A Major Strike of Beef Workers Pauses in Colorado—but Workers Say the Fight Isn’t Over

Thousands of striking workers at a beef plant in Colorado agreed on Saturday to return to work as JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, agreed to resume contract negotiations.

The workers, who are part of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, went on strike on March 16, 2026, focused on disputes over wages, safety equipment, and working conditions at the plant, which packs about seven percent of beef in the entire country. The strike took place as the price of beef has spiked over the past year**.** According to the personal finance website Money, a pound of ground beef is now more expensive than the federal minimum wage.

UFCW Local 7 President Kim Cordova said that JBS would meet on April 9 and 10 to resume negotiations, and workers would return to work on Tuesday, April 7. “Workers remain united and will continue to fight until JBS fully ends its unfair labor practices and gives workers a contract offer that protects them,” Cordova said in the Saturday press release.

In a March story for Mother Jones, just days into the strike, Ted Genoways summarized the stakes:

“If the strike lasts more than a few days, then what has been a local battle over workplace conditions, healthcare, and wages could turn into a proxy for bigger picture conflicts—inflation and affordability, the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and corrupt corporate influence.”

Genoways explained that most of the workers at the Greeley, Colorado, plant are foreign-born laborers from Haiti, Somalia, Burma, and Mexico. The last major meatpacking worker strike, which took place 40 years ago at a Minnesota pork facility, largely failed as the plant brought in over 500 “permanent replacements,” leading to hundreds of union members ultimately crossing the picket line and returning to work. This paved the way for meatpacking companies to consolidate the market, replacing a majority-white, US-born workforce with immigrant workers. A lawsuit filed last December by Haitian workers in the Colorado plant alleges the plant segregated them to a night shift and forced them to work at “dangerously fast speeds.”

In explaining the rationale for this strike, the UFCW press release notes, “Instead of shifting toward fair treatment, the Company has recently doubled down on its illegal tactics by threatening to discontinue their healthcare benefits, and by threatening workers with termination if they did not resign from the Union and refuse to strike.”

“This decision by the union comes without any new agreement or change to [the] company’s original offer,” JBS said in a Saturday news release about the return to work, maintaining that the company’s “Last, Best and Final offer” is still on the table.

The union said the company had offered less than two percent more a year in wages, which does not reflect the rate of inflation in Colorado. JBS has denied any labor law violations and said its contract offer was fair.

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Trump’s Easter Message to Iran: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait” or “You’ll Be Living in Hell”

President Donald Trump gave Americans a bizarre, expletive-filled Easter Sunday message, celebrating US plans for war crimes against Iran following what appears to be the rescue of two airmen shot down in southern Iran.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

As a text launched on the morning of one of the most significant religious holidays on the Christian calendar, the post is disturbing enough, but it becomes even more so when read aloud, as Jake Tapper did on CNN’s Sunday show, State of the Union:

"Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell" — Jake Tapper reads Trump's Truth Social post on air

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-05T13:06:40.529Z

Aside from the president’s uninhibited vocabulary, attacking civilian infrastructure such as power plants is generally considered a war crime by international law experts.

“Given that such power plants are essential for meeting the basic needs and livelihoods of tens of millions of civilians, attacking them would be disproportionate and thus unlawful under international humanitarian law,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, said when such threats initially surfaced, “even in the limited cases that they qualify as military targets.”

Trump’s repeated belligerence and the continued and escalating military aggression in Iran, which has reportedly killed at least 2,000 people since the US and Israel launched the war on February 28, framed the sermon of Pope Leo XIV, who proclaimed in his Easter message on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica that the world was becoming “accustomed to violence.”

“Let those who have weapons lay them down,” he said. “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace. Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue.”

Pope Leo has long criticized the war and, for the first time, explicitly mentioned Trump last Tuesday, saying he hoped the president would find an “off-ramp” to end the fighting.

But perhaps the president was just overtaken with joy on Sunday with the news that the US military had rescued the second American pilot who was shot down while flying over southern Iran on Friday. The two-member fighter jet was the first US aircraft to crash in Iranian territory since the beginning of the war. The first pilot was rescued just hours after the crash.

“At my direction, the U.S. Military sent dozens of aircraft, armed with the most lethal weapons in the World, to retrieve him,” Trump posted in celebration on Truth Social just after midnight on Sunday. “The fact that we were able to pull off both of these operations, without a SINGLE American killed, or even wounded, just proves once again, that we have achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies.”

As Amin Saikal, a professor of Middle East and Central Asian studies at the Australian National University, told Al Jazeera on Sunday, rescuing the two pilots allows Trump to more freely pursue his military strategy, namely, the 48-hour deadline he imposed on Iran’s leadership Saturday morning to open the Strait of Hormuz before “all Hell will reign down on them.”

Later on Sunday, Trump told ABC News‘ Rachel Scott that if Iran does not agree to a deal, “we’re blowing up the whole country.”

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China Leads the World on Renewables, But It’s Still Addicted to Burning Rocks

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In 2021, China’s leader Xi Jinping made two important promises intended to signal China‘s commitment to fighting climate change. At the Leaders Climate Summit in that April, he announced that China would “strictly control” coal generation until 2025 when it would start to gradually phase it out. He also pledged that year that China would reduce the energy intensity of its economy—the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP—to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

This month, as China unveiled its plans for the next five years, both promises appeared to be in trouble.

The annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and attended by some 3,000 delegates, is the occasion for China’s Communist Party leaders to make important policy announcements to China and the world. This year’s meeting was keenly watched: Running from March 5 to March 12, it marked the launch of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, a set of national policies and targets that will determine the shape and ambitions of China’s economy up to 2030.

China is the biggest installer of renewable energy, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest user of coal.

2030 is also the date by which China promised, in 2015, that the country will have peaked its greenhouse gas emissions, a milestone on the way to becoming carbon neutral by 2060. Since first making that commitment a decade ago, China’s leadership has further promised to bring the peaking date forward. What happens in the next five years will determine if those promises can be kept. But analysts fear that the continuing growth in the numbers of China’s coal-fired power stations and the lack of any clear commitment in the new five-year plan to call a halt to coal expansion, may make both promises impossible to reach.

China’s government can point to some progress in the long battle against coal: In 2015 coal generated 69 percent of China’s primary energy, and by 2024 it was down to 56 percent (still much higher than the United States at 8 percent). But the actual volume of coal consumed was greater than ever, simply because China’s electricity demand continues to grow. Despite its efforts to reduce coal use, four years after Xi Jinping’s pledges, China was consuming 40 percent more coal than the rest of the world combined.

That total might have been greater still if not for China’s impressive growth in renewable energy. China installed a record 300 gigawatts of solar power and 100 gigawatts of wind power last year, which meant that the continuing increase in China’s electricity demand was largely met by clean energy. But although China’s decades-long investment in the manufacture of renewable technologies has been a hugely successful industrial policy, its attachment to coal means that this success has not translated into a correspondingly large reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Paradoxically, China is at the same time the biggest installer of renewable energy, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest user of coal. One explanation for this conundrum is a national concern over energy security: Coal is the only fossil fuel that China is not obliged to import, either through vulnerable pipelines or along sea routes that pass through precarious choke points like the Straits of Hormuz.

China has an abundant supply of coal, boasting about 13 percent of the world’s recoverable coal reserves, and, importantly, it is the one fossil fuel that Chinese planners know will remain abundantly available, regardless of any tensions in China’s East Asia region or military action in the Middle East, the region that supplies China with nearly half its oil. This means that despite China’s role as a renewable energy superpower, coal has continued to play a leading role in its energy system.

Until recently, China has argued that its claim to be a developing country meant it did not need to set emissions limits.

The importance to China of a steady coal market was reinforced in 2021, the same year that Xi Jinping made his coal pledge, when China suffered power shortages that affected 20 provinces and impacted both industry and consumers. The problem arose as China emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic: Industrial production recovered, electricity demand soared, and that in turn sent coal prices spiralling upward. Coal-fired power stations were locked into regulated prices for the sale of their electricity, but the price of coal was not controlled. When the coal price became too high, the generators began to cut output to limit their losses, pleading supply shortages or technical problems.

In October that year, the then Premier Li Keqiang reacted to the crisis, signaling an adjustment to China’s approach to climate policy. Economic growth, he said, was the key to lowering emissions in the long term and “energy security should be the premise on which a modern energy system is built.” China soon announced a new lending facility to support the “clean and efficient use of coal.”

The following year there was a new energy crisis: A severe drought in Sichuan caused output to drop from the province’s hydroelectric plants, normally the source of 80 percent of its electricity. Factories were ordered to close or reduce their output to save households from power cuts, and applications for permission to build new coal-fired power plants reached record levels as provincial authorities worried about having the energy to meet their economic growth targets. The equivalent of two new coal plants per week were approved in 2022, and by 2023, permitting reached a 10-year high of almost 113 gigawatts. The pace of construction continued in 2024, when China started building 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity—roughly 93 percent of all new global coal construction that year.

Following a surge in permitting and construction, more than 50 large coal-fired power plants were commissioned in China last year. Source: CREA / Global Energy Monitor. Yale Environment 360 / Made with Flourish

By 2023, analysts were warning that, in addition to putting its climate goals out of reach, the surge in new coal meant that China risked building coal-fired power stations that would never recover their investment and were likely to become stranded assets. Most of the new projects, according to a report from the energy think tank CREA, did not meet the central government’s criteria for new plants since they were located in provinces that had sufficient generating capacity to meet their needs.

With a further 243 gigawatts of new coal power permitted or under construction and 149 gigawatts more announced, CREA’s analysts predicted that there were two possible results, both negative: a massive increase in coal power generation and emissions, or the coal plants would have to run well below their capacity. There would be no reduction in coal use, the report concluded, unless new projects were canceled or existing plants retired early.

Not only have none been canceled, but the rush to build new plants has continued, and as predicted, the utilization rate of the new plants has dropped.

China’s energy demand has continued to rise, and so despite greater efficiency, its emissions have increased.

The 15th Five-Year Plan offered a chance to correct these negative trends and get China’s climate ambitions back on track, but it is an opportunity the government appears to have missed. The plan does promise a continuing effort to produce and install renewable energy, and China did install more renewable solar and wind power last year than the whole of the rest of the world, but other signals were less encouraging.

Until recently, China argued that its continuing claim to be a developing country meant it did not need to set emissions limits, focusing instead on the energy density (also known as energy intensity) targets highlighted by Xi Jinping. In measuring the energy required to produce a unit of GDP, they are essentially measures of efficiency: As long as energy consumption grows more slowly than GDP, energy intensity is reduced.

China set its first energy density target in the 11th Five-Year Plan in 2006, and it has been an important target in every subsequent plan, steadily improving the efficiency of China’s energy use. But greater efficiency does not necessarily mean that emissions fall. China’s energy demand has continued to rise, and so despite its greater efficiency, its emissions have increased. In the last 18 months, emissions have been down slightly, but if energy density improvements slacken off, that trend is expected to reverse.

Over the last five years, China’s continuing dramatic growth in demand seemed largely to have been met by the equally rapidly expanding supply of renewable energy. But on the negative side, China has missed its energy density target, for the first time. Aiming at a 17 percent improvement over those five years, it achieved only 12.4 percent. Given its GDP growth, that would imply that its emissions increased by 13 percent over the same period.

Builders expanding a coal plant in Zhangye, China.Cfoto/DDP/Zuma

That would put the country’s hopes of meeting its Paris commitments and Xi Jinping’s promise to reduce China’s carbon intensity by 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 severely off track. Planners could have compensated with renewed ambition in the 15th Five-Year Plan. Instead, they changed the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi’s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years.

If one aspect of China’s reluctance to abandon coal is related to energy security, another major obstacle is the vested interests within the system: Coal-producing provinces want to preserve jobs and local economies, and for provincial governments, a steady supply of electricity is more important than controlling emissions. These concerns can be in competition with national climate goals.

The government claims coal is necessary to balance the grid, filling the gaps in supply when demand is at its peak.

In China, which has the largest electricity system in the world, power generation is under the control of provincial governments, while the generating companies and the grid operators who distribute the energy are dominated by state-owned companies. When China started to build large-scale wind and solar projects more than 10 years ago, the energy system was dominated by coal-fired power stations with annual contracts to supply the grid with electricity. Because the grid operator paid for that output regardless of how much it used, the operator ensured that coal output had preferential access. That meant that when wind farms were producing high levels of electricity, they frequently found that they were unable to sell onto the grid, and it was wasted.

There have been successive attempts to reform the system to favor renewable energy, and in the 15th Five-Year Plan, the government points to its continuing commitment to expanding the renewables sector as the key to its climate policy. But this industrial policy, however successful, will not in itself reduce emissions if coal continues to play a substantial role in the power sector.

The government continues to claim that coal is necessary to balance the grid, filling the gaps in supply when demand is at its peak or when renewable output falls. But as the analysts at CREA point out, that is not the best or most efficient use of a coal-fired power station that has been designed for steady rather than sporadic operation. It can take several hours to get a coal-fired station into operation and, once operating at its maximum, it cannot easily be turned down when demand drops. To get around this problem, it appears that many operators are keeping plants in a state known as “spinning reserve,” running in the background and ready to dispatch energy at short notice. But this is inefficient both in energy use and in carbon emissions since the plant just keeps ticking, using fuel and emitting CO2.

There has also been a remarkable expansion of various forms of energy storage in China, including battery and pumped hydro, precisely to address the challenge of intermittent renewable power. Battery storage alone has increased by a factor of 20 in just four years. These forms of storage are cheaper, more efficient, and more climate friendly than keeping a coal fleet on standby and, as they grow, the case for the continued use of coal, let alone its expansion, seems sure to grow even weaker.

Of concern for investors, the cost of China’s recent coal build-out in long-term stranded assets could run into trillions. The cost to the climate is of concern to everybody.

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HHS Directly Gives Crisis Pregnancy Centers Millions of Dollars

The US Department of Health and Human Services gave at least $34 million directly to 16 crisis pregnancy centers between 2018 and 2024, according to a US Government Accountability Office report publicly released on Wednesday.

Crisis pregnancy centers, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are “facilities that represent themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics providing care for pregnant people” but work to dissuade them from seeing abortions, even during life-threatening situations such as ectopic pregnancies. There are between 2,400 and 2,800 crisis pregnancy centers in the United States.

This report comes as the Trump administration doubles down on its “pro-life and pro-family agenda,” according to White House spokesperson Kush Desai. On Friday, the Trump administration, in its budget proposal, announced plans to overhaul its Title X family planning program, moving away from contraception and instead focusing on “optimal health (defined as physical, mental, and social wellbeing), not just medical intervention.” This also seems to dismiss that some people need medical interventions, like IVF, in order to have children.

The researchers at GAO noted that it was difficult to identify how much money was given to crisis pregnancy centers over the six-year period, which does not include Trump’s second term, as they “are not easy to identify in government spending data.” They were able to identify 16 crisis pregnancy centers that received federal funds from HHS because they received a large amount of funding through two HHS Sexual Risk Avoidance Education grants.

“HHS’s oversight of federal funding obligated to CPCs is specific to the
requirements of the grant awarded and varies depending on whether the CPC is
the direct or pass-through recipient of the grant, according to HHS officials,” the researchers wrote. “HHS neither targets nor excludes CPCs from any federal grant opportunities, according to agency officials.”

The amount of grant funding that GAO located given to crisis pregnancy centers was not exclusive to the years during the first Trump administration. 2021 to 2024, HHS gave an average of just under $4.8 million per year over a four-year period during the Biden administration, just under the average of $5 million per year under the first Trump administration.

The GAO report lines up with a 2024 Health Management Associates report, which found that 650 crisis pregnancy centers received close to $400 million from federal funding streams between 2017 and 2023.

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Hold off on Celebrating Trump’s Proposal to Increase Disability Education Funding

On Friday, President Donald Trump released his budget proposal for the fiscal year 2027. Surprisingly, given the cuts that would be necessary to fund the $1.5 trillion the Trump administration is asking for military spending, the budget also included over $500 million more funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, for a total of over $16 billion. But disability experts are wary of other aspects of what the Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought, Project 2025’s architect, put forward. Vought wrote in the proposal that the budget “continues the Department of Education’s path to elimination, returning control of education back to America’s families.”

Under the IDEA, qualifying students with disabilities are able to receive modifications to their education, making sure that they have equitable access to learning opportunities in the least restrictive environment for them. The administration’s proposal includes nearly $700 million that would go directly to states.

“We do need to provide more money to states to provide direct services for kids with disabilities,” said Rob Trombley, who was an account lead for the Department of Education’s IDEA team during the Obama administration.

“IDEA really is a comprehensive program, and all of the parts of it kind of work in tandem and together to support the implementation.”

The budget recommends removing funding specifically designated for parent information centers, which help equip parents with information and resources they need to advocate for their kids with disabilities, as well as technical assistance for schools. This funding would instead come out of each state’s IDEA budget. Multiple experts I spoke with expressed concerns that this will lead to these parent programs not getting the funding they need.

“These are programs that are really critical for ensuring the implementation of IDEA,” National Center for Learning Disabilities‘ associate director of policy and advocacy Nicole Fuller said. “IDEA really is a comprehensive program, and all of the parts of it kind of work in tandem and together to support the implementation.”

The Trump administration tried the same move last year, but Congress, in a bipartisan fashion, rejected this change to the budget for parent information centers. “Advocates for students and families will call on Congress to do so again,” said Stephanie Smith Lee, former director of the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs during the George W. Bush administration.

Last year, there was also an attempt to put funding for preschool for kids with disabilities in the states through consolidated grants. Though that was similarly rejected, it is again in the budget bill for fiscal year 2027.

Early intervention during preschool years can help kids learn the skills that they need to thrive. “The sooner we can provide services for those who have developmental delays, the less likelihood that they may have a more severe disability,” Trombley told me.

It is also perhaps unsurprising that the budget refers to unborn disabled children, as anti-abortion activists tend to do, claiming that IDEA serves “eight million children with disabilities, including those unborn.” But there’s no tracking of the federal government by the Department of Education of fetuses with disabilities—that eight million number just refers to students with Individualized Education Plans, commonly known as IEPs.

There are also attacks on other aspects of education that will undoubtedly impact disabled students of color if the budget is approved by Congress, including an attempt to eliminate the English language acquisition program entirely and funding for minority-serving institutions programs. The 93-page Special Education appropriations report for the budget proposal also only mentions the term “race” once, acknowledging that schools can be held to account for disproportionately penalizing disabled students of one race over another.

Disability education is, of course, far from perfect. The federal government has already not followed through on a commitment to fund 40 percent of the cost of IEPs. The new budget proposal says that it will reduce “paperwork burdens on special educators so they can focus their time on serving students.” But, reducing paperwork for IEPs may not end up helping disabled students. Trombley told me that he does think a pilot program for finding ways to streamline IEPs could be useful if it is effective, but he does not have faith in the current administration to accomplish this. “We still need to make sure that kids are protected,” he added.

“For families, [an] IEP being comprehensive is really important, not only for their child’s services and supports,” Fuller noted, “but also should they need to use their due process rights.”

There very much remains a concern among disability education advocates that the Trump administration will soon try to move the disability education programs from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has suggested that autistic people have no value, would have a more profound influence on disability education policy.

“It is time to focus on how to improve educational opportunities for all students, including students with disabilities,” Smith Lee, now the co-director of policy and advocacy at the National Down Syndrome Congress, said, “and stop focusing on eliminating important programs, dismantling the US Department of Education, and cutting department staff.”

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Border Wall Blasting Begins on New Mexico’s Mount Cristo Rey, Cherished by Catholics

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

On a Saturday morning in March, high school students, mountain bikers and soldiers from a nearby Army base climbed the winding path up Mount Cristo Rey. From the summit, they could see most of El Paso, the sprawling city that dominates a stretch of desert where New Mexico, Texas and the Mexican state of Chihuahua meet.

They paused to trace the line of the Rio Grande, where it divides Mexico and the United States, and then touched the smooth tiles lining the base of the Christ the King statue, a cherished monument that gives the mountain its name.

Two days later, on a Monday morning, explosions rattled the same site. Contractors were blasting the south side of Mount Cristo Rey to prepare the terrain for construction of the border wall President Donald Trump has long promised would run from San Diego in California to Brownsville in Texas.

After the explosions, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) uploaded a video of the blasts to social media. One earlier post boasted the mountain was getting a “face lift” to “secure a historically challenging terrain.”

The sarcasm didn’t sit well with thousands of residents from both sides of the border, who looked forward to the annual Good Friday pilgrimage to the mountain summit. This year, they would be walking above an active construction zone.

Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park, New Mexico, from the Mexican metropolis of Ciudad Juárez. But building a wall on the rugged slopes of Mount Cristo Rey was long considered impractical. Eventually, the mountain’s slopes became the only significant gap without an imposing border fence in the binational metro area of more than 2.5 million people.

Crews work on the wall near Sunland Park, with Anapra, Mexico, visible in the background.Gaby Velasquez/Puente News Collaborative

In recent years, Sunland Park and the area around Mount Cristo Rey saw high numbers of unauthorized crossings. Migrant deaths in the nearby desert soared. In lieu of a wall, Border Patrol agents blanketed the mountain and stationed themselves, along with surveillance equipment, on nearby roads.

Border crossings in the El Paso sector slowed during the final year of the Biden administration and have plummeted since Trump returned to office. The second Trump administration is intent on sealing every border gap.

SLSCO, a Texas company based in Galveston, has a $95 million contract to build a 1.3-mile wall on Mount Cristo Rey and two other barriers near El Paso. CBP waived environmental and historical preservation laws in June 2025, clearing the way for a border wall on the mountain. Over the objections of the local Catholic diocese, which owns most of the mountain, work began at the site in January.

Robert Ardovino, a business owner in Sunland Park, is no stranger to the traffic of Border Patrol vehicles and undocumented migrants crossing into New Mexico. But he was appalled to see the side of the mountain being shaved off. “Electronics would have made more sense than destroying a whole mountain,” Ardovino said on a recent afternoon. “But they’re doing what they’re doing.”

He predicted that when the Good Friday pilgrims ascended the mountain, many would be shaking their heads at the destruction. “There is no accountability,” he said. “And the damage will be irreparable.”

“CBP has environmental monitors present during these activities to ensure construction best management practices are being followed and implemented by the construction contractor,” an agency spokesperson said.

An environmental summary report, completed in lieu of an environmental impact assessment, is not available to the public, the spokesperson said.

Mount Cristo Rey is where the land border between the US and Mexico ends and the Rio Grande becomes the dividing line. This point, for centuries called Paso del Norte—the northern pass—has been a crossroads for Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonizers and later settlers traveling west on the early transcontinental railroads.

Once the railroad reached El Paso in 1881, the city grew quickly. A brick company opened on the flanks of Mount Cristo Rey, and a quarry was carved into the mountainside. Later, a copper smelter rose in its shadow. Mexican American workers lived nearby in a company town called Smeltertown.

A priest at Smeltertown’s Catholic church first proposed building a statue on the mountaintop. The 29-foot limestone statue of Christ was dedicated in 1939. The mountain, previously known as Cerro de los Muleros, or Mule Driver’s Mountain, was renamed Mount Cristo Rey.

Smeltertown was demolished in the 1970s. But descendants of several families who lived there still volunteer with the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee, which maintains the trail and monument. They keep a watchful eye on the thousands of people, the religious and the secular, who join the Good Friday walk.

Mt. Cristo Rey monument sits atop a hill overlooking the border wall near Sunland Park.Gaby Velasquez/Puente News Collaborative

During the first Trump administration, in 2019, a group called We Build the Wall, that included Steve Bannon, tapped private donations to build a half-mile wall on the eastern side of Mount Cristo Rey. Fisher Sand and Gravel, which has received billions of dollars in border wall construction contracts under the Trump administration, built this section of wall on private property. CBP cut a dirt road across the south side of the mountain.

Bannon later pleaded guilty to defrauding donors. Lights illuminating the wall, which separates Mexico from the United States and El Paso from New Mexico, were turned off when the builders’ bank accounts were frozen.

Border wall construction largely stopped during the Biden administration. But once Trump returned to office, Mount Cristo Rey became a priority. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waived more than two dozen laws on June 3 to expedite construction of the wall across the mountain. The REAL ID Act of 2005 granted DHS the authority to “waive all legal requirements” necessary to expedite construction of border barriers. Among the laws waived were the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.

Geologist Eric Kappus considers Mount Cristo Rey one of the premier sites anywhere for geology education.

CBP announced plans for a 30-foot-high barrier that would run along the south side of the mountain and loom over the Anapra neighborhood in Ciudad Juárez. Agency plans state the wall will consist of steel bollards spaced four inches apart. It will require drainage gates and access roads.

Funding for CBP’s El Paso Anapra 16-4 Wall Project, which includes Mount Cristo Rey, dates back to DHS 2020 border wall appropriations. Since then, the agency has received 224 written statements about the proposal. According to the summary, 211 comments opposed the wall.

Notably, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces urged the agency to exclude Mount Cristo Rey from its barrier plans. In its comments, the diocese referred to the mountain as a place “where faith transcends borders.”

“A grant of entry onto land [the diocese] owns for CBP purposes, whether temporary or permanent, would deter those pilgrims and migrants from exercising their religion as they have done for almost one hundred years,” wrote the Diocese’s general counsel, Kathryn Brack Morrow. “A place of hope, faith, and communion would become a place of fear, exclusion and division.”

Morrow wrote that the Diocese had received multiple requests for access to its property from the Department of Justice, which were denied.

The trail to the summit has not been disturbed by construction. But last year, the area along the border in Sunland Park and at Mount Cristo Rey was designated a National Defense Area, part of the US Army’s Fort Huachuca. People who enter a National Defense Area can be charged with trespassing.

Contractors are blasting the mountain along a 60-mile strip of federal property known as the Roosevelt Reservation. The City of Sunland Park also owns property on the mountain. A city spokesperson said Sunland Park has no jurisdiction over the area where construction is occurring.

The construction company JOBE also owns property on the mountain and declined to comment.

Wall construction crews operate heavy equipment near Sunland Park.Gaby Velasquez/Puente News Collaborative

To the untrained eye, Mount Cristo Rey, like many Chihuahuan Desert locales, can appear desolate. A local CBP spokesperson compared it to a “moonscape” in a local news interview. “It’s just rock and sand.”

But for geologists like Eric Kappus, Mount Cristo Rey is a “treasure.”

Kappus discovered a series of dinosaur footprints at Mount Cristo Rey in 2002 while he was a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso. The prints were formed between 80 and 100 million years ago when Iguanodons and theropods plodded through mud on the edge of what was then a vast sea.

Kappus said he spent thousands of hours exploring Mount Cristo Rey, looking for fossils and prints. After working as an exploratory geologist and teaching across the country, he still considers it one of the premier sites anywhere for geology education.

“I could teach 75 to 80 percent of an introductory geology class in the field at Mount Cristo Rey,” he said. “It’s like a giant chalkboard.”

“The border wall is quite disrespectful to a lot of work that’s been undertaken by numerous government agencies.”

The prints, preserved in sandstone, were exposed during excavation for the brick yard. The site was later donated to the non-profit INSIGHTS El Paso Science Center. The dinosaur tracks site is not threatened by border wall construction.

William Lukefahr, an INSIGHTS tour guide, led a group down a rocky trail to the dinosaur tracks on a warm March morning. He slowed down to look for plants and animals. He pointed out a Black-spined prickly pear cactus and a Mormon Tea shrub. Then he spotted a spider web encasing a cocoon-like structure made of debris—the home of a desert shrub spider. “This mountain is very unique,” he said. “But there hasn’t been a lot of scientific research done here.”

Other creatures commonly seen on Mount Cristo Rey include coyotes, canyon wrens, and the greater earless lizard. Scruffy sotol and creosote shrubs dot the mountainside. Lukefahr explained that Mount Cristo Rey creates a corridor connecting the mountains in Juárez with those on the western and northern flanks of El Paso.

In their public comments to CBP, more than 80 people expressed concern for Mount Cristo Rey’s prized environment. The agency’s summary statement, in response, explained that a biological survey yielded no federally listed threatened or endangered species. The survey deemed that the habitat has a “low to moderate” suitability for wildlife.

“CBP has also determined there is minimal impact to vegetation and behavioral patterns of wildlife since the project area is flanked by existing barrier and an active patrol road,” the agency wrote.

Ardovino, the local business owner, said that wildlife activity in Sunland Park diminished after Border Patrol was “unleashed” to drive across the desert and carve new roads.

Robert Ardovino, a Sunland Park businessman, stands beside his vehicle as he watches crews work on the border wall.Gaby Velasquez/Puente News Collaborative

Years ago, he said, there were 18 pairs of burrowing owls, a diminutive variety, on his property. That was until Border Patrol vehicles repeatedly disrupted their habitat. “They’re gone now,” he said. “Concern for the environment is last on [the CBP] list.”

Myles Traphagen coordinates the borderlands project of the Wildlands Network, a nonprofit advocacy group. He said building the border wall will counteract federal efforts to foster endangered species, including the Mexican gray wolf.

US and Mexican government biologists collaborate on wolf reintroduction, with pups from New Mexico transported to Northern Mexico to grow the population and increase genetic diversity. “The border wall is quite disrespectful to a lot of work that’s been undertaken by numerous government agencies,” he said.

In 2017, Traphagen tracked the movements of a Mexican gray wolf outfitted with a GPS collar. The wolf traveled north from Chihuahua into New Mexico, then followed the Rio Grande to Mount Cristo Rey, where it crossed back into Mexico.

He said the border wall will close off this wildlife crossing point.

Ardovino owns property less than a half mile from the blast site. He said his interactions with local Border Patrol agents have always been respectful, although he was not notified before the blasting began. The boom of an unexpected explosion signaled that construction was underway.

The neighborhood of Anapra in Juárez is just feet away from the blast site. Warning signs were posted in the neighborhood in January.

Morrow, the attorney for the Diocese, said she has yet to receive notification from federal agencies of the blasting. Neither has Ruben Escandon Jr., spokesperson for the Mount Cristo Rey Restoration Committee. “Hopefully,” blasting would not occur during the Good Friday walk, he said.

A construction zone at the border wall near Sunland Park.Gaby Velasquez/Puente News Collaborative

The CBP spokesperson said landowners would be notified, but that there are no landowners in the blast zone.

The Wildlands Network’s Traphagen said that contractors at Mount Cristo Rey are defying common blasting protocols. Blast impact goes well beyond the thin strip of land where construction is underway, he said, and nearby residents and landowners should be notified for safety.

Construction activities are so far limited to the government’s Roosevelt Reservation. But it is unlikely the wall can be built without access to the diocese’s property on the mountain. The Diocese’s attorney was adamant the church will not sell.

The CBP spokesperson said that if the agency is unable to purchase property for border wall construction through voluntary sales, the Department of Justice can use eminent domain.

In public comments, the diocese attorney said attempts to seize the land would violate religious freedom and the right to worship, protected by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

For now, the diocese is holding on to its sacred space. On Good Friday, thousands of people would climb Mount Cristo Rey, as they have every year going back almost a century.

But blast by blast, border wall construction is coming for Mount Cristo Rey.

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A Midnight Phone Call. A Missing Movie. Decades of Questions.

Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, paper trails, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work. But that gave us an idea: What would happen if we used these skills for things that are less about accountability and more about joy? If we turned our energy toward personally meaningful questions?

That was the spark for our first-ever Inconsequential Investigations hour. We turned our journalistic strategies on our own biggest questions to see where the trail led.

This week on Reveal, we take up Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes’ quest to find the first short film he ever made, even though it was lost to the early 2000s internet. Yowei Shaw of the podcast Proxy brings us along as she meets her doppelganger and discovers the truth behind how people see her. And Reveal reporter and producer Ashley Cleek untangles her own unsolved mystery: Did reclusive rock star Jeff Mangum really call into her college radio show, asking her for a favor?

We plan to do more Inconsequential Investigations like this. If you have a personal mystery that needs looking into, please email Inconsequential@revealnews.org.

This is an update of an episode that first aired in October 2025.

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See Photos from the First Lunar Travelers Since 1972

NASA just released the first photos taken by astronauts aboard Artemis II– the first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years. The images show Earth from space, in one photo swathed in clouds and in another almost obscured in darkness.

The four-person crew includes pilot Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to travel to deep space, and mission specialist Christina Koch, the first woman on a lunar mission. On Day 6 of their 10-day journey, they’ll loop around the far side of the moon without landing and continue home.

“You look amazing. You look beautiful,” said Glover looking back at Earth in an interview with CBS News. “From up here you also look like one thing… No matter where you’re from or what you look, like we’re all one people.”

Back on Earth, NASA’s future is less certain. The White House has proposed cutting the agency’s science budget by 47%, and for the first time in 40 years, NASA has not committed to starting any new science missions.

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Pam Bondi Traded Her Department’s Independence for Loyalty to Trump

President Donald Trump’s dumping of Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday was the kind of shrewd personnel change one might expect from an executive who made a name for himself by firing people. Bondi presided over the unraveling of the Department of Justice. Under her leadership, the DOJ has lost the respect of judges and juries, its ranks have been decimated by lawyers fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, and it racked up embarrassing losses at an unheard of clip. Almost impressively, Bondi has turned the Justice Department from an august symbol of the rule of law into a limping, corrupt enterprise.

But Bondi wasn’t ousted for her disastrous leadership. Her incompetence, magnified in her handling of the Epstein files, in which she managed to make sure a bad story for her boss wouldn’t go away, contributed to Trump’s growing frustration. But Trump reportedly soured on Bondi because she failed to failed to lock up his political enemies. The irony of the situation, of course, is that Trump’s own involvement is what doomed not just those sham prosecutions, but ultimately the DOJ itself.

Trump spent his first term pining for a Justice Department that would protect him, and an attorney general who would serve like his personal attorney—or hit man. In his second term, Bondi willingly tried to fill that role. But her tenure is living proof of a problem whose origin ultimately lies with the rightwing push for a so-called unitary executive who controls every inch of the executive branch: that sort of presidential power breeds distrust, corruption, and ultimately failure.

Before Trump returned to the White House, the Supreme Court granted him criminal immunity for official acts. That instantly infamous opinion, Trump v. United States, also emphasized that the Justice Department was the president’s personal playground. The attorney general was no longer the nation’s chief law enforcement official but, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “acts as the President’s ‘chief law enforcement officer.’” Trump could direct investigations and prosecutions; he could even utilize the department’s prosecutorial powers in furtherance of crimes, including politically motivated investigation and charges.

This Supreme Court constructed an all-powerful presidency on the premise that such power would breed both decisive leadership and democracy accountability. In Trump, Roberts wrote that the Constitution’s framers “deemed an energetic executive essential to…‘the steady administration of the laws.’” And in a 2021 case that acted as a stepping stone to the immunity decision, Roberts assured the public that a unitary executive would create the most politically responsive government. The executive power “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote,” he wrote.

Bondi was the first attorney general to operate unencumbered by any loyalty to the rule of law, or any pretense of independence. Instead, she was liberated to act, unabashedly, as an appendage of the president. Not long ago, political interference at the Justice Department cost an attorney general his job. For Bondi, that sort of thing was all in a day’s work. In multiple congressional hearings, she demonstrated—through pre-planned zingers hurled at Democratic lawmakers, combatively refusing to answer questions, and praising Trump in terms that would make Stalin blush—that she had no respect for the idea of democratic accountability.

Bondi showed that treating the Justice Department as an instrument of the president’s will is ultimately self-defeating. Whereas Roberts promised “steady administration of the laws,” Bondi delivered embarrassing loss after embarrassing loss, and racked up scandal after scandal. Once elite jobs at DOJ are now so hard to fill that officials are left begging for applicants on social media, even as experience requirements have been slashed. Judges and jurors alike know that the Justice Department has been compromised.

Let’s survey the wreckage. The Justice Department has mounted numerous prosecutions against anti-Trump protesters who oppose the administration’s cruel immigration sweeps. But in its zeal to punish dissent, dozens of have failed. A prosecutor, the aphorism goes, can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. But Bondi’s DOJ failed to secure an indictment against DC’s famous sandwich-thrower, who hurled a hoagie at a law enforcement official in protest of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge. Undeterred, DOJ hauled the thrower before a jury on a misdemeanor charge, where he was promptly acquitted.

Last September, the Trump administration launched a showy, chaotic, and violent immigration operation in Chicago. Immigration agents descended from helicopters onto an apartment building in the middle of the night, where they not only detained immigrants but also zip-tied citizens and naked children. The brutal crackdown sparked demonstrations, and in came the Justice Department to prosecute the protesters, often with charges of impeding or assaulting officers. So far, they’ve failed to get a single conviction.

The Chicago Sun-Times has tracked 32 federal prosecutions tied to the Chicago deportation blitz. Of those, half were dismissed, grand juries declined to indict in three, one ended with a jury acquittal, and three will have charges dropped for good behavior. One of the people whose prosecution was dropped was Marimar Martinez, a US citizen who was shot five times by an ICE officer, then smeared as a domestic terrorist and charged with assaulting a federal officer.

The department’s motives can’t be trusted, and no longer can it be trusted to speak honestly to judges or to follow their orders.

On September 20, Trump tapped out a message to Bondi demanding that she hurry up and prosecute three people he held grudges against. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia???” he wrote, referring to former FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and New York Attorney General Leticia James. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” When he hit send, Trump reportedly thought he was delivering a private message through his Truth Social media platform. Instead, he posted the instructions for the world to see. Bondi sprang into action.

In her pursuit of a Comey indictment, Bondi and Trump ousted the US attorney in Virginia’s eastern district who wouldn’t go along with the scheme. They replaced him with Florida insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan. Halligan lacked any prosecutorial experience, and had worked on exactly three federal cases. But she had the qualification Trump and Bondi cared most about: Loyalty, as in all three cases, she had represented Trump. In a government run on the whim of one man, allegiance has proven more important than competence.

Unfortunately, loyalty isn’t enough to secure a conviction. Halligan promptly engineered indictments against James and Comey, although a judge questioned whether Halligan had made critical misstatements of the law to a grand jury in Comey’ case. The New York Times found that Halligan omitted possibly exculpatory facts to James’ grand jury. Ultimately, a federal judge dismissed both indictments on grounds that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful. When the Justice Department tried to get a new indictment against James, the grand jury refused. The government is still appealing the dismissal of the charges against Comey.

When a video featuring six Democratic lawmakers reminding active-duty military and intelligence officers that they have a duty not to follow illegal orders enraged Trump, DOJ jumped into action. The US attorney’s office in DC, led by Trump ally Jeanine Pirro, sought indictments against the members of Congress. A unanimous grand jury rebuffed them.

Then came the attempted prosecution of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom Trump wants to oust as part of his bid to take control of the powerful central bank. A federal judge in Washington quashed two grand jury subpoenas last month that were part of that criminal investigation. The opinion of Judge James Boasberg laid out not just that the case against Powell is paper thin, but that the Justice Department’s reputation is in such a state of ruin that it can no longer be trusted to act in the interest of justice. Boasberg was clear-eyed about the DOJ’s track record of launching prosecutions at the president’s behest, and how that history tainted the Powell case. The department once enjoyed a “presumption of regularity,” or good faith, before judges. Now, judges are presuming the worst.

In New Jersey last month, a federal judge threw a top prosecutor out of his courtroom and ordered his superiors to come in to testify about who was actually running the state’s US attorney’s office. Bondi had previously split the top job between three people after judges ousted another Trump lackey and former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, from the position, for having been unlawfully appointed. Bondi’s attempt to keep the office in the hands of Trump allies who aren’t Senate-confirmed failed when, last month, another court ruled that the three prosecutors jointly running the office had also been appointed unlawfully.

“The Administration has made clear that it cares far more about who is running the” US attorney’s office, Judge Matthew Brann wrote, “than whether it is running at all.”

It’s a truth that applies to the department as a whole. Trump is so bent on loyalists—Bondi, Halligan, Pirro, Habba—who will implement his agenda, that he has undermined the department’s ability to function. Perhaps his next attorney general will not be so inept as those four. But the problem for Trump and his withering department remains: A Justice Department carrying out the president’s personal revenge plots is ultimately an untrustworthy institution.

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A MAGA Crack-up?

A version of the below article first appeared in 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._

Often political movements end up as circular firing squads, especially when there’s a competition for leadership. The same can be true for cults. With Trump’s misnamed Make America Great Again cult movement, the firing squad is shaped more like a Möbius strip. In the past year or so, MAGA World has been racked with a series of cross-cutting feuds, with incoming and outgoing fire ricocheting across the Trumpian landscape in all directions, causing chaos and confusion, as multiple conspiracy theories clash and vitriolic accusations pile up. An outsider cannot keep track of the infighting without a program or a wire diagram that would make Carrie Mathison proud.

You may have caught particular episodes in this sweeping saga. One of the main ones occurred when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and commentator Tucker Carlson got into a dust-up last year over Israel, with Carlson, an America First anti-interventionist, decrying Cruz for being a pro-Israel warmonger and Cruz slamming Carlson for hosting on his show Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white nationalist and Hitler fanboy. Cruz accused Carlson of being “complicit in…evil” for platforming Fuentes. This tiff led to a civil war inside the influential Heritage Foundation between those who backed Carlson (including its president) and those who found his association with Fuentes despicable.

This row reflected a deepening fault line among Trump followers between isolationists and hawks, with Israel as the fulcrum and antisemitism (actual or false charges of) imbuing the debate. With this baseline split, it was no surprise that the Iran war has led to more MAGA-on-MAGA catfighting. Fox News loudmouths Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Mark Levin, along with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, have been cheerleaders for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Tehran, with Carlson and Megyn Kelly blaming Israel for dragging Trump and the United States into this conflict.

Kelly complained the war was sold to the American public by “Israel firsters, like Mark Levin.” He retorted by calling Kelly an “emotionally unhinged, lewd and petulant wreck.” Then it got nasty. Kelly asserted that Levin had a small penis. He said she was a slut. I’m not making this up:

Look at Deep Throat. Oh the stories I hear. Filthy mouth. https://t.co/RmSvFNM0rM

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) March 28, 2026

Adjacent to this fight over Israel and the Iran war, much of the internecine warfare within MAGA has been driven by an absurd conflict between commentator Candace Owens and Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA chieftain Charlie Kirk. Owens used to be a hotshot at The Daily Wire, a conservative media operation co-founded by Shapiro. But she and Shapiro had a bitter falling out two years ago, as Owens blended her criticism of Israel with explicit antisemitism. She departed and started her own podcast, where she built a massive audience of millions promoting extremism and conspiracy theories.

Erika Kirk begged Candace Owens to cease her conspiracizing about her husband’s death. Owens didn’t.

After Charlie Kirk was shot in September, Owens, who once worked at TPUSA, devoted hours of her show to promoting the conspiracy theory that he had been betrayed by close colleagues and killed by Egypt and France. Or maybe Israel. Or maybe the US government. She suggested that Kirk was about to leave the pro-Israel cause, and this led to his execution by one or more of these nefarious powers. And it gets more bizarre: Owens insisted she had proof that Egyptian military planes had been tracking Erika Kirk for years. I will spare you more of the bonkers details; there are plenty of them. (Another one of Owens’ prominent conspiracy theories is that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife is really a man, and she alleged Macron had ordered her assassination for outing this secret.)

Erika Kirk begged Owens to cease her conspiracizing about her husband’s death. Owens didn’t. After all, as she peddled this cuckoo narrative, her audience grew. Shapiro called Owens a “vampire.” Laura Loomer, the Islamophobic MAGA influencer and 9/11 conspiracy theorist close to Trump, branded Owens a “grifter” and urged Erika Kirk to sue Owens.

On the other side, Carlson saluted Owens’ search for the truth. And Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who recently resigned to protest the Iran war, tried to investigate supposed foreign involvement in the Kirk murder when he was in the Trump administration—and pissed off FBI Director Kash Patel by digging through the FBI files on the case without being authorized to do so.

An FBI spokesperson called Kent a “dishonest hack” and assailed him for spreading “baseless conspiracy theories” about Kirk’s murder, adding, “If he had any shame, Joe Kent should be ashamed of himself.”

Appearing on Carlson’s independent internet show two weeks ago, Kent, who has past ties to Fuentes (the antisemitic white nationalist Carlson respectfully interviewed), insinuated that Israel killed Kirk. “When one of President Trump’s closest advisers, who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink, at least, our relationship with the Israelis,” Kent told Carlson, “and then he’s suddenly publicly assassinated and we’re not allowed to ask any questions about that, it’s a data point. It’s a data point that we need to look into.”

Kent has long been an avid conspiracy theorist, and he has championed the claim that the FBI orchestrated the January 6 riot—a notion that Patel, too, advanced before he became the bureau’s director. But now these former comrades in conspiracy are on the outs. An FBI spokesperson called Kent a “dishonest hack” and assailed him for spreading “baseless conspiracy theories” about Kirk’s murder, adding, “If he had any shame, Joe Kent should be ashamed of himself.”

The night after he was on Carlson’s show, Kent spoke at a gala fundraiser for Catholics for Catholics, a far-right organization that feted…you got it, Owens.

Back to Loomer: She’s been feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who got into a tussle with Trump over the Jeffrey Epstein files), and last month she referred to Carlson as a “vile Jew hater.”

Are you dizzy yet? I haven’t gotten to the nuttiest part.

Last week, Alexis Wilkins, a MAGA-ish country singer and Patel’s girlfriend (for whom Patel has assigned an FBI SWAT unit as a security detail), took the suspicion and paranoia to a new level. In a 13-part thread on X, she claimed she was the victim of an operation mounted against her by a “foreign-linked influence network” that was also conniving to create “chaos in the Republican Party” so the GOP loses the midterm elections and Trump’s agenda is subverted.

Her posts were convoluted, but she cited a bunch of familiar names as seeming participants in this diabolical scheme, including Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser who has become a Christian nationalist champion, Catholics for Catholics, Owens, Kent, and RT, the English-language Russian propaganda outlet.

Leadership vacuums can heighten tensions within a movement. Charlie Kirk is gone, and some of this internal bickering can be attributed to the fight for his following of young conservatives.

Presenting an analysis of social media posts—she did her own research!—she insisted that RT and the “Flynn network” were both promoting overlapping messages asserting that MAGA was dead. “The goal of this operation,” Wilkins said, “is not to win a political argument, but to make the fractures feel permanent. To make Republicans believe their movement is over. To make soldiers feel the war isn’t worth fighting.”

Not long ago, Wilkins was accused by a MAGA influencer of being a “honeypot” for Mossad, assigned to influence Patel. Now she contended that Owens’ claim that Israel killed Kirk was part of the same operation that had falsely tagged her as an Israeli spy.

By this point, your head may be hurting. Mine is. And I’ve not covered the entirety of all the MAGA mud-wrestling. Nor have I mentioned the death of Jeff Webb, the so-called “father of modern cheerleading” and a mentor of Charlie Kirk, who expired last week at the age of 76 due to a pickleball accident. Could that be a coincidence?

As I noted above, leadership vacuums can heighten tensions within a movement. Charlie Kirk is gone, and some of this internal bickering can be attributed to the fight for his following of young conservatives. And Trump presumably will be out of office in 34 months. Who inherits what’s left of MAGA? Will the post-Trump cult be anti-interventionist? Or pro-Israel and hawkish? Will it be led by or include antisemites? Much of this combat is propelled by that.

During transitional phases, underlying tensions in a movement will surface. And when a movement is predicated on deranged notions, what emerges will be batcrap bananas.

Let us not forget, this is not only about power and influence. There’s much money at stake. Most of these right-wing warriors are competing with each other for eyeballs and ears in the MAGAverse. With an audience of more than 7 million, Owens is raking it in. Her crazy is crazy profitable.

Conspiracism has always run deep in the veins of modern American conservatism, ever since Joe McCarthy claimed everyone other than him and his supporters were secret commies trying to destroy America. The tea party said that Barack Obama had a secret scheme to destroy the economy so he could become emperor (and set up concentration camps for conservatives). Trump pushed the racist birther conspiracy theory. His supporters promoted Pizzagate. He embraced QAnon. Election denialism and Deep State conspiracy theories are articles of faith for MAGA and the GOP.

During transitional phases, underlying tensions in a movement will surface. And when a movement is predicated on deranged notions, what emerges will be batcrap bananas. That’s what’s happening now in Trumpland. These volcanic eruptions triggered by MAGA’s shifting tectonic plates are spewing lunacy.

Will any of this impact politics in the real world? It certainly won’t boost the GOP’s prospects in the midterms. (I’m not sure it matters, but Fuentes told his followers to skip the midterms or vote for Democrats to protest the Iran war.) As jockeying for 2028 begins, these scuffles might shape the GOP battlefield. Fundamentally, what’s happening is that MAGA is revealing its animating forces: extremism, nastiness, paranoia, and madness. And when you let loose the crazy, there’s no telling where it will flow.

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Texas Leads the Nation in Wind Energy, So Why Are There No Turbines Offshore?

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

Texas state officials have led a successful and concerted effort to prevent offshore wind developments in the Gulf. Over the last few years, key leaders whose signatures and support are required to permit energy developments off the coast signaled to investors that such approvals would be unlikely.

So even as five offshore wind projects resume construction this month after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s stop-work order for the developments, Texas has none in the mix. The US has a small number of projects operating off the East Coast, totaling some 40 gigawatts.

Texas leads the nation in wind energy, producing more than a fifth of the country’s wind-sourced electricity. Studies show the region could have similar success offshore, especially given the state’s experience building oil and gas rigs in the Gulf. Yet an auction of federal seabed leases nearly three years ago saw no bids.

While there are a myriad of reasons no offshore wind projects are operational or underway off the coast of Texas, experts say chief among them is the political hostility from state leaders, and, more recently, the federal government, toward this type of renewable energy.

In August 2023, three federal leases were put up for bid for the first time in the Gulf of Mexico by the Biden administration to build wind farms.

President Joe Biden had set a goal to produce 30 gigawatts, which the administration said could power 10 million homes and avoid 78 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. One of the federal land sites was off the coast of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The other two were off the Texas coast, some 30 nautical miles from Galveston.

The massive blades of coastal turbines allow them to generate three times as much power as a land turbines.

Both renewable energy developers and oil and gas companies, like Shell and TotalEnergies, qualified as bidders for the Texas sites.

The leaseholder would have been eligible to generate power to sell to Texas’ electric grid or to produce hydrogen power. The Louisiana lease sold for $5.6 million, but no company bid on either of the Texas spots.

Despite the mature workforce with the know-how to build offshore facilities in the Gulf, Colin Leyden, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Texas director, said there weren’t high expectations that the Texas leases would be the first to go. It was clear that offshore wind had a few high-profile antagonists, he said.

Any offshore substations or cable landing facilities onshore from sea wind developments would need approval from the state’s coastal lands and seabeds regulator, General Land Office Commissioner Dawn Buckingham. Ahead of the lease sale, Buckingham said her office wouldn’t grant the necessary approvals for an offshore wind farm to commence construction.

The General Land Office did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News.

It signaled to investors that Texas was a risky place to invest, said Stacy Ortego, the Gulf of Mexico offshore wind energy campaign manager for the National Wildlife Federation.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, state leadership welcomed the investment. Louisiana’s previous governor, John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, put together a climate initiative task force that recommended 5 gigawatts of offshore wind power generation by 2035.

“That was a strong indicator that Louisiana was open for business for offshore wind,” Ortego said. “Whereas Texas was sending the opposite message.”

The 2023 auction also came shortly after a legislative session in which nearly a dozen bills sought to curb the expansion of renewable energy across the state, including one that proposed a new process that would make it extremely difficult to build offshore wind farms on the Texas side of the Gulf of Mexico.

When the two leases received no bids, Sen. Mayes Middleton, a Republican from Galveston who sponsored the bill aiming to ban offshore wind, posted that he would refile bills in the following session to ensure that there would never be offshore wind in Texas. Many of those same bills were reintroduced in the 2025 Legislature and were unsuccessful.

On a random day in February, renewables provided nearly 70 percent of the state’s power.

Middleton, who heads an oil company, did not respond to an interview request.

Wayne Christian, a leader of the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator, wrote in 2023 to Gov. Greg Abbott and Buckingham to express his concern that while the wind farms would be in federal waters, they would have consequences across Texas lands. He said he was especially worried about coastal communities relying on the Gulf for commercial fishing, tourism, and industrial or transportation jobs, Christian wrote.

The oil and gas regulator also wrote in defense of the state’s fossil fuel industry, a common sight offshore in the Gulf. Christian said he feared that the Biden administration would not rest until it ended Texas oil and gas. “Something must be done to stop President Biden from implementing these wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico,” Christian said.

Anna Weiss, director of green initiatives at Vision Galveston, a community nonprofit, has heard the concern that offshore wind would obstruct views and harm tourism. But the turbines would be far offshore, she noted. And Galveston’s shoreline has many industrial applications already.

“Offshore wind would really transform the Texas energy grid,” Weiss said. “We need to balance these concerns and try to understand what it is going to take to move forward together.”

Nearly three years after Christian’s comments opposing offshore wind, he remains firm in his opinion that it cannot make the same promises of reliability and economic growth as Texas’ methane can. Offshore wind requires massive subsidies and backup generation to account for the vagaries of weather, Christian said in a statement.

“At the end of the day, Texans deserve energy that is dependable, affordable, and grounded in reality—not policies driven by ideology,” he said in his statement. “That’s why I’ll continue to stand up for the resources that have made Texas the energy capital of the world.”

The same year the state’s oil and gas regulators lobbied against federal lease sales for offshore wind and the federal government offered clean energy tax credits, state legislators floated the idea of a natural gas subsidy program. In 2025 they approved a $7.2 billion fund of low-interest loans and bonus grants incentivizing new gas-fueled power plants.

The federal government initially estimated that the two Gulf sites, plus the Lake Charles lease, would generate some 3.7 gigawatts of power, depending on which models of turbines were ultimately selected, enough for almost 1.3 million homes. The coastal turbines with rotor blades reaching nearly 900 feet tall generate three times the power of a land turbine.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management identified that nearly a third of the shallow-water offshore wind potential in the US lies beyond the Texas and Louisiana shores in the Gulf. High wind speeds and proximity to coastal energy users make the area well-suited for such projects, the agency noted.

Tugboats tow the semi-submersible drilling platform Noble Danny Adkins through the Port Aransas Channel.Tom Pennington/Getty/Inside Climate News

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory said after the lackluster auction that while it’s unlikely offshore wind will develop in the Gulf before 2030, there remains significant optimism that it can be deployed as the global industry matures and costs come down. The area’s oil and gas infrastructure and skilled labor give it a head start, a 2023 report from the lab stated.

Part of why the Texas area leases didn’t get any bids was bad timing, said Ortego. Supply chain bottlenecks, rising material costs and higher interest rates contributed to the disinterest, too. But the main reason the leases went unsold, Ortego figures, is political pushback from state leadership.

If Americans later elect a president friendlier to offshore wind, Ortego said, momentum in Texas could pick up. “There’s a lot of opportunities in the Gulf—we have a very robust offshore energy development industry that’s really poised to take advantage of offshore wind opportunities.”

Beyond opposition from state officials, there are other barriers in Texas to an offshore wind energy industry taking off in the Gulf.

One is that offshore wind farms in Texas are more challenging to develop than in other states because of the way the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ electric market works, Leyden said. The competitive energy market makes it difficult for new energy types to join the mix.

New entrants with high price tags do not benefit from, in the case of Louisiana, for example, an integrated utility potentially wrapping all the costs of new infrastructure into the ratepayer base, Leyden said. It’s true for nuclear or hydrogen too, he said, or any resource type that has a premium on the front end.

“That’s certainly one reason why there hasn’t been as much excitement around development,” Leyden said.

This lack of enthusiasm is notable because solar, batteries and onshore wind are the cheapest resources available to build in ERCOT, Leyden said. Texas continues to increasingly power the state’s electricity demands with renewables. On February 28, for example, 83 percent of the morning demand was met by solar and wind. Throughout the whole day, renewables provided nearly 70 percent of the state’s power.

Given how productive offshore wind could be in the Gulf, existing large generators probably feel more threatened by it than by other renewables, Leyden said.“It’s hard to know how much that plays into it as well,” Leyden said.

Developers also must consider hurricanes in the Gulf. A National Renewable Energy Laboratory report suggested using stronger “typhoon class” wind turbines.

Meanwhile, the attempts by Trump’s second administration to shutter nearly completed offshore wind facilities sends a message to the capital markets that these projects are risky to put money into right now, Leyden said.

“Don’t discount what the federal administration has done with existing offshore wind projects as having a chilling effect,” Leyden said.

Last week, the administration disclosed that it had agreed to pay TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas major, nearly $1 billion to stop its plans for building wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina in exchange for the company investing the funds in new oil and gas projects in the United States.

The Southern Shrimp Alliance, which represents the shrimping industry across eight states, worried about the impact of offshore wind construction and operation in the Gulf when auction plans geared up. Alliance spokesperson Deborah Long said the trade association persuaded the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to eliminate problematic locations.

“Of the 13 areas BOEM initially identified as suitable for wind energy development in the Gulf—areas that could have catastrophically disrupted access to traditional shrimping grounds—only a single, carefully selected area was ultimately leased,” Long said.

Shrimpers weren’t only concerned about shrimp. If development harmed sensitive species, like endangered sea turtles and red snappers, the alliance worried its members would be on the hook to pay regulatory fines or see the fishery temporarily closed.

The wildlife impacts can be overcome, the National Wildlife Federation’s Ortego said. Responsible offshore wind developments reduce noise during site surveying by lowering vessel speeds in areas frequented by endangered species and plan construction schedules in tandem with species’ migration calendars, she said.

The biggest threat to wildlife is not transitioning to cleaner energy, Ortego added. “The effects of climate change far outweigh any potential impacts of offshore wind or other renewable development,” she said.

The National Audubon Society, a conservancy group for birds, says in a 2025 report that “developing offshore wind energy is a solvable problem for birds, while unchecked climate change is not.” Two thirds of North American bird species are set to face extinction unless climate change is addressed, the group warned.

To avoid bird collisions and impacts, the Audubon Society recommends siting prospective Gulf wind farms in the middle continental shelf, further offshore.

After the failed 2023 auction, the Biden administration considered another sale of federal leases for offshore wind. In a letter filed to BOEM in September 2024, Buckingham, the Texas General Land Office commissioner, reminded the agency that access to underwater land for transmission lines required an easement she could approve or deny.

The land office, she wrote, might very well condition approval on a heightened bond and financial assurance measure beyond what BOEM would require.

A few months earlier, she told the agency she was “uniquely qualified to shed light on the folly of the Biden administration’s…continued efforts to force-feed the American people failed ‘green’ policies.”

“I am charged with determining whether the granting of an easement is in the best interest of the state. I can assure you that when weighing the interests, I will do so objectively and without being influenced by ‘green’ policy goals,” Buckingham wrote.

That and other opposition against offshore wind comes as the state anticipates up to 5 million more residents by 2036 and a growing queue of large energy users seeking to connect to the state’s grid. A 2025 poll by Texas A&M University at Galveston found that 71 percent of Texans support wind development off the state’s coast.

One of the study authors, Elizabeth Nyman, an associate professor of maritime studies, said the state has about half the Gulf’s technical capacity for offshore wind thanks to its long shoreline—enough to meet more than 160 percent of the state’s 2025 energy needs.

Of the 600 Texas residents polled, more than three-quarters ranked both on and offshore wind in the top five energy sources they’d like the state to incentivize.

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Pam Bondi Proves That for Trump, You Can’t Debase Yourself Enough

Of all the rot that flowed from Pam Bondi’s tenure leading the Justice Department under Donald Trump’s second term, the one that will be remembered beyond this political moment is likely to be her February 2026 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

It was there that the attorney general, now former, approached congressional oversight like a vulgar cage fight.

“You’re a washed-up, loser lawyer,” Bondi told Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee. “You’re not even a lawyer.”

Coming from the highest law enforcement officer in the country, the taunt was absurd, the stuff of reality television theatrics intended to please our reality television president. It was easy to see why. Bondi was testifying before Congress about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, a source of abject rage for the president. And Bondi, who angered both Democrats and Republicans with her conduct over the files, couldn’t afford a bad performance. So there she was, effectively punching her way through a congressional hearing.

“They are trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done,” Bondi snarled in another moment from the February hearing.

None of which ended up boosting her favorability. On Thursday, two months after the hearing, Trump fired Bondi anyway, claiming in a Truth Social post that she was relocating to an “important job in the private sector.” The ouster comes almost exactly one month after the president fired Kristi Noem, another fierce loyalist, after the former Homeland Security Secretary reportedly pissed him off with her own congressional performance. Together, the firings once again underscored a singular Trumpian truth: that you’re useful to Donald Trump until you’re not. That this is a man who does not hesitate to discard anyone, no matter how much they’ve contorted themselves for the job.

For Bondi, those contortions came in the form of constant debasing, both of herself as a law enforcement official and the Justice Department, where, in little over a year, she politicized the department to the point of transforming it into the president’s personal law firm. All while shredding her already thin credibility—she did, after all, decline to investigate allegations of fraud into Trump University after Trump sent a $25,000 check to a PAC close to Bondi—in the process. And for what? An “important job in the private sector,” it turns out.

“You’re about as good of a lawyer today as you were when you tried to impeach President Trump,” Bondi told Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) at the February hearing. It turns out that in Trumpworld, you’re only as good as your least bad congressional performance.

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Trump’s Iran Speech Offered Zero Answers and Backfired

Donald Trump’s first national address since launching his war in Iran with Israel on Wednesday night tremendously backfired.

The speech, reportedly designed to reassure Americans that all of his administration’s military goals would be achieved swiftly, provided few new details about how exactly the fighting would continue in the near future.

But one remark was notable: comparing the war against Iran with long, unpopular US wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq to demonstrate how much he has accomplished against “one of the most powerful countries” in just 32 days. Maybe mentioning unpopular wars that dragged on is not a good way to ease anxieties?

Oil prices skyrocketed again in response to Trump’s address, rising more than eight percent.

While Trump seemed to temper his rhetoric on some of his usual talking points, namely, directly insulting NATO allies and threatening to withdraw from the alliance—something he said earlier that same Wednesday—the president instead stated countries that rely on oil traveling through the Strait of Hormuz should “build up some delayed courage” and take care of the passage.

“The hard part is done,” Trump said, referring to the extensive airstrikes against Iran that he claims opened the door for re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. The US and Israel bombing campaign has killed nearly 2,000 people as of March 26.

According to the Washington Post, leaders from more than 30 countries will meet Thursday to assess ways to reopen the waterway, including finding diplomatic ways to make the strait “safe” after the war ends (Trump did not state an end date on the war on Wednesday night). Officials say that freeing the strait would necessitate their navies to escort oil tankers.

It’s another needless Trump war that he is demanding everyone else clean up.

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Trump’s Forest Service Upheaval Sows Confusion and Concern

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

On March 31, the US Forest Service announced plans to move its headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah. It will also close or repurpose all nine of its regional offices, create 15 state offices, and shutter research and development facilities in more than 30 states. According to a news release, the plan is intended to make the agency more “nimble, efficient [and] effective.” Forest Service leaders told staff on a call after the announcement that no changes will be made to fire and aviation management programs or field-based operational firefighters.

Since first announcing its intent to reorganize the agency last July, the Trump administration has marketed the plan as a way to streamline Forest Service operations, with a focus on boosting timber production and communicating more closely with local communities. But during a congressional hearing and public comment period on the subject last summer, more than 80 percent of the 14,000 public comments submitted were negative, with many tribal representatives, conservation groups and former Forest Service staffers opposing the move.

A US Department of Agriculture summary of public comments included concerns that relocating Forest Service staff and further cuts to its budgets “could compromise ecological management, public access, and employee morale.” The current plan incorporates many elements of the original proposal, including the move to Salt Lake City and the closure of regional offices. “Nobody is asking for this,” said Robert Bonnie, who oversaw the Forest Service as a Department of Agriculture undersecretary during the Obama administration. “None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody.”

To Bonnie and other former Forest Service staff, the plan, which will uproot thousands of employees, looks like it will only make the agency’s existing troubles worse, especially given the past year of deep cuts and chaos. “This is not going to strengthen the Forest Service, it is going to weaken it,” Bonnie said. “It’s not about solving problems, it’s about blowing things up.”

Mary Erickson, a retired Custer Gallatin National Forest supervisor, had more questions than answers after the announcement. “I’m not going to say if it’s good or bad at this point,” she said. “It’s just such a sweeping change with no real analysis about if there would be cost savings.”

Under the new proposal, some states will have their own offices and others will be lumped together, similar to the organization of the Bureau of Land Management. This will be a new approach for the country’s 154 national forests, which have long been managed by the nine regional offices that will be shuttered or repurposed. Now, forests in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and Idaho will each be managed by their own state office. Forests in Nevada and Utah, however, will be managed together, as will forests in Colorado and Kansas.

Custer Gallatin National Forest in Montana, where Erickson worked in the Forest Service.Daniel Feinberg/Forest Service

Some Forest Service research facilities, including the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, will stay open. Others, including the research station in Portland, Oregon, which is responsible for critical work on species like spotted owls, will be closed. Losing local leadership “is not going to improve the programs,” said former Forest Service wildlife biologist Eric Forsman. Forsman, who retired in 2016, studied spotted owls and red tree voles at the agency’s Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon, which will remain in operation. “It may help budgets,” he added, “but it won’t improve the quality of the research or the amount of research that gets done.”

Erickson and others were also concerned about the plan to move high-level bureaucrats out of DC, where the nation’s law- and policymakers reside. “I would push back on this idea that moving out of DC is moving closer to the people you serve. That’s not the role of the national office,” Erickson said. The national office, she added, is supposed to coordinate and create guidance based on national policy. “Forests and districts have always been the heart of local communities and local delivery.”

After talking with current and former Forest Service staffers following Tuesday’s announcement, she also worries that, at least in the short term, disarray created by the reorganization will hamstring the agency’s ability to address the complex and worsening challenges that modern forests face. Those include tree disease outbreaks, the growing wildland-urban interface, and climate change-induced drought. The Forest Service is already reeling from the loss of thousands of employees during the last year, through the terminations and deferred resignations effected by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The reorganization may also lead to states playing an even bigger role in forest management, said Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, who retired in 2025 after decades working in the Forest Service throughout the West. While local coordination isn’t bad in theory, he said, he’s concerned the new structure will be a step toward ceding the management of national forests and other public lands to states.

Tribal representatives, several of whom declined to comment for this story, voiced concerns during the July public comment process that the reorganization would lead to losses of expertise and fractured relationships. Mass staff relocations, one representative wrote, would “destroy irreplaceable knowledge about Treaty rights, forest conditions, and working relationships built over decades, and new staff unfamiliar with the land will make mistakes.”

The Sidney R. Yates Federal Building in DC, where the Forest Service main office currently resides.Dominic Cumberland/Forest Service

For many people in conservation, the Forest Service reorganization feels like déjà vu, or even a recurring nightmare.

In 2019, during Trump’s first term, his administration announced a plan to move nearly all Bureau of Land Management staff out of the agency’s DC headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado—then a 66,000-person city located hundreds of miles from a major airport. As with the March 31 Forest Service announcement, the administration said the change would put high-level staff closer to the mostly-Western lands they manage. Instead, many of those staff left the agency altogether, said Tracy Stone-Manning, who directed the BLM under President Joe Biden and is now president of The Wilderness Society.

In fact, by the time the Grand Junction office opened in 2020, only 41 of the 328 BLM employees expected to move West chose to do so, according to a High Country News investigation. For many, moving meant uprooting their entire family, and required a spouse to find a new job in a much smaller market.

The reorganization cost taxpayers $28 million. And the Biden administration ended up moving many high-level positions back to DC, though it did keep some agency leaders in the Grand Junction office, which it renamed the agency’s “Western Headquarters.” John Gale, who headed the office for two years under Biden, sees merit in searching for ways to improve public-lands management. But restructuring and relocation need to be done thoughtfully and carefully to be effective, he said.

That’s because agencies lose irreplaceable institutional knowledge when people with decades of experience are forced out the door, said Stone-Manning. And while that may not have been the first Trump administration’s intention, it was indeed the outcome of the BLM reorganization. She and others expect the Forest Service to suffer the same fate, with even more dire results for the public.

“Our public lands are not being cared for the way they need to be,” she said. “And what that means is ultimately people will throw up their hands and say the federal government can’t manage them, let’s sell them off.”

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Trump’s Executive Order on Mail Voting Is Plainly Unconstitutional

Last week, President Donald Trump did what roughly one in three American voters have done in recent elections: He voted by mail.

But while Trump personally used that method to cast his vote in a Florida special election, he also signed an executive order Tuesday night aimed at dramatically tightening restrictions on mail voting for everybody else. Experts and state election officials say the order is plainly unconstitutional and will face court challenges.

“We’ll see the president in court,” says Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who is coordinating with her counterparts in other states on a legal response to the executive order.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who serves as the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, tells Mother Jones he expects a lawsuit will be filed in “days.”

“The Constitution is very clear, in plain language, that the state has the responsibility to run elections,” Aguilar adds.

Aguilar is referring to Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution—often called the Elections Clause. “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” the 238-year-old document reads. Congress, the Constitution says, can also contribute to election procedure by passing laws.

But Trump’s new executive order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” runs afoul of that language. His executive order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of eligible voters in each state, which the US Postal Service would then use to identify voters who can receive mail ballots marked with special barcodes for tracking purposes. The executive order also grants the attorney general the power of “withholding Federal funds from noncompliant States and localities.”

Bellows says she recently mailed Trump a copy of the Constitution. “Clearly, he needs to read it,” she says. “You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand the states—not the president—are in charge of elections.”

She is far from the only top state official or expert who says Trump does not have authority over how elections are run.

“Where the Constitution might need interpretation in some areas and might be vague in other areas, on elections, it’s extraordinarily clear the President has zero power with regard to elections,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, and a former senior trial attorney in the DOJ’s voting section.

Purportedly, Trump signed the executive order to reduce voting fraud. “The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s going on,” Trump said Tuesday, repeating false allegations that he and other Republicans have made for years. Data resoundingly supports that mail voting is extremely secure. A 2025 report by the Brookings Institution, for example, found that the prevalence of mail-voting fraud is forty-three millionths of one percent. In other words, fraud was discovered in roughly four cases out of every 10 million ballots cast by mail.

Tuesday’s executive order is just the latest instance of Trump’s incessant efforts to assert control over election procedures in a clear effort to give his party the upper hand.

His strategy to “take over” elections, as he put it a couple of months ago, includes ongoing efforts by the Department of Justice to collect voter rolls from all 50 states. The DOJ has sued more than 25 states for these lists in an effort to create what effectively constitutes a national voter roll, which could be used to wrongly purge eligible voters from the rolls. Courts have thus far entirely sided with the states refusing to hand over their files, which contain voters’ private information, such as Social Security numbers and party affiliation.

Meanwhile, the Trump-supported SAVE Act—which would, among other things, require proof of citizenship to register to vote and would effectively end mail and online voter registration—is currently stalled in the Senate. Trump has so far been unsuccessful in convincing Republican senators to eliminate the 60-vote filibuster threshold in order to pass the SAVE Act along partisan lines.

Previous efforts by Trump to change election rules include his failed March 2025 executive order requiring proof of citizenship on federal voting forms. A federal judge shot that down, citing the same constitutional provision—the Elections Clause—that would apply to this new executive order.

“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her opinion.

Becker says he is “100 percent confident” that courts will rule similarly on the new executive order. “Courts will block this. It not only violates the express terms of the Constitution; it violates existing federal law, where Congress has spoken clearly. It violates the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits people from being removed from voter lists within 90 days of a major election. It violates the Help America Vote Act, which has similar provisions.”

If Becker, Aguilar, and Bellows are correct in their predictions that courts will quickly and unequivocally block the executive order, the tens of millions of voters who opted to vote by mail in 2024 will have that choice again in the 2026 midterms.

Voting by mail is a “popular, trusted method of voting,” says Molly McGrath, director of national democracy campaigns at the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the Administration over its 2025 executive order. “These are voters from red states, blue states, purple states.”

That, of course, includes Trump himself.

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This Man’s Great-Grandfather Made Millions of People Americans

Today, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over the future of birthright citizenship, the justices kept returning to one name: Wong Kim Ark.

Wong was born around 1870 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the son of Chinese parents who had settled in the United States. As a young man, he traveled to China, and when he tried to come home, he was stopped at the Port of San Francisco. He was denied entry on the grounds that he wasn’t a US citizen because of his Chinese descent and his parents’ status as non-US citizens.

His community in Chinatown pooled resources and hired lawyers. Their argument was straightforward: Under the 14th Amendment, Wong was a citizen. His parents’ immigration status had nothing to do with it.

In 1898, the Supreme Court agreed. And for over a century since, Wong Kim Ark’s case has served as the definitive interpretation of the 14th Amendment: All children born in the United States are automatically US citizens.

That is, unless President Donald Trump gets his way.

Trump has been targeting birthright citizenship ever since his first term. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order attempting to restrict it, limiting citizenship to children with at least one parent that is a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. Federal courts have blocked the order at every turn, but the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, and today they did.

So we sat down with Wong’s great-grandson, Norman Wong, a 76-year-old retired carpenter living outside San Francisco. His family has not only fought for the constitutional right to citizenship, they’re painfully aware of what it looks like when that citizenship, once won, can be used against you.

Like his great-grandfather, Norman, 76, was born in San Francisco. He’s a retired carpenter and still lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Maureen. We met initially over Zoom, where he invited me to the monthly veterans meeting of Cathay Post 384 in San Francisco, the oldest Chinese American post in The American Legion.

He, Maureen, and his sister Sandra were invited by Alicia Ponzio, a Post member, former lieutenant in the United States’ Navy Nurse Corps, and professional figurative sculpture artist. Ponzio, upon learning about the story of Wong through a podcast, became inspired to sculpt a bust of Wong as a young man. At the meeting, she revealed the plaster model seen in the video.

This model she shared with us is one of many renderings made ahead of the final sculpture of Wong Kim Ark, which will be cast in bronze and proposed to stand at his birthplace of the original 751 Sacramento Street in San Francisco.

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Nurul Amin Shah Alam’s Death Was a Homicide

On Wednesday, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office announced that it ruled the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind Rohingya refugee who was left on the freezing streets of Buffalo by Border Patrol officers, a homicide. Neither Shah Alam’s family, who had waited to meet him outside the facility where he was being held, nor his lawyers, who had been attempting to contact him, were notified of his location. Shah Alam spoke very little English.

The Associated Press reported that the medical examiner’s office did not “reach any conclusions about responsibility” for the homicide and that Shah Alam’s death was “caused by complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration. “

“The designation of homicide does not imply intent to cause harm or death,” Erie County official Mark Poloncarz said at a press conference on Wednesday. “Manner-of-death determinations are neutral, non-legal, and exist for vital statistical purposes only. They do not indicate criminality, which is the purview of the justice system.”

Shah Alam was initially arrested after an incident where he became lost attempting to return home; the Buffalo Police Department approached him as a threat, ostensibly for holding a curtain rod he used as a walking stick. Instead of trying to assist him, officers tased and arrested him. He was incarcerated for a year before his release, when Border Patrol in effect dumped him.

The Department of Homeland Security claimed on X that Shah Alam “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance,” despite being blind and experiencing other health issues. “DHS is lying,” New York Democrat and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded in a quote post.

Poloncarz said that he has spoken to Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane and New York Attorney General Letitia James about the case, and he encouraged questions about criminal investigations to be directed to them.

“I want to express my deepest condolences to the family of Mr. Amin Shah Alam for the death,” Poloncarz also remarked. “It should not have happened. Simple as that. The death was one that we believe could have been prevented.”

James, in a press release, said that her office is continuing to investigate Shah Alam’s death. “Mr. Shah Alam fled genocide to build a life in this country,” James said. “Instead, he was abandoned and left to suffer alone in his final hours.

In a press release, Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who represents the area in Congress, demanded that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Patrol, cooperate in James’ state-level investigation.

“In light of this determination, DHS must fully cooperate with New York State Attorney General James, and newly-confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin must order an independent and transparent investigation,” he said.

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It Was Another Supremely Humiliating Day for Trump

After oral arguments on Wednesday, the Supreme Court appears likely to strike down President Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to newborns without a citizen or lawful permanent resident parent. A loss for the administration would be a setback to the president’s project of creating a permanent underclass of mostly racial minorities. The centrality of this radical scheme to Trump’s presidency was underscored by his presence in the courtroom, the first time a sitting president attended Supreme Court oral arguments.

Though there is much to be relieved about after hearing skepticism from most of the justices, the very fact that the court is contemplating revising what it means to be an American citizen is chilling. Even if the government loses—and it almost certainly will—Trump will have moved the goalposts about respectable debate and muddied the clear rules that establish a society of equals. Ultimately, the biggest winner may be Chief Justice John Roberts, whose unpopular court would be able to boast that it reaffirmed the promise of birthright citizenship, accruing legitimacy to an institution that has under his leadership wielded its power to erode American democracy.

The case will likely prove to be an example of Trump going too far, even for this court.

The first sentence of the 14th Amendment is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Drafted by Congress after the Civil War and ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment put an end to the shameful era of inherited status that defined slavery. In its place, not only would formerly enslaved people and their children be citizens, but so too would the children of all immigrants born on US soil. That way, never again would politicians or judges be able to turn a disfavored group into a permanent underclass. The only exceptions were the children of ambassadors, invading armies, and sovereign Indian tribes—because those newborns would not be subject to American laws in the same way that everyone else is.

The arguments against this plain reading of the text and history are bad arguments; they distort the history and misread the precedent to create a nonsensical rule. To defend Trump’s executive order, Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the meaning of the term “jurisdiction” implies an allegiance that can only be obtained through citizenship or permanent residence, what he called domicile. Sauer’s argument also relied on a misreading of a landmark 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the Supreme Court affirmed that the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States, and that the understood exceptions were the only ones.

Sauer’s argument ran up against the incredulity of many of the justices. When Sauer cited Wong Kim Ark as evidence that the children of undocumented immigrants couldn’t be citizens, Justice Neil Gorsuch cut him off. “I’m not sure how much you want to rely on Wong Kim Ark,” he cooly said. Gorsuch was also skeptical that there was evidence backing Trump in the congressional record of 1866 debates over the Citizenship Clause. “In none of the debates do we have parents discussed,” he said. “We have the child’s citizenship and the focus of the clause is on the child, not on the parents, and you don’t see domicile mentioned in the debates. The absence is striking.”

Sauer’s points were often at odds with each other, and he attempted both to argue he was right about the original purpose of the Citizenship Clause and to raise modern utilitarian reasons that a broad understanding of birthright citizenship is dangerous. “We’re in a new world now, where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who is a US citizen,” Sauer argued. Roberts was unconvinced. “Well, it’s a new world,” he replied. “It’s the same Constitution.”

The only justice who clearly seemed to have bought Sauer’s chaotic and contradictory arguments was Samuel Alito. Justice Alito seemed convinced that the narrow exceptions to birthright citizenship could be widened if the political branches see fit. And he agreed with Sauer that Wong Kim Ark, because the case was about a person whose parents were domiciled when he was born, only affirmed the citizenship of the children of domiciled immigrants. Alito launched multiple lines of questioning with ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang, who argued against the executive order on behalf of a class of children who would be denied citizenship. But he never landed a blow.

In one remarkable exchange, Alito posited that the ruling in Wong Kim Ark might have mentioned the term “domicile” many times because it was trying to differentiate between the children of domiciled and assimilating Chinese immigrants, like Wong Kim Ark’s parents, against the exploited and disfavored Chinese workers building the transcontinental railroad. These laborers “were overwhelmingly men, there wasn’t an indication that they would stay here, they could stay here, they didn’t have permanent homes,” Alito said. “And the opinion is drawing a distinction between those two categories of people who would have been well understood at the time when Wong Kim Ark was decided.”

Wang began to disagree but was interrupted by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who saw an easy explanation for Alito’s question: that the court emphasized the status of Wong Kim Ark’s parents not to restrict birthright citizenship, but to smooth the public’s acceptance of its ruling at a time of intense anti-Chinese sentiment. “One could imagine that it was important, from a standpoint of helping people accept this citizen rule under these circumstances, to emphasize that these particular people in this case were in Justice Alito’s first category,” Jackson suggested.

In a second exchange with Wang, Alito asked whether the child of an Iranian man born in the United States but still a subject of Iran and expected to serve in the Iranian army, would be a US citizen at birth. “Is he not subject to any foreign power?” Alito asked, using language from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, a precursor to the 14th Amendment. The question seemed like a Fox News talking point, and was not difficult for Wang to answer. “That would have meant that the children of Irish, Italian and other immigrants…would not have been citizens either,” she said. “Because, if the only test is whether that US born child is considered a citizen by another country under their jus sanguinis”—inherited citizenship—“laws, then no foreign nationals’ children” would get birthright citizenship. Alito conceded this point, saying that those children could naturalize if and when their parents did. “Well, in all of those cases, the parents could be naturalized, and then the children would be derivatively naturalized when the parents were naturalized.” It was a shocking statement because it was an acknowledgment that birthright citizenship wouldn’t actually exist under Alito’s and the government’s conception of allegiance. Wang, sensing that Alito had just proved her point, didn’t respond, letting Alito’s words hang in the air.

Though it received little attention during oral arguments, one of the reasons Trump is likely to lose is that the effects of a win would be so enormous. Even though the executive order is constructed to apply prospectively to people born after it was issued, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Trump—or another president, or Congress—could apply it retroactively, putting the citizenship of millions of people in jeopardy. Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked whether the children of people trafficked illegally to the US would be denied citizenship, and Sauer seemed to concede they could be. Sauer also conceded at various points that Congress could adjust the meaning of domicile, and therefore who is eligible for birthright citizenship at a given time. Other times, he seemed to suggest that one could appeal a denial of citizenship to a newborn if the parents intended to stay in the country. Either way, he promised to replace a clear, workable rule with a chaotic and ever-changing definition of citizenship.

The Roberts Court has gone out of its way to greenlight most of Trump’s second term agenda. They have repeatedly rescued his illegal and unconstitutional policies from lower court orders blocking his actions. Only in a small number of cases has the majority contradicted him, including striking down many of Trump’s tariffs. This case will likely prove another example of Trump going too far even for this court. If Trump’s presence on Wednesday was meant to intimidate the justices, this time it didn’t appear to work.

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The Trump Administration is Slashing Food Stamps. Here’s What They’re Buying Instead.

Somewhere, paid for with your tax dollars, are $12,540 worth of three-tiered fruit basket stands. It’s a symptom of a much larger problem.

Buried in the way Congress funds the government is a “use it or lose it” rule that forces federal agencies to spend whatever’s left in their budgets before the fiscal year ends September 30 or hand the excess money back to the Treasury and potentially lose it in the next year’s allocation.

This happens every year, and every administration does this. But last September shattered every previous record, according to a report released in March by Open the Books, a nonpartisan government watchdog that tracks federal spending.

The Defense Department spent $93.4 billion in September, with $50 billion of that spent in the last five working days. To put that in perspective, only nine countries on Earth have an annual military budget that large.

The shopping list included luxury items like $6.9 million for lobster tail, $15.1 million in ribeye steak, and $2 million for Alaskan king crab, as well as musical instruments ($21,750 for a custom handmade Japanese flute), ice cream machines ($124,000), sushi prep tables ($26,000), and $12,540 for three-tiered fruit basket stands. This is the same administration that created DOGE—an entire department whose sole purpose was to eliminate government waste.

The month after the September splurge, the government shutdown left 42 million Americans—1 in 8—briefly cut off from SNAP food assistance. A federal judge eventually ordered benefits restored, but the disruption was immediate and real for millions of families.

And it may get worse. In July, President Donald Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act restructured SNAP with new work and eligibility requirements and shifted part of the cost to states. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates as many as 4 million people could lose their food assistance permanently as a result.

Trump is now pushing to increase next year’s Defense Department budget by 66 percent, to $1.5 trillion, the largest increase since the Korean War.

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No Oil, No Power, No Surgical Gloves: Inside Cuba’s Medical Collapse

As Cuba’s worst economic crisis continues to ravage the country, its approximately 10 million people have endured nationwide blackouts, scarce food, and a pervasive sense of anxiety about their country’s political and economic stability. But no part of the infrastructure has been more affected than the island’s medical care. Once lauded as one of the best health care systems in the world, it has deteriorated in the last decade as many doctors migrated elsewhere, and medical supply shortages have worsened due to failing economic policies. The situation reached a breaking point earlier this year, following the US invasion of Venezuela on January 3, 2026. That’s when the crucial supply of oil to Cuba was cut off, and President Donald Trump threatened other nations with punishing tariffs should they send oil to the island. The US government recently softened its stance, the New York Times reported on Monday, and will decide which oil shipments can arrive in Cuba on a “case-by-case basis.”

The lack of fuel has prompted island-wide power outages that last several hours, sometimes even days. “You cannot damage a state’s economy without affecting its inhabitants,” Cuba’s Health Minister, José Ángel Portal Miranda, told the Associated Press. “This situation could put lives at risk.” A recent New York Times story chronicled the myriad of problems affecting patients and providers: clinics struggling to provide treatments like chemotherapy and dialysis, ambulances left without gas, underweight pregnant mothers, and vaccine delays for tens of thousands of children. Last week, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, called the situation “deeply concerning.” He wrote on X, “Thousands of surgeries have been postponed during the last month, and people needing care, from cancer patients to pregnant women preparing for delivery, have been put at risk due to lack of power to operate medical equipment and cold chain storage for vaccines.”

Economic ties between the US and Cuba are restricted under the decades-old embargo, which began in 1962 under President John F. Kennedy following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. As I reported last month, the embargo severely limits commerce with the island. It does, however, allow for some exceptions, such as humanitarian aid. Since 1994, the Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, Global Links, has shipped medical supplies to Cuba under a partnership with the Pan American Health Organization, the WHO Regional Office for the Americas. For more than three decades, the nonprofit has distributed surplus medical products from the US healthcare system locally and abroad.

I spoke with Global Links executive director Angela Garcia on a Zoom call last week about the organization’s mission to send supplies to Cuba’s medical providers in recent months. Our interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

You last visited Cuba in February. What struck you the most about the country’s ongoing crisis during that trip?

Cuba has one of the fastest aging populations. With migration out of the country, there are a lot of older adults who are living in very challenging situations and now have to cook over charcoal outside due to the power outages. Malnutrition is hitting the oldest population and the very youngest the hardest. And doctors don’t have a lot of choices— triaging surgeries that they’re forced to do because of the shortages and the lack of power, consolidating hospital services, and triaging which patients get the highest level of care. They are being forced to make these types of decisions. More people will die of preventable things there than they would have before. That’s what’s most heartbreaking.

“More people will die of preventable things there than they would have before. That’s what’s most heartbreaking.”

What did you hear from medical providers on the ground about the state of their health care facilities? What resources are most needed?

They’re asking us for things that are so basic, for example, gloves. Best practice is that you use a glove, and then you throw the glove away. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re washing and reusing gloves, which we have seen in many places around the world. It’s not that they don’t know that’s not ideal. It’s the reality of [the fact that] there’s no glove after this, so we’re going to wash and reuse it. It doesn’t have to be this way. These are a series of human-made decisions that put patients in a position where they’re not able to get care, even if it’s known by doctors what the care needs to be. From a humanitarian perspective, this is not like after a hurricane. This is not like a civil war. This doesn’t have to be this way.

I was meeting with a group of hospital directors I’ve worked with for the past couple of years. When I ask them, what are the top three most needed products, they’ll say medical gloves, surgical gloves, sutures, or IV catheters. And I asked, what else besides that? And they said adult diapers. I just didn’t expect that. They said, well, because of the personnel shortages and because of the older population, before we leave at night, we want to make sure they have adult briefs on because if they get up in the middle of the night and slip and fall or have an accident, they have a much more serious health issue. That to me just spoke to the humanity of hospital leadership and top surgeons thinking, how do we minimize a severe situation? How do we do the best we can for our patients, despite the shortages, despite the power outages, despite the personnel shortage? That just sort of hit me.

What is the shipping process like for aid that goes to Cuba, and with all the different needs right now, how do you prioritize what to send?

We ship by the most cost-efficient method, which is the back of a 40-foot semi truck that goes on a container ship. We’ve sent one every time we raise $25,000. So, in the past 12 months, it’s been about every two to three months. We send large quantities of gloves, wound care bandages, gauze, incontinence products, supplies for intubation and delivering babies, and vaccine syringes. We look at how do we decide what we ship when the needs are so big? And we know what those things are. We have to continue to support women having their babies, the surgeries that are being planned, pediatrics, and the older adult population. So that’s what we look at with each container. And then just start on the next one and do the same thing over again.

What challenges has your organization faced in sending supplies due to the ongoing fuel shortage?

The logistics are the biggest challenge. Once you ship a container, it’s just as if you mailed a package. If you mailed it with FedEx or UPS, to actually change the end destination once it’s out there, is not easy—if you can do it at all. With each container that has left since last fall, we’ve had to update the shipping line with the final destination. We’ve had the WHO in Havana tell us, it can’t come into Mariel, it has to go to Santiago. And then one was destined for Santiago, we had to do the reverse, and that adds cost on our end. But if they can’t pull it out when it gets there, there’s no point, right? So there is a congestion that we have to work through on literally, a day-by-day basis to ensure that as the containers are heading down, they get to the port where WHO can get to the container and pull out the supplies, which we’ve never had to do before.

That sounds like so much work. How do you manage to adapt so frequently?

It’s what we’re set up to do. Cubans need us more than ever. They’re communicating what those needs are. People can support what we do, and that, in turn, supports Cubans in their time of need.

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Punished for Protesting, Talking to Press, and Having a Toothache: More Dilley Horror Stories

Last week, Mother Jones published firsthand accounts of children and parents detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the nation’s only family detention center. The stories, which came from sworn oral declarations given to legal aid groups between July 2025 and February of this year, painted a bleak picture of life at the facility: wormy food, dangerously lacking medical and mental health care, water that makes children sick, nearly impossible sleeping conditions, and intimidating treatment by guards.

Now, dozens more sworn declarations included in a recent 361-page court filing reveal new details about life in the facility from January, February, and March of this year.

Detainees repeatedly said that guards threatened or intimidated them for participating in protests or filing grievances, in some cases destroying children’s letters and confiscating their art supplies.

Many of the detainees, whose declarations were translated into English by sworn interpreters, discussed the same issues that we highlighted in our first story. But they also talked about another trend: As media and political scrutiny of Dilley has increased—particularly since the arrival of 5-year-old Liam Ramos in January—so have threats of retribution against those who speak out. Detainees repeatedly said that guards threatened or intimidated them for participating in protests or filing grievances, in some cases destroying children’s letters and confiscating their art supplies. They recounted being hidden away from congressional delegations visiting the facility, or, conversely, receiving special treatment on the days that politicians and lawyers visited.

The Department of Homeland Security and CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates Dilley, have consistently said that the facility is a safe, family-friendly place where detainees have access to high-quality medical care, meals, clean water, and educational opportunities. DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, but in the past has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not destroy letters or confiscate art supplies. In an email, CoreCivic said that the facility has been the target of “baseless allegations” that “undermine the public-service centric work” of their staff.

We went through the detainees’ recent declarations and pulled out some particularly telling parts.

On Christmas they treated us so cruelly. They brought an ICE official in a Santa Claus outfit here, but he brought no toys or sweets, and the kids all did not understand why Santa did not bring them anything. Young children went up to hug Santa, but he would push them away. It was so cruel. They clearly did it as a photo opportunity to use us to pretend they were treating us humanely. It left the kids all upset.

—41-year-old mother of a 17-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl , on their 74th day at Dilley (January 14)

The holidays at Dilley were awful. On Christmas, they told us they were going to have a special Christmas event for the children. They said they would put a good movie on, and they even had flyers at the gym about it. They had all the kids come into the gym and sit in the chairs. Then they put on a video clip of the Grinch movie. After a few minutes, someone came in the gym dressed like Santa. The children were excited and started to gather around him. Staff yelled at them all to sit down, and then the Santa just gave the children who were sitting a bag of chips. Then the staff took a picture of the kids with Santa, turned the video on for another few minutes, and told the kids the activity was over. It was humiliating and frustrating to be treated this way; it was worse than doing nothing actually.

—Parent of a 9-year-old girl, on their estimated 113th day at Dilley (January 15)

When we took part in a peaceful protest here, one guard here told us that they were going to charge all of us with crimes for obstructing the law and then separate all the fathers and send them to a prison if we ever did another protest. They also said they were going to use the cameras to identify who was participating in the protests. After hearing these threats, we felt overwhelmed with fear.

—33-year-old father of a four-year-old girl, on their 49th day at Dilley (February 11)

A couple weeks ago, when the congresspeople were here, the staff enclosed us in our room from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. At 12 p.m., they let us go to eat with guards flanking us on both sides to make sure we didn’t talk with the congressmembers.

That day, they passed around a list for people to sign up and talk with the congressmembers. We all wrote our names down, but staff only allowed two people from our hallway to talk with the congressmembers. We think they were punishing the people who were filing the most grievances by preventing them from speaking with them.

On that day, they didn’t even let my three children go outside to get medicine. Instead, they brought the medicine to our room. The nurse who came to our room said that [the] medical wing was closed for the day. She said, “This is the result of you guys for doing protests; this is the punishment…”

A few days ago, the officials here found out that I have spoken with reporters, and the staff have taken reprisal steps against my children and me.

For the past couple of days, my children and I have been locked down in our room. They put us on lockdown after a staff member pushed my daughter and took all of her coloring materials away.

This week, my young daughter wrote “liberty” on a piece of paper. One of the officers found me in the laundry room and told me that I needed to come to the recreation area with that paper. When I went there, a man named Officer __ took the paper and ripped it up. He said you cannot have papers that say this. Then, he threw it away. I told him I did not know that the children were not allowed to express themselves in writing. He told me that our family could have a report made against us for this. So, I apologized.

—31-year-old mother of 7-year-old boy, 9-year-old girl, and 15-year-old girl on their 49th day at Dilley (February 12)

Some families did a protest a few weeks ago. After the protest, the staff started searching our rooms. My 2-year-old had some crayons that another family had given her. CoreCivic staff confiscated her crayons and threw them away. She was crying. They said they were throwing away the crayons for our security and so the children would not write more letters about the conditions at Dilley. They also threw away our Tylenol, Advil, and VapoRub. They probably would have taken my daughter’s letters, too, but I keep them in a folder with all of our legal documents. I keep these documents with me at all times. A picture of two of my daughter’s letters are attached to this statement. They speak for themselves.

In the letter on the left, a 9-year-old writes, “Please help me get out of here. I want to study, I want to be free with my sister,” with the words “freedom” and “help” above her drawing. On the right, she writes, “We’ve been here four months but for me and my sister it seems like a year.”

—34-year-old mother of two kids, ages 9 and 2, who had been at Dilley for more than 125 days (February 12)

I never got to see the little boy, Liam, when he was here, but I saw him on the news. I was happy when he was released, but I couldn’t help but think, “What about the rest of us?”

—33-year-old parent of children ages 14, 11, and 7, on their 53rd day at Dilley (March 11)

My 2-year-old has been having a severe medical issue. She has a swollen gum and an infected tooth, and has a fever anytime she isn’t taking ibuprofen from this infection. This has been going on since we arrived at Dilley, over 20 days ago. The top of her tooth is green at the root. I think the nerve there has been hit or opened…

When Congressmen Castro was here this past Monday, we begged for his help. He tried to advocate for us, Dilley ended up sending us to a hospital 15 minutes away. My husband went with my sick daughter. I had to stay here with my two other daughters.

Unfortunately, the hospital could not help. They just checked her blood pressure. The nurse at a hospital said this is not a dental clinic. They couldn’t help her.

The staff here think and say that I am beating my daughter, and that is why she cries so much. I tried to explain to them the toothache, but they threatened to separate us. They said if she keeps crying, we will take her away from you.

—22-year-old mother of 2-year-old, 1-year-old, and 10-month-old girls, on their 23rd day at Dilley (March 12)

The food here is really bad, but whenever reporters or congresspeople come they give us better food that they would never give us otherwise, like roast chicken, cakes, pizza, and ice cream. But that is just ICE hiding how it is the rest of the time to the outside world…

I have to pay to call my dad. There are times when we have Facetimed my dad and tried to explain what is happening and ICE cut the signal, like when we tried to tell my dad that they had locked us in our rooms because the congresspeople had come. This happened another time when we had a call with a reporter as well. I think they do not want us to share critical things about our experience here and interfere with these calls. The guards also completely change how they act anytime an outside congressperson or reporter comes. The guards start being kind to us and saying, “Hi,” which is something they would never do when they are not being watched…

If I stay in the US, I want to be an advocate for people who are innocent to get out of jail. I want to do whatever I can to make sure that more children do not get brought to places like this, because they are going to suffer.

—13-year-old child on their 86th day at Dilley (March 12)

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As Nuclear Reactors Proliferate, Trump Is Scaling Back Rules That Protect Workers

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

Bradley P. Clawson spent more than three decades handling highly radioactive materials at Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear energy testing and production hub outside Idaho Falls. His work ranged from shipping and receiving nuclear naval fuels to helping bring hundreds of canisters of leftover fuel to Idaho for storage after the catastrophic Three Mile Island meltdown. He often handled nuclear fuel in “hot cells,” immensely contaminated areas reinforced with thick concrete.

Throughout, Clawson, a member of the United Steelworkers union, leaned on safety standards to argue for extra protections against radiation, including respirators and additional shielding.

But President Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda to expand nuclear energy and modernize nuclear weapons now includes easing the radiation standards that Clawson credits with keeping his exposure as low as possible.

“They’re pulling away from what’s kept us safe all these years,” said Clawson, who retired in 2021 and now serves on the advisory board on radiation and workers under the Centers for Disease Control. He spoke to High Country News in an unofficial personal capacity.

Last May, Trump signed four executive orders aimed at reviving what he called an industry “atrophied” by regulation. The US Department of Energy quickly began stripping away regulations designed to reduce the amount of radiation exposure workers can face at its national laboratories, cleanup sites and energy infrastructure.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses and regulates commercial reactors and related infrastructure, is following suit. In response to another executive order that required it undergo “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance,” the agency recently announced that it’s considering easing long-held standards that limit workers’ and the public’s exposure to radioactivity.

The controversial changes promise to reshape nuclear sites across the nation—especially in the Western US, where nuclear weapons and nuclear energy were born and continue to hold an outsized presence.

And while some hailed the moves as a new dawn for industry, the United Steel Workers union called the directives a “dangerous rewriting of radiation safety rules.”

Forty-one other organizations—community advocates, scientists and doctors—said it amounted to “a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests,” in a letter of protest to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

An Energy Department spokesperson told HCN that it “is committed to ensuring its radiation protection standards are aligned with Gold Standard Science,” as outlined in another executive order. “DOE is still evaluating what specific changes to these standards are needed,” the statement added.

A spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote that the agency was still in the process of amending the framework for radiation protection, adding that “public health and safety will always be our top priority.” A new rule will be released at the end of April.

For decades, radiation protection was based on the hypothesis that even a small amount of radiation carries some risk of harm. The Trump administration now rejects the very basis of this view, which could change how work is performed on dozens of projects in the West.

At Los Alamos National Laboratory, for instance, workers build the nuclear bomb cores or “pits” that will be used to arm the next generation of warheads. Besides the technicians handling plutonium are the pipefitters, ironworkers and carpenters renovating the facility, who are also exposed to at least some radiation. Meanwhile, the federal government has moved to double the facility’s annual output.

“The people not doing the job are the ones calculating the risk.”

More than 50 reactors have been built and operated at the nearly 900-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory since 1951. Another extremely radioactive form of plutonium used to power Mars’ rovers is also produced there, and now, more reactors are slated to be constructed.

Nuclear laboratories, including the Los Alamos and Idaho facilities, send waste, old and new, to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico, the nation’s only long-term repository built for such waste.

At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, nuclear materials are handled for research, while the Hanford Site in Washington, a decommissioned nuclear production complex is undergoing a decades-long remediation effort. Elsewhere, at the Nevada National Security Site, plutonium pits from the current stockpile undergo tests—without nuclear explosions—to ensure their continued usefulness.

Other efforts include a push to power data centers with nuclear reactors on 16 national laboratories in the West. A February announcement said that Energy Department will no longer require environmental assessments in order to build advanced nuclear reactors.

Among the sites that the Nuclear Regulatory agency regulates in the region is the Palo Verde Generating Station, located in Wintersburg, Arizona, one of the nation’s largest, along with other nuclear waste dumps, and shuttered uranium mills.

An overriding priority of the Trump administration has been “to usher in a nuclear renaissance,” a credo that has manifested in the rollbacks. The major regulatory standard now in the crosshairs, called ALARA and short for “as low as reasonably achievable,” has long been central to radiation safety at numerous federal and international agencies.

At its core is the “Linear No-Threshold model,” which holds that no dose of radiation is safe. An agency would set limits on how much radiation exposure workers and the public were permitted. ALARA further required that exposures under that limit be reduced to the lowest amount possible under the circumstances. That could happen in various ways—curbing the amount of time employees worked with radioactive materials, requiring added protective gear, putting lead blankets over highly radioactive equipment to reduce exposures or maintaining greater distances from a radioactive source. For the public, it could mean lowering emissions from facilities below legal thresholds.

Because of the added guardrails, worker exposures have been substantially lower than the Energy Department’s limits, according to a 2025 report from Idaho National Laboratory. Without them, workers could be exposed to up to five times more radiation. The loss of ALARA doesn’t mean workers won’t have any protections at all; instead, experts believe that they may lose those additional layers of safety.

The policy shifts have been made possible by ongoing scientific debate over whether low doses of radiation pose harm. The most comprehensive epidemiological study to date, based on over 300,000 nuclear workers from the US, UK and France, found that cumulative exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation increased the rate of death from certain types of cancer by 50 percent. “These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially for low dose exposures,” the authors wrote in 2023.

However, some critics in the field of health physics, which is dedicated to managing radiation safety, say ALARA is subjective and outdated. The Idaho report stated that rescinding ALARA would save money while still protecting workers. Some even argue that ALARA is scientifically unsound, while a small minority of health physicists insist that low levels of radiation are beneficial.

“The people not doing the job are the ones calculating the risk,” said Clawson, who is only too familiar with the back-and-forth. When he started out, ALARA was not a rule at the Energy Department. It was codified in 1993 as part of a suite of worker protections created after the Cold War, when nearly every aspect of the nuclear landscape, including safety culture, came under scrutiny. Proof that the previously accepted practices were unsafe, he added, can be seen in the number of workers currently being compensated by the federal government for illnesses attributed to their exposure.

Clawson acknowledged that complying with ALARA could slow down planning because workers had to carefully consider how to accomplish high-stakes tasks while minimizing risks, especially in hot cells where a person’s exposure could change simply based on where they were standing. The effects of an exposure—potentially compounded by exposures to other toxic chemicals—may not be seen for years, however.

“In the long run it helped us as workers,” Clawson said. “It was keeping us from getting a higher dose.”

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Al Gore: Trump Administration Is the Most Corrupt in History

Few political figures occupy the sort of space in American history that Al Gore does. A longtime Tennessee congressman before becoming vice president, Gore lost the presidency in 2000 to George W. Bush after a highly controversial decision by the Supreme Court. But in the years that followed, Gore didn’t slink into history. Instead, he worked to sound the growing alarm on climate change, most notably with his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which came out 20 years ago. A year later, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Today, he’s still at it and in many ways more adamant than ever that now is the time to act on global warming, especially as the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections and condemns climate science. But he also has more on his mind than the state of the planet, namely the state of democracy and the direction of the country under President Donald Trump.

“This is the most corrupt administration not only in American history, but more corrupt than I could ever have imagined a president would be able to get away with to the extent that he has,” Gore tells More To The Story’s Al Letson. “It’s shocking to me.”

On this week’s episode, the former vice president admonishes the White House for making an “astonishing mistake” in its attack on Iran, looks back at his groundbreaking climate change documentary, and talks about why he believes political will in America is still a renewable resource.

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

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The “Massive Human Consequences” of Ending Birthright Citizenship

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14160, denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and other parents who are not permanent residents. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over the order’s legality. If Trump prevails, the case will fundamentally change American society.

“This is not an academic exercise,” says Matthew Platkin, the former Democratic attorney general of New Jersey, who led a coalition of states in challenging the executive order last year. “The consequences for the people in this country, for our government, both at the federal and state and local levels, and just for the fabric of this nation, would be extraordinary.”

When Platkin challenged the order the day after Trump signed it, practical concerns were top of mind. There is no workable way that the states could implement this order. Starting from the very first question—Who would be a citizen?—and cascading on down to what benefits states and local governments could provide to which people, the order threatened unmitigated chaos.

A Trump victory would unleash harm, not just on immigrants and their children, but on every American.

“States, I can just tell you, are not in a position to parse through someone’s citizenship status,” explains Platkin. “The initial order gave the federal government a 30 day implementation window. This is the federal government that can’t even get TSA lines working at an airport. They’re going to figure out a new class of citizenship in 30 days?” He added: “There would be really immediate and long term and probably irreversible harms to individuals, babies born here, their families, the services they they get, the quality of their lives, disrupted and impacted in ways that we can’t possibly even fathom right now. No one has ever really thought that the government could do this, and then for them to sort of cavalierly go and do it with no plan: massive human consequences.”

The legal question in the case, Trump v. Barbara, is whether the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship applies to the children of undocumented immigrants and people without green cards. And on that legal and historical question, the near universal consensus is that it clearly does. But much less attention has been paid to the harms that a Trump victory would unleash, not just on immigrants and their children, but on every American.

Amicus briefs submitted to the court highlight how the order would fundamentally alter American society. As states pointed out in their litigation against the order last year, newborns around the country would be denied access to food security and health care. During Trump’s winter crackdown, immigrants in Minnesota had babies at home rather than risk being detained while giving birth in a hospital; it’s not hard to imagine ICE sweeps on maternity wards if the order is upheld. Newborns who are hungry, or suffer from untreated health conditions, or who miss their vaccinations, bear the immediate brunt of this cruelty. But the effects would ripple out.

A brief filed by municipal governments and local elected officials warned of a loss of social cohesion, and an increase in bullying and alienation for a new caste of children who know no other home. Barred from federal public assistance, they will be much less likely to have health insurance and ready access to vaccinations, and more likely to suffer preventable diseases. This will ultimately compromise public health more broadly.

The brief also warns of disaster to local economies if Trump implements the order. City and county governments will pay the price of communities unable to get federal food and health benefits, and their tax base will shrink. Businesses and universities may struggle to attract immigrant employees and students, who may fear that if they have children in the US they will end up second-class citizens in their own country. State coffers would be strained. A brief filed by multiple states points out that “states and their subdivisions would also lose millions in federal funding (often for services they must provide regardless of federal reimbursement) and would incur onerous administrative burdens.”

Citizens and those who should become citizens under the order are also vulnerable. A birth certificate would no longer suffice to prove citizenship, and the children of citizens might never obtain that status if their parents lacked the documents necessary to prove theirs. It’s not clear what documentation would suffice, or how far back the ancestry rabbit hole one would have to journey to prove that they are indeed birthright citizens. Citizens might find it difficult to obtain passports, enroll in school, or obtain food and health care assistance when needed.

The American dream is the idea that in the United States, people’s fate is determined by their own merit, not the status of their parents. But the executive order would create a caste of people who inherit a lesser status from which there could be no escape. “The Order would create a permanent underclass of unauthorized and potentially stateless individuals, perpetuating inequality, legal disabilities, and social and economic disadvantages across successive generations,” reads an amicus brief filed by 19 labor unions that warns of economic risk. Around 255,000 children born in the United States every year will be denied citizenship, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute. By 2045, the undocumented population would have swollen by 2.7 million, and by 5.4 million by 2075.

“Immigrants and their U.S.-born children—first-generation U.S. citizens—have been the driver of growth in the American labor force over the past 20 years,” the unions’ brief continues. Rather than contributing to the economy and providing critical services like health care, childcare, and education, “successive generations of children born in the United States will be stripped of U.S. citizenship and be excluded from public life, the formal economy, and the ability to live fully independent, productive lives.”

The US has a demonstrated record of stripping citizenship.

Trump’s executive order purported to restrict birthright citizenship going forward, to all those born 30 days after the date of the order. But multiple briefs warn that this is not binding. After all, it’s just one president’s order. If the court agrees Trump’s 2025 order is constitutional, there would be nothing to stop him or any subsequent president from applying it retroactively, potentially stripping millions of people of citizenship based on their family histories. In this way, the rights and livelihoods of millions of people are at risk. “If, as the Administration argues, the Fourteenth Amendment does not make citizens of certain people, neither this Court nor the Administration has the power to create citizens of children of ineligible foreign nationals simply because they were born before issuance of the Executive Order,” a brief by three constitutional and immigration scholars warns. “In other words, a prospective-only application is not possible.”

The idea might seem far-fetched, but the United States has a demonstrated record of stripping citizenship. As a brief from dozens of nonprofits dedicated to racial justice warned, the government specifically has a “long history of revoking the citizenship of racial minorities and women.” In just one example, after the Supreme Court held in 1923 that South Asians did not qualify as white and were thus incapable of becoming citizens because, at the time, naturalization was limited to Caucasians, the government began stripping citizenship from naturalized South Asian citizens.

The brief also warned that even if the federal government didn’t target anyone for citizenship-stripping, local governments and officials might embark on their own attempts to effectively denaturalize people by removing them from voting rolls and juries. The Trump administration is already encouraging voter roll purges on the false premise that noncitizens are skewing US elections. It’s entirely predictable that state and local officials would attempt to remove voters whom they deem non-citizens according to Trump’s order. This might be encouraged by the practical effect of striking Latinos and other racial minorities who might be expected to vote for Democrats. Jury pools could likewise grow whiter, reinforcing the white supremacy that the 14th Amendment and civil rights laws tried to end.

Supreme Court decisions change the country, but few are remembered for reordering American society. Dred Scott v. Sandford helped precipitate the Civil War by denying citizenship to all Black people; Plessy v. Ferguson blessed Jim Crow, which shaped American society for nearly 100 years; Brown v. Board of Education undid Plessy and transformed the country again. Trump v. Barbara threatens to be the next in this tradition of cases that determine whether or not we live in a multiracial democracy. As former University of Baltimore law professor Garrett Epps warned this week, “reinstating a hereditary, lifelong, inferior status” without political rights or welfare benefits “recreates the conditions for the growth of a racialized slave economy.”

America has been down that road before. No one will escape the consequences if the Supreme Court takes us there again.

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On Trans Day of Visibility, Supreme Court Sides With Conversion Therapy

In an 8-1 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled against a Colorado law forbidding licensed therapists from trying to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity—a practice known as conversion therapy that the medical profession has long since discredited and condemned.

Decades of research show not only that conversion therapy doesn’t work, it puts individuals at higher risk of depression and suicidality. In response to those findings, and a rising tide of acceptance for LGBTQ people since 2012, 23 states have forbidden licensed mental health practitioners from attempting conversion therapy on minors. The decision in the case, known as Chiles v. Salazar, now threatens to overturn those laws nationwide.

The case was brought by a Christian counselor named Kaley Chiles, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom—the religious-right legal group behind many of the Supreme Court’s recent anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion rulings. Chiles argued that because she practices talk therapy, not the painful aversion therapy widely used in the past, the Colorado law censors her speech and violates the First Amendment.

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor agreed, joining the court’s conservatives in a majority opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch. “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Gorsuch wrote. “Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

“As applied to Ms. Chiles, the State seeks neither to regulate her speech incident to any conduct, nor does it seek to compel disclosure of factual and uncontroversial information,” Gorsuch wrote. “Instead, it seeks to silence a viewpoint she wishes to express.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Kagan wrote that Colorado’s law could have potentially survived if it regulated the content of a therapist’s speech, but did not draw lines based on the therapist’s viewpoint on matters of sex and gender.

“A law drawing a line based on the ‘ideology’ of the speaker—disadvantaging one view and advantaging another—skews the marketplace of ideas our society depends on to discover truth,” Kagan wrote. The Colorado law, she added, “prevents a therapist from saying she can help a minor change his same-sex orientation, but permits her to say that such a goal is impossible and so she will help him accept his gay identity.” A law banning therapists from affirming trans kids’ gender identity, she added, would also run afoul of the First Amendment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole dissenting judge, wrote that Chiles “does not dispute that conversion therapy can be harmful to minors in certain circumstances” and “does she contest that Colorado has a significant interest in protecting minors from harm.” But, she continued, “Chiles complains nevertheless” because “the particular form of conversion therapy she wants to offer clients utilizes only speech.”

Jackson added that the Colorado law as written did not prohibit Chiles from sharing any views on sexuality, gender identity, or conversion therapy outside of individual talk therapy sessions—like in discussions with patients and their families. The “aim of the statute is not suppressing speech,” she wrote in her dissent. “Talk therapy is a medical treatment. So, why wouldn’t such speech based medical treatments be subject to reasonable state regulation like any other kind of medical care?”

As we’ve reported before, the science on conversion therapy has been considered settled for over a decade:

The science on conversion therapy is unambiguous: it’s both ineffective and dangerous. All the way back in 2009, an American Psychological Association task force issued a landmark report documenting the lack of evidence behind sexual orientation “change efforts,” as scientists refer to them. Since then, APA has only strengthened its stance against both anti-gay and anti-trans conversion efforts. In October 2015, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration published a report concluding that sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts were “coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”

Nonetheless, conversion therapists have continued to practice on the fringes of the profession, typically working with conservative religious clients. In recent years they’ve turned their attention on transgender youth, capitalizing on politicized controversy over medical treatments for trans kids, a Mother Jones investigation found in 2024. And they’ve embraced so-called “gender exploratory therapy”—a treatment posed an alternative to gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors in a Health and Human Services report last year.

The justices’ decision on Tuesday fell on Transgender Day of Visibility, created by Rachel Crandall-Crocker over 15 years ago. It’s a day to celebrate transgender people and draw attention to the ongoing challenges the community faces. Being a visible, civically-active trans person in the United States is becoming increasingly more volatile as Republican legislators—local to federal—seek to codify discrimination against trans and gender nonconforming people.

In 2025, according to the independent research organization Trans Legislation Tracker, 1,022 bills that would negatively impact the transgender and gender nonconforming community were considered; 126 passed. In 2026, so far, 747 such bills are under consideration—a number that is expected to grow. These laws target people’s ability to seek out gender affirming healthcare, use the bathroom in public and private buildings, dictate what their personal identification says, serve in the military, and celebrate Pride Month, among other things.

This push is buoyed by President Donald Trump and his administration, who supported the therapist’s position in Tuesday’s Supreme Court case. On day one of his second term, Trump signed an executive order declaring that it would be “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” requiring agencies to base decisions on an outdated and scientifically inaccurate gender binary and providing a runway for anti-trans attacks across the nation.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, who helped lead the effort to pass state laws banning conversion therapy, said in a statement on Tuesday that legal avenues remain to fight back against conversion therapy. “Survivors can still bring malpractice and consumer fraud claims,” he said. “Licensing boards can still discipline providers who engage in unethical or harmful conduct”

“Though today’s ruling is not the outcome we sought, our commitment remains unwavering—as does that of the families, survivors, and advocates who have stood beside us for thirty years,” he added.

The Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit for queer young people, is one of the groups that filed an amicus brief in Chiles v. Salazar in support of upholding nationwide statutes that ward against conversion therapy. It’s CEO, Jaymes Black, called Tuesday’s ruling “a tragic step backward for our country that will put young lives at risk.”

“The Court’s decision today is painful,” Black said in a statement, adding, “but our community has dealt with difficult outcomes time and time again throughout our history. And we will deal with this, too.”

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The Ugly History Behind the Olympics’ New Gender Test

On March 26, the International Olympic Committee announced that all athletes competing in women’s sports will be required to undergo genetic eligibility testing. Claiming to be concerned with “fairness” and “the protection of the female category,” the IOC aims to ban transgender women from future Olympic games by screening for the SRY gene, which is usually found on the Y chromosome. The 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles will be the first games with this policy in effect.

For queer historian and writer Michael Waters, the IOC’s announcement elicited a feeling of déjà vu: The institution has employed similar gender verification rules before—only to abandon them amid public backlash. In his 2024 book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, Waters traces the history of trans athletes in the early 20th century, showing how a World War II–era moral panic around gender expression directly informs today’s anti-trans attacks.

I spoke with Waters about his book, the history of sex testing in international sports, and how the IOC’s latest policy marks a return to a discriminatory model of gender surveillance that draws from a dark eugenic past.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.

Let’s start with the basics: What is the IOC’s new policy on sex testing, and how does it differ from previous approaches?

The IOC’s new policy is resurrecting a policy of genetic testing that actually had been active for a few decades in the 20th century. In the 1960s, when the IOC first introduced genetic testing, it used these things called Barr body tests, which essentially were measuring the presence of XX chromosomes. Anyone without two X chromosomes would have been kicked out of women’s sports.

“These tests that the IOC and a lot of sports federations are now presenting as new, non-invasive, cutting-edge technology—they have literally used these before and found that they were, on one hand, inaccurate in creating these false positives, and on the other hand, just in violation of people’s human rights.”

There actually were some high-profile cases of cis women athletes who had a multiplicity of chromosomes—who did not just have XX—who were pushed out of sports because they failed this gene test. There’s this Polish sprinter named Ewa Kłobukowska in 1967 who had played in elite track and field competition before, and then when the Track and Field Federation implemented the first version of chromosome testing, she failed for vaguely explained reasons. An official said that she had “one chromosome too many,” and then she was banned from sports entirely. After that moment, the IOC stopped releasing and trying to publicize the banning of certain women from sports, but many more probably were kicked out because of failed tests that we just don’t know about.

The version of genetic testing that the IOC implemented in the late 1960s, and that continued on until the end of the 1990s, accrued so much backlash and criticism—from scientists, from athletes, from politicians, and actually the whole government of Norway banned this sort of genetic testing for sports practice—that around 2000 the IOC just got rid of genetic testing policies wholesale.

In the early 2000s, the IOC started to move toward creating some path to participation for trans women athletes. There were a lot of restrictions around how trans women could compete; the earliest rules required people to have gone through some sort of surgery-based medical care. And eventually, in 2021, the IOC kind of just stopped implementing any requirements overall and created this framework that would allow individual sports federations to make their own policies around which women can compete in women’s sports.

So what’s happening here is after this brief period of the IOC saying, “We’re going to leave it up to the individual athletic federations,” now they’re stepping back in and saying, “Okay, here is our policy.” While they’re framing it as this new thing that has risen out of discussion with stakeholders, really this is a direct resurrection of the policy that they had in the ’90s that was widely derided and abandoned.

Did anything in particular happen socially or culturally in the late 1990s that caused the IOC to abandon universal sex testing?

In the early decades, it was the Barr body test that measured XX chromosomes, and eventually, the IOC did actually switch to SRY tests around the mid-’90s. In 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics, there were eight women who originally failed the SRY test, who after further review were all reinstated. So these tests that the IOC and a lot of sports federations are now presenting as new, non-invasive, cutting-edge technology—they have literally used these before and found that they were, on one hand, inaccurate in creating these false positives, and on the other hand, just in violation of people’s human rights.

There are a lot of people assigned female at birth who might have a Y chromosome, or some traces of Y chromosomal DNA, and could actually test positive during the SRY test. Instead of dealing with the complexities of the human body—not to mention gender itself—this is just resurrecting an old-school approach. I think it’s notable that even the scientist who discovered the SRY gene has vocally been talking about why the application of this test in sports doesn’t make sense and is discriminatory.

So we’ve talked about the 1960s to our present day, but your book looks at the history of trans athletes going all the way back to the 1930s. Your research shows how the 1936 Berlin Olympics was a turning point, when the Track and Field Federation—now called World Athletics—implemented the first sex testing policy for women athletes. What happened in 1936, and what was going on in the years leading up to that moment?

It’s important to realize that in the early 20th century, women’s sports were a source of moral and gender panic. The founder of the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, hated women’s sports—he didn’t think women should compete at all—and the early Olympics had very few sports available to women because of this.

“There was a belief that competitions like track and field would be both detrimental to women’s health, and in some cases even a masculinizing force on them. Butch women were looked upon as suspicious and cast as having an unfair advantage over more ‘petite’ feminine women.”

Actually, the only sports available to women were those like tennis—which at the time were very closely associated with a white, rich, European elite—because so much fearmongering around gender was so racialized. There was a belief that competitions like track and field would be both detrimental to women’s health, and in some cases even a masculinizing force on them. Butch women were looked upon as suspicious and cast as having an unfair advantage over more “petite” feminine women. And so before we’re even talking about gender diverse athletes and intersex athletes and trans women, there’s just this whole panic around cis women athletes and which kinds of cis women are winning in sports competitions.

In late 1935/early 1936, there are a few different things going on. The Nazis are hosting the Berlin Olympics and are applying really significant pressure on the IOC to limit which kinds of athletes can compete. This is mostly racialized—there’s all this discussion around whether or not the Germans would allow Jewish athletes to compete. In the German case, they were banning athletes of color and exacting their eugenics logic onto sports. The Nazis also were really skeptical of butch women and queer women.

Then, two athletes—both of whom had retired but had played in women’s sports—kind of one after another announced that they were transitioning gender and would begin living as men. Their names were Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston. Koubek is Czech; Weston is British. Sports officials saw the idea that an athlete could transition gender as a threat to the binary categories they had built. And so there was this high-profile Nazi sports doctor [Wilhelm Knoll] who pushed for sex testing policies after reading about the cases of these athletes transitioning. And again, neither of these two were trying to compete in women’s sports. They were living as men.

But the news of these transitions became wrapped up in the historical panic around butch women in sports and became a reason for the global right, the Nazis in particular, to push forward the first sex-testing policies, which ultimately only the Track and Field Federation passed in August 1936 at the Berlin Olympics.

The other important moment is that in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics, there’s an American sprinter named Helen Stephens who wins a gold medal for the US. And almost immediately after she wins, there are newspaper stories that come out that essentially accuse her of being a man in disguise. And so Helen Stephens is stereotyped as being pretty butch—she has kind of a deep voice, big arms, big legs. And the fact of her being this butch woman who had won this track and field event was treated by certain sports commentators as proof that she was unfairly masculine. So there was a whole news cycle in August 1936 about whether or not Helen Stephens was actually a man. It’s really reminiscent of what happened in 2024 with the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. There was a storyline circulating that this woman who had won gold was not feminine enough, and was therefore a threat to sports. Her story and success became proof of the need for these medical exams in women’s sports.

Why did this Nazi-era approach to sex testing expand from the Track and Field Federation to become broader IOC policy in the 1960s?

The IOC sex testing stuff in the ’60s was really influenced by Cold War tensions. USSR women kept beating American women in sports, and there was all this fearmongering about the perceived butchness of the Soviet athletes and the possibility that the Soviets were sending men in disguise. Those underlying Cold War tensions really expedited the adoption of sex testing across the whole IOC in 1968.

It’s interesting to me that right now the focus is on trans women, but the early cases that your book looks at are trans men, yet the fear that’s undergirding both is the same: This idea of an invasion in the field of women’s sports. Why do you think that’s a consistent throughline? Are the Olympics sex testing men’s sports at all?

No, they’ve never sex-tested men’s sports.

And why do you think that is?

“I think women’s sports always really activated the global right because of what sports success says about women’s independence.”

From the early days of the Olympics there is this deep-seated paranoia about women’s sports and what sports mean for the place of women in society. There have been so many junctures of discomfort with women’s athletics, and specifically what a successful woman athlete means for gender politics and for women’s economic role and physical role and sexual reproductive role. It’s not surprising then that often the actors pushing sex testing policies—kind of at every juncture of the 20th century, up until today—are right-wing actors who themselves also are deeply concerned with pushing forward a conservative idea of gender. I think women’s sports always really activated the global right because of what sports success says about women’s independence.

In the case of the US, we see women’s sports as the starting point of a much larger push to disenfranchise and strip rights away from trans women. A lot of states start by banning trans women and girls from sports, and then go further and take away basic health care rights. The Nazis also focused a lot on women’s sports because of the historical fact that women’s sports had been a site of deep gender anxieties since the Olympics started.

I think what’s interesting about the history of sex testing in the Olympics—and the history of gender medicine more broadly—is that we see people at different points trying to take scientific discoveries and graft them onto a social understanding of sex and gender. Do you have thoughts on how these different scientific frameworks—from hormone testing to chromosome testing—have been used at different points to perform gender surveillance? What do these shifting methods reveal about the broader project of enforcing the gender binary?

I think the history of sex testing is a story of sports officials constantly coming up against the reality that sex is not a binary, and that you actually just can’t neatly cleave people into two categories, even against their will. And what you see throughout the 20th century up until today is that there are all these different scientific levers that officials try to pull.

“Maybe there was a moment in the early 2000s when the Olympics was willing to grapple with the fact that people are complicated and the body is complicated. What we’re seeing is the IOC completely abandoning that potential.”

The first sex tests were just a strip test, where women athletes would have to present doctor’s notes affirming that a doctor had looked at their genitalia and decided that they were in fact women, which was quickly proven to be both not a way to measure sex and also deeply humiliating and discriminatory. So then they embrace chromosome tests, which, similarly, not everyone neatly falls into an XX-XY structure. And so in the early 2000s, you see this shift towards hormones instead as a proxy for sex. But there’s no neat cut off between hormones associated with different genders.

Through all of these efforts, what you see is the fact that sports officials—and really we as a people—just have no clear way of measuring sex in a binary way, because it is simply just not binary. I think maybe there was a moment in the early 2000s when the Olympics was willing to grapple with the fact that people are complicated and the body is complicated, and maybe reconcile with the fact that being inclusive is going to be a process. What we’re seeing is the IOC completely abandoning that potential.

Fundamentally, the issue of trans women and intersex women’s access to sports is a human rights issue. Sports officials historically have used the guise of science as a way to justify often vehemently anti-trans policies. I think that we can and should respond by mentioning some science—and also mentioning the fact that there really is very little evidence around a lot of these scientific claims that the IOC is making—but I think more importantly we should be framing this as a human rights issue. Science does not absolve this issue either way. Really this is about whether states have a right to determine people’s gender for them.

What do you think happens next? And is there anything we can learn from history that could inform resistance to these policies moving forward?

These policies are an outgrowth of a global anti-trans panic, and I think they are becoming part of a right-wing feedback loop where what is happening in certain countries, like the US, is then informing global Olympic policies. You actually see this with the Supreme Court case that bans trans women and girls from sports in America. You saw the Olympics being cited as justification for banning trans women; the Supreme Court justices on the right noted that the Olympics has been moving in this direction and therefore are kind of using what happens on a global level as evidence for their own crackdowns on trans people, particularly trans women.

“This is all a manufactured moral panic, and institutions are just kind of slowly giving into it.”

In the same way, the IOC, I’m sure, is passing this policy in part because the next host of the Olympics is the US, which has banned trans women from competing in its borders. What is happening in the US and the global right is directly impacting what’s happening with the IOC. All of this ignoring the fact that there’s no reason that we’re doing any of this in the first place. This is all a manufactured moral panic, and institutions are just kind of slowly giving into it.

That is the dark read of the situation. On the flip side, these policies are fundamentally arising out of culture and politics, and there’s no reason that they should exist on their own. I think that’s why we saw in the ’90s the IOC abandoned chromosome testing: because there was a groundswell of people who pointed out, rightfully, that it’s a really discriminatory policy that violates women’s human rights in a lot of cases.

I do think ultimately it’s going to take something similar. We have to push for a cultural shift that takes into account bodily diversity and champions trans women’s rights. I also think we’re going to see plenty of different lawsuits being filed by intersex women athletes who are denied the chance to play in the Olympics now. National governments like France also have privacy laws that would really restrict and perhaps just not allow a body like the IOC to require genetic testing. So if more countries pass legislation like that, that would conflict with the IOC policy, and perhaps they would roll it back. But I think fundamentally what we need is cultural change.

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Trump Calls on “God Squad” to Bypass Endangered Species Laws for Offshore Drilling

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

The Trump administration is turning to the nuclear option on endangered-species protections in the name of national security.

A rarely tapped panel nicknamed the “God Squad” will meet Tuesday to discuss whether overriding Endangered Species Act regulations for all federally regulated fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico is more important than preventing the extinction of several imperiled species. That includes sea turtles and a whale species down to its last 51 individuals.

“This is the antithesis of the way the God committee has worked in the past.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the upcoming Endangered Species Committee meeting last week, with no details on specific projects in the Gulf or the basis for what would constitute an extraordinary action. Only twice in the panel’s nearly half-century has it ever lifted restrictions.

But after the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the meeting, the Trump administration told the court that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf exempted “for reasons of national security.”

A federal judge declined Friday to block the meeting.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum speaks during a news conference at the White House on Aug. 11, 2025.Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu/Getty via ICN

“It’s disappointing that the court didn’t immediately stop Hegseth’s reckless power grab, but this is just the first battle in a longer fight to protect the Gulf’s endangered whales and turtles,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

The situation puts the country in uncharted waters. No administration has ever before requested a national security exemption from endangered-species protections.

It’s a challenging case to make. US oil production is hovering around record highs. Companies working offshore in the Gulf’s federal waters produced 1.9 million barrels of oil per day last year, and that’s with endangered-species protections in place, which require companies to minimize their impact on animals rather than limiting or prohibiting oil and gas operations altogether.

Experts also say it’s doubtful that increasing oil production there would have any immediate benefits to national security.

But it does align with President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” platform. His administration has called for much more production—especially after gas prices soared since he authorized strikes on Iran in February. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a $5 billion deepwater oil drilling project in the Gulf this month.

Though the committee meeting is moving forward, the Trump administration skipped several usual steps in the process, experts say. “It was written to be a rare but necessary emergency escape clause when there was no alternative and human welfare was desperately at issue,” said Zygmunt Plater, a professor at Boston College Law School. “This is not carefully done. This is the antithesis of the way the God committee has worked in the past.”

Plater was lead counsel in a high-profile 1970s lawsuit that gave rise to the creation of the Endangered Species Committee. A dam under construction in Tennessee, his legal team and environmentalists in the area argued, would threaten a tiny endangered fish called the snail darter.

Many saw this “Tellico Dam v. Snail Darter” case as the first real test of the Endangered Species Act’s powers. It eventually reached the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled in favor of the snail darter. Based on the law’s wording, they said, the government must protect an endangered species “whatever the cost.”

This powerful language prompted Congress to pass an amendment in 1978 creating the committee as an extreme measure to override endangered species protections in specific cases with major implications for the US economy and welfare.

The committee is composed of several top officials, including the heads of the Interior Department, the US Department of Agriculture, the Army, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Last time I looked, we weren’t actually running short [on oil] at all.”

Ironically, even this new entity sided with the fish—or, at the very least, against the dam. “They had just figured out…that the cost of the dam was actually greater than the benefits, even putting aside the fish,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. (Construction was eventually completed anyway after Congress tucked an exemption for it in a budget bill.)

Since then, the God Squad has only been convened a handful of times. Just two exemptions have ever been granted, once for a dam in endangered whooping cranes’ habitat in the Great Plains region and another for proposed federal timber sales in Oregon, which would have affected threatened northern spotted owls. The God Squad voted to permit some of the timber sales, but the agency involved later withdrew its exemption request.

It’s been decades since the committee was last brought together.

The only parties that can request an exemption are federal agencies proposing an action, the governor of the state in which the action is proposed or the entity seeking a permit related to an agency action.

Before that point, as part of the normal endangered-species process for a federal action, government researchers perform rigorous analyses to forecast project impacts, creating what’s called a “biological opinion.” In it, they typically outline mandatory measures that could mitigate threats to endangered species.

In very rare cases, agencies conclude a federal action cannot be conducted without jeopardizing an endangered animal or plant. That’s when the God Squad comes into play.

Similar to a trial, the officials call in a range of experts—from economists to biologists—to testify on the project impacts. By the end, the committee must be able to answer two major questions: Is there a “reasonable and prudent” alternative? If not, do the pros outweigh the cons for the public?

That’s why it’s called the God Squad. There is a very real possibility a species could go extinct if the project moves forward, even if the committee still requires some level of mitigation measures.

The Trump administration said in a court filing this week that it would bypass the evidentiary hearing meant to inform the committee’s decision.

“It’s almost impossible to believe that there would be a project that couldn’t be altered in a way that would allow for the promotion of an endangered or threatened species,” said Rob Verchick, an environmental law expert at Loyola University New Orleans. “One thing I think we do know is that when Congress created this committee, it was seen as being an alternative of very last resort.”

Recent actions suggest the Trump administration doesn’t see it that way.

On Trump’s first day back in office last year, he declared a “National Energy Emergency” and directed the Interior secretary to convene the committee “not less than quarterly” to review applications or “identify obstacles to domestic energy infrastructure specifically deriving from implementation of the [Endangered Species Act] or the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

While that hasn’t occurred—publicly, at least—the administration is now moving forward with its first God Squad meeting on March 31, which will be livestreamed at 9:30 a.m. Eastern.

The initial announcement of the meeting “seemed a little ridiculous, frankly, because there hadn’t been the proper procedural requirements to allow for a convening,” said Verchick, who served in the EPA during the Obama administration. In an interview before the administration’s court filing raised the specter of national security, he added: “It’s so unusual that they’re not even talking about what the individual project is that they’re concerned about. And then they’re not even talking about the individual animals that are, in theory, posing a barrier to whatever the project is.”

“It’s about power and control. It’s more political than it is energy security.”

Christopher Danley, senior counselor to the Secretary of the Interior, argued in that court filing Wednesday that no exemption application or applicant is necessary due to the national security determination.

Verchick said over email the next day that the section of the law cited in the legal filing “does not relieve Secretary Hegseth from having to issue a valid exemption application.” Instead, it “directs how the Committee must respond upon receiving a valid exemption application that asserts an exemption is necessary for national security.”

He added that the Department of Defense “does not appear to have submitted a valid exemption application or report. There’s no evidence of an application or report at all. If the application exists, it was submitted too late.”

Asked about that, the Defense Department did not respond. The Interior Department also did not answer questions from Inside Climate News.

The sprawling nature of the exemption the agency seems to be seeking for all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf could make it more difficult to secure, said Farber, the UC Berkeley professor. “That’s sort of characteristic of the administration, you know, go big,” he said. “But on the other hand, it may make it more vulnerable than a more targeted exemption request.”

Even amid the conflict in Iran, it might also be challenging for the federal government to justify why overruling endangered species regulations in the Gulf will support national security, according to Charles McConnell, the executive director for the Center for Carbon Management in Energy at the University of Houston.

“​​If this is simply being looked at as a visceral reaction to the prices at the pump, and people want to see this announcement as something that’s going to make gasoline prices less next week, that’s absurd,” he said. “Last time I looked, we weren’t actually running short [on oil] at all.”

Instead, McConnell thinks this move could be the Trump administration’s way of showing it is “100 percent behind the oil and gas community.”

“It’s about power and control,” he said. “It’s more political than it is energy security.”

The Gulf of Mexico hosts one of the highest concentrations of offshore fossil fuel infrastructure in the world, with about 3,500 oil and gas structures and tens of thousands of inactive wells. Trump is looking to open up oil and gas operations by around 1.27 billion acres of federal waters in the Gulf, off California, and along Alaska’s coast.

“This is not just talking about a whale and the need for fossil fuels. It is just one more act in a political quashing of citizen involvement.”

However, NOAA issued a biological opinion 10 months ago, finding that collisions with oil industry boats in the Gulf of Mexico could jeopardize the continued survival of the endangered Rice’s whale. At night, the whales spend most of their time within 50 feet of the water’s surface.

Some 51 remain, so even the loss of a single whale could have outsized effects on the population.

The analysis also found that noises from oil and gas construction or other activities are “likely to result in chronic stress” for the Rice’s whales and many other species in the area, including endangered sperm whales and five imperiled species of sea turtles.

Another profound—and potentially extinction-level—risk? Oil spills, as evidenced by the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The largest marine oil spill in US history, the offshore drilling rig explosion killed 11 people directly and dumped more than 210 million gallons into the Gulf.

A Kemp’s ridley turtle is released into the wild at Stewart Beach in May 2015 in Galveston, Texas. Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle/Getty via ICN

Sea turtles suffocated under sludge. Poisoned seabirds washed up by the hundreds on Louisiana shores. The spill killed an estimated 20 percent of the Rice’s whale population. Researchers, nonprofits, and local volunteers are still cleaning up the aftermath of the spill in Gulf coastal ecosystems 16 years later.

Now, oil rigs in the region face stricter regulations to ensure their systems are up to date. They are also required to comply with Endangered Species Act requirements to minimize their impacts on vulnerable animals. The latest jeopardy finding for the Rice’s whale says boats should immediately begin using technology to avoid vessel strikes and monitor for the presence of the animal.

But Trump has rolled back many environmental protections he thinks stand in the way of oil. He scrapped drilling prohibitions in ecologically sensitive areas. His offshore fossil fuel expansion plan, the Center for Biological Diversity estimated, could trigger thousands of oil spills across the country, based on average spill rates in recent decades. And his administration rescinded guidance in February for oil and gas vessels to slow down in the western Gulf to avoid hitting whales.

The God Squad could remove other regulations on industry activities. Given that this national security exemption is unprecedented, only time will tell how it plays out, Farber said. But he expects further litigation. The Trump administration has “a real advantage going in, because it’s [claiming] national security, but they’re really pressing that to kind of its far limits,” he said.

Plater said the Endangered Species Act is one of the few laws that allows citizens to increase enforcement through substantive actions. He’s seen this firsthand: The snail darter case that threw the law into the public spotlight decades ago was spurred by an idea from one of his law students for a paper.

In his view, the committee that grew out of that case is for the most part “a very fair, careful bypass” for extreme scenarios.

Now, however, Plater fears it will be “weaponized to roll back citizen enforceable protections for all the endangered and threatened species in the Gulf.”

“This is not just talking about a whale and the need for fossil fuels. It is just one more act in a political quashing of citizen involvement in statutory enforcement and protection of public values,” he said. “Scratch away at almost any environmental controversy, and pretty soon you’re looking at big questions of democratic governance.”

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The Black Veteran Who Desegregated Interstate Buses

In the summer of 1952, 23-year-old Sarah Keys (later Sarah Keys Evans)was making her first trip home from the Army hospital where she worked in Trenton, New Jersey, to North Carolina since joining the Women’s Army Corps the year before. Awoken around midnight, the private first class was ordered to give up her seat to a white Marine. When she refused, Evans was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. She spent the night pacing around a dirty jail cell in her uniform and high-heeled shoes before paying $25 (around $300 in today’s dollars) for her release in the morning. Evans had never even participated in a civil rights protest, but she would spend the next three years—with the support of her father and the trailblazing Black attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree—fighting for transportation equality.

Evans and Roundtree brought her case to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the regulatory agency that oversaw interstate travel at the time. After an initial defeat, Evans’ legal team appealed, using the momentum from the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A year later, in 1955—days before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus in Alabama—the ICC ruled in Evans’ favor, marking the first time that an executive branch institution outside the military rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine of 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. But it would take several more years of direct action for the federal government to finally enforce the ICC’s decision.

In the early aughts, while researching a book on American women in the military, author Amy Nathan stumbled upon this now little-known piece of civil rights history. Nathan interviewed Evans, self-publishing a children’s book about her two years later. They remained friends and collaborators until Evans passed away in 2023. In 2020, nearly 70 years after Evans’ arrest, Roanoke Rapids installed a series of murals about the veteran’s fight for justice, which Evans told a Time reporter she saw as a tribute to all the overlooked women who “kept the spark going” during the Civil Rights Movement.

“That’s why we decided to write this book, to really place her story within the whole context of the struggle—from the early 1800s onward—to end segregation on public transportation,” Nathan told me about Riding Into History, an account of Evans’ story published by Duke University Press.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the experience of trying to get Sarah Keys’ story out there. I know you first wrote a book about her for younger readers in 2006: what was the process like? What obstacles did you encounter?

Oh, plenty of obstacles. I just thought this was an original story, and it was a really important story. So I naively thought, of course I’d find somebody who wanted to do it. But I have subsequently learned, and I was told this a couple of times by people in publishing, that they only do books for children on people who are household names, and she wasn’t a household name. How do you become a household name if somebody [isn’t] going to write books about you? I had spent two years interviewing her and her family, and they were all excited about the idea [that] this story would finally become better known.

Of course, the reason her story wasn’t as well known as others is that shortly after she won her victory at the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1955, one week after it was announced publicly, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Montgomery bus boycott started, led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his first effort at being a Civil Rights leader. So everything got much more exciting after Sarah Keys Evans’ victory, [which] also was not enforced by the federal government until the Freedom Rides in 1961 caused such a disturbance, such bad publicity for the United States, that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the federal government to finally enforce the Sarah Keys rule.

What have you heard from people in this process of uplifting the often overlooked stories of women in the Civil Rights movement like Evans and Roundtree?

People seem to be very, very supportive of it, and they all seem very surprised when they hear about it. In the back of the book, in the appendix, I include a list of other people whose stories have been overlooked for a long time. They’re very, very short, just [to] show that it was a lot of people—because, I think, maybe some people think that people of color just sort of submitted to this and [then] the Civil Rights Movement happened, but no. People were protesting about this all along, from the very beginning. More and more books are being written now that tell about these overlooked heroes. It took many foot soldiers, as we say in the book, to win this victory.

What sparked your interest in women’s military history?

When I was in college, that was the start of the women’s movement and the women’s magazines that started coming up. I remember one summer I read a book on women’s history, and I was astonished. I began to become aware that there was this thing called women’s history, and that women really were overlooked. I went to an all-girls’ college, the branch of Harvard that was called Radcliffe, and we actually were pretty badly treated for a while. During the time that I was there, there were no bathrooms in Harvard Yard that we could use. There was no place where we could have lunch, that kind of thing, and so I had a personal experience of being discriminated against as a woman.

Also I, just by chance, came across a book [with] articles about the [American] women pilots of World War II, the WASP pilots. My local public library got me many of the original interviews that these women had done, and put me in touch with some of the WASP women who were still alive, and I began interviewing them. I got really excited about trying to bring history to life in this way, by interviewing people and sharing their personal stories, more than just the bare facts of it.

That book was very well received, so I thought, well, why not write about all the women in the military? Because they’ve been serving ever since the Revolutionary War. I did a lot of research, trying to track down these women, and interviewing many of them, and interviewing many women who were currently serving. This was before this book came out in 2004 and that was before women were really much more integrated into the military. These women also saw themselves as being groundbreakers, and they were really eager to share their stories.

The first chapter of Riding Into History is a deep dive into the legal history behind segregation on public transportation. Something that struck me was how differently the 14th Amendment has been interpreted by different people and government institutions, and how it’s been used to both empower and disenfranchise communities of color.

Yes, indeed. I learned more about that when I was doing [a] book on the Plessy & Ferguson [Initiative]. I learned about this interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the back and forth on that when learning the legal history of that case. It didn’t give Congress specific permission to regulate individual people’s activities. So that’s how the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 saying, well, the federal government didn’t have any right to regulate individual activities. Only states could do that.

Decades later, in 1946’s Morgan v. Virginia , the NAACP successfully argued that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause extended to regulate, and ban segregation on, interstate travel.

There had to be a uniform rule for all of travel. But because Morgan v. Virginia [only] said that no legislation could do that, bus companies just went and made their own segregation seating rules. The victory that [Evans] scored at the Interstate Commerce Commission, [after] Brown, ruled that neither state laws nor bus company rules could be applied in interstate bus rides or train rides that went from one state to another. From [1841], when Frederick Douglass was first thrown off of a train shortly after he escaped from enslavement in the north, ever since, it’s been back and forth, a seesaw of making a little progress and then slipping backwards. I hope we’re not slipping backwards again.

To that point, what would you say to young readers, and especially young women, who are fighting injustice in a moment where it feels as though our civil rights and liberties are under attack?

It does seem like they are under attack. I would just say that Sarah Keys Evans didn’t give many talks. [What] happened to her on that bus really impacted her for the rest of her life, made her a very cautious person, cautious about what she said in public. But she did give a talk to a high school [around 2019], and in that she said, “You must never stop fighting for your rights, because once you lose them, it’s very hard to get them back.” She said, “Each time you challenge a wrong, that news travels.” That’s what she told the students—and she told them, “I’m glad I didn’t give up. I’m glad I was able to help unlock another door of freedom.” That’s the message that she gave. So I think this is a story that can give people courage to think, well, yes, you can stand up for what’s right and what’s fair.

The middle section of the book focuses a lot on the history of education in the area and Sarah Keys Evans’ father’s efforts to build a school in her hometown. How did you make the decision to emphasize education in the book?

I think because there was such an up and down with education, too, after the Civil War. [Evans’] father went to a vocational school [made popular by Booker T. Washington after the Civil War], but then he heard from a friend of his, who had left Washington, North Carolina, earlier, that there [were] more opportunities [elsewhere, so] he went and lived in Washington, DC for a while, and had a chance to experience a different kind of education at Dunbar High School there, which was one of the first high schools for Black students in the United States. When he came back from having served in the Navy, he had become a Catholic.

[But] there was no Catholic church for Black people or for anybody in Washington, North Carolina. It had been destroyed during the Civil War and had never been rebuilt. A priest from [the] nearby town of New Bern would come periodically and hold mass at a rented room. This book called Washington and the Pamlico reported that [during] one such service in the early 1920s Sarah Keys Evans’ father said, “What can be done for my people?”

That started a whole conversation among the priests in New Bern who were thinking about starting a Black school. He helped find the land that they could use for that, and they started this school there, called the Mother of Mercy School, which taught the strict academic curriculum that was being taught up north and that was being taught in other parochial schools. It provided a sense of insulation from some of the affronts of the Jim Crow environment in that town. And so in a way, I think that gave [Evans] a sense of self confidence and that then carried on when she went into the military.

When desegregation happened and the schools were combined and Black students could go to the regular white high school in Washington, North Carolina, fewer people wanted to enroll in the Mother of Mercy School, and so it closed. A lot of the Black teachers and Black administrators lost their jobs so it’s a complicated story, but I thought it was a good story, because it shows the complexity of this whole topic. It wasn’t just yay, the Civil War ended, now everything was going to be all right. No, that was not what happened. [Or] yay, Brown v. Board of Education happened. [But] that didn’t solve every problem either. And so I think it’s good for people to understand the complexity of these issues and that people have to keep fighting for rights all the way through it, every step of the way.

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Ms. Rachel Is Helping Kids Get Out of ICE Detention—One Video at a Time

“One woman became so sick from eating the food that she began vomiting blood

“My kids are terrified; we are all depressed.”

“I always ask my children for forgiveness for making them suffer through all of this.”

Though the number of families inside Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas has dropped dramatically in recent months, for dozens of children still inside, such brutal conditions remain. Now, at the risk of their stories fading to the background of the Trump administration’s cascading crises, Ms. Rachel, the beloved children’s educator, is calling on the public to fight for their release.

“We have to hold on to hope for families who are locked in Dilley and keep going,” Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, told Mother Jones. “I do believe the public outcries and the people who have come together and worked on this long before I have are making a huge difference.”

“I do believe the public outcries and the people who have come together and worked on this long before I have are making a huge difference.”

It’s difficult to overstate Accurso’s influence, both among young children and their parents, many of whom see her as today’s Mister Rogers. Dilley is the new focus of Accurso‘s social media presence, where in recent weeks, she has highlighted the story of Deiver Henao Jimenez, a 9-year-old boy who has been detained with his family, asylum-seekers from Colombia, since early March after a routine immigration appointment in New Mexico.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Deiver told Accurso in a Zoom call she posted to Instagram. He repeatedly described how much he wanted to “go to the spelling bee.”

“It was devastating to hear him talk about just wanting to attend his spelling bee,” Accurso said. “I never thought I’d be on a call with a 9-year-old who was begging me for help to get out of a prison-like detention center. It was devastating and surreal.”

View this post on Instagram

In a surprise move days later, Deiver and his family were released. So, too, was Gael, a 5-year-old nonverbal boy whom Accurso met over video and similarly spotlighted on her Instagram.

“When we started talking about Dilley, Deiver and his mom held each other and started crying…They are an amazing family, and I’m honored to know them.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about what led to their releases. But coming within days of being featured on Accurso’s Instagram, which has over 5 million followers, it’s hard not to connect what had happened withthe power of her advocacy.

“I FaceTimed Deiver on Friday, and I saw a smile that was not present in Dilley,” Accurso said after the boy’s release. “He had just come home from his first day back at school with a huge card the school community had made for him. They missed him so much.”

Accurso reflected on the intensity of the experience of their conversation. “When we started talking about Dilley,” she recalled, “Deiver and his mom held each other and started crying. We know that trauma can have lasting effects on children in immigration centers. They worry and care so much for other families still at Dilley. They are an amazing family, and I’m honored to know them.”

The attention on ICE is a new political focus for Accurso, but it is not the only one. Over the past year, she has used her platform over the past year to call attention to the war in Gaza, where UNICEF reports 64,000 children have either been killed or seriously injured. Some parents have viewed such outspoken advocacy as inappropriate for a children’s educator; last year, the group StopAntisemitism wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding an investigation into whether Accurso had ties to Hamas. But Accurso sees her advocacy as a natural, if not crucial, extension of the same message she imbues her educational videos on YouTube and Netflix: All children deserve to be seen for their humanity.

I asked Accurso about the disconnect she sees between critics of ICE’s detention of children and those who support such a policy.

“I think it’s really important to think of each child in this position as we think of our own children if we are parents, or a child we love, or even ourselves as a child,” she said. “Christianity and the other religions call us to practice the Golden Rule and love our neighbors as ourselves. That means to really put yourself in their shoes and imagine what they are experiencing.”

“I’ve worked with kids across so many communities, and they have beautiful differences, but they are also so similar,” Accurso continued. “They want to play, they want to learn, they care about each other. It devastates me, thinking about them watching us and seeing us not have compassion for each other. We have to do better for kids.”

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Usha Vance Started a Reading Show for Kids Whose Families Haven’t Been Separated

Second Lady Usha Vance is normal and relatable, actually.

Or, at least she said as much on Sunday in an NBC interview promoting her new podcast show Storytime with the Second Lady, where she brings on a guest to read a children’s book.

“It’s a podcast that really is just for children,” Usha Vance explained. “We will have someone come in—a special reader, we’re calling them—read a fun book, have a very short little conversation about things related to the book, maybe about their career.”

Three episodes were released on YouTube Monday morning, with the first show featuring Vance reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit solo and the next two featuring former racing driver Danica Patrick and author and Paralympian Brent Poppen.

“[We] then invite children to pick up books on their own. It’s sort of just an advertisement for reading,” Vance continued.

The second lady’s launch comes as her husband and other officials in the Trump administration terrorize and inflict brutal violence on children and families around the world—the remainder of the discussion hammered home an awkward whitewashing attempt.

Vance’s young children helped make the podcast set, including building a Lego cherry blossom tree and even has a Costco membership! But when NBC News’ Kate Snow asked her simple questions about her politics and thoughts on the Trump administration, the second lady largely shied away from answering. While Vance doesn’t agree with her husband on every issue, she is “not involved in this in any professional sense,” so she can have “open-minded” and “very productive” conversations with him when his work becomes “important personally.”

As much as she tries to present the contrary, she is a person with influence within the Trump administration.

“I do feel very comfortable in that no one has ever asked me to engage in any kind of litmus test on anything,” Vance said when asked about her stark political shift from being registered as a Democrat until at least 2014. “What I’ve found is that I was myself in 2014. I can be myself today. And I feel very comfortable in that world.”

Q: In 2014 you were a registered Democrat. Do you feel fully comfortable in the universe you're in now?

Usha Vance: Sometimes I have thoughts that fit very comfortably into one side or another, sometimes I have views that are idiosyncratic pic.twitter.com/yDThevAr5M

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) March 30, 2026

The second lady is comfortable in a government that’s trying to replace educators with AI robots while it detains and deports young children, reportedly kills over a hundred elementary school students by missile strike, and starves families in Cuba of basic living essentials.

It’s all normal and relatable as long as you don’t ask too many questions.

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