with the sale.

The move comes after steep pressure from locals who have been consistently protesting the potential sale since immigration officials toured the facility on January 15.

Platform Ventures said it “is not actively engaged with the U.S. Government or any other prospective purchaser” in a statement to Kansas City Public Radio.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said that while his city welcomed the news, his office is prepared to keep fighting. “A mass encampment warehouse” is “offensive to the dignity and human rights of those who would be detained.”

According to a report from the American Immigration Council, by the end of November 2025, ICE was using 104 more facilities for detention than at the start of the year. That’s a 91 percent increase. The Council report found that the Trump administration’s arrest practices have led to a 2,450 percent increase in the number of people being held in ICE detention with no criminal record.

As DHS continues to expand its existing presence and open new offices around the country, Kansas City residents join other community leaders in Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, Ashland, Virginia, and elsewhere who are fighting back against potential ICE detention centers in their cities.

Terrence Wise, a leader with the activist groups Stand Up KC and Missouri Workers Center, said in a statement that the no-sale wouldn’t have happened without “several weeks of protest and collective action” from locals who “will continue fighting to keep masked, unaccountable federal agents out of our communities.”

Mother JonesFeb 12, 2026, 7:34 PM

I’m a Minneapolis Postal Worker. This Is What I Saw.

Bianca Sonnenberg’s uniform has become her security blanket. Before ICE arrived in Minneapolis, she would change when she finished her route. Recently, she’s hoped her identity as a US Postal Service worker would protect her from getting targeted by ICE operations. She’s Native American, and over the last few months, she’s heard about ICE detaining Indigenous people in Minneapolis and around the country. It terrifies her.

White House border czar Tom Homan announced today that the Department of Homeland Security will end Operation Metro Surge after months of chaos resulting in DHS claims of more than 4,000 arrests, the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, and immense community resistance.

Sonnenberg spoke to Reveal about the big and small changes she and her colleagues witnessed along their routes in South Minneapolis during the disruptive operation. She spoke from her personal perspective and not as a representative of the USPS.

Her story has been edited and condensed for clarity.

As mail carriers, when we’re on our route for a long time, you start to know your community, so you memorize names. And a co-worker was like, “Alex Pretti’s on my route.”

And so I was like, “Oh my gosh.” He was like, “Yeah, they got a little memorial out there. I feel so bad. He has packages today.”

That almost made tears come to my eyes. It’s so sad how you’re here one second and you’re just gone the next. And you don’t think about that when you are ordering a package. You don’t think, “Oh, I’m not gonna be here to get my package.”

It’s really sad that he was taken and he did nothing wrong. I’ve seen the videos, and he didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t reach for any gun and all the stuff that they’re trying to make him seem like. First of all, they were calling him an assassin…but then it’s, “We gotta go through a full investigation.” How can you say that?

I feel grateful that I got this privilege of being a federal employee. In the daytime, I can go to the store; I can move about my community and not feel like they’re gonna bother me, per se. But I wear my uniform home because I’m too scared not to. I could be targeted.

My mindset is let me get what I need from the store or whatnot before I come home. Because God forbid somebody pulls the Uber driver over and I don’t have my uniform on. I run into the store before I get home, and there’s an operation on the block that I wasn’t paying attention to. I get caught up and they slam me around a little. I’m fragile. I’m 49 years old. I can get bruised. I bruise easily. I don’t want to go through that.

You don’t think about that when you are ordering a package. You don’t think, “Oh, I’m not gonna be here to get my package.”

It’s crazy, because I always say I only fear God, but they have definitely triggered something in me to be more protective of myself and of my surroundings and the people that I care about, including other people on my route.

I’ve been around them for over a decade. Most of them have all been on my route the whole time. So we’re a big village.

Our supervisor let us know (on January 24) that ICE had killed somebody close to the route. She said it happened in front of Glam Doll Donuts. I was like, “Oh my God, that’s my block.”

You could see the yellow tape and the community coming from every direction. I’m hearing the flash-bangs and I’m seeing the smoke.

As I’m delivering, I got a few people saying: “You shouldn’t be at work! You shouldn’t be here! You know that they’re shooting tear gas on the other side of the block.” And I’m like: “Yeah, I know, but I gotta keep doing my job. I may have medicine. I don’t know what I have in my packages.” But that’s my job.

So I go into an apartment building. There are a lot of customers in the hallway, and they’re watching through the windows. I’m like: “You guys gotta stay in here and be safe. That’s tear gas. You don’t wanna breathe that in.” So everybody stayed in the apartment building. I said, “I’m gonna keep going and get this next building done.”

As I went outside, going from one building to the next is about 50 feet, that tear gas got into me. And I’m breathing in and it kind of felt like glass shards in my nose and my throat. I didn’t want to cough right away to breathe it in more, so I just hurried up and got into the next building.

And then just kind of breathed a little bit and I was like, “Oh, man, is this what I’m gonna do?” I was just in shock that this was really happening. There’s some people who probably would say: “Oh, this is a dangerous environment. Let me get off the street. Let me just take care of myself.”

I didn’t feel like that. I felt like a medic in the war. I just gotta make sure all my people are okay. I had to make sure everybody on my route was okay.

In my head, I’m always thinking, this is somebody’s medicine or something that they need. If I don’t get it to ’em today, they’re gonna have to wait till Monday. And that’s just me doing my part that I could at that moment.

Mother JonesFeb 12, 2026, 7:14 PM

DHS Claims to Be Winding Down in the Twin Cities. Local Leaders Are Still Pissed.

After more than two months of an aggressive—and deadly—occupation of the Twin Cities, top immigration official Tom Homan said during a press conference on Thursday that the Trump administration is scaling back “Operation Metro Surge.” Yet some local officials who have long been at odds with federal leaders aren’t buying it.

Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Immigration enforcement will still continue in the region, Homan also admitted, adding that removing agents depends partly on if “agitators” behave as the administration sees fit.

Homan cited “unprecedented levels of coordination” from state and local law enforcement, as well as elected officials, as one of the main reasons they are reportedly slowing down operations. But that coordination hasn’t been solely friendly. At one point, he said “I have not met with one county jail that says no to us.” But, according to the New York Times, the Hennepin County jail “has not agreed to change its policy of non-cooperation on civil immigration enforcement in any way.”

The announcement follows an aggressive takeover of the Twin Cities by immigration enforcement that included agents fatally shooting Renée Good and Alex Pretti, repeatedly using harmful chemical weapons, targeting operations at schools and on children, and overall creating an environment of fear that led many immigrants to fear leaving their homes. The Trump administration’s action in the area sparked nationwide protests and economic strikes. Homan was sent in to replace Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, who oversaw the majority of the violent operation in the Twin Cities.

Last week Homan announced that the Trump administration was removing 700 immigration agents from the area, yet around 2,000 federal law enforcement officials still remain in the Twin Cities. That’s nearly four times the number of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department.

Aisha Gomez, a Minnesota State Representative, released a statement calling the operation “authoritarianism” and vowed to continue fighting federal officials “until every abducted neighbor is returned to the arms of their family.”

Mother JonesFeb 12, 2026, 12:30 PM

Trump Plans to Repeal the Finding That Lets the EPA Regulate Climate-Warming Emissions

_This story was originally published b_y the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In what is set to be its most audacious anti-environment move yet, the Trump administration on Thursday will roll back the mechanism allowing the government to regulate planet-heating pollution, the White House press secretary has told reporters.

“President Trump will be joined by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to formalize the recession of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding,” Karoline Leavitt said at a press conference on Tuesday. “This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history.”

The finding determined that CO2 and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, establishing a legal basis to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. Its overturning would be a “devastating blow to millions of Americans facing growing risks of unnatural disasters,” said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the environmental advocacy nonprofit National Resources Defense Council.

“Trump and Zeldin are telling our families: we’ll let you get sicker and watch your healthcare costs skyrocket as long as oil and gas CEOs can profit.”

“The Trump EPA is cynically pretending climate change isn’t a risk to Americans’ health and welfare,” said Hankins. “This is the biggest attack ever on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis.”

The rollback is sure to draw legal challenges.

“This isn’t going to stand without a fight,” Hankins added. “The EPA’s slapdash legal arguments should be laughed out of court. We will be seeing them in court—and we are going to win.”

The Environmental Defense Fund has also promised to sue the EPA over the rule, said Fred Krupp, its president**.** Abigail Dillen, president of the green legal organization Earthjustice, also said her group “will see the Trump administration in court..

In a statement, an EPA spokesperson called the endangerment finding “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” and said “hardworking families and small businesses have paid the price” for it.

“EPA is actively working to deliver a historic action for the American people,” the spokesperson said.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office directing EPA to assess whether the endangerment finding should be preserved.

After Zeldin announced the plan to repeal the finding in July 2025, the agency received half a million comments on the proposal. He then submitted the repeal of the legal determination for White House review last month.

Leavitt said on Tuesday the rollback would save Americans $1.3 trillion, but did not explain how officials arrived at that number. Though the new rule may save some corporations money, it could pose trillions in climate damages and healthcare costs, experts warn. The climate rules EPA is targeting could prevent tens of thousands of deaths and save the US $275 billion for each year they are in effect, an analysis by the Associated Press in July found.

Trump’s EPA has also sought a finding that emissions from power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.”

“Trump and Zeldin are telling our families: we’ll let you get sicker and watch your healthcare costs skyrocket as long as oil and gas CEOs can profit,” said Alex Witt, senior adviser at environmental advocacy group Climate Power.

The endangerment finding forms the legal underpinning of virtually all federal climate regulations, including those on vehicles, oil and gas operations, and power plants. But the final rule, Zeldin told the Wall Street Journal this week, will apply only to emissions standards on cars and trucks, not those governing stationary sources such as power plants.

The EPA did not directly confirm the scope of the planned change. The spokesperson said: “The Endangerment Finding is the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new vehicles and engines. Absent this finding, EPA would lack statutory authority…to prescribe standards for certain motor vehicle emissions.”

The agency has separately proposed to find that emissions from power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution” and therefore should not be regulated.

Gretchen Goldman, president of the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions was evident in 2009 and it’s even more undeniable today.”

“EPA has a legal obligation to regulate this pollution under the Clean Air Act,” said Goldman, who previously served in the Department of Transportation and the White House. “The American public deserves a government that will face the challenge of the climate crisis head on with proven policy solutions, not actively serve as agents of destruction by worsening it to boost fossil fuel profits.”

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