Republicans Slide “Nonprofit Killer” Law Into Tax Bill

The “nonprofit killer” is back—this time tucked into congressional Republicans’ aggressive new tax proposal, which they’ve dubbed the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill.”

For those who forgot: In November, the House of Representatives passed HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” which would give the Secretary of the Treasury the power to strip a nonprofit’s tax-exempt status on the suspicion of giving or receiving any backing from a ‘terrorist supporting’ group or person—as defined by the White House.

The legislation started with widespread bipartisan support that waned as experts and constituents voiced outrage; it waned further after Donald Trump’s election. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), initially a backer, is one of dozens of House Democrats who flipped their vote. Doggett, as Sophie Hurwitz reported for Mother Jones, was less concerned about the bill’s text than the way Donald Trump was likely to use it:

One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”

“Protests are inconvenient,” he said. “The one I had was inconvenient. [But] America is stronger when we protect dissent in all its forms, as long as it is done in a proper way.”

“There has been much made in this debate of the fact that some of us have been switching positions,” he said. “Well, we listen to our constituents.”

Kia Hamadanchy, the ACLU’s senior policy counsel, says the measure grants the Secretary of the Treasury “broad and unilateral discretion” to strip organizations of their tax-exempt status “without any due process”—or any evidence beyond the “accusation that they support terrorism.”

Hamadanchy calls that an authority that no administration of any party should have, one that “could be weaponized against people across the political spectrum,” particularly by the Trump administration. “They’ve already shown,” Hamadanchy says, “that they want to weaponize things like nonprofit status.”

Nonprofits are taking note, too.

Dom Kelly, who heads the disability rights group New Disabled South, characterized the legislation as “a continued attempt to silence those who work in opposition to the Trump administration and the right’s extreme agenda.” The bill’s vague, expansive language, Kelly explains, “means that this administration can go after organizations for any reason they want.”

Still, Kelly isn’t backing down: “If they come for us,” they said, “we will fight them with everything we’ve got.”

For most nonprofits, especially smaller ones, that fight won’t be easy. “Even having to litigate is a huge mess, takes time, causes all sorts of headaches,” Hamadanchy says, offering the example of universities targeted by the Trump administration over student protests.

“If they come for us, we will fight them with everything we’ve got.”

“A lot of people in Congress conflated student protesters with Hamas, without really any evidence,” he says. “You can imagine a world where the Trump administration tells a university: ‘You let these people protest on your campus? You are providing material support to Hamas.'”

Indeed, the Trump administration has already stripped Columbia’s research funding to the tune of $400 million, ostensibly motivated by allegations of antisemitismfollowing pro-Palestine protests last year. Harvard University has lost more than $2.5 billion in federal support since April, when it balked at Trump’s demands—again largely citing antisemitism claims—for sweeping power over its campus, curriculum, and personnel.

Hamadanchy doesn’t think every application of the bill will survive legal challenges, but harm would be done simply by its becoming law: “It basically serves a larger purpose,” he says, “of chilling speech.”

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The GOP’s Plan to Defund Planned Parenthood Would Add $300 Million to the Deficit

The contentious plan to defund Planned Parenthood, included in the Republican-backed reconciliation bill that would slash millions in Medicaid funding, would cost taxpayers $300 million over the next decade, according to a leaked preliminary estimate compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The news comes as House Republicans have doubled down on the proposal to prohibit funding to Planned Parenthood, despite some moderate Republicans’ opposition to the measure. Medicaid already does not fund most abortions due to the Hyde Amendment, so the proposed cuts to the health centers would instead affect the provision of services such as pap smears, cancer screenings, and birth control. These services account for the majority of Planned Parenthood’s work, while abortions only account for four percent of services the organization’s affiliates provide.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said the organization provides those services to more than two million people a year. More than half of its patients use Medicaid and other public insurance programs, and most of the clinics are located in underserved areas.

Spokespeople for the CBO declined to comment on how it arrived at the $300 million estimate. Back in 2017, when Republicans tried, and failed, to defund Planned Parenthood, the CBO estimated increased government costs would come from additional births stemming from a lack of access to contraception and other services Planned Parenthood provides, as well as more children enrolling in Medicaid. The latest projected increase comes as especially ironic in light of President Donald Trump’s promises to slash spending, cut government programs, and slash personnel in an effort spearheaded by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Speaker Mike Johnson’s office (R-La.) did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Politico reported on Tuesday that Republicans released the estimates before the House Energy and Commerce Committee took up the legislation. That process ended Wednesday afternoon after more than 26 hours, during which time Democratic lawmakers slammed Republicans for claiming to care about women’s health while seeking to defund Planned Parenthood.

McGill Johnson said in a statement that the new CBO estimate shows that the reconciliation bill “is about attacking Planned Parenthood and taking away people’s access to essential health care.” While the bill text does not mention Planned Parenthood by name, it takes direct aim at Medicaid funding to “essential community providers that are primarily engaged in family planning services or reproductive services” and that receive one million dollars or more per year. New research published on Tuesday by Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research and policy organization, notes that other health centers “would need to dramatically increase their contraceptive client caseloads” if Planned Parenthood was, indeed, defunded.

Rachana Desai Martin, chief U.S. program officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said that Medicaid is critical to ensuring that millions of low-income Americans can access sexual and reproductive health services.

“Defunding providers like Planned Parenthood would eliminate that choice and targets communities who are already facing barriers to care,” she added.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement that despite polling that shows most Americans oppose defunding Planned Parenthood, “Republicans are so hell-bent on ripping away reproductive freedom at any cost that they are refusing to listen to their own constituents.”

The latest attack is not the only effort to restrict Planned Parenthood’s services. A case currently pending before the Supreme Court could allow states to unilaterally cut off Planned Parenthood’s access to Medicaid funding, as my colleague Madison Pauly has covered. In March, the Trump administration withheld tens of millions of dollars in Title X funding, which Planned Parenthood and other health centers use to provide birth control and other services to low-income people.

It looks like this latest effort to defund Planned Parenthood may also, ultimately, fail, just like it did in 2017: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Wednesday he thinks the House reconciliation bill will struggle to pass the Senate.Spokespeople for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The irony of all this? It’s coming during National Women’s Health Week, which the White House acknowledged on Monday.

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We Still Don’t Know What Kash Patel Did as a Consultant for Qatar

In a curious twist during his confirmation process, Kash Patel failed to disclose significant personal financial information until after the Senate hearing in January on his nomination to become FBI director. Consequently, one peculiar item listed on his financial disclosure form received no attention during that hearing: Patel’s work as a consultant for the embassy of Qatar. On this document, Patel did not specify what he did for Qatar or how much he was paid.

Even now—nearly three months after he took the helm of the nation’s top law enforcement agency—the details of Patel’s Qatari connection remain a mystery.

This week Mother Jones contacted the FBI and texted Patel, asking if they would reveal what services he provided to Qatar and what payments he received. Neither responded.

Patel is just one of several top Trump administration aides who have had financial ties to this Arab monarchy. Susan Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, worked for a lobbying firm that represented Qatar. Attorney General Pam Bondi lobbied for the Qataris. Mike Huckabee, now US Ambassador to Israel, was paid $50,000 to visit Qatar in 2018. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, also has pocketed money from Qatar. In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought the Park Lane Hotel from Witkoff’s company in a $623 million deal. The Trump Organization itself recently struck a deal to develop a luxury golf resort in Qatar. And now Qatar is consideringhanding as a gift to Trump a jumbo airliner worth about $400 million for Trump to use as Air Force One. The plan reportedly is for the 747 to be transferred to Trump’s presidential library foundation after he leaves office, where it could come under his personal control.

There have been few public clues regarding the nature of Patel’s tie to Qatar. His financial disclosure form only says that he made more than $5,000 from this work. It notes that he was paid through a company he owned called Trishul, which engaged in “national security, defense, and intelligence” consulting. According to the form, he earned more than $2.1 million in 2024 through Trishul, which had a number of clients. Those clients included the Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates the Truth Social, Trump’s money-losing social media platform. But the form does not break down how much of Patel’s Trishul income came from each client.

In an ethics agreement Patel filed with the Justice Department, he noted that under federal law he would not be permitted to engage in matters related to Qatar without receiving written authorization permitting him to do so. The agreement stated that he expected such authorization to be granted.

Last year, the Atlantic reported that Patel had claimed that he worked as a security consultant for Qatar during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Doha. And in February—as ethics experts were questioning whether Patel’s consulting for Qatar would have required him to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent (which he did not)—the right-wing Federalist reported, “A source close to Patel’s confirmation told The Federalist his work for Qatar was limited to securing the 2022 FIFA World Cup and other security measures, not the kind of representation that would require FARA registration.”

Patel has not offered this World Cup explanation himself. He has said nothing that has been publicly reported about his business association with Qatar. And when Mother Jones asked the Qatari Supreme Committee on Delivery and Legacy, which ran the 2022 World Cup, if Patel did work related to the event, it replied that it had “nothing to comment on this.”

Moreover, Patel’s paperwork states that he was working for Qatar until November 2024. That’s two years past the World Cup. Was he still providing security services at that point for an event that had long since concluded? Also, his financial disclosure form indicates he was paid by the Qatari embassy in the US, not the Qatari sports committee.

The whole point of financial disclosure for top-ranking US officials is for the public to be able to see the size and scope of any conflicts of interests. Yet this episode shows that the current requirements are inadequate. Patel is now heading the FBI, yet questions remain about his finances—including a $25,000 payment he received from a Russian-American-Ukrainian filmmaker who was connected to a Russian propaganda project financed by Vladimir Putin’s office.

Americans have the right know whether an FBI director is clean as a whistle and free of ties that could unduly affect or compromise his actions. Yet Patel has not provided the public a full view of his finances. And even though he is now securely in the position, he won’t explain his relationship to a foreign government with a checkered human rights record and that has has tried to influence US policy and policymakers. The Case of the FBI Chief’s Mysterious Tie to Qatar remains open.

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Will the Supreme Court Let Trump Target Babies for the “Sins of the Parents”?

In 2022, Florida Republicans enacted the Stop WOKE Act, which sought to remove from school curriculums any lessons that might cause students to feel “discomfort,” “guilt,” or any other “psychological distress” because of their race. It went without saying that the legislation’s authors were referring to white students who might experience a sad feeling because of what their ancestors did to Black people in the United States. Instead of bummer stuff like the enduring legacy of slavery, the bill required teaching that individuals do not “bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

“The Trump administration and its supporters want to redirect the attention to the parents.”

The law was an attempt to erase the history of discrimination from the public consciousness and with it the collective will to correct the unfairness that has stalked our society as a result. The irony, of course, is that the law’s odes to merit, equality, and a fresh start for everyone were being used to achieve a less fair, less meritocratic society in which fresh starts are handicapped by past discrimination.

Regardless, the ethos they were appealing to is real and deeply embedded in American culture and law, all the way back to the Constitution itself: Each individual deserves equal treatment, regardless of the sins of their ancestors. On the Supreme Court, Republican-appointed justices have wielded this definition of equality to roll back laws and policies that sought to make our society more equal, from affirmative action in college admissions to voting rights. Still, the idea that people should’t be punished for the actions of their parents is a noble one, even if it is often weaponized for opposite purposes.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over President Donald Trump’s executive order that seeks to withhold birthright citizenship fromchildren born to both undocumented immigrants and visa holders. Technically, the court is considering whether to allow the executive order to take effect for those who have not challenged it while the courts consider whether the order is legal. But it will be impossible for the court to consider this technical question without also considering whether it is likely to ultimately uphold or strike down the order.

The Trump administration’s argument limits the citizenship rights of children based on the actions and status of their parents. The argument is striking, as it contradicts the notion of an equality completely independent of the past that the Republican Party and its six justice majority on the court have embraced. If the Supreme Court sides with the administration’s argument, it will be opportunistically eschewing a principle it has championed again and again in recent years to advance the GOP’s agenda: That children don’t inherit the sins or status of their forefathers.

“It’s definitely inconsistent with a long standing conservative principle that we’re all individuals, and the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause in particular, protect individuals, not groups,” says Cristina Rodríguez, a Yale Law professor and expert on birthright citizenship. “That’s part of the understanding of the birthright citizenship clause—that whatever the sins of the parents are, the clause breaks that connection. What matters is where the individual was born.”

Rodríguez has called the Citizenship Clause our “constitutional reset button” because “it’s what ensures that each generation starts fresh, and we don’t worry about status because of what’s in our past.”

Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, parts of which were struck down by federal courts as unconstitutional, sought to prohibit bad feelings by learning about history. It’s of a piece with Elon Musk telling Germans to stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust. Speaking virtually at a far-right political rally in Germany in January, days after joining the Trump administration, he told the crowd that “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents” and that “there is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” The Trump administration itself has taken up this call with executive orders attempting to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion policies across the government and private sector, on the basis that these policies replace merit-based assessments of individuals with attempts to remedy the effects of past discrimination. It’s even going after a New York state requirement that schools ditch Native American mascots, apparently under the idea that today’s children shouldn’t be deprived of offensive sports logos just because their ancestors tried to eradicate native peoples.

“It’s much harder to justify the assault on birthright citizenship if one stays focused on the child.”

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has been busy making sure that no one is judged today by the actions of their ancestors. Two years ago, the GOP-appointed justices overturned nearly 50 years of precedent to end affirmative action in higher education admissions. Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, held that using race as a factor in admissions decisions did constitutional violence to the applicants. “‘Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,’” Roberts wrote, importing a quotation from a case in which the Supreme Court greenlit curfews on Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Despite its soaring language in the case, the court’s 1943 ruling allowed the government to treat people differently based on their ancestry.

Roberts’ aversion to importing the past into the present extends to regulation of the states. In 2013, Roberts struck down a core provision of the Voting Rights Act on the premise that requiring states with a history of racial discrimination to get approval for voting rule changes was intolerable because it treated states unequally. The Constitution, he wrote, does not “punish for the past.” While that same punishment frame was invoked decades earlier by segregationist Strom Thurmond when attacking the law, the VRA wasn’t resurrecting past grievances: it sought to halt current discrimination. Once Roberts’ ruling removed the review—the ostensible punishment—these states immediately passed discriminatory voting laws.

Roberts and his GOP-appointed colleagues, like the Trump administration and its allies, are using the idea of not punishing people (or states) for past sins to shed the responsibility to make the country fairer today. It’s a contrivance to argue that the 14th Amendment, written to ensure equality, now prevents the creation of an equal society and instead mandates the status quo of inequality—but that’s where they’ve landed. Whereas the Democratic-appointed justices saw affirmative action admissions programs and federally-vetted voting rules as protections against inequality, the majority saw them as a form of retribution.

But this framework, however wrongheaded in the civil rights context, cannot be squared with the Trump administration’s anti-birthright citizenship crusade.

In the birthright citizenship case, the Trump administration is asking the court to literally punish newborn babies based on something their ancestors did in the past—coming to the United States on a temporary visa or crossing the border without authorization. On the campaign trail last year, Trump said citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants is a “reward for breaking the laws of the United States,” framing the issue not as a right of the child but dependent on the actions of the parents.

The 14th Amendment begins: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It does not mention parents, or ancestors. The clause was intended to overturn Dred Scott v. Sanford, the 1857 Supreme Court case that had found all Black people ineligible for citizenship. The Civil War, which Dred Scott had precipitated, had ended the institution of slavery, which, in the United States, people were born into. The guarantee of birthright citizenship expanded citizenship to everyone born in the United States and ended the practice of inherited status.

Trump’s plan to limit birthright citizenship, and similar proposals that came before, have long been viewed by scholars as a return to Dred Scott. “You’re back to a system where citizenship is defined not by your birth in the territory, but by what your ancestry consists of,” says Rodríguez. Further, “Dred Scott reflects the idea that we, the people of the time, can decide who deserves to be a citizen and who’s capable of being a citizen, and who’s qualified to be a citizen. And the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to take that off the table and to say, ‘We’re going to have this universal rule. Anyone born here is a citizen, you can’t take that away from them.’”

“Anyone born here is a citizen, you can’t take that away.”

Without it, the country would create an underclass of people who lack the legal protections and opportunities afforded to citizens because of their ancestry—the exact situation Dred Scott had enshrined in the Constitution. Immigration experts warn that enforcing Trump’s executive order would force millions of Americans to begin digging through their ancestry to prove their citizenship and ensure it passes to their children.

The idea that status and guilt are not inheritable is not new. Garrett Epps, a former law professor at the University of Baltimore, points out that the Constitution even embodies this principle in its treatment of treason, where the framers provided that a convicted traitor’s confiscated property must be returned to the children upon their death. “Even a freaking traitor, even Benedict fucking Arnold loses his property, but only for life, because it’s not fair to take it away from his children,” says Epps. Guilt is not inherited.

The Trump administration argues that because the Citizenship Clause has three exceptions that do turn on the status of the parents, these exceptions are actually an unwritten rule to be read back into the amendment. But there’s no historical evidence of that, according to scholars of the 14th Amendment. The exceptions are for the children of foreign diplomats, the children of invaders occupying the land, and Indians born on tribal land. The first two are long-held common law exceptions and are also quite logical: diplomats hold diplomatic immunity and are not subjects of the country where they are posted, while invaders are trying to take over the country. The tribal exception is unique to the American experience but reflected the sovereignty of Indian tribes at the time. (Congress later granted Native Americans birthright citizenship.)

“The Trump administration and its supporters want to redirect the attention to the parents,” says John Mikhail, a professor at Georgetown Law. “They want to find a legitimate means by which to say it’s the parents’ lack of allegiance or the parents’ legal status or lack of domicile or lack of permanent residence, or lack of some other feature that the child inherits. It’s much harder to justify the assault on birthright citizenship if one stays focused on the child, which is what the text of the Constitution does.”

It won’t be long before the Supreme Court decides whether the executive order can go into effect for large swaths of the country. If they allow it, it will return us to a time, long since abolished, in which the equality of thousands of American-born children hinges on their ancestry.

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Jair Bolsonaro’s Son Has an Idea for Trump: Send Immigrants From Brazil to Prison in El Salvador

In December 2023, Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s sons and a congressman from Rio de Janeiro, led a delegation of federal deputiesto El Salvador on a fact-finding mission focused on public safety. As part of the trip, Eduardo and his entourage visited the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, the notorious mega-prison where the Trump administration recently sent more than 230 Venezuelans accused of gang membership.

At the time, Eduardo praised Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s state of exception and crackdown on crime, which have led to human rights groups sounding the alarm about systematic due process violations and arbitrary detentions.

“It’s really something sensational,” Eduardo said of CECOT in a recent video shared on his YouTube channel.

In the video, Eduardo also hinted at initial conversations he said he has hadwith the Trump administration about potentially sending immigrants from Brazil, who are detained in the United States and have alleged ties to criminal organizations, to El Salvador. The idea, which Eduardo described as a work in progress, would involve designating the two main Brazilian organized crime groups—Primeiro Comando da Capital, known as PCC, and Comando Vermelho (CV)—as foreign terrorist organizations. The gangs started in prisons in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro decades ago and have since expanded their drug trafficking and money laundering activitiesbeyond Latin America.

After assessing extradition agreements between Brazil and the United States, Eduardo suggested it could be possible to have “Brazilian criminals serve their sentences in prisons in El Salvador.”

Eduardo has recently taken a leave of absence from his role in Congress and is now living in the United States. Back in March, hehad already urged the Trump administration to formally designate the PCC as a foreign terrorist organization, calling it “a decisive step toward dismantling one of the most dangerous criminal networks in the world and ensuring the security and stability of our nations.” Then, on May 10, he posted on X how great it would be to see President Trump send “Brazil’s worst criminals to serve their sentences in the prison of the most hard-line guy of the moment, Bukele.”

Such a move would resemble President Donald Trump’s earlier designation of Venezuela’s gang Tren de Aragua and the Salvadoran group MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations, later followed by the secret invocation of the 18th-century wartime Alien Enemies Act to summarily remove alleged members of those groups from the United States without due process. As a Mother Jones investigation showed, several of the men sent to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act appear to have been targeted because of their tattoos—which experts say offer no reliable sign of membership in Tren de Aragua—and despite having no criminal history. And several federal courts have now blocked Trump’s use of the Act as unlawful. It has only been invoked three times before and always at times of war.

Earlier this month, State Department officials, including theacting coordinator for sanctions David Gamble, traveled to Brazil to hold bilateral meetings to discuss, among other issues, transnational criminal organizations. During the meetings, Trump administration officials reportedly shared an assessment from the FBI showing PCC and CV had a presence in 12 US states, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Florida, where they are said to be involved in money laundering.

The government of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, however, reportedly turned down the Trump administration’s request to label these gangs as foreign terrorist organizations. “We don’t have terrorist organizations here,” Mario Sarrubbo, Brazil’s national secretary of public security told Reuters, “we have criminal organizations that have infiltrated society.”

In an interview with CNN Brasil, Sarrubbo explained that Brazilian legislation defines terrorism as specific acts motivated by xenophobia or discrimination based on race, color, ethnicity, and religion. The law, therefore, wouldn’t apply to the criminal organizations operating in the country. “That [terrorism] classification,” he said, “would not be in accordance with our constitutional and legal system.”

A spokesperson for the State Department said reports of these discussions didn’t accurately reflect the engagement with the Brazilian government, adding that the focus of the delegation led by Gamble was on “strengthening bilateral cooperation on transnational criminal organizations, as well as US Counter Terrorism and Counter Narcotic Trafficking sanctions programs.”

Still, Eduardo suggested on X that the Brazilian government’s refusal shouldn’t stop the Trump administration from moving forward with the designation in much the same way as it did with Tren de Aragua**,** which he called the “CV/PCC of Venezuela.”

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Every President Since Lyndon Johnson Has Recognized the Security Risks of Climate Change. Then Came Trump.

This story was originally published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For more than half a century, US intelligence agencies and the armed forces have analyzed threats to national security from a range of environmental angles, including dependence on fossil fuels, competition for scarce water resources and strategic minerals, and especially human-caused climate change. These reports have been produced under presidential administrations across the political spectrum.

Hundreds of assessments have come from, among others, White House National Security Strategy reports, Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense reviews, and studies from every branch of the military, all the war colleges, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Their consistent conclusions: Environmental factors pose direct, indirect, and accelerating threats to US forces, operations, bases, and national security interests.

Immediately after the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2025, his administration began purging these reports from the public record, removing environmental security studies from government websites or disabling those pages, cutting funding for environmental security studies, and requiring military and intelligence communities to suppress and censor references to climate change.

Trump also rescinded President Joe Biden’s executive order 14008, which said, “climate considerations shall be an essential element of United States foreign policy and national security.” This censorship was not limited to military and intelligence work; the administration ordered other federal agencies to “archive or unpublish” materials related to climate change as well.

These actions will not reduce the actual risk that environmental problems pose for national security or the military—the physical reality of those threats will be unchanged. Instead, they will blind the country to environmental instability and real-world conflict risks that jeopardize our military and national security.

Awareness of environmental security threats goes back to the middle of the last century. In November 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee issued a report warning about the growing impacts of environmental pollution, including the threat of catastrophic climate impacts from melting of ice caps, sea-level rise, and rising temperatures. In September 1969, White House advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a memo to John Ehrlichman, assistant to President Nixon, highlighting those conclusions and urging the administration and NATO get involved with the growing risk to the United States of “the carbon dioxide problem.”

A year later, the Rand Corporation launched a program on “climate modification and national security” saying “the US might be harmed either inadvertently or maliciously by changes in the climate.” In December 1974, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger issued National Security Study Memorandum NSSM200, suggesting “a major research effort to address the growing problems of water supply, ecological damage, and adverse climate” and their threat to “world economic well-being and political stability.”

The 1990 White House National Security Strategy, required by Congress, explicitly acknowledged the growing risk of emissions from fossil fuels. That same year the US Naval War College issued a report “Global Climate Change: Implications for the United States,” which said:

Naval operations in the coming half century may be drastically affected by the impact of global climate change. For the Navy to be fully prepared for operations in this future climate environment, resources of both mind and money must be committed to the problem.

President Bush’s 1991 National Security Strategy explicitly called out climate change as a threat already contributing to political conflict:

Global environmental concerns include such diverse but interrelated issues as stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, food security, water supply, deforestation, biodiversity and treatment of wastes. A common ingredient in each is that they respect no international boundaries. The stress from these environmental challenges is already contributing to political conflict.

My own work in this area extends back to 1989, when I published a research paper on the implications of global climatic changes for international security and an analysis of environmental security in the Bulletin in 1991. In May 2006, I testified on this issue to a congressional subcommittee on national security, emerging threats, and international relations.

The recognition of environmental security threats has only intensified in subsequent decades in hundreds of unclassified assessments and government statements, focused in two key areas: the risk that these factors will lead to (1) “widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states;” and (2) the strategic implications for “military capability,” bases, and operations, as the US Joint Forces Command concluded in 2007. That same year, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard published their joint concerns about how climate change is reshaping Arctic strategic issues.

In the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (HR2810), Congress noted the testimony of Secretary of Defense James Mattis:

I agree that the effects of a changing climate—such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, desertification, among others—impact our security situation.

and the testimony of Former Chief of Staff of the US Army, Gordon Sullivan:

Climate change is a national security issue. We found that climate instability will lead to instability in geopolitics and impact American military operations around the world.

This emphasis continued through the Biden Administration as well and in 2023, the Annual Threat Assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated:

In every region of the world, challenges from climate change, demographic trends, human and health security, and economic disruptions caused by energy and food insecurity and technology proliferation will combine and interact in specific and unique ways to trigger events ranging from political instability, to terrorist threats, to mass migration, and potential humanitarian emergencies.

Climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about the global response to the challenge. The increasing physical effects of climate change also are likely to intensify or cause domestic and cross-border geopolitical flashpoints.

But there were also hints that outmoded security concepts like realpolitik, focused on narrow “superpower competition,” together with deep climate denial, were in ascendency. The first Trump administration censored words like “climate change” in government documents and narrowed security concerns to single-nation competition with China, North Korea, and Iran.

The Trump White House failed to produce any National Security Strategy in 2018, 2019, or 2020, and the 2018 National Defense Strategy report, which replaced the Quadrennial Defense Assessments, for the first time made no mention of environmental security threats at all. These unprecedented changes were so worrisome that in March 2019, 58 senior military and national security leaders wrote a letter to President Trump to denounce his efforts to “dispute and undermine military and intelligence judgments on the threat posed by climate change.”

All of this is prelude to the recent massive and coordinated effort to purge documents that reference environmental security threats, censor and cut current research and intelligence assessments, and suppress climate science that informs the national security community. In early March 2025, democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth criticizing the Trump administration efforts:

Your threats to cut climate programs at the Department of Defense (DoD) will jeopardize our national security, putting thousands of American lives and billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk.

Very real climate changes are already underway, including accelerating extreme events, an increasingly ice-free Arctic and rising sea levels, disruptions to food supplies, more failed states and environmental refugees, and violence over shared water resources. Wars and armed conflicts are already being triggered, influenced, or worsened by environmental factors.

Denying or turning a blind eye to environmental security threats and hamstringing intelligence agencies will only make the United States weaker and more exposed to dangerous security surprises, military bases and operations more vulnerable, and communities less prepared. Physical reality will always trump political ideology.

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Pet-Eating Lies to Deportation Fears: Haitians in Trump’s Crosshairs

Lindsay Aime remembers the moment his Haitian immigrant community came under a national spotlight. It was September 2024 when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating people’s pets. To Aime, who is originally from Haiti but has lived in Springfield since 2019, the accusation was not just absurd. It felt like Trump was portraying his entire community as criminal.

Today, the estimated 10,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield are under a different sort of spotlight. The Trump administration is trying to revoke the legal status that allows hundreds of thousands of Haitians and other immigrants to live in the US. Those moves are being challenged in court, but many are feeling panicked and confused. Aime is the co-founder of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield, a resource for immigrants looking for legal advice, especially now. “We don’t have any good news,” he says. “We keep telling all our people who come in our office: Stay safe, stay safe, stay safe. Stay out of trouble.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with Aime about what it was like when all eyes were on his community during the election, why returning to his home country is not an option, and the challenges of trying to reunite with a son still living in Haiti.

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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Report: One in Five People in Gaza Could Starve to Death Within Months

Nearly 470,000 people in the Gaza Strip, or approximately one in five of its residents,could starve to death in the coming months under Israel’s total aid blockade, according to a new report published Monday.

The report, a product of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—a partnership between 19 organizations including various United Nations agencies, Save the Children, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Food Programme (WFP)—states that while the entire population of the Gaza Strip, approximately 2.1 million people, will at best be able to meet basic food needs, approximately 470,000 of the area’s residents will struggle to obtain almost any food at all through September. Women and children will face disproportionate impacts, with nearly 71,000 kids and almost 17,000 breastfeeding and pregnant women expected to experience “acute malnutrition” through next March.

Life for civilians in Gaza has been hell under continual bombardment by Israel following the terror attack launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 people as hostages, including a dozen Americans (the last living US citizen, Edan Alexander, was just released from captivity on Monday).

But ever since Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza in early March, the situation has grown more desperate, as food supplies have run critically low. Currently, about 1.94 million people in Gaza—or 93 percent of the population—are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity, including nearly 244,000 who are starving, according to the report. The more than two dozen bakeries supported by WFP have shuttered due to lack of supplies, and most of the 177 kitchens producing hot meals have also run out of supplies, according to the IPC report. At least 57 children have died since the aid blockade began, according to the WHO, citing the Gaza Health Ministry.

Nearly 71,000 kids in Gaza are expected to experience “acute malnutrition” through next March, according to a new report.Omar Ashtawy/APA/ZUMA

“Hunger and acute malnutrition are a daily reality for children across the Gaza Strip,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement. “We have repeatedly warned of this trajectory and call again on all parties to prevent a catastrophe.”

The blockade has also prevented water, medicine, fuel, and cooking gas from entering the Gaza Strip, and food prices have skyrocketed due to the shortage, with the price of wheat flour increasing by more than 3,000 percent since February, according to the IPC report. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that some Israeli military officers have privately admitted to a similar conclusion to the IPC report: Gaza could face widespread starvation if aid deliveries are not restored in the coming weeks. [According to][8] the WFP, there is enough food assistance ready to be brought into Gaza to feed up to one million people for four months.

The Trump administration has reportedly [backed][9] a plan proposed by Israel to force Gazans to move south to access aid, as part of a bid to prevent Hamas from accessing it. (President Donald Trump previously [floated][10] plans to take over Gaza and force Palestinians to leave, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres [described][11] as “ethnic cleansing.”) But top aid groups—including the WHO and [UN agencies][12]—oppose the aid plan, arguing it would be inadequate to solve the scale of the crisis and would allow the Israeli military to control the distribution of aid. NPR [reports][9] that the proposal would only initially provide food and aid to 60 percent of Gaza’s population, citing a copy of the plan the outlet reviewed.

Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) [blasted][13] Congress in a speech on the Senate floor for its silence on the suffering of Palestinians under Israel’s aid blockade. “What is happening in Gaza will be a permanent stain on the world’s collective conscience,” Sanders said. “History will never forget that we allowed this to happen and, for us here in the United States, that we, in fact, enabled this atrocity.”

The IPC report calls for “ending hostilities, ensuring unrestricted humanitarian access, restoring essential services and commercial flows, and providing sufficient lifesaving assistance to all in need.” Since the start of the war, approximately 90 precent of the population of the Gaza Strip has been displaced, and more than 52,400 people have been killed, including a large proportion of women and children, according to the IPC report; another 118,o00 have been injured.

In December, Amnesty International released a report concluding that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, as my colleague Noah Lanard [reported][14] at the time. Last year, the International Criminal Court also issued [arrest warrants][15] for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and the use of starvation as a weapon of war; Israeli [officials][16][ denied and condemned][17] the charges.

The White House and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the latest figures.

The war in Gaza has killed or injured 170,000.

Children are starving to death.

Trump is encouraging the ethnic cleansing of 2.2 million people.

Why is there no discussion in the US government about why we are spending billions of taxpayer dollars starving children in Gaza? [pic.twitter.com/SrPlmgT4PY][18]

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) [May 9, 2025][19]

[8]: http://bernie sanders [9]: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/11/nx-s1-5395011/israel-new-gaza-aid-plan-us [10]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/trump-gaza-real-estate-takeover/ [11]: https://x.com/farnazfassihi/status/1886943054696677881 [12]: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/statement-humanitarian-country-team-occupied-palestinian-territory-principled-aid-delivery-gaza [13]: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/prepared-remarks-sanders-confronts-congress-silence-on-gaza/ [14]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/12/israel-genocide-gaza-amnesty-international-report/ [15]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/05/why-the-icc-arrest-warrants-for-hamas-and-israeli-leaders-matter/ [16]: https://x.com/Isaac%5FHerzog/status/1859578515487592658 [17]: https://x.com/gidonsaar/status/1859587210548310191 [18]: https://t.co/SrPlmgT4PY [19]: https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1920824120335302666?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw

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25 Arrested While Protesting GOP Medicaid Cuts

Within the first few minutes of Tuesday’s House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on planned Republican Medicaid cuts—which would render more than 8 million Americans uninsured—a contingent of protesters entered the room in Washington, DC’s Rayburn Building where members of Congress had gathered. The protesters, shouting “No cuts to Medicaid!” represented groups including the disability rights protest organization ADAPT. Twenty-five demonstrators were arrested and removed from the building.

The committee’s proposal for extensive cuts to federal health funding, including sweeping Medicaid cuts, are estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to likely “reduce the number of people with health insurance by at least 8.6 million” nationwide. The legislation would also enact more than $700 billion dollars in health-related cuts, in addition to also promoting work requirements for people on Medicaid—which tends only to serve as a means of of kicking them off, even though federal data shows that a majority of adults on Medicaid already work full- or part-time.

After the initial protests, committee Chair Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), who released the legislation on Sunday evening—Mother’s Day—threatened the protesters with arrest for disrupting the hearing, calling the outcry illegal and “a criminal offense.”

The Energy and Commerce Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), asked the Capitol Police to avoid making arrests, especially given the subject at hand. “People feel very strongly because they know they’re losing their health care, and [because of] the cruelty that comes from the Republican proposal,” Pallone said.

Pallone went unheeded. The Hill reported that more than two dozen protesters were arrested for civil disobedience, including wheelchair users. One protester, while being escorted out of the room by the police, shouted, “You will kill me,” according to the Independent’s Eric Garcia.

It wasn’t just people in the room who were loudly protesting against Medicaid cuts—other protesters demanding that Medicaid cuts be halted filled the hallway.

BREAKING: Chaos at the Rayburn Building. A Congressional hearing just stopped cold as protesters flooded the halls to fight Medicaid cuts. Capitol Police are warning of arrests. The situation is developing… #NoCutsToMedicaid pic.twitter.com/cRAfsppI4U

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) May 13, 2025

Back in 2017, civil disobedience coordinated by ADAPT helped halt the GOP’s plan to destroy the Affordable Care Act: As activist Colleen Flanagan told the 19th’s Sara Luterman, “We risked injury. We put our bodies on the line to demand that they save our health care.”

Now, it’s a wait-and-see game to determine whether a similar fightback by disabled people can help stop destructive cuts to Medicaid.

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MAGA World Is Not Happy About Trump’s Gift From Qatar

Some of President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are not thrilled about his plan to accept a luxury jet as a gift from Qatari royals to use as Air Force One.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told CNN, “I don’t think another country should be providing America [a plane]. We don’t need that….I think America can afford their own plane and build their own Air Force One.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told reporters, “It would be better if Air Force One were a big, beautiful jet made in the United States of America.” And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told CNBC Tuesday morning that he is “not a fan of Qatar,” adding, “The plane poses significant espionage and surveillance problems.” (Indeed, a Defense Department official told the New York Times it would take “years, not months” to make the necessary security upgrades for the plane.)

Democrats and legal experts have alleged the plan, first reported by ABC News on Sunday, violates the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits any person holding elected office from accepting gifts “from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) acknowledged that the gift appears to run afoul of the Emoluments Clause, telling Fox News host Jesse Waters, “There is a provision in the Constitution that says you can’t do this.” Paul also characterized accepting the plane as “a mistake,” adding, “I think it’s not worth the appearance of impropriety.”

Paul: The constitution in article two talks about the president cannot take gifts from foreign leaders. There is a provision in the constitution that says you cannot do this… I think it’s not worth the appearance of impropriety pic.twitter.com/tPPcEVd8E8

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2025

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told CNN that Trump and the White House “need to look at the Constitutionality” of accepting the plane. And Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the news “raises questions” about whether the administration would be in compliance with the “gift law.”

According to ABC’s reporting, Attorney General Pam Bondi and top White House lawyer David Warrington believe that transferring the plane to the Trump library foundation before the end of his term will make the arrangement legally sound. When asked about the gift, valued at approximately $400 million, Trump called it a “very nice gesture,” adding, “it helps us out,” given that upgrades to the current Air Force One have repeatedly been delayed. “I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer,” Trump added.

But some of his most ardent supporter think he should.

Laura Loomer, a close friend of Trump’s who appeared to influence his decision to fire several members of his National Security Council and recently claimed credit for Mike Waltz’s ousting as national security advisor, lambasted the decision to accept the plane in multiple posts on X. “This is really going to be such a stain on the admin if this is true. And I say that as someone who would take a bullet for Trump,” Loomer wrote on Sunday, noting that Qatar has helped fund Hamas. “We cannot accept a $400 million ‘gift’ from jihadists in suits,” Loomer added. (It’s worth noting that Loomer has a history of making Islamophobic comments.) In other posts, Loomer claimed, without evidence, that Qatar was funding the Black Lives Matter movement and Antifa and that Qatar was behind the attempted assassinations of Trump.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) also pointed to Qatar’s role in funding Hamas as his rationale for opposing the gift, adding, “I don’t know how you make [the plane] safe.” Right wing commentator Ben Shapiro called the decision to accept the gift “skeezy,” alleging it was “not America first” given Qatar’s support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the news outlet Al Jazeera, which is partly funded by the Qatari government.

It remains to be seen if this chorus of right-wing voices will sway Trump’s decision to accept the plane. But if he does, at least Loomer and her cronies will likely be staying off the “palace in the sky.”

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Your Weather Forecasts Are About to Get a Lot Less Accurate

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

Did you check the weather forecast today?

Whether it was on your phone, the five-day outlook in your newspaper, or your friendly TV meteorologist, that forecast was built on a massive government-run network of sensors and computers that get the weather right more often than not while rarely getting the attention they deserve. And now that system is being taken apart, piece by piece.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the main US science agency that studies weather and climate, has already lost at least 2,000 workers since January thanks to a combination of layoffs, buyouts, and retirements. More job cuts may be looming. The White House says it wants to cut NOAA’s $6 billion budget by almost 30 percent. The upshot is that with these cuts, efforts to make forecasts even more accurate will stall, while existing forecasts may get worse.

Weather forecasts are not just about whether or not you need an umbrella; they provide critical planning information for air travel, farming, shipping, and energy production. And they also save lives.

In April, massive spring floods hit the central and southern US. Ahead of the storm, the National Weather Service at NOAA warned of upward of 15 inches of rainfall. “This is not your average flood risk,” according to a NWS bulletin from April 2. “Generational flooding with devastating impacts is possible.”

“The National Weather Service, that is definitely the center point of all weather forecasting in the United States.”

The ensuing storms and floods killed at least 24 people, but given their extensive area, the death toll could have been much higher. In a report this week, scientists at the World Weather Attribution research group said that good storm predictions and effective emergency management were key to saving lives. Those forecasts and storm alerts were the product of decades of investment and infrastructure built up across the country.

“The US National Weather Service forecast the floods a week in advance and issued warnings throughout the event,” Friederike Otto, a climatologist who leads World Weather Attribution, said during a recent call with reporters. “And as a result, people in the region knew when they needed to evacuate, and so the death toll was relatively small compared to similar events.”

But with the recent government cuts, the US is losing the data that informs these predictions and the scientists who produce them. The NWS has been contending with understaffing for decades, and now the recent firings have made things worse as the US heads into another summer likely filled with more extreme weather.

Of the 122 NWS forecast offices across the US, 30 do not have a chief meteorologist at the moment.

More people are living in vulnerable areas, and as global temperatures continue to rise, the destruction from extreme weather is getting worse. But even places that historically have avoided severe heat and torrential downpours are seeing dangerous weather become more common. That’s why predicting the weather is more valuable than ever and why it’s so alarming that the US is losing its capabilities.

To build a weather prediction, you start with measurements of the Earth, the sky, and the sea, sometimes from very far away. A thunderstorm in the southeastern US may have its seeds in the Pacific Ocean weeks in advance, for example. “It all starts with data,” said Alan Sealls, president of the American Meteorological Society.

But how do we actually get all of that data? It can come from something as sophisticated as a geostationary satellite or as simple as a weather balloon. Twice a day, the National Weather Service launches these helium-filled orbs from 92 sites across the US. They take snapshots of temperature, humidity, and windspeed as they rise into the atmosphere. This data doesn’t just inform weather models for the US but feeds into global models that help predict sunshine, rain, clouds, and snow all over the world.

“The weather balloons give us such detailed, precise data no other instrument can get,” Sealls said. “If we don’t have those in the area where that weather is likely to be hazardous or threatening, we potentially have a degraded forecast.”

Between balloons, radars, satellites, buoys, aircraft measurements, and ground instruments across the country, NOAA has built one of the most robust weather monitoring systems in the world, collecting 6.3 billion observations per day. The NWS then plugs the data from these instruments into computer models to predict the next torrential downpour, cold snap, heat wave, or thunderstorm.

And almost all of this information is available to the public for free.

“They do not have enough folks to go out and launch those balloons.”

However, most of us aren’t collating our own, personal weather reports from raw data. We’re getting them from any of the multitude of cell phone apps available—from the Weather Channel to Carrot Weather to Weather Underground—or from local experts who we trust. Meteorologists from news agencies or private companies also use the government’s raw data and models to produce their own weather predictions that are focused on specific areas or draw on outside expertise and experience. That’s why the forecasts on TV, in newspapers, or in weather apps can differ. But they still rely on the same foundational government data—especially when it comes to dangerous extremes.

“When we’re on TV talking about hazardous weather, most of us around the country are in direct contact with the National Weather Service,” Sealls said. “The National Weather Service, that is definitely the center point of all weather forecasting in the United States.”

Government researchers are also constantly improving weather forecasting. A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast in 1980. A 72-hour hurricane track prediction these days is better than a 24-hour prediction from decades ago.

The National Weather Service’s annual budget is just $1.3 billion—and yet its services add up to billions of dollars in economic benefits and untold numbers of lives saved. The NOAA is now testing even better models for hurricanes and tropical storms that could provide up to five days of lead time.

Already, some NWS sites in the US have reduced the number of weather balloon launches and some have stopped due to budget and staffing cuts.

“They’ve been short-staffed for a long time, but the recent spate of people retiring or being let go have led some stations now to the point where they do not have enough folks to go out and launch those balloons,” said Pamela Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia extension and director of the UGA weather network.

Since weather models rely so much on initial readings from real-world measurements like weather balloons, losing them can lower the quality of predictions. Losing personnel might also mean less maintenance on equipment like radars, leading to more outages. And having fewer staff scientists makes it more difficult to provide timely emergency alerts.

“We’re becoming more blind because we are not having access to that data anymore,” Knox said. “A bigger issue is when you have extreme events, because extreme events have a tendency to happen very quickly. You have to have real-time data.”

“If you have fewer people on staff,” she added, “more things are going to fall through the cracks.”

At the same time, the climate is changing. That means that the historical patterns of weather no longer apply in much of the country, and continued warming will alter these trends further. The World Weather Attribution team estimated that the April extreme rainfall in the US was two to five times more likely due to warming, and that its intensity increased by 13 to 26 percent.

Yet at a time when the impacts of these changes have become impossible to ignore, the Trump administration is cutting climate research as well. The White House’s budget proposal specifically “terminates a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs, which are not aligned with Administration policy-ending ‘Green New Deal’ initiatives.”

The US did have a system for staying ahead of these long-term threats, but the Trump administration dismissed all the scientists working on the National Climate Assessment, a report required by law that assesses the current and future impacts of climate change to the country.

The result is a country facing a growing threat from natural forces but actively sabotaging its ability to stay ahead of them.

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“The Children Are Being Used as Bait”

In early March, a seven-year-old boy in immigration custody received good news: He would finally be released to his mother’s care. Months earlier, he had been apprehended as an unaccompanied minor while crossing the US-Mexico border. Since then, he had been staying in a facility run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, waiting for his mother, who was already in the United States, to be approved as his sponsor. She had painstakingly jumped through the necessary hoops, submitting the required documents and undergoing a home study to show that she was a safe caregiver. But soon after the boy learned of his imminent release, a new federal policy abruptly made his mother ineligible as a sponsor.

Confused about why he is still in custody, the boy recently told his mother, through tears, that she must not want him after all.

Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are “being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention.”

Some of the kids in custody are appearing in immigration court alone, as a result of recent cuts to federal funding for legal representation for unaccompanied children.

“We don’t know when, if ever, they will be able to reunite with their family.”

“They’re crying, having a lot of anxiety and distress that they are expressing,” says Mickey Donovan-Kaloust, director of legal services at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, one of the lawsuit plaintiffs. “It’s heartbreaking for our team.”

When kids cross the border without a legal guardian and are detained by the Border Patrol, they’re transferred into the care of ORR while they wait for a sponsor—usually a parent or relative—to jump through the necessary hoops to take them in. Teenagers in ORR custody are confined to shelters, which take the form of campuses with a school and recreational areas, while younger children often stay in foster homes. Historically, the kids have been released from ORR to live with their sponsors while immigration courts weigh their cases to remain in the country.

But over the past three months, the Trump administration has rolled out a series of new screening rules that make it nearly impossible for undocumented people to become sponsors. There are now about 2,000 children in custody, far fewer than there were when Trump was elected, reflecting the sharp downturn in people trying to enter the country. Yet those children who are in custody, many of whom arrived at the end of the Biden administration or the beginning of Trump’s second term, are staying much longer.

In December 2024, the average length of stay for a child in ORR custody was about two months. By March of this year, it had nearly tripled, to six months.

In the past, says Donovan**–**Kaloust, if her team was working with a child in ORR custody, “We could say, ‘Yes, we know this is hard, but the case managers are working on it and you’ll be out soon.’ And we can’t say that anymore. We don’t know when, if ever, they will be able to reunite with their family.”

Until March, prospective sponsors could use a foreign passport or national ID, along with birth certificates, verified by the home country’s consulate, to show the US government that they were who they said they were. Now, prospective sponsors—along with everyone else in their household—must present either a US form of identification or a foreign passport with a stamp showing the pending receipt of a green card. They also must present proof of income, such as pay stubs or tax returns connected to their current address, excluding those who are paid in cash or lack formal employment agreements. All sponsors and their household members must agree to be fingerprinted, and, if they claim a biological relationship with the child in custody, they must submit to DNA testing.

The administration claims these changes are in the name of child safety. Trump has said, falsely, that 300,000 migrant children were lost under Biden’s administration. (The number appears to come from a 2024 report finding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement hadn’t served notices to appear in court to 291,000 migrant children.) Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doubled down on the conspiracy at a recent cabinet meeting, claiming that the Biden administration had become a “collaborator in child trafficking for sex and slavery,” and that HHS is “very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children.” HHS posted on X that ORR was “combing through every report, every detail — because protecting children isn’t optional.”

But many immigration experts say the new sponsor screening rules are antithetical to child welfare. In some cases, children have resorted to self-harm “because their reunification has been delayed or entirely prevented over a document that their sponsor literally cannot obtain,” says Molly Chew, who directs the ReUnite Project, which is part of immigrant legal services nonprofit Vecina. “We are weaponizing child welfare as this pretext for immigration enforcement while children sit in detention, increasingly traumatized, indefinitely, waiting for a way out.” (ORR didn’t respond to Mother Jones‘ questions.)

While multiple administrations have struggled over decades to respond to unaccompanied minors crossing the border, politicians on both sides of the aisle have historically supported federal protections that prevent the kids from being immediately deported, including access to legal representation and care under ORR. Part of HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, ORR is not an immigration enforcement agency; its stated mission is to support unaccompanied children through “culturally responsive and trauma-informed” services.

In the past, ORR didn’t share information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the legal status of sponsors. But that, too, has changed under Trump.ICE agents have been given access to ORR’s database of information about unaccompanied children, and agents from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security now accompany ORR on “welfare checks” of unaccompanied children and their sponsors.

Bilal Askaryar, communications director at the Acacia Center for Justice, which provides immigrant legal defense, says some of the welfare checks are virtually indistinguishable from enforcement visits, with uniform-clad ICE officers banging on doors and demanding to be let inside. The message to prospective sponsors is clear, says Askaryar: “You take care of these kids, and it’s now going to put a target on your back.”

“It seems the purpose is to assist with enforcement and to put a chilling effect on people willing to take in children,” says Donovan-Kaloust, of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “The children are being used as bait, basically.”

At the same time that the White House has implemented new screening rules for sponsors, it has also stripped many unaccompanied kids of the legal services that helped them make their cases in front of immigration judges.

In March, the Trump administration abruptly terminated part of a $200 million contract that funds attorneys and other legal services for 26,000 unaccompanied kids, including those in ORR custody. The legal service providers immediately challenged the termination, but while the case is pending, the groups say damage is already done.

“A lot of kids have been going in the past few weeks to the court alone—completely alone,” says Evelyn Flores, managing paralegal at Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which represents children in Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia. “How can a 4-year-old kid attend immigration court completely alone?”

A Gothamist story in late April laid out the scene from one such court hearing. About a dozen migrant children sat in front of a computer screen at a shelter in New York last month as Judge Ubaid ul-Haq explained, “The reason we’re here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States.” The story continued:

The parties included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill while the judge spoke. There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.

Research shows that many unaccompanied children have valid claims for immigration relief, and most unaccompanied kids with legal representation end up being allowed to stay in the country, says Jonathan Beier, director of research and evaluation for Acacia’s program for unaccompanied children. “But not having a lawyer,” Beier says, “makes it virtually impossible.”

The vast majority of those appearing in immigration court without counsel are eventually deported.

The cuts to legal services affect not only kids in ORR custody, but those who had been living with family members. In late April, news broke that the parents of a two-year-old girl in El Paso had both been deported—he was sent to a high-security prison in El Salvador; she was deported to Venezuela—leaving their daughter in ORR custody. The girl has lived in at least four foster homes since March.

Estrella del Paso, which provides legal services to immigrants in El Paso, had been representing the two-year-old before the funding cuts. But the organization was one of many forced to furlough or lay off employees this spring, leaving just six employees to handle the hundreds of children the organization already represented. As a result, staffers weren’t aware of what was happening to the girl it was too late, says CEO Melissa Lopez. “But for this termination order, we would have intervened and likely had, in my opinion, a different outcome,” she says.

The court battle over the terminated legal service contract has left legal aid organizations that represent unaccompanied kids in limbo. In March, the groups sued the federal government over the funding cuts for legal assistance for unaccompanied kids. On April 1, US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin granted them a temporary restraining order, which should have resumed federal funding. But the groups filed subsequent complaints saying that the government was still not complying with the restraining order. Finally, in late April, the government signed a new contract with Acacia, which administers the funding, and Martínez-Olguin ordered the government to continue paying for the legal assistance in a preliminary injunction.

But it remains unclear how long the funding will last; HHS has appealed and filed a motion to stay the judge’s injunction. Some legal aid organizations, like Estrella del Paso, have rehired workers lost to the funding cuts. Others, like the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, have not, fearful that services could be interrupted again.

“It’s a fast-track to deportation for kids that really otherwise would be otherwise eligible for asylum.”

All the while, the Trump administration has directed immigration courts to speed up cases. Some courts have seen the return of “rocket dockets,” in which the court quickly schedules and moves through the proceedings. Immigration advocates argue that the process pressures children to accept removal orders and undermines due process. “It’s a fast-track to deportation for kids that really otherwise would be otherwise eligible for asylum,” says Acacia’s Askaryar.

A recent Republican House budget proposal would further dismantle protections for unaccompanied kids. The budget would omit funding for unaccompanied children’s legal services and require sponsors to pay the government $8,500 before the child could be released to the sponsor’s care; $5,000 could be reimbursed if the child attends every court proceeding.

All told, immigration advocates say, the recent policy changes affecting unaccompanied minors—the new rules for sponsors, the information sharing between ORR and ICE, the funding cuts for legal representation, the fast-tracking of cases—are part of a broader effort to deport kids.

“The government’s been clear that they want to remove as many immigrants as possible,” Donovan-Kaloust says. “Low-hanging fruit is children. If you keep them detained and seal off their access to counsel, the end result will likely be that they’ll get deported.”

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GOP Unveils Sweeping, Brutal Medicaid Cuts

On Sunday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) released budget reconciliation text that outlined extensive cuts to Medicaid planned by the Republican Party—which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office promptly estimated “would reduce the number of people with health insurance by at least 8.6 million” nationwide.

At least $715 billion would be cut from health programs, according to the CBO analysis, but it is unclear how much would be cut directly from Medicaid. Optional services under Medicaid—including physical therapy, hospice, and respiratory care for people on ventilators—would likely face cuts in many states.

“This bill confirms what we’ve been saying all along, Trump and Republicans have been lying when they claim they aren’t going to cut Medicaid and take away people’s health care,” Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a press release Sunday. “Let’s be clear, Republican leadership released this bill under cover of night because they don’t want people to know their true intentions.”

Not all Republicans are on board with the cuts, which appear to be driving fissures within the party. In a New York Times op-ed on Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote the following, echoing the types of stories that both Democratic and Republican legislators have shared to try to stop Congress and President Donald Trump from slashing Medicaid:

If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.

One of my constituents, a married mother of five, contacted me to explain why Medicaid is vital to her 8-year-old daughter, who depends on a feeding tube to survive. Formula, pump rentals, feeding extensions and other treatments cost $1,500 a month; prescriptions nearly double that cost. These expenses aren’t covered by private insurance. The mother wrote to me, “Without Medicaid, we would lose everything — our home, our vehicles, and eventually, our daughter.”

States are also not in the position to replace slashed federal funding and maintain their Medicaid services, as we wrote in January coverage of potential cuts to Medicaid-funded Home and Community-Based Services:

Given that federal Medicaid funds already make up, on average, one-third of state budgets, [Caring Across Generations chief of advocacy] Nicole Jorwic believes that state governments coughing up the extra cost “is never going to happen.” She notes that health funding is a popular target even in blue states like Maryland, where a $3 billion state funding shortfall has put hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for its human services department funds—where Medicaid is housed—on the chopping block.

The proposed cuts would also prohibit Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood for the next decade, which accounts for more than a third of the organization’s budget. Those cuts would affect the provision of services such as pap smears, cancer screenings, and birth control, since Medicaid already does not fund most abortions due to the Hyde Amendment. But abortion opponents and hardline Republicans are pushing to defund the organization regardless as punishment for its abortion services and its historic support for the Democratic party.

On a call with reporters Monday afternoon, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said that Planned Parenthood health centers provide those services to more than two million people annually, and that the majority of the clinics are located in “medically underserved areas, rural areas or areas with health professional shortages.” More than half of its patients use Medicaid and other public insurance programs, she added.

“If patients can’t get care at Planned Parenthood health centers, many will have nowhere to go,” McGill Johnson said, characterizing the proposal as a “targeted attack” and “an attempt to defund a political opponent.”

But the idea appears broadly unpopular. A January poll conducted by the nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem found that nearly three-quarters of respondents—73 percent—oppose defunding Planned Parenthood for services such as birth control, wellness exams, and cancer screenings. Last week, NOTUS reported that some moderate Republicans told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) they would oppose defunding Planned Parenthood. “The fact is that numerous organizations provide critical health care services for women outside of the issue of abortion, and to cut off funding for those services in any way creates a challenge,” one House Republican told NOTUS.

Additionally, the budget reconciliation text aims to weaken the ability the federal government’s ability to negotiate drug costs for Medicare users—a major move put forward by the Biden White House to make medication more affordable for aging and disabled people in the United States, who regularly pay some of the world’s highest drug costs.

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Top-Earning 10 Percent Responsible for the Majority of Global Warming, Study Finds

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

The world’s wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for two-thirds of global heating since 1990, driving droughts and heatwaves in the poorest parts of the world, according to a study.

While researchers have previously shown that higher income groups emit disproportionately large amounts of greenhouse gases, the latest survey is the first to try to pin down how that inequality translates into responsibility for climate breakdown. It offers a powerful argument for climate finance and wealth taxes by attempting to give an evidential basis for how many people in the developed world—including more than 50 percent of full-time employees in the UK—bear a heightened responsibility for the climate disasters affecting people who can least afford it.

“If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50 percent of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990.”

“Our study shows that extreme climate impacts are not just the result of abstract global emissions; instead we can directly link them to our lifestyle and investment choices, which in turn are linked to wealth,”said Sarah Schöngart, a climate modeling analyst and the study’s lead author.

“We found that wealthy emitters play a major role in driving climate extremes, which provides strong support for climate policies that target the reduction of their emissions.”

It has been clearly established that wealthier individuals, through their consumption and investments, create more carbon emissions, while poorer countries located near the equator bear the brunt of the resulting extreme weather and rising temperatures.

The new research attempts to specifically quantify how much that inequality in emissions feeds into climate breakdown. To produce their analysis, the researchers fed wealth-based greenhouse gas emissions inequality assessments into climate modeling frameworks, allowing them to systematically attribute the changes in global temperatures and the frequency of extreme weather events that have taken place between 1990 and 2019.

By subtracting the emissions of the wealthiest 10 percent, 1 percent and 0.1 percent, they modeled the changes to the climate and frequency of extreme weather events that would have taken place without them. By comparing those with the changes that have occurred, they believed they would be able to calculate their responsibility for the crisis the world finds itself in today.

In 2020, the global mean temperature was 0.61C higher than 1990. The researchers found that about 65 percent of that increase could be attributed to emissions from the global richest 10 percent, a group they defined as including all those earning more than $48,600 a year. That includes all those on the UK median salary for full-time employees, which is $49,760.

Wealthier groups bore more disproportionate responsibility still, with the richest 1 percent globally—those with annual incomes of about $166,450—responsible for 20 percent of global heating, and the richest 0.1 percent—the 800,000 or so people in the world raking in more than $608,090—responsible for 8 percent.

“We found that the wealthiest 10 percent contributed 6.5 times more to global warming than the average, with the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent contributing 20 and 76 times more, respectively,” the write in their paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Co-author Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, said: “If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50 percent of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990.” On the other hand, if the whole world population had emitted as the top 10 percent, 1 percent or 0.1 percent had, the temperature increase would have been 2.9 C, 6.7 C, or a completely unsurvivable 12.2 C.

The researchers said they hoped the analysis would inform policy interventions that recognise the unequal contributions to climate breakdown made by the world’s wealthiest, and foster social acceptance of climate action.

The research comes amid intense pushback from countries such as the US, and even cuts from the UK and other European countries, to providing finance for poorer countries to adapt to climate breakdown and mitigate its worst effects.

“This is not an academic discussion—it’s about the real impacts of the climate crisis today,” added Schleussner. “Climate action that doesn’t address the outsize responsibilities of the wealthiest members of society risks missing one of the most powerful levers we have to reduce future harm.”

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Florida Families Could Buckle Under the Pressure of Trump Policies

On a recent Wednesday morning, a hot pink van emblazoned with the words “Keeping South Florida Babies in Need Clean, Happy & Healthy Since 2013” pulled into the parking lot of the North Miami Beach Library. The van’s side door opened, revealing a shelf packed with diapers and a counter stackedwith baby wipe packs.

The van belongs to the Miami Diaper Bank. The nonprofit collects diapers and other supplies from donors and distributes them to families in need, many of whom live in this area of Miami-Dade County. The library is one of their prime locations.

A slow trickle of families, many of them led bymothers pushing strollers, soon began to appear to collect tote bags filled with diapers, baby food, and other essentials. About three dozen families were expected that day. At an event a few days earlier, more than 100 families showed up. Miami Diaper Bank provides 50 diapers per child per month. Sizes range from preemie babies to pull-ups for toddlers; there are larger diapers for children with special needs.

“It’s what I call the falling off middle class.”

Growing inflation and rising housing costs all over the region has meant a greater demand for the nonprofit’s services. Earlier this year, as many as 20 new families signed up every week, up from their customary three to four families per week, says Gabriela Rojas, the bank’s executive director. Most of the roughly 2,300 children they serve per month live in households below the poverty line that rely on federal programs like food assistance and Medicaid, she added. Diaper banks nationwide have noted similar increases in clients, according to the National Diaper Bank Network. According to the network’s data, 46 percent of families nationwide with children under the age of 4 couldn’t afford diapers in 2024.

The cost of diapers has already increased by 20 percent since 2018, and now tariffs are expected to further hike the cost of diapers manufactured or made from materials from abroad. In recent conversations with other Florida diaper banks, Rojas noted, the group discussed the escalating costs of other baby items, like strollers and formula.

The experience at the Miami Diaper Bank is being replicated in social service nonprofits all over the country. Other charities interviewed by Mother Jones already had noted an increase in the number of families needing their support in recent years. And now, with looming federal funding cuts to crucial assistance programs for low-income families, combined with the threat of tariffs, the need will certainly grow, further straining a system that has been on overdrive since the COVID-19 pandemic. “We anticipate an even bigger influx of families looking for us to be their safety net,” Rojas says. Some charities also expressed concern that federal cuts could directly impact them, potentially limiting the services they can provide.

Families with lower incomes never fully recovered from the Covid pandemic, says Elaine Maag, a tax expert specializing in lower and middle-income families at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization. In 2021, an expanded child tax credit for families with children helped keep them afloat. But when the tax cut ended in 2022, “We started noticing families reporting they’re having trouble, once again, paying for basic needs,” Maag says. And families are now facing the possibility of cuts to life-sustaining programs like SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, and Headstart, combined with the threat of tariffs that will raise the cost of everyday goods. The inevitable result will be a rise in poverty with cascading effects on families, particularly those with young children.

“When children don’t have access to appropriate healthcare and appropriate nutrition, especially in those early years, it can have a lifetime of negative effects,” Maag says. Children who are hungry at school, for instance, find it more difficult to learn, which sets them up for potential difficulty in graduating from high school, much less attending college. Later in life, she explains, they likely will need assistance. “So these investments in children very early are important,” she notes.

Volunteers distributed boxes of food and other necessities to 400 families at a recent food distribution event in Sunrise, Fla. Laura Morel

One of the first mothers to arrive at the North Miami Beach library was Naw San. She pushed her daughter’s stroller toward the pink van, her toddler son in Paw Patrol shoes trailing behind her. San says she has been enrolled at the diaper bank since the pandemic. The assistance helps her stretch her family’s income so they can cover other household expenses, like the electric bill and groceries. “I’m really grateful for that,” she says.

Yessenia Bustamante arrived shortly after, pushing a stroller with her two-year-old son, who was wearing a baseball cap stitched with dinosaurs. She walked about ten blocks to the library. For the last five months, the diaper bank has made it possible for her to spend more money on fruit and vegetables for her son. “Things have gotten more expensive,” she says. Bustamante works as a delivery driver and her husband remodels bathrooms. But even with their combined incomes, plus food assistance and the free diapers, it’s been difficult to make ends meet, she says. Recently, her rent also increased. “Little by little, we are getting by,” she says.

More than half of residents in North Miami Beach are immigrants, many of them from Latin America and Haiti, according to recent US Census data, with nearly 15 percent of all residents living below the poverty line. Miami Diaper Bank’s other distribution site—Florida City—also has a large Latin American community that makes up a third of its population. The diaper bank has usually distributed supplies at the city hall parking lot. But with its location right next to a police station, Rojas says she is considering moving their site given the growing collaboration between local police and federal immigration enforcement. “We want them to feel safe and secure coming to get what they need for their kids,” she says.

Charities themselves may also be impacted by federal funding cuts. At Camillus House, which provides services to people and families experiencing homelessness in the Miami area, CEO Eddie Gloria has seen first-hand how rising housing costs in Miami, now one of the most expensive cities in the country, have affected the community. “It’s what I call the falling off middle class,” he says. “Folks who used to be able to get through or get by at least with the area median income are now severely struggling.”

Every night, approximately 1,600 people sleep at shelters or housing units run by Camillus House—including 200 single-family homes for families with children. Residents who are employed pay 30 percent of their gross income toward rent. Camillus House receives funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is among DOGE’s targets. If the cuts happen, Gloria predicts “a crisis of homelessness among families and children that are supported by systems like ours.”

The inside of the Miami Diaper Bank’s van. Laura Morel

Then there are the threatened rollbacks of the SNAP program, which provides food assistance to lower income households, which would place further strain on food banks and pantries. Today, even though unemployment rates remain low, food banks across the country are seeing record high demand, according to Feeding America, which partners with more than 200 food banks nationwide that are on track to provide nearly 6 billion meals this year. But these services are meant to be supplemental, not the primary source of food assistance for families.

Since the pandemic, Feeding Tampa Bay, a Feeding America member that serves ten counties in southwest Florida, saw a 30 percent increase in need—and that has not waned, says CEO Thomas Mantz. “The challenge right now is the increased demand against a potential reduction in resources and that’s never a good trajectory,” Mantz says. “Those are two cars leaving in opposite directions and the gulf only gets wider.”

Village Elementary School is located in Sunrise, a city of 96,000 residents in Broward County where more than one in ten residents live below the poverty line. One Friday morning, dozens of cars were lined up bumper to bumper around the block for an event hosted by a food distribution nonprofit called Joshua’s Heart Foundation, and other community partners.

The goal was to help 400 families that morning. The drive resembled an assembly line, as volunteers loaded boxes, donated by Feed the Children, of pantry goods, produce, toiletries, and children’s toys into cars. At its headquarters in North Miami Beach, Joshua’s Heart distributes groceries to more than 100 families every week. Within a few hours, all the boxes had been distributed.

Joshua’s Heart has remained busy since the pandemic, says Karen Grey, publicist for the foundation. “We don’t know what that’s going to look like as the need increases and as everybody starts to feel the results of tariffs and higher prices,” she says. “The need has never gone away and it’s going to intensify. We have to figure out how to be sustainable through it.”

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Trump’s Latest Conflict of Interest? Accepting a Plane From Qatari Royals

This week, President Donald Trump will head to the Middle East for the first foreign trip of his second term. While he is there, he will reportedly manufacture a new conflict of interest for himself by accepting a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the Qatari royal family.

Trump will use the plane as the new Air Force One until just before the end of his term, at which point the plane’s ownership will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, according to ABC, which first reported the news, citing sources familiar with the proposed arrangement. ABC reports that the gift of the plane—which is reportedly so opulent that it’s known as “the flying palace”—will be announced this week, when Trump visits Qatar.

According to ABC, the White House and Department of Justice concluded that the gift does not constitute bribery because it is “not conditioned on any official act.” The U.S. Air Force will modify the 13-year-old aircraft to meet the standards of a plane used to carry the president, and Attorney General Pam Bondi and top White House lawyer David Warrington reportedly believe that transferring the plane to the Trump library foundation before the end of his term will make the arrangement legally sound.

The approximate value of the plane is approximately $400 million, aviation experts told ABC—and that’s before whatever upgrades the Air Force will make. (And we know Trump likes his gold trimmings.)

Trump has long been obsessed with upgrading the presidential plane. During his first term, the White House awarded Boeing a $3.9 billion contract to build new presidential planes. The work was supposed to be completed by the end of last year and has repeatedly been delayed; earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump commissioned another company, L3Harris, to overhaul the Qatari plane to be ready for use by this fall.

Obviously, despite the administration’s apparent self-delusion that they are not running afoul of any laws or ethics guidelines, questions around the ethics of the gift of the new plane abound—and what Qataris will expect in return. The Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, for example, prohibits any person holding elected office from accepting gifts “from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Several Democrats—including those on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.)—pointed to that rule as evidence that accepting the gift would be illegal. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at the Washington University School of Law, told the Associated Press the news is “outrageous,” adding that the gift is the “logical, inevitable, unfortunate consequence of Congress and the Supreme Court refusing to enforce” the Emoluments Clause.

But as we well know by now, the possibility of breaking laws does not seem to deter the president—who was found guilty on 34 felony counts in the hush-money case in which he covered up payments to Stormy Daniels—from doing whatever he wants.

In fact, Trump has explicitly bent the law to his will. In February, the administration announced it would not enforce one of the strongest anti-bribery and corruption laws—the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—for at least the next six months, as my colleague Russ Choma reported at the time. A legal expert told Choma that the pausing of the law, which prohibits American companies from paying bribes to do business in foreign countries, would make it harder to rebuff foreign officials trying to extort them. “It’s a really good time to be a corrupt official in Russia or Asia,” Jessica Tillipman, the dean of government procurement law at George Washington University, told Choma.

Following his re-election, Trump flouted a law that he signed in 2020 requiring presidents-elect to outline ethics requirements for their transition members; when he finally did share the plan well past the deadline, it did not contain any details about how Trump himself would abide by the code. Since then, high-profile administration officials have also failed to file paperwork showing they divested from Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that owns his Truth Social platform, which several officials held shares in or were on the board of, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote last month.

And as my colleague Mike Mechanic outlined at the time of Trump’s inauguration, several of Trump’s other businesses have also presented major conflicts of interests, and potential national security risks, including: Trump’s Manhattan tower, which reportedly rented luxury condos to foreign governments; his other properties, which have hosted Saudi-backed golf events; international Trump developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; and the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins. We also still do not know who financed Trump’s transition, which his team has declined to disclose after refusing to sign agreements with the General Services Administration that would compel disclosure, as previous presidents have done. And to top it all off, just a couple of weeks ago, the Trump Organization struck a $5.5 billion deal to build an international golf club in Qatar.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

Last year, in a dissent last year, over whether Trump should have immunity from criminal prosecution for “official” acts taken as president, US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” Coupled with the administration’s jailing of its political opponents and flouting of the Constitution, the news of the gift appears to make that characterization accurate. The real threat to our democratic institutions and national interests, then, may not be the foreign kings the Emoluments Clause warned about, but the one sitting in the White House.

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After Jailing of Newark Mayor, DHS Official Warns of “More Arrests Coming”

After the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Ras Baraka, was arrested Friday for protesting outside of a new immigration detention facility, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official is threatening to arrest three more elected officials who were present.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Baraka, who is running for governor, on Friday after he and three Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey—Rep. Robert Menendez, Rep. LaMonica McIver, and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman—sought to enter the facility,called Delaney Hall. The officials said they were conducting an “oversight visit” at the detention center, alleging that city officials and fire inspectors had previously been denied entry. Federal law states that members and employees of Congress have the right to enter ICE facilities for oversight visits and that they do not have to provide advanced notice in order to do so. Videos from the scene show Menendez, McIver and Watson Coleman asking guards to let them in and seemingly being denied.

They were eventually allowed to enter the facility, but Baraka was not. According to Watson Coleman, she and the other representatives went to speak to the mayor after exiting the facility, and that’s when the arrest occurred. Video of Baraka’s arrest shows him, McIver and Watson Coleman clinging to each other as the officers surround them and eventually pull Baraka away. McIver subsequently said in a post on X that ICE “shoved me, manhandled [Watson Coleman], and arrested [Baraka]”; Watson Coleman also said an ICE agent “physically shoved” her during the scuffle.

In a post on X, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and Interim US Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba claimed that Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations,” adding, “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.” But at the scene, McIver said that Baraka was arrested after he had already complied with ICE officials’ directives to leave a restricted area while waiting for the members of Congress to exit the facility, and that he “did nothing wrong.”

BREAKING: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside Delaney Hall on Friday, a member of his staff confirmed to NJ Spotlight News. pic.twitter.com/sGVXbqilLw

— NJ Spotlight News (@NJSpotlightNews) May 9, 2025

Baraka was released from detention within hours and charged with federal trespassing, he said. “I didn’t go there to break any laws. I didn’t break any laws,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday night. Federal and state Democratic officials promptly condemned Baraka’s arrest. Gov. Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) said he was “outraged” by the arrest, calling Baraka “an exemplary public servant who has always stood up for our most vulnerable neighbors.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) blasted ICE’s response in a lengthy statement, saying, “keep your hands off of members of Congress.” Attorney General Matt Platkin (D-N.J.) said Baraka’s arrest was “deeply troubling.”

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka says he's been charged with federal trespassing and calls his arrest "really humiliating and painful." He says he has no regrets about what happened. pic.twitter.com/kVwkfu9Zf1

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) May 10, 2025

But all this has not stopped DHS from threatening to arrest the other officials who were at the scene. On Saturday, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said on CNN, “There will likely be more arrests coming,” alleging that body camera footage shows “some of these members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer.”

Baraka and the members of Congress reject those allegations. Baraka told CNN host Victor Blackwell on Saturday, “None of those people body-slammed any officer.” On CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, McIver told host Dana Bash, “I honestly do not know how to body-slam anyone. There’s no video that supports me body-slamming anyone.” She called for DHS to release the full, unedited body camera footage. Menendez added that there were more than 20 “heavily-armed” ICE agents at the scene, whose faces were covered and who were lacking identification.

DHS did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

Responding to DHS accusing her of "body slamming" an ICE officer, @RepLaMonica tells @DanaBashCNN, "I honestly do not know how to body slam anyone. There's no video that supports me body slamming anyone."@RepMenendez says, "There were a lot of opportunities for DHS, for ICE to… pic.twitter.com/Fhfpq06jHq

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) May 11, 2025

All this comes after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters on Friday that the administration is considering suspending habeas corpus, or the right of individuals to challenge their detention—even thoughit is enshrined in the Constitution and only Congress can suspend it in cases of “rebellion or invasion.”

Consider what something like this could mean for people like Baraka, the New Jersey members of Congress who are being threatened with arrest, or the international students who the administration has jailed on spurious grounds. Through all of this, the administration is sending one message loud and clear: There is no rule of law.

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How Trump’s Dismantling of NOAA Threatens the Keeling Curve—and Why That Matters

This story was originally published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There are trillions upon trillions of numbers in the world. We use numbers to describe almost every conceivable thing in the universe. But there is one number that surpasses all others for the enormous impact it will have on every living thing on Earth over the next few thousand years. We consider it so important that we’ve dedicated our lives to acquiring and understanding it. Today that number happens to be: 427.6.

This is a measure (known in scientific terms as the mole fraction) of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, in parts per million. It’s part of a continuous chain of observations stretching back across two generations, to 1958, when Dave Keeling recorded the first measurement of 313 parts per million. Keeling maintained this record, known as the Keeling Curve, using a running hodgepodge of short-term grants until 2005, at which point geochemist Ralph Keeling, a professor at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, co-author of this piece and Dave’s son, assumed its stewardship. But now, after 67 years of battling to keep the program funded and provide the data to other scientists around the world, the program faces its most dire threat ever.

The community of researchers making sustained measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide probably numbers less than 30.

Why? Endeavors of this nature—highly precise measurements of a trace gas over many decades—require three basic inputs: knowledge, people, and money. It’s the third one that’s at risk, thanks to the current administration’s attacks on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA provides support for our program both through an annual grant and through invaluable “in-kind” support, such as staffers taking samples for us, maintaining buildings in remote areas where sampling occurs, and running the Mauna Loa Observatory.

The Trump administration has made clear it wishes to gut NOAA’s research enterprise, which is at the center of climate research globally. Already, we’ve seen large-scale firings and rejections of research proposals. Recent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget shows the administration intends to assiduously follow the blueprint of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and shutter the Ocean and Atmospheric Research Line Office.

This is not just a little haircut for a large federal agency—it’s grabbing the scissors and stabbing the agency through the heart. If successful, this loss will be a nightmare scenario for climate science, not just in the United States, but the world. It will also likely spell the end of our ability to continuously update the Keeling Curve.

Against this ominous backdrop, a small group of scientists is scrambling to preserve the ability to know how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. NOAA maintains a global backbone of measurements of carbon dioxide and other gases, not just at Mauna Loa, but at more than 50 stations around the world. In parallel, our program at Scripps maintains records at a dozen stations. Other countries also contribute, but their efforts are almost all focused regionally, leaving the big picture to just a few programs that are global in scope.

Climate change, however, is a global problem, and global networks address the really important questions. Such networks provide critical information on how fast carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are building up in the air from fossil-fuel burning and other processes. They provide information on how much carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere by the oceans and by land plants. They provide information critical to independently verify emissions, to negotiate international treaties, to make decisions now about how much carbon dioxide the world can emit. These observational networks are the factual basis upon which all efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change are based.

NOAA and Scripps play another key role in the atmospheric measurement community. How does the world know that the value of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today is really 427.6 and not 427.7 parts per million? Such differences may seem small, but they are consequential in the realm climate research, and they can be calculated only because a lot of work has gone into calibration. Hundreds of groups can measure carbon dioxide using various off-the-shelf analyzers, but these analyzers first need to be calibrated using compressed air that has a known amount of carbon dioxide in it. Scripps assumed the lead role for preparing tanks filled with known amounts of carbon dioxide and dispensing them to the community until 1995, at which point NOAA took over.

After just three short months of the Trump administration, we are contemplating the abdication of US leadership in oceanic and atmospheric science.

The country and the world are now at risk of losing the only two programs that have played this central role. If the administration has its way, the climate change research community could soon be fully adrift, unable to know with sufficient accuracy how quickly carbon dioxide levels are rising.

Even in the best of times, long-term observations can be very fragile. It is difficult to convince funding agencies to put money into long-term observations because, by definition, they are continuations; they have been done before. Most funding entities, from science agencies to philanthropic organizations, want to be associated with exciting, groundbreaking work, and sustained observations are too routine to scratch that itch. (Dave Keeling records in his autobiography, Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth, that at one point a National Science Foundation program manager demanded that, to maintain funding, he generate two discoveries per year from his record of carbon dioxide levels.)

Another vulnerability stems from the fact that the community of researchers making sustained measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide probably numbers less than 30. Graduate students interested in learning to conduct this arcane work are a rare commodity. Patience and attention to detail are required, and years may be needed to accumulate enough data to answer the key questions or make groundbreaking discoveries. Researchers have to be extremely diligent and exacting to ensure that measurements in 1958 are comparable to those today. Calibration is an endless chore. This scientific pursuit isn’t for everyone.

Perversely, while the Keeling Curve has attained iconic global importance, this actually can hinder, rather than help the funding situation. Environmental programs tend to be organized by geographic domain and discipline—the National Water Quality Program of the US Geological Survey, NSF’s Arctic Observing Network, and the US Forest Service, for instance. Amid these focused efforts, the big picture can be lost. As the climate change field has evolved, we have found it increasingly difficult to find sponsors who accept responsibility for measuring vital signs of the Earth as a whole.

The original Mauna Loa measurements were started during the International Geophysical Year in 1957/1958. This was a massive, remarkable effort, led by the United States and including 67 countries, with the goal (simply put) of measuring every physical attribute possible on the Earth in one year. It led to numerous, important scientific discoveries and the establishment of many measurement programs worldwide. It established the South Pole station, for instance, a home for vital climate research that is still going today. It was a time of enormous optimism, of international cooperation (even during the height of the Cold War), of vast dreams, of global cooperation. And the United States was proud to lead the way.

This sense of endeavor continued into the 1970s, when then-President Richard Nixon—a conservative Republican—established NOAA to better understand the world’s oceans and atmosphere. By the 1980s, the NOAA grew in scope, alongside the Scripps effort, to become the beating heart of global climate science. Now, after just three short months of the Trump administration, we are contemplating the abdication of US leadership in oceanic and atmospheric science and the loss of the largest and most critical observing network for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and their calibration laboratories.

Our colleagues at NOAA are living day to day, not sure if tomorrow will be their last on the job. We pray that common sense will prevail and that NOAA will be spared the worse. Whatever its fate, we will remain in the fight to preserve the world’s ability to measure carbon dioxide levels with whatever support we can muster, a small bulwark against climate science’s new dark age.

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Tufts PhD Student Released From ICE Detention After Chilling Arrest

Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk has been released from an immigration detention center in rural Louisiana in response to an order from a federal judge. Öztürk’s arrest led to nationwide outrage after a chilling video showed plainclothes immigration agents in masks pulling her off the street in Massachusetts in March.

Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish national, has been accused of no criminal activity. Instead, the Trump administration has falsely claimed that she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” In reality, Öztürk co-wrote a op-ed for the Tufts Daily that pushed for divesting from companies with ties to Israel.

“Thank you so much for all the support and love,” Öztürk said outside the Louisiana immigration detention center on Friday. “I am a little tired so I will take some rest. But I really appreciate you being here.”

Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts PhD candidate whose sudden arrest by federal immigration agents made national headlines, walked out of a Louisiana detention facility after a judge ordered her release.

Watch the moment she spoke to supporters outside. https://t.co/rsttOeBNTz pic.twitter.com/KGd4zO1Q68

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) May 10, 2025

At a federal court hearing earlier on Friday, William Sessions III, a district court judge in Vermont, where Öztürk was briefly detained, made clear that the Trump administration had provided essentially nothing to support its decision to detain and attempt to deport Öztürk. “There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the op-ed. I mean, that literally is the case,” Sessions said. “There is no evidence here as to the motivation, absent the consideration of the op-ed.”

“There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence,” Sessions said, according to CBS News. “She has no criminal record. She has done nothing other than essentially attend her university and expand her contacts within the community in such a supportive way.” The judge called Öztürk’s detention a “continued infringement” on her due process and First Amendment rights that also “potentially chil[ed] the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens.”

Michael Drescher, the Justice Department attorney representing the Trump administration, barely spoke and called no witnesses at the hearing, the New York Times reported. He did say that the administration would continue its effort to deport Öztürk regardless of whether she was released from detention.

The judge called Öztürk’s detention a “continued infringement” on her due process and First Amendment rights that also “potentially chil[ed] the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens.”

Mahsa Khanbabai, Öztürk’s lawyer, said in a statement provided to Zeteo that she was “relieved and ecstatic” her client had been ordered released. “Unfortunately, it is 45 days too late. She has been imprisoned all these days for simply writing an op-ed that called for human rights and dignity for the people in Palestine,” Khanbabai added. “When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?”

In early April, Mother Jones reported that Öztürk had suffered three asthma attacks during her first 10 days in detention. As Sophie Hurwitz and Julia Métraux explained at the time:

Öztürk, who studies child psychology, was moved by ICE agents from Massachusetts to Vermont and then to Louisiana, her attorneys report. For nearly 24 hours, her legal team was unable to contact or locate her. En route to Louisiana, she suffered her first of three asthma attacks. Hearings in Öztürk’s case began yesterday, with her lawyers describing the way she was transported across several state lines as “venue shopping” by the government and “an act of either furtiveness or bad faith.” They also revealed that in the days since being moved to a detention center in Louisiana, Öztürk has suffered two more asthma attacks.

Unmanaged asthma can have severe acute outcomes, the most extreme being respiratory failure resulting in death, as well as long-term effects, such as permanently altering a person’s airways. The way to avoid these devastating effects is simple: People with asthma need to have access to their medication, like inhalers, to manage this chronic health condition.

CBS reported that Öztürk suffered another asthma attack during the Friday hearing. She told the court that she had suffered a dozen asthma attacks while in ICE custody, and that they were becoming “longer and harder to stop.”

The Washington Post has reported that, prior to ICE detaining Öztürk, the State Department “determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.” The Post added:

The finding, contained in a March memo that was described to The Washington Post, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for revoking Ozturk’s visa under an authority empowering the top U.S. diplomat to safeguard the foreign policy interests of the United States.

The memo, written by an office within the State Department, raises doubts about the public accusations made by the Trump administration as it has sought to justify Ozturk’s deportation. The Department of Homeland Security has said Ozturk engaged in activities “in support of Hamas,” a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, but neither that agency nor U.S. prosecutors have provided evidence for that claim.

Despite that finding, the Trump administration revoked Öztürk’s visa without notification then quickly detained her. Video of her disturbing arrest attracted national attention.

Federal immigration authorities detained a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University.⁠ The government hasn’t filed any charges against Rumeysa, Ozturk, who was in the U.S. on a student visa, her lawyer said.

Read more: https://t.co/Vs3iLHGAkU pic.twitter.com/29aNJWaJmr

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 26, 2025

Before being targeted by the Trump administration, Öztürk was on track to receive her doctorate in February. She said at the Friday hearing that she was eager to get back to her research on adolescent media use.

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White South African “Refugees” Will Soon Arrive in the United States

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions from around the world. In February, Trump made one exception—ordering the US government to promote refugee resettlement for white South Africans. Now, the first group of Afrikaners is set to arrive.

National Public Radio reports that a flight with 54 Afrikaners will arrive at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC, on Monday. In a highly unusual move, the administration plans to have high-level US officials meet the Afrikaners at the airport for a press conference, according to NPR. The administration is reportedly trying to charter a jet—presumably at US taxpayers’ expense—from Johannesburg to bring in the South Africans.

“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.”

Timothy Young, a spokesman for Global Refuge, a resettlement agency, told the New York Times that thousands “of refugees from across the globe remain stranded in limbo despite being fully vetted and approved for travel, including Afghan allies, religious minorities and other populations facing extreme violence and persecution.” The fact that the Trump administration is bypassing those people in favor of white South Africans who have not met international criteria for refugee status lays bare the white nationalism at the heart of its immigration policy.

Chrispin Phiri, a spokesperson for South Africa’s foreign ministry, said in a statement provided to the New York Times that Afrikaners should not be considered refugees under international law. “It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy,” Phiri stated. (The Trump administration has cut off aid to South Africa based on its specious claim about discrimination against white South Africans.)

Once in the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services will help the South Africans find “temporary or longer-term housing,” according to a government memo obtained by the Lever and the New York Times. The memo states that the US government will also help them obtain “groceries, weather-appropriate clothing, diapers, formula, hygiene products and prepaid phones that support the day-to-day well-being of households.”

The Trump administration approved Afrikaners to come to the United States on an unusually fast timeline. As the Times reports:

Refugees can often wait years in camps around the world before they are processed and approved to travel to the United States. Before the first Trump administration, refugee resettlement took an average of 18 to 24 months, according to the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group for immigrants. Many refugees must wait years longer.

The Afrikaners, however, had to wait no more than three months.

In theory, much of the reason for bringing Afrikaners to the United States as refugees is a land reform law enacted earlier this year in South Africa. Elon Musk and others on the right have seized on the law to argue that white South Africans are being persecuted and are at risk of having their land unjustly confiscated.

Musk and the Trump administration are grossly misrepresenting the situation in South Africa. As I reported in February:

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa did recently sign a controversial law that expands the state’s ability to expropriate land—in some cases without providing compensation. But the law, which was signed by a democratically elected government and is motivated by a desire to address severe injustices imposed on Black people by past regimes, is not what Trump and Musk are making it out to be.

President Ramaphosa wrote on social media that the law is not “a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution.”

The Democratic Alliance, a more centrist and white-led party in South Africa, has opposed the law and has argued it needs to be amended. Nevertheless, the party strongly objected to Trump’s recent move and said in a statement released on Monday that “it is not true that the Act allows land to be seized by the state arbitrarily.” It added that funding cuts could have devastating consequences for vulnerable South Africans, explaining that the country is slated to receive $439 million this year for HIV/AIDs treatment and support. “It would be a tragedy if this funding were terminated because of a misunderstanding of the facts,” the party stressed.

More broadly, land reform is a response to the staggering inequity that still plagues South Africa. As of 2018, nearly two-thirds of Black South Africans lived in poverty, compared to just one percent of white South Africans.

South African business interests have similarly argued that Musk and others are wrong to portray the land reform law in such dire terms. As I also reported in February:

In response to an interview request, Wandile Sihlobo, the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, directed me to an article he recently wrote about why there was no need to panic about the law. Fasken, a major international law firm, has taken a similar perspective. South African lawyers at the firm concluded that, while they have some reservations about sections of the law, it is generally “doubtful if the Expropriation Act will generally affect private property rights as envisaged” in the country’s constitution. Even the leader of AfriForum, a far-right group that largely advocates on behalf of white Afrikaners and vehemently opposes the Expropriation Act, has expressed concern with Trump’s decision to target South Africa so broadly.

None of this has stopped the Trump administration from twisting America’s refugee program—once a symbol of the country’s commitment to those fleeing life-threatening violence—into yet another avatar of white grievance.

On Friday, Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration deputy chief of staff, went as far to say that “what’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created.” His newfound sympathy for allegedly oppressed whites comes after spending much of his adult life smearing immigrants of color.

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“They’re Trying to Kidnap Someone”

This dispatch by Bill Shaner, an independent journalist who writes the Worcester Sucks and I Love It newsletter, was first published by Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World.

I’m driving five miles across the city to check out a tip that there’s an ICE rendition ongoing. I’ve got the scanner on the car stereo as I’m about to pull onto the street in question. It’s a quiet neighborhood, small houses on small lots, people walking dogs, the mailman waving, the lawnmowers running, and I hear the dispatcher: “We have an ICE officer over there who’s allegedly being surrounded.”

“On our way,” the officer responds.

As a local reporter for a decade now, I’ve learned that you can hear the cops at their most honest on the scanner. And as I’m hearing that “surrounded” comment I remember what the city’s police chief told the city council in January:

“We do not do civil detention arrests,” Police Chief Paul Saucier said at the time, reassuring them that they wouldn’t be party to the ICE assault Trump was about to unleash. The police, he said, “do not have the authority to affect a civil arrest.”

What he didn’t say is that if you try to stop the civil arrest, the police will stop you from stopping it.

I park my car on the edge of the scene and all I can hear are the screams—the deafening desperate screams, from a mother, from her daughter, from the woman holding the daughter’s baby.

This morning a few dozen of us here in Worcester, Massachusetts, got to see that unstated fine print in action firsthand. A woman was led by federal agents in cuffs away from her family, through a throng of community organizers trying to stop it, and into an unmarked car. The local police arrived to prevent the community from protecting their neighbor from an unlawful kidnapping. They succeeded, and in the process arrested two of the people who tried to stop it.

I park my car on the edge of the scene and all I can hear are the screams—the deafening desperate screams, from a mother, from her daughter, from the woman holding the daughter’s baby. Wordless screams.

And then I see the mother, a young woman in a green shirt, wailing, crying, held on either side by menacing white men in tactical vests, black neck warmers pulled over their noses in the style du jour for our secret police forces.

Surrounding them are a few dozen community members who were tipped off about the ICE raid and got to it before the police did. Before I arrived, they demanded to see a warrant. The ICE agents refused to provide one, so they created a human chain, which the ICE officers eventually broke through.

I still don’t know her name or where they’ve taken her. The federal officials provided no information to anyone at the scene. But apparently they called the local police for backup. They felt that they were surrounded. Black Hawk Down.

New video shows close-up view of ICE agents slamming the young woman's face into the ground during arrest in neighborhood raid.

"I don't have anyone at home. They arrested my mom, my sister, and a 2-month-old baby," a family member cries out. pic.twitter.com/9vcxEICW5Y

— LongTimeFirstTime (@LongTimeHistory) May 9, 2025

As they’re marching this woman to the back door of the tan unmarked Ford SUV representing her nebulous fate, the community is swarming, surrounding, yelling at the ICE officers. City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, a dear friend and a relentless advocate for her community, is following closest behind them. She’s screaming. “You are cowards.” She’s jogging to keep pace as they march their jackbooted march to the SUV with New York plates. “This is an innocent woman.”

An ICE agent opens the door and the woman’s daughter shrieks—an unforgettable noise of agony. Her mother is about to disappear, into the purposefully vague bureaucratic world of forced removal. The opening of that door, to this shrieking girl…it must look like a life torn apart. Her family fractured. And for what? No one bothers to explain that to her. Perhaps they’re not allowed to. The rules.

The crowd chants “Don’t take the mother!” over and over again as the daughter keeps trying to get back on the hood of the car. More Worcester cops arrive, all helping the ICE agents carry out their rotten senseless work.

The Worcester Police Department steps in at this crucial juncture, among us residents surrounding the car about to take one of our neighbors away. And they do so on behalf of the ICE agents, not us. A Worcester cop comes over, stepping between the open car door and the community, past the ICE agents stuffing the mother into the back seat, and he looks at a woman holding the shrieking daughter’s baby. She’s also wailing in desperate anger and he says—to her—“Stop, stop, stop. They’ll explain. They’ll explain.”

Of course they don’t explain.

The woman’s daughter then jumps on the hood of the car. A Worcester cop pulls her off.

The crowd chants, “Don’t take the mother!” over and over again as the daughter keeps trying to get back on the hood of the car. More Worcester cops arrive, all helping the ICE agents carry out their rotten senseless work.

The deportee’s daughter, a 16-year-old whose name has not been disclosed, held to the ground and cuffed by Worcester police officers. Bill Shaner

When I say ICE, it’s a catchall. These federal agents were wearing a myriad of badges and few of them had name tags. Most of them had “POLICE” written somewhere on their tactical vests. There were ICE insignias, but also Customs and Border Patrol, and one ATF.

A CBP agent, his face cover falling down slightly below his nose, pushes a woman away from the car in the manner of an offensive tackle—elbows out, knees bent, forearms thrusting. Others take the woman’s place.

“This is ICE. This is federal,” one of the WPD officers explains, as if a suitable explanation. Case closed.

We’re on a quiet residential street on a peaceful spring day, the sun beating down serenely, a light breeze. The sort of day you wait all year for. For this mother and her daughter and the little baby it was that sort of day before federal agents showed up, without saying why, intending to bring her to an undisclosed somewhere without even proving they had the legal right_._

The crowd of community members, who these officers ostensibly protect and serve, continues to cheer, “Don’t take the mother, don’t take the mother.” The daughter is still shrieking.

“This is ICE. This is federal,” one of the WPD officers explains, as if a suitable explanation. Case closed.

A woman says, “They don’t have a warrant.” Another says, “They’re trying to kidnap someone.”

As the local cops are clearing the road for ICE’s unmarked SUV, community organizer Maydee Morales confronts them. “Worcester police are not supposed to be involved in this.”

Another officer, frustrated, says, “They don’t need a warrant.” Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they’re concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing.

In the background, a Worcester police officer looks at the desperate woman holding her baby trying to stop the agents from taking her mother and says “Do you want to stay with your baby?” The tacit threat of separation for her protestation of another separation. Later he would complain “She’s putting the baby in harm’s way.” A classic move: “harm” goes undefined because the harm is him.

Maydee, still confronting the officers, says, “Where is the warrant?” Officer Lugo, according to his nameplate, says, “Ma’am we are trying our best but they are federal.”

Morales again asks for the warrant.

“They’re federal.”

“They still need a warrant.”

Another officer, frustrated, says, “They don’t need a warrant.” Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they’re concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing. At this point an ICE agent starts pushing me away, but not very hard. Lazy jabs, his mind elsewhere. Too many people, too much pushing to be done. I return to my pre-push position. I keep filming. I don’t know what else to do.

A Worcester police officer stands between the ICE agents and a crowd of community members. Bill Shaner

A cop pulls his cruiser behind us—we’re boxed in now—and from the intercom says “This is the Worcester Police Department. This is an unlawful assembly, I’m warning you to disperse right now or you will be subject to arrest.”

On the other side of me, a crackle of the scanner from an officer’s vest-mounted radio: “Do I have a car to escort the marshals out of here?”

They don’t need a warrant but they do need an escort.

Next to me is a TV reporter from a Spanish language station and her cameraman. She yells out, “What’s your name?” and the woman responds in Portuguese. I can’t make it out. She asks her age and this one I catch: “dezesseis.” Not a woman—a girl. A 16-year-old girl.

As the car pulls away, nudging into the thick crowd, the daughter shrieks another horrible horrible horrible shriek, communicating the non-communicable as the disappearers take another step toward disappearing her mother. As the car breaks from the crowd she runs after it. A Worcester police officer, his voice frothing with anger, shouts, “Arrest her right now. You are under arrest.” And then four cops swarm her, grab her, throw her to the ground. All the while she’s crying crying crying. Her hair’s caught in her mouth and matted to her face, wet with spit and tears. Four cops hold her pinned to the ground.

Then they march her away. Her and another member of the community who had tried to intervene. They take the pair away from the crowd. I follow. They have the daughter by both arms, same as the ICE agents had her mother. I still don’t know either of their names. Next to me is a TV reporter from a Spanish language station and her cameraman. She yells out, “What’s your name?” and the woman responds in Portuguese. I can’t make it out. She asks her age and this one I catch: “dezesseis.”

Not a woman—a girl. A 16-year-old girl. Now in custody for the crime of reacting in an unruly way to the sudden forceful disappearance of her mother.

I keep asking about the charges. The only cop who doesn’t ignore me explains “I’m not the arresting officer.” The arresting officers go on ignoring me.

We get to the spot where the wagon is set to arrive. I ask again. Eventually I get an answer, and it’s the usual package job: disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, unlawful assembly. The charges they throw on anyone they want to arrest for the sake of arresting them, knowing they’re unlikely to stick. But sticking isn’t the goal. The officer who tells me this has a tactical K9 Unit vest on. He tells me the 16-year-old girl was interfering with police business. “Worcester police business?” I ask. What was the police business here exactly? He looks at me like I’m a smart ass. He doesn’t say anything. I press him again: “Kind of a grey area, huh?”

“Not really,” he says.

Update: In a statement posted to the Worcester Police Department’s Facebook page Thursday night, the WPD said they responded to “a report of a federal agent who was surrounded by a large group of about twenty-five people.” The daughter was charged with reckless endangerment of a child, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. The other community organizer faces charges of assault and battery on a police officer, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (unknown liquid), disorderly conduct, and interfering with a police officer. Both were out on bail by Thursday night, according to local organizers. The name and whereabouts of the woman taken by ICE remain unknown.

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Inside Alabama’s Threats to Prosecute Abortion Helpers

In August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned R_oe v. Wade_, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.

“If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.”

This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help.

This week on Reveal, reporter Nina Martin spends time with abortion rights groups in Alabama, following how they’ve adapted to one of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion policies—and evolved their definition of help.

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Purslane Sex and the City

This story was originally published by bioGraphic a_nd is reproduced here as part of the_ Climate Desk collaboration.

Steps from a public bathroom, across a narrow street from a home goods store in Tokyo, Japan, a tangle of delicate reddish stems fringed with rubbery emerald leaves pokes from a crack in the pavement. Smaller than a discarded Big Mac box, the plant sprawls close to the ground, appearing entirely unremarkable. Put more plainly: Common purslane looks like a weed.

Purslane is so inconspicuous that when Tomohiro Fujita, a biologist at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies in Ibaraki, started studying it in August 2021, he had trouble picking it out in the bustling cityscape. “There were several times when I walked around Tokyo for an entire day without finding a single individual,” he wrote by email. But once he learned to recognize the plant, he found it in all kinds of places. Growing in a lush, tree-ringed quad outside a cafeteria at Rikkyo University, for instance. Or eking out a modest living near a city bus lot not far from Sugamo Station.

Common purslane, known to scientists as Portulaca oleracea, is not just big in Japan. By some counts, it’s the eighth most widely distributed plant in the world. As happy growing in gardens as along roads or parking lots, it has been documented everywhere from Mexico City to Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park to Midway Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean.

“Plants that depend on pollinators to reproduce have to evolve in a very short time to survive.”

No one seems to agree on where purslane got its start—scientists have speculated that it came from India, North Africa, or Australia—but it’s moved around the world for millennia. It came to the Americas well before Columbus; Indigenous people in present-day Ontario were harvesting the plant as early as 1350. In some places, the plant probably hitched a ride with migrating animals or oblivious humans; in others, it traveled first class, brought along for its many medicinal and culinary uses.

Fujita and his colleagues’ recent study helps explain how common purslane continues to find purchase in our increasingly anthropogenic world. Fujita collected seeds from purslane plants at 10 urban sites in Tokyo—including the one near the public bathroom—and from rice paddies and fields at 10 sites outside the city. After growing those seeds into mature plants in a greenhouse, he observed something surprising: the purslane grown from urban seeds was much less likely to open its flowers and bloom than the rural plants. Or, as Fujita and his co-authors poetically phrased it, “the flower does not open in the city.”

Although plants have multiple ways to do the deed, flowers are the decorative boudoirs where fertilization happens. Some common purslane individuals cross-pollinate by swapping pollen with each other. On hot, sunny days, these plants explode with small yellow flowers that open just long enough to let insects carry pollen between plants. Other purslane plants, however, self-pollinate by fertilizing within their own tightly curled buds, which never unfurl to become flowers.

Flowering is so ephemeral that Fujita didn’t spot purslane with open flowers at any of the collection sites either in Tokyo or outside the city. But his team observed the plants’ offspring as they flowered in the greenhouse. While environmental conditions trigger or suppress flowering in most species, a purslane plant’s specific genes dictate whether it opens its flowers for pollination or takes care of business itself. And Fujita found that the vast majority of urban plant offspring—95 percent—never flowered, compared with roughly 76 percent of individuals from rural areas.

The fact that so many more plants in Tokyo carry the genes for closed flowers shows that the urban population is evolving to almost exclusively self-pollinate, Fujita says. Closed buds take less energy to grow, mature earlier than open flowers, and produce bigger seeds, which often develop into seedlings with larger root systems for reaching scant moisture. In dryer, hotter urban environments that tend to have fewer pollinators, these benefits may help purslane survive.

With some 70 percent of the Earth’s surface now altered by human development, the study offers a peek into one way that plants are adapting to urbanization. In a 2022 review, Fernanda Bered, a geneticist at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, found that, globally, urban plant communities are less diverse than those in surrounding areas and tend to feature more introduced and hardy species.

Bered and her coauthors also identified other ways plants respond to urbanization. City plants often grow faster, flower earlier and longer, and make smaller seeds than their rural counterparts. Some plants respond to industrialized environments by growing more slowly in soils laden with heavy metals. And plants exposed to polluted air produce less chlorophyll A, a key pigment for absorbing light, meaning they make less energy and oxygen.

Purslane isn’t the only urban plant turning to solo reproduction. In industrial sites near the port of Antwerp, Belgium, where pollinating hoverflies are rare, common centaury (Centaurium erythraea) produce smaller flowers that are more likely to self-pollinate. In Osaka, Japan, Asiatic dayflowers (Commelina communis) in more urban areas grow reproductive parts that are physically closer together, making self-pollination easier. Bered points out that such strategies give plants a leg up in places where fragmented habitat has made nearby cross-pollinating plants scarce, or where there’s a shortage of pollinators.

“It’s difficult for pollinators like birds, bats, and insects to live in the cities,” Bered says. “Plants that depend on pollinators to reproduce have to evolve in a very short time to survive.”

But “selfing,” as it’s called, can have drawbacks, too. Populations that self-pollinate for generations will likely have less genetic diversity than plants that cross-pollinate, Fujita explains. And lower genetic diversity could make it harder for future generations of urban purslane to weather stressors, particularly as cities become warmer.

For now, though, common purslane is doing just fine: The succulent thrives in full sun and warm temperatures, and its waxy leaves retain precious moisture in paved-over spots like near that Tokyo bathroom. In cities around the world, the plant is winding its way along the cracks between sidewalk pavers, reaching for water and soaking up sun.

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Trump’s Killing of Energy Star Program Will Cost Families a Bundle

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

The federal Energy Star program is among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can, and appliances bearing it save American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes in.

This week, however, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to kill it, the Washington Post first reported. Grist also reviewed a US EPA document obtained by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that shows the program is slated to be “eliminated.”

“Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs,” said Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking member of the committee, in a statement. “By eliminating this program, [Trump] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy.”

“It’s an odd thing that you would jettison a voluntary public-private partnership that costs a rounding error in EPA’s budget and affords consumers billions of dollars of value.”

Launched in 1992, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Energy Star sets efficiency specifications for products ranging from dishwashers to entire homes. Those standards are beyond government-mandated minimums, and Energy Star’s website says the goal is to provide “simple, credible, and unbiased information” people can use to make better decisions.

While Energy Star certification is voluntary, most major manufacturers participate. According to the government, around 9 in 10 households recognize the Energy Star label. Depending on the year, as many as 80 percent say the label “very much” or “somewhat” influenced their purchases. Overall, consumers have bought more than 300 million appliances with the Energy Star label and the program has cumulatively helped avoid 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Energy Star remains one of our most effective bipartisan tools for ensuring energy reliability, affordability, and American competitiveness,” said Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy. She noted the broader economic impact of the program as well, including creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing, retail, real estate, and energy services industries. “Shutting it down is a risk to those jobs.”

For years, though, Trump has complained about efficiency benchmarks for appliances. Lower-flow showerheads, he said, make showers “five times longer.” LED light bulbs make him look orange. People are flushing efficient toilets ”10 times, 15 times” and, with dishwashers, “the electric bill is 10 times more than the water.” These claims are, by and large, inaccurate.

Veracity aside, Trump’s efforts play into a larger culture war against appliance standards—one that the White House has continued to aggressively wage since his second term began.

In February, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced it was delaying efficiency regulation of appliances ranging from central air conditioners and freezers to washing machines and dryers. In March, it said it was withdrawing four efficiency standards that the Biden administration had proposed and was pushing back the implementation date of others. Last month, Trump issued an executive order titled, in all caps, “MAINTAINING ACCEPTABLE WATER PRESSURE IN SHOWERHEADS.”

The Energy Star rollback would likely be the most visible attack yet on appliance efficiency, and it even has manufacturers worried. Last month, more than 1,000 companies, cities, and groups wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin urging him to support the program.

“This would be a very big deal,” said the representative of one manufacturer, who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the potential closure. Energy Star, they explained, helps companies market and move higher volumes of high-efficiency products. “It’s an odd thing that you would jettison a voluntary public-private partnership that costs a rounding error in EPA’s budget and affords consumers billions of dollars of value.”

Beyond eliminating staff, the EPA’s exact plans and timeline for any Energy Star rollback remain unclear. The agency did not respond directly to questions about the program’s future but in an emailed statement told Grist the “EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit the American people.”

Losing Energy Star could have a range of ripple effects. In addition to making selecting products more confusing for consumers, it could hinder people’s ability to qualify for federal, state, or utility incentives that are tied to the certification. There is, for example, a federal tax incentive for building Energy Star homes. Appliance rebates are also often linked to the designation.

“How are those programs now going to know which kinds of appliances they want to give a rebate to or a tax incentive for?” asked Glover. States or utilities could conceivably fill that void with their own standards, creating a patchwork of regulation and incentives. “Having Energy Star that gives a federal standard makes far more sense. It’s certainly easier for consumers to understand what their options are.”

These are among the many details that would have to be worked out if the Trump administration proceeds with its plan.

“I don’t think they expected this kind of pushback,” said Steve Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, about the media attention that the latest change has garnered. “This is getting a lot of publicity.”

The move could also face legal challenges, he said, pointing to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as one possible roadblock for the administration. It directs the EPA and DOE to, among other things, “promote Energy Star-compliant technologies as the preferred technologies in the marketplace” and “preserve the integrity of the Energy Star label.”

Another possibility is that the DOE takes over as Energy Star’s primary administrator. But as with other aspects of the president’s ambitious agenda, it could take time to sort out real-world impact.

If Energy Star is ultimately eliminated, Nadel said the labels would eventually go away—as would potentially billions in consumer savings. But, he added, “Nothing is done yet.”

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Trump’s DOJ Stripped Lifeline Legal Services From the Most Vulnerable Detained Immigrants

On April 3, a Justice Department contracting officer sent the Acacia Center for Justice a “notice of termination for convenience.” The email instructed the nonprofit to discontinue several federally funded programs described as“no longer needed.” Among them was the little-knownNational Qualified Representative Program (NQRP),which appoints government-paid counsel to detained immigrants deemed unfit to represent themselves in court due to serious mental health needs or cognitive disabilities.

The termination notice put the organization and its dozens of legal partners on high alert. As the federal government’s main contractor for this $35-million program since 2022, the Acacia Center for Justice has relied on federal dollars to refer anywhere between 300 to 400cases a year to a network of about 35 direct services providers that includes other nonprofits, small private law firms, and solo practitioners.

The following day, the Washington, DC-based group received another letter, this one rescinding the previous order “until further notice.” As they tried to make sense of the confounding messages, within the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review—charged with managing the US immigration courts system— agency officials were discussing how to reduce the scope of the NQRP and “end representation funded by EOIR,” according to internal emails obtained through litigation. The downsizing, they anticipated, should “allow for representatives to withdraw” from ongoing cases and “facilitate finding other representation.”

The planned defunding wasthe latest in a series of cuts by the Trump administration to legal aid forimmigrants. In practice, it would all but eliminate the only available mechanism for immigration courts to designate counsel to people with mental health needs in detention centers across the United States.

Finally,on April 25, the Justice Department dealt the final blow, notifying the Acacia Center for Justice of its decision to cancel the discretionarynationwide initiative that immigrant rights advocates, attorneys, and former immigration judges say is a lifeline for hundreds, if not thousands, of detained people in immigration proceedings. With the exception of detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington—where court-ordered government-appointed counsel provisions remain in place—advocates anticipate these especially vulnerable immigrantswill go unidentified and unrepresented, left to face potential deportation without a fighting chance.

“What I fear the most is that they are going to languish in detention with no end in sight,” said Lisa Okamoto, program director for the NQRP at the Acacia Center for Justice, “or without understanding what they are facing.” Without federal funding, immigration attorneys are unlikely to take on these highly complex cases since most detainees, many of whom are held in remote detention centers where pro bono assistance is hard to come by, can’t afford legal representation. (The EOIR declined to comment on the termination of the program.)

“What I fear the most is that they are going to languish in detention without no end in sight, or without understanding what they are facing.”

“To think of those people behind bars without anybody telling them where they are or why they are there or what might happen to them…” she said, pausing as her voice became emotional. “And then the serious risk of them being put on a plane and possibly evensent to a country they have no ties to.”

The nationwide government-appointed counsel program was created in 2013 in responseto a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit and settlement order in Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder that established the right to legal representation for immigrant detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington, who have been deemed “incompetent” by an immigration judge to properly defend themselves.

One of the named plaintiffs in the case was José Antonio Franco-Gonzalez, a 29-year-old Mexican man with an intellectual disability. A psychological report had found that his cognitive functions resembled those of a toddler. An immigration judge requested a psychiatric evaluation of Franco-Gonzalez, which concluded that he had no idea what kind of court he was appearing in and it would be “impossible for him to stand trial.”

The judge agreed that Franco-Gonzalez’s case couldn’t move forward without legal representation and decided to put it on hold. But Franco-Gonzalez remained in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), without another day in court. Talia Inlender, then a young lawyer giving “know-your- rights” presentations to immigrant detainees at the Santa Ana City Jail, had learned about his case from an ICE officer. When she met him in late 2009, he had been detained for almost five years. Franco-Gonzalez couldn’t sign his own name to join Inlender’s workshop.

Even today, Inlender, now the deputy director of UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, still remembers her first encounter with Franco-Gonzalez. She said his skin looked almost translucent from the lengthy confinement period and he was practically nonverbal. He didn’t know his birthday or age. And, he had little understanding of his situation other than wanting to be reunited with his family members, many of whom were US citizens and lawful permanent residents.

In early 2010, Inlender’s organization at the time, Public Counsel, and the ACLU sued on behalf of Franco-Gonzalez and another detainee, both of whom were “effectively lost” in the system. Franco-Gonzalez was released from detention three days later. (He went on to become a naturalized US citizen.)“But we knew he wasn’t the only one suffering in immigration detention solely as a result of a mental disability,” Inlender said. Around that time, Human Rights Watch published a report titled “Deportation By Default” noting that people with mental illnesses made up an estimated 15 percent of the detained immigrant population.

So they expanded the case to a class action lawsuit to cover detainees whose conditions—including schizophrenia, severe depression, and dissociative identity disorder—might prevent them from having a fair day in court.In Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the courts found that detained immigrants with mental disabilities facing deportation were entitled to counsel as a reasonable accommodation based on the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In fact, that was the “only means” by which someone not competent for self-representation could exercise their rights.

On April 23, 2013, a federal district judge in California issued a permanent injunction requiring the government to appoint a qualified representative to those immigrants and to grant a bond hearing to detainees who had been in custody for six months or more. The permanent injunction only applied to the three states covered by the lawsuit. But just the day before that injunction, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security announced a policy to “enhance procedural protections,” including processes for mental health screenings and competency hearings, throughout the country.

Today, that nationwide program is being gutted. “I know firsthand the difference it makes to have a fair hearing with a lawyer by your side,” Inlender said. “I think it’s just a devastating blow to due process and to all of the individual people and families that are going to be deeply impacted by the termination.”

Amelia Wilson, a law professor and director of the immigration justice clinic at Pace University who served as the NQRP’s program manager from 2016 to 2018, described the program as a “massive seismic change.” Wilson had been involved in deportation defense work on behalf of immigrants with mental health issues for years. Prior to 2013, she said, it was a “hodgepodge system.” She used to get “clandestine calls from immigration judges” alerting her to unrepresented immigrants on their dockets who needed assistance. Sometimes the information about a potential client came from a DHS attorney or guards in detention centers. “I would take cases that would just appear before me,” she said. “But there was no referral system.”

The rollout of the nationwide policy program was imperfect, Wilson said. But it was an opportunity to offer life-saving legal services, in a formalized way, to more people who otherwise would have been unlikely to receive them. By the time she left, the program had been implemented in 25 locations outside of the original Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction and, as of 2024, more than 2,500 immigrants had been given legal counsel through it.

“We could fund not just the attorney but also social workers, experts, post-release planning so if the person was going to be released on bond or if they won their case, it wasn’t just like, here, open the doors, goodbye, good luck,” Wilson said. Most immigration judges were receptive to, if not enthusiastic about, the initiative. “It was a major shift for the population it was meant to serve—by far the most vulnerable of any immigrant group I can think of.”

“It was a major shift for the population it was meant to serve—by far the most vulnerable of any immigrant group I can think of.”

Detained immigrants in removal proceedings, especially those who are unrepresented, already face an uphill battle. Unlike inthe criminal justice system where someone is considered innocent until proven guilty, immigrants seeking relief bear the burden to prove their case. To be found credible, they usually have to recount past events in detail. For people with dementia, for example, or experiencing memory issues due to traumatic brain injury, that alone can present an obstacle.

Gregory Pleasants, a lawyer who worked in the creation of the government-appointed counsel program, said immigrants with mental health needs were often detained indefinitely and subject to solitary confinement. As a result, their conditions only worsened. “Predictably,” Pleasants said, “people who are detained with mental illness just got deported without being heard by a system that is primarily designed to deny detain and deport.”

Pleasants recalled a former client with schizophrenia who had a recurring delusion about something he called a “re-existence plan.” Eventually, after spending time with the man and his family, Pleasants was able to gather information helpful to the case, and the client was allowed to stay in the United States. “No trial can be fair that leaves a person with mental illness alone before a court, especially one as draconian as the immigration system,” Pleasants said. “Without a lawyer, people don’t have a prayer. They don’t have a chance in hell.”

What theNQRP did was build an infrastructure of skilled lawyers, paralegals, and social workers equipped to provide meaningful and trauma-informed detention and deportation defense. For Pleasants, it represented a “brief gleaming moment” of promise that due process could be realized in the immigration system. The dismantling of the program means “that promise is slipping out of our hands,” he added, “and that’s a grievous loss.”

On May 5, nine legal service providers filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s partial termination ofthe government-paid counsel program. The organizations argue they are faced with an “untenable choice” between having to withdraw representation from some of the roughly 100 affected NQRPcases or continuing the work without payment. Alternatively, they might have to move funds from other critical services and risk staff layoffs.

“We are not talking about a huge amount of money, especially relative to some of the other programs,” said Evan Benz, a senior attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, the only subcontractor providing legal services under the program across Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North and South Carolina. “But these resources make all the difference in these individuals’ lives because without this program there’s no realistic way that they would ever have a competent and qualified attorney to represent them in their case.”

Laura Lunn, the director of advocacy and litigation at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Colorado, has represented somewhere between 20 and 30 NQRP clients in her nine years as a qualified representative. Often, she explained, these types of cases are more time and resource-intensive because of the added challenges of obtaining testimony, collecting evidence, and doing cross-examination. Lawyers may need to rely more heavily on forensic psychology and country condition expert reports, both of which incur expenses.

Some of Lunn’s clients have experiencedaudio and visual hallucinations that prevent them from knowing what’s real and what’s not. These symptoms are further exacerbated by prolonged detention. “Imagine trying to synthesize an immigration case while dealing with those types of external stimuli,” Lunn said. Without legal counsel, people will lose in court not because they lack a strong case, but because they simply can’t present the information needed to an immigration judge.

In some instances, someone’s claim to stay in the United States is based on their disability and how it could make them susceptible to harm or even persecution if they are deported back to their home country. Lately, Lunn has been thinking a lot about one of her clients from South Sudan, a survivor of the civil war who became an orphan as a child. As a result of severe PTSD, he heard voices of people threatening to kill him. Ultimately, he was allowed to stay in the United States. “If he had been flown back there,” Lunn said, “I have no doubt in my mind that he would have been targeted and he would have been killed.”

That man is just one of many people Lunn and her organization have helped over the years. She chokes up thinking about those immigrants whose needs may prompt an immigration judge to determine they should be appointed counsel, only for there not to be anyone available to ensure they have a shot at a reasonably fair process. And she wonders: How much longer can they keep assisting their current clients? The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, which had anticipated more than $310,000 in funding through the NQRP for 2025, has 15 clients whose legal counsel falls underthe now-stricken program.

“People have survived so much in their lives to get to the place where a court appoints a qualified representative for them,” Lunn said. “It’s just heartbreaking to think about them being alone again.”

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Ed Martin’s Derailed Nomination Shows Donald Trump’s Power Is Waning

In late March, Ed Martin, then the embattled acting US Attorney for DC, showed up at a community meeting at a police station to tout his efforts to combat crime in the district.

Martin politely fielded questions from attendees, even answering one from a man who, citing Martin’s widely condemned description of his office as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers,” asked: “How do we as residents trust that you are going to have our back and not be a personal lawyer for the President of the United States, who is a felon and a racist?”

Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for this is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.

Martin responded by citing Matthew Graves, who had occupied his position under President Biden. “My predecessor” also “worked for the guy elected president, for his polices, for his vision,” Martin said. “And that was his preference. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“The president ran on an agenda,” Martin added. “The agenda includes major policy initiatives that a prosecutor has a role in. And I certainly, as you know, don’t shy away from being public about those.”

As far as I know, that is the most that Martin, whose nomination Trump pulled Thursday due to opposition by GOP senators, has said publicly in defense of his wildly controversial tenure.

It was a dishonest downplaying of his effort to make the country’s largest prosecutorial office into an instrument of MAGA retribution, but also telling.

As US attorney, Martin fired, demoted, and investigated January 6 prosecutors, threatened to prosecute congressional Democrats for hyperbolic political statements, suggested his office would investigate DOGE critics and former prosecutors faulted by Trump, and harassed medical journals, Wikipedia and Georgetown’s law school with threats to punish them over their speech.

Martin’s remarks at the community meeting justified these actions as merely the GOP-version of what Democratic prosecutors did under Biden. I don’t know if Martin really believes that, but it’s not true.

US Attorneys do pursue the policies of presidents who pick them, but within legal and normative limits set by the Constitution, Congress, and longstanding practice. No US attorney, until Martin, volunteered to use his office against critics of government policies, including those who “acted simply unethically” and “chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.” No other US Attorney has reportedly attempted to present a grand jury with evidence for a criminal case against the Minority Leader of the US Senate based on five-year-old criticism of the Supreme Court. Nor has a US Attorney personally attempted to use criminal investigative power to seize money from environmental groups awarded contracts by the past administration without having any evidence of a crime.

Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for debasing his office is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.

Martin, though only an acting US Attorney, got a torrent of negative press coverage in part because he loudly volunteered himself as the leader of Trump’s crusade to use the DOJ against his political enemies. As we wrote in a March: “In a new administration defined by a mixture of malevolence and ineptitude, Martin has emerged as an avatar: a typo-spewing henchman of the moment, eager to help Trump transform the Justice Department into a political tool—and unable to shut up about it.”

The evident defeat of Martin’s nomination is a loss, though by no means a death knell, for proponents of the unitary executive theory’s claim that Justice Department prosecutors are the president’s lawyers, and have always been.

With Martin, Trump tried to force GOP senators to confirm an unqualified bumbler and extremist just because he is Trump’s “favorite US Attorney.” That didn’t work. That makes Martin’s derailed nomination a defeat for Trump too.

Trump backed off the nomination after Senate Republicans said they lacked the votes to confirm him. The fatal blow came from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a judiciary committee member who said he would oppose Martin due to his support for January 6 rioters. In January, after initially appearing to oppose Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary, Tillis, who is up for reelection next year, buckled amid heavy pressure from Trump and supported the former Fox News host’s confirmation. Though Martin sought a lesser post, Tillis’ opposition may signal that Trump’s plummeting poll numbers are diminishing his power.

The rejection of Martin’s nomiation is also a sign of the limits of Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of January 6 and the lies that led to it. Martin, as Mother Jones has detailed, was a 2020 election truther who was deeply involved in the Stop the Steal organizing. In the aftermath of January 6, he claimed “antifa” was behind the attack, called it a “hoax,” referred to January 6 attackers as “patriots” and said the marauders who were prosecuted should receive “reparations.” Martin has never renounced those claims. As US attorney, he has continued to promote a conspiracy theory suggesting that the FBI helped plan January 6. He even railed against January 6 prosecutions while appearing, in his official capacity, at a March fundraiser attended by convicted seditionists and an alleged Nazi sympathizer who Martin later tried to distance himself from.

Installing Martin as the head of the office that prosecuted 1,600 people for the attack was a deliberate provocation to anyone, including Republican senators, who rejects Trump’s effort to redefine a deadly attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power as a “day of love.” Ed Martin is a minor figure. But his defeat is a significant sign that Trump’s power to make the government accept his lies is ebbing.

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Is the New Pope MAGA or Woke? Depends Who You Ask.

The Conclave has spoken, and President Donald Trump will not be the next pope. Instead, that designation will go toRobert Francis Prevost, who will be known as Pope Leo XIV, the Vatican announced on Thursday.

Leo, who is 69 years old and was born in Chicago, will be the first American pope following the April 21 death of Pope Francis—and everyone wants to claim it as a win for their side of the political aisle. To some on the right, Leo’s selection is a boon for Trump’s “America-first” administration. To other Republicans, he is not pro-Trump enough, based on a series of seemingly critical posts on his X account. The left, on the other hand, is eating those up.

Trump called Leo’s selection “a Great Honor for our Country” in a Truth Social post congratulating him. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk claimed that voting records show Leo is a strong Republican who has consistently voted conservatively. Some of his prior comments appear to make him indistinguishable from the MAGA crowd: The New York Times previously reported that in 2012, Leo spoke out against what he called “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.” And as a bishop in Peru, he railed against what he called “the promotion of gender ideology” in schools, which he alleged “seeks to create genders that don’t exist.”

But Trump opponents quickly pointed to Leo’s X account as evidence that the new pope may be a member of the resistance. Leo’s most recent repost shared comments from Evelio Menjivar, an auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, who criticized the Trump administration’s seemingly illegal deportations to El Salvador.

Leo also posted two links this year that criticized Vice President JD Vance following Vance’s attempt to use an ancient Catholic concept to justify the administration’s mass deportations of immigrants, which Francis blasted as incorrect. “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” read the headline of one article Leo posted. Ten days later, Leo shared another articlerecounting Vance’s and Francis’ different interpretations of the doctrine. Nonetheless, Vance congratulated him on his selection as pope on Thursday.

In May 2020, at the height of protests following the police murder of George Floyd, Leo wrote: “We need to hear more from leaders in the Church, to reject racism and seek justice.” And during Trump’s first term, Leo shared posts decrying Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and the violence in Charlottesville, where Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”; supporting Dreamers; urging Trump to take action on climate change; and criticizing Trump’s Muslim ban.

Some political strategists and advocates on the left pointed to these posts as evidence that the pope shared their politics. Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters, on the other hand, were triggered. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called him “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis” in a post on X.

“Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to,” she added. “Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”

After far-right activist and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec dug up Leo’s prior X posts, he wrote, “God Save the Church,” and, “The Pope is not infallible on political matters.”

The truth is that only time will tell where Leo falls on the ideological spectrum. As his own record suggests, he will more than likely not be a faithful adherent to either side of the political aisle. Pope Francis was not either. While he supported immigrants and Palestinians under Israeli bombardment and tepidly welcomed gay people into the church, he was firmly anti-abortion, reportedly used an anti-gay slur, and claimed “gender theory…does not recognize the order of creation.”

Like Francis, wecan expect Leo to be fully loyal only to the man upstairs.

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Trump’s New Surgeon General Pick Wants to “Raise the Vibration of Humanity”

On Wednesday, following controversy about inconsistencies in her résumé, President Trump withdrew his nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat to become surgeon general, and gave the nod to alternative medicine practitioner and author Dr. Casey Means.

“Her academic achievements, together with her life’s work, are absolutely outstanding,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States History.”

Her academic achievements include dropping out of a medical residency in otolaryngology because, she says, she was frustrated that the discipline did not focus on “root causes.” Means’ medical license is inactive, according to Oregon medical board records.

Means’ medical opining has occasionally veered in a New Age direction.

Her life’s work includes co-founding Levels, a business that sells glucose monitors, co-writing the book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, and promoting an eight-day online course on metabolic health.

Means has promoted the idea that the national epidemic of chronic disease is attributable to diet and lifestyle choices, an argument that largely echoes the talking points of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That’s no coincidence: both Means and her brother Calley, who describes himself as a lobbyist and evangelist for healthy food, played a central role in advising Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Calley Means, who now works with Kennedy as a White House health advisor, is said to be assisting with the creation of a “Make America Healthy Again” commission, set to focus on chronic disease and preventable illnesses in children—meaning ones influenced by lifestyle factors like diabetes, rather than vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles. Last September, at a four-hour Senate roundtable hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) that was meant to welcome Kennedy’s MAHA movement to the GOP fold, the senator hailed Casey “the person who is the catalyst for this event.”

In her writing and speaking gigs, Casey Means highlights the importance of metabolic health, an enthusiasm for many alternative health practitioners. Like many of them, she assigns a mystically important role to the gut: In Good Energy, Means states that “conditions like depression and schizophrenia” are “tied to poor gut bacteria,” adding that “researchers can identify a person with depression or schizophrenia just by analyzing their gut bacteria composition.” (The study Means appears to be citing specifically says that more research is needed to determine whether there’s a causal link between schizophrenia and the gut microbiome.) She’s also hailed raw dairy, writing how she wants “to be free to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm.”

But Means’ medical opining has occasionally veered in a more New Age direction. She has claimed that “the universe” speaks to her and that people can “manifest” what they want by writing it down. “Perhaps the body is simply the material ‘radio receiver’ through which we can ‘tune in’ to the divine,” she wrote in an October 2024 newsletter. “We will get instructions (through human inspiration and reason) for what we need to do to raise the vibration of humanity and create a sustainable future… The future of medicine will be about light. I don’t exactly know how yet.”

“Humans are out of alignment with the Earth and depleting its life force,” she wrote the next month. “And human bodies are now exhibiting signs of blocking the flow of energy through them. This is insulin resistance. We are the Earth.”

Means’ track record of statements about medicine and health that aren’t backed by science are troubling to Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. He noted that Means’ treatment modality of choice, functional medicine, is not a recognized medical specialty, and that it often involves unnecessary tests and unproven supplement regimens. Functional medicine is “using a veneer of medicine to sell supplements in the hope that these fix a patient’s health problems,” he said. “It is not evidence based.” Jarry was “appalled, yet not surprised in the slightest” about her nomination, which, he said, “shows a continuing disregard for expertise and an embrace of make believe.”

It’s not just people in the scientific community who are displeased with Means’ nomination. Despite seemingly crowd-pleasing views on topics like life forces and raw milk, some of Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine and alternative health worlds have intimated that they see the Means siblings as sinister functionaries of Big Pharma, Big Food, or something much worse. Some of those people greeted Means’ nomination with outrage and dark suspicion, with many claiming Dr. Kelly Victory, a health influencer and ivermectin fan, was Kennedy’s preferred choice.

“I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr…. neither of these siblings would be working… (and that people much more qualified would be).”

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, the founder of the anti-vaccine group Americans for Health Freedom, tweeted that Victory had told her she was being chosen for the position last week, but that she ultimately “was passed over because of her outspoken stance against the mRNA shots. Clearly RFK has no power.” Several other major anti-vaccine figures also tweeted their anger that Victory hadn’t been chosen, including Steve Kirsch, a wealthy Silicon Valley figure turned anti-vaccine crusader. “As surgeon general, @DrKellyVictory would have advocated to pull the mRNA shots from the market immediately,” he tweeted. “Probably why she was not selected. Trump does not want those shots to be pulled.”

Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan also expressed immediate displeasure, tweeting that Means’ nomination was “very strange,” as she hinted at a longtime distrust of the Means siblings.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” she wrote. “I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be). I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn’t President Trump). With regards to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.”

Shanahan didn’t respond to a request for comment about whose “Manchurian assets” she believes the Means siblings to be.

Shanahan’s tweet was, in turn, a quote tweet of Dr. Suzanne Humphries, an osteopathic physician who’s been critical of vaccines. (Humphries appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast last month to promote those views.) Humphries, too, was critical of Means as a choice, tweeting, “I can’t help but think this is a very carefully groomed and selected person. Just about no clinical experience. Talks a great game about everything but vaccines. Feels all wrong. Why? There were so many better choices.”

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The Brain Rot Cabinet

Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration.

“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that. We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

“For people who aren’t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman.”

To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one’s brain to be thoroughly bathed in the corrosive acid of the right-wing internet, where it’s taken on faith that the Biden administration either allowed hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked or perhaps actively participated in that trafficking themselves.

Kennedy’s comments are an excellent demonstration of how, in the Trump era, public statements by administration figures and their congressional backers are heavily influenced by the far-right and conspiratorial internet—sometimes in addled, confused, or strangely remixed forms. Why is Attorney General Pam Bondi promising to release an “Epstein client list” that probably isn’t real?Why is Kennedy also claiming that vaccines are made from “fetus debris,” which is a lie, and promising to fight chemtrails, which don’t exist, but which he recently claimed DARPA is spraying into the sky? Why is Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claiming he wants a Congressional hearing into “what actually happened” on September 11, as he claimed a “controlled demolition” brought down building 7? Why are Donald Trump and Elon Musk reviving a 1970s conspiracy theory which claims that the gold inside Fort Knox might be gone? Why was a government website where Americans could once order free Covid tests has been transformed into a webpage promoting an extremely longwinded version of the still-unproven lab leak theory? Why is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) declaring there were “two shooters” involved in the JFK assassination, before hosting a hearing that in no way proved that?

Rumors, conspiracy theories, memes, jokes, contextless claims and thinly-sourced allegations all now find their way at lightning speed to the White House and to other senior Republican officials, where they’re immediately spat back out in statements and public appearances. These statements make it incredibly clear how deeply online and profoundly conspiracy-brained the modern GOPis—and how much taxpayer-funded time the Trump administration plans to spend pursuing ideas that range from ludicrous to already debunked.

Kennedy, who has previously admitted that he falls for online misinformation “all the time,” and his bald claim that HHS engaged in the trafficking of children caused uproar and confusion, even among the conservative faithful. “If true, this would be a really really big deal,” tweeted collegiate swimmer turned conservative activist Riley Gaines. “Arrest and prosecute!!!!” “HOLY SHLIT,” tweeted Chaya Raichik of the far-right Libs of TikTok.

The way that the claim about 300,000 missing children made it out of Kennedy’s mouth helps to demonstrate how conspiracy theories function in the current, fever-dream version of the GOP. The claim has a long and increasingly convoluted pedigree in right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: versions circulated during the Biden administration, when a self-proclaimed HHS whistleblower named Tara Rhodas claimed the agency routinely released unaccompanied migrant children into the care of people affiliated with gangs like MS-13. Rhodas suspected that these sponsors would then traffic the children.

The claims are a pastiche of true and unproven: in one 2021 case highly publicized by Republican lawmakers, two children were sent to a home where their sponsors had suspected MS-13 ties. Other migrant children—in cases Republican lawmakers have been less excited to discuss—were sent to places where they were labor trafficked, forced to work in slaughterhouses, farms, and factories.

While the Biden administration may have helped create this situation by pressuring caseworkers to move children out of shelters and release them to sponsors as quickly as possible, Kennedy’s more QAnon-ish claim—that 300,000 children have simply vanished into thin air—seems to have its roots in a August 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General. That report found the government “could not monitor the location and status” of all unaccompanied minors known to be in the country, including some 291,000 who ICE had never made steps to remove, and another 32,000 who did not appear for court dates. The report did not state that any of the children had been trafficked. As an expert at the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program explained to CBS, this isn’t a problem of “missing kids” but one of “missing paperwork.”

It’s a very long walk from those facts to claiming that the children are “missing,” let alone being sex trafficked. But by in October 2024, JD Vance claimed during a debate with Governor Tim Walz that 300,000 children were missing. Trump gave a lurid version of the line in a December Time interview. “We have 325,000 children here during Democrats—and this was done by Democrats—who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead,” he said. “What I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents.” That month, incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested that the “missing” youth had been trafficked and pledged to track them down in an interview with the Washington Post where, with no apparent sense of irony or contradiction, he also discussed how the administration would bring back the family separation policy Trump deployed during his first term.

To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one’s brain to be thoroughly bathed in corrosive acid .

But while most people who heard about Kennedy’s claim greeted it with bafflement, reflexive outrage, or, rarely, demands for further proof, according to author and journalist Mike Rothschild, the QAnon community celebrated.

“Kennedy’s comments at the Trump cabinet meeting/praise-a-thon are a great example of a conspiracy theory that makes little sense outside the right wing influencer bubble, but a cause for celebration inside it,” Rothschild, who has written a book about QAnon and another on antisemitic conspiracy theories, explains.

Whether he knows it or not, Rothschild adds, “Kennedy is pushing hardcore QAnon-style moral panic to an audience of devotees who are desperate for Trump to finally sweep away the bad guys and deliver on the promises Q made years ago,” namely to uncover sex trafficking being conducted by high-level Democratic politicians.

“For people who aren’t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman,” Rothschild adds. But Q and its ilk are so mainstream on the right now that it’s finding a large and receptive audience.”

Embracing conspiracy theories has worked incredibly well for the current GOP and Trump administration, a way to keep their base captivated and profitably enraged. In one ongoing example, a February attempt to release Epstein names and flight logs to a group of conservative influencers quickly turned into a mess once it became clear the files weren’t new at all. Nonetheless, Attorney General Bondi has continued to insist new information on the case is forthcoming, claiming this week that the FBI is combing through “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children.” While Rep. Luna’s first JFK hearing did not produce the second gunman she’s said she’s in search of, she has pledged to keep working to provide “needed transparency about federal secrets to the American people,” including about the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

And while Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has provided no further information about the 300,000 children he claims are missing, there’s no question that their speculative existence will be mentioned again, whenever it might be politically profitable to do so.

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FEMA Will No Longer Go Door-to-Door to Assist Disaster Victims

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

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making significant changes to how it will respond to disasters on the ground this season, including ending federal door-to-door canvassing of survivors in disaster areas, WIRED has learned.

A memo reviewed by WIRED, dated May 2 and addressed to regional FEMA leaders from Cameron Hamilton, a senior official performing the duties of the administrator, instructs program offices to “take steps to implement” five “key reforms” for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire season.

Under the first reform, titled “Prioritize Survivor Assistance at Fixed Facilities,” the memo states that “FEMA will discontinue unaccompanied FEMA door-to-door canvassing to focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues, improving access to those in need, and increasing collaboration with [state, local, tribal, and territorial] partners and nonprofit service providers.”

“Going door-to-door, especially in critically hit areas, to share information is very important…Getting rid of it completely is really going to hamper some things.”

FEMA has for years deployed staff to travel door-to-door in disaster areas, interacting directly with survivors in their homes to give an overview of FEMA aid application processes and help them register for federal aid. This group of workers is part of a larger cadre often called FEMA’s “boots on the ground” in disaster areas.

Ending door-to-door canvassing, one FEMA worker says, will “severely hamper our ability to reach vulnerable people.” The assistance provided by workers going door-to-door, they say, “has usually focused on the most impacted and the most vulnerable communities where there may be people who are elderly or with disabilities or lack of transportation and are unable to reach Disaster Recovery Centers.” This person spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.

“Door-to-door canvassing is another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” Geoff Harbaugh, FEMA’s associate administrator for the Office of External Affairs tells WIRED in an email. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, FEMA is changing how it operates and reforming its policies to better support disaster survivors and the American people. President Trump’s recent executive orders empower states to effectively respond to natural disasters and provide resources at the community level.”

Todd DeVoe, the emergency management coordinator for the city of Inglewood, California, and the second vice president at the International Association of Emergency Managers, says that in his years of working in disaster management he has seen how many survivors don’t get information about recovery or resources without door-to-door outreach—despite emergency managers using strategies like direct mailers and radio and newspaper ads.

“Going door-to-door, especially in critically hit areas, to share information is very important,” he says. “There’s a need for it. Can it be done more efficiently? Probably, but getting rid of it completely is really going to hamper some things.”

FEMA’s door-to-door canvassing became a political flash point last year during Hurricane Milton, when an agency whistleblower alerted the conservative news site The Daily Wire that one official had told workers in Florida to avoid approaching homes with Trump yard signs. Former FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability during a hearing last year that the incident was isolated to one employee who had since been fired. The employee, in turn, claimed that she acted on orders from a superior and that the issue was a pattern of “hostile encounters” with survivors who had Trump yard signs.

Republicans on the Oversight committee alleged that they had received information indicating “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” throughout FEMA. In March, the agency fired three more employees following an internal investigation into the issue.

The Office of Professional Responsibility “investigation found no evidence that this was a systemic problem, nor that it was directed by agency or field leadership,” Hamilton wrote in a letter sent to Oversight chair James Comer.

The canvassing controversy made it into the White House’s 2026 budget, released Friday, which decries “woke FEMA grant programs” and proposes cutting $646 million from “non-disaster” FEMA programs.

“FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the President in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated,” the budget document states. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There is no mention in the FEMA memo of the investigation or recent controversy and no reasoning provided for ending the door-to-door canvassing process. FEMA has deployed door-to-door canvassing in states with federal disaster declarations approved under the Trump administration: An agency press release from March mentions teams going door-to-door in West Virginia following February’s severe storms.

The memo comes at a turbulent time for the agency as it prepares for disaster season. In late April, CNN reported that FEMA stood to lose around 20 percent of its staff in buyouts as part of cuts related to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Last week, Politico reported that the administration had stopped approving allocations for a crucial hazard-mitigation program just a few weeks after news broke that the agency would end one of the federal government’s biggest climate-adaptation programs.

Some of the other reforms in the memo include directives for the agency to “emphasize assistance available from other partners” over federal aid, as well as to emphasize efforts to rely on local- and state-run recovery centers rather than federally run ones, “reducing the need to establish FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers and optimizing support for state and locally led recovery efforts.” The memo emphasizes that the agency intends to “respect the primacy of states, territories, and Tribal Nations in disaster response.”

“Our role is to support our partners, not replace them,” the memo states. “FEMA does not act alone.”

DeVoe says that like many of the responsibilities being shifted from FEMA to local response, the task of surveying survivors door-to-door will now fall to local and state responders. These groups may be hard-pressed to find the budget and manpower, especially as federal programs and grants keep getting cut.

“California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Florida, Texas—they’re going to be OK,” he says. “It’s going to be those smaller states—are they going to be OK?”

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