The Army Veteran Arrested for Protesting at a St. Paul Church Was Just Set Free

Ian Austin, the Army veteran who was arrested in Minneapolis on Friday by federal agents for participating in an anti-ICE protest, has been released without conditions.

Austin was featured in a viral Mother Jones video last week in which he was protesting outside the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE is based and detainees are held. “When they say, ‘Why would you be out here?’ How the fuck could I not be out here?” he said at the time. “My nation is under attack.”

“He loves his country so much, and he sees coming here and standing up for the values that he truly believes in as an extension of that act of service.”

Austin was one of nine defendants, including journalist Don Lemon, who were taken into custody for participating in or reporting on a demonstration last month at a St. Paul church where a local ICE official serves as a pastor. They face federal charges, including for interfering with religious freedom in a place of worship.

The arrests have alarmed free speech advocates, who say the protesters were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.

“He loves his country so much,” said Sarah Gad, the defense attorney representing Austin, “and he sees coming here and standing up for the values that he truly believes in as an extension of that act of service.” Gad said that the gallery at Monday’s hearing was full of observers supporting Austin, including many veterans.

Austin said on Monday that he appreciated the support, but he felt uncomfortable that his case was getting so much attention. “As a white person, and as a veteran, it’s like, ‘Oh, some big deal,'” he said. “Meanwhile, families are being ripped apart.”

He said that he plans to continue protesting in the days to come, though he wants to make sure he’s not arrested again. “I’ve been pretty vocal and very willing to be on the front lines,” he said. “Now, I sort of have to shift my tack.”

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Report: Education Department’s “Efficiency” Layoffs Cost At Least $28 Million

The Education Department spent an estimated $28 to $38 million on attempted staff cuts last year at its Office of Civil Rights, according to a report from the US Government Accountability Office released Monday.

The department initiated a reduction in force last March, pushing nearly 50 percent of its more than 4,000-strong workforce onto administrative leave. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called the cuts a “commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”

Later that month, Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that the Secretary of Education should “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.”

At the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which enforces federal civil rights laws in schools and other institutions that receive Education Department funding, close to half its 575employees were put on leave in March. In October, they were officially laid off. In November, they were taken off the payroll. The department’s cuts were challenged in court, and in December, some fired staff were told to return to work.

This back-and-forth doesn’t scream “efficiency.” Andthe cuts to OCR did not, in fact, save money.

But they did have real consequences: From the beginning of the layoffs in March to September 23, Americans filed more than 9,000 federal complaints about discrimination in education. Of the 7,000 cases resolved, about 90 percent were thrown out.

From Trump’s first inauguration through the end of 2017, OCR reached a resolution agreement in more than 30 racial harassment cases. From his second inauguration through the end of 2025, it resolved only two, a review of public OCR data by NPR found. In 2017, the office reached about ten times as many agreements in disability cases than in 2025. And while even Trump’s first-term OCR resolved about 60 sexual harassment cases and 15 sexual assault cases in 2017, it did not reach a single agreement on either kind of case in 2025.

The Department of Education declined to comment regarding the cost of its staff cuts and the stark increase in civil rights complaint dismissals, citing the temporary government shutdown.

“Every child in America should be able to get a good education no matter where they live, what their religious beliefs are or whether or not they have a disability,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who commissioned the GAO report. “Instead, the Trump administration fired half of the Education Department employees working to protect the civil rights of students and wasted as much as $38 million in taxpayer dollars by preventing investigators from doing their jobs. That is unacceptable.”

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The Power of Mocking Trump’s Pathetic Monsters

Over a few weeks this January, two Minneapolis sisters repeatedly left their homes and headed out to mock, insult, and record Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, who until recently was leading the disastrous and violent anti-immigrant operation of the city. The first time they heard him speak, the women, who uploaded their street surveillance of Bovino to TikTok, howled with laughter: Bovino’s voice is somewhat high and surprisingly nasal. “Wait, your voice is not what I expected,” one of the women hollered through a megaphone, sounding near tears with hilarity. “Speak again! Talk again!”

“When I realized that I had eyeballs on these videos, I had some power.”

The first time they had seen Bovino, things went differently. The two women, who are both in their 20s and asked that they not be named or have their videos linked, were standing on a public sidewalk after spotting ICE vehicles nearby, when Bovino walked out of a local TV-affiliate’s building flanked by masked men.

“I had my megaphone,” one sister told me. “And I just screamed at him with all the rage in my body from across the street.” While righteously venting was, she says, “cathartic,” she noticed that Bovino also seemed to enjoy it. “He was energized by it. It was so gross.”

With their anger seeming to backfire, the sisters “realized we need to strategize,” she says. After some research, “we chose mockery as a deliberate tactic,” she says, a way to try to respond to and puncture the image that Bovino has carefully crafted. “His social media presence, his news appearances—everything he does—leans into these theatrics,” she says. “He posts what I call thirst traps to his Instagram, these edited videos of him walking around and detaining people. It was so clear that it was the attention that he wanted.”

Luck was on their side; the next time they saw Bovino again, he looked at the sisters and chirped, “All right! Title 8 immigration enforcement!”

Her laughing response of borderline hysteria worked, she says: “You can see in his body language that it just shuts him down.” The video went viral, and prompted the sisters to create a series of riotously funny and often uncomfortable videos based on their continued birddogging of Bovino and the agents accompanying him.

“I wanted to put a video out there so other people could see him and make sure they could recognize him in public and make sure he didn’t have peace,” the Minnesota woman explains. “I wanted to alter public perception of him. He works so visibly hard to portray a powerful image. When I realized that I had eyeballs on these videos, I had some power myself to alter that perception.”

Before his apparent demotion and unceremonious return to the arid confines of El Centro, California, Bovino had come to stand in for the proudly amoral, violent, lie-riddled way that ICE has conducted operations in Minnesota and elsewhere. He’s also an excellent representation of how monumentally cheesy these guys are. The Border Patrol commander, who is, as many protesters have pointed out, quite diminutive in stature, likes to stride around in a long military-style green coat and a questionably useful leather cross-body strap, both of which clearly resemble outfits donned by Nazi SS commanders. “Get your Hitler coat off, you little bitch,” one of the Minneapolis women recommended during one of their on-camera interactions. (In a sympathetic interview with the outlet News Nation, Bovino claimed that the coat is “Border Patrol issued,” adding, “I’ve had it for over 25 years.”)

More broadly, the clothes that ICE and CBP agents wear are a fine example of the powerful blend of menace, deadly incompetence, and total lack of drip they constantly display. Having made anonymity a hallmark, they virtually always appear masked, sometimes sporting neck gaiters with skulls on them, when they’re not wearing what GQ has called “Dropshipped Normcore,” “a kind of algorithmically-influenced, masculine mish-mash of the kind of high-crowned baseball hats, tight graphic T-shirts, open plaid button-ups, slim stretch denim jeans or cargo pants, and anonymous walking sneakers or trail shoes.” The author and illustrator Molly Crabapple has called them a “Temu death squad.” It’s no surprise that masked ICE agents slipping on (real) ice have provoked such intense hilarity that Homeland Security officials apparently instructed FEMA workers to avoid using the term “ice” in recent winter storm warnings, to avoid having their posts “being turned into internet fodder.”

It is, of course, not just ICE and CBP who look and sound like tremendous dorks while doing real and frightening damage. The Trump administration has adopted a cruel, gross, and weird way of communicating, blending moldy internet memes with overt white supremacy. The way they perform impunity when they are caught doing that is also a blend of chilling and deeply uncool. After Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Twin Cities activist was arrested after allegedly disrupting a church service, the White House was caught circulating a manipulated image showing her in tears. (Actual photos of the arrest show her looking calm and serious as she’s led away.) After The Guardian broke that story, the White House responded with what they clearly considered to be an epic clapback. As deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr posted, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

The response from the American public has been to continue making fun of this administration.

“The memes will continue” is incredibly weak: it sounds like something Elon Musk would tweet in his frenzied and thus far unsuccessful efforts to be funny online. The White House’s memes about taking over Greenland last month also had an unpleasantly Musk-like aroma: an AI-generated image of Donald Trump walking hand-in-hand with a penguin that is holding an American flag, for instance, along with the words “Embrace the penguin.” (There are no penguins in Greenland, or really anywhere in the northern hemisphere.)

These attempts at meme-based relevance go hand-in-hand with all the unsuccessful pivots and impersonations that people in the Trump orbit have tried to look cool, culturally relevant or even, God help us, badass: Katie Miller’s excruciatingly dull fascist wine mom podcast, say, or Pete Hegseth’s American flag-lined suit, camo ties, and ongoing impression of Slim Pickens‘ atomic bomb-riding cowboy character in Dr. Strangelove. There’s also JD Vance pretending he enjoys the Internet jokes about him having sex with a couch. All of these gambits try—and fail—to serve the same purpose: to make these people look cool, funny, or with it while they advance a profoundly unpopular agenda.

Not surprisingly, the response from a large sector of the American public has been to continue making fun of this administration, from our increasingly exasperated and radicalized late night hosts—minus the always gutless Jimmy Fallon—to Minnesota protesters braving subzero temperatures to throw snowballs at ICE vehicles, pour a little freezing water on the ground, and let Greg Bovino know his coat looks stupid. Even world leaders openly mock Trump, as in a viral video from earlier this year of the leaders of France, Azerbaijan, and Armenia joking about Trump’s inability to keep the later two countries straight, or who might be at war with whom.

Trump’s opponents have tried this before: the former-reality TV star was treated like a joke almost right until the moment he won the 2016 election. It was hard not to, what with his surreal Baked Alaska hair, his ridiculous braggadocio, his weird grudge against windmills, and other endless things about him to mock—physically, financially, and spiritually. Recall, if you will, that the Huffington Post classified Donald Trump under “entertainment” news until, at the end of 2015, they had to stop doing that. Personally, in the time I worked at the feminist website Jezebel, we came up with dozens of creative nicknames to describe the then-candidate, including ones like “future leader of the free world” that I imagine were somewhat funny at the time.

Srdja Popovic, a self-described “revolution consultant” whose activism helped overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, calls mocking the powerful “laughtivism”—using humor and creativity to effect profound social change. The Minnesota woman says that in their video-recorded beclowning of Greg Bovino, she and her sister happened on a central principle of mocking a powerful public figure, one that Popovic also understood: forcing the target into a situation where he would wind up looking silly no matter what. Popovic calls it a “dilemma action.”

“We put him in a lose-lose situation,” the Minnesota woman says. “He could’ve kept talking and we would make fun of his voice, or he shuts up and we looked like we shut him down.”

Dictators and despots understand the dangers of humor: early in his rule, Vladimir Putin was reportedly enraged by a depiction of him as an ugly, weird-looking puppet on “Kukly,” a show put out by the then-independent TV channel NTV. He demanded his puppet avatar never appear again and the show, as the New Yorker has written, cheekily obliged: a subsequent episode showed Putin as various weird manifestations of God, like “as a burning bush and a storm cloud.”

In Nazi Germany, people also mocked Reich officials for being unpopular, incompetent, sweaty losers; so-called “whisper jokes” proliferated as a way to express discontent. Germans did this even when the stakes were deadly: in 1943, a woman named Marianne K cracked a joke about Hitler standing atop a radio tower with with Goering, trying to come up with something that would cheer up Berliners. “Why don’t you jump?” Goering suggests. After someone ratted her out, Marianne was soon executed.

By clumsily attempting to get in on the jokes, the people in charge try to defuse their power.

In an echo that might sound familiar today, Hitler and other Reich officials also took their own stabs at humor to make themselves more popular: a New York Times article from 1940, with the unfortunate headline “Hitler’s Fun,” says that a recent speech by the dictator was full of “merry quips,” adding, “He was very jovial about the thousands and thousands of bombs he promised to drop on England nightly for every hundred the British raiders scatter over Germany.”

By 1944, mockery was firmly entrenched in Germany as a form of dissent, the Times reported, including widespread parodies of popular Nazi songs. “None of the joking is very brilliant humor,” the paper sniffed, “some descending to gutter level, but showing, nevertheless, the general discontent with the Nazi regime on the part of vast numbers who have been deprived of other means of registering their disapproval.”

The danger with merely making jokes, then as now, is that they serve as a way to let off steam without effecting actual change. The Nazis, for instance, tried to at first stem the tide of parody songs, as the Times reported, before eventually thinking the better of it: “Goebbels evidently has decided on second thought that this sort of activity was a safety valve that would be dangerous to remove.” Similarly, JD Vance has not only pretended to love being called a couch-fucker, but, on Halloween, dressed as one of the memes of himself that has circulated online. By clumsily attempting to get in on the joke, the people in charge try to defuse the power those jokes have against them.

These days, it feels borderline delusional to think it will do any good to mock Trump or the various maladaptive, malevolent dorks around him. Every joke that could be made has been, and all of them have bounced off him like a million arrows against the carapace of an armadillo streaked with cheap self-tanner. (See, I couldn’t resist one more, and look where it’s gotten us: nowhere.) Most credit for how Minnesota is prevailing against ICE should go to serious, effective, broad-scale activism, resistance, and community solidarity—and not just jokes about Greg Bovino.

Yet the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. And in a way, jokes about Trump, ICE, and all the rest of them are a way of reasserting and insisting upon observable reality: what’s taking place is shocking, reprehensible—and also powerfully wack. When then-vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Trump and his gang “weird,” it went over remarkably well, a rare example of a politician simply saying what so much of the public was thinking.

Humor alone will not save us. But perhaps it allows us to continue the painful task of looking at what’s really happening here, and, in the words of the artist Barbara Kruger, “the ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers” who are doing it to us.

The day that we spoke, the Minneapolis woman was digesting Bovino’s departure, and Tom Homan’s installation. “I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and learn about the new guy,” she told me. If ICE ever actually leaves her city, she adds, “I think sharing what we as a community have learned with the other cities that they’re going to go to will be huge. I think we’re going to be a model for the resistance of the occupation. I hope my videos showed one way of doing that, but there are so many more.”

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Trump Goes Public With Plan to “Take Over” Elections

Days after the FBI seized 700 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, President Trump called on Republicans “to take over the voting in at least 15 places” in advance of the next election, raising new fears that his administration plans to interfere in the midterms and beyond.

“Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump told former deputy FBI director and conservative commentator Dan Bongino on his radio show on Monday. “We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get, with a court order, the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things come out.”

Trump is once again saying the quiet part out loud, suggesting that the FBI raid in Georgia was a prelude to how his administration intends to interfere in state and local election processes in advance of the midterms.

There are still many unanswered questions about the Georgia raid, such as why a criminal investigation has been opened into an election that took place six years ago and was audited three times and why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present for the operation when she is barred by law from participating in domestic law enforcement operations. The New York Times reported on Monday that Gabbard called Trump and put him on speakerphone with FBI agents who took part in the raid, which represents yet another erosion of democratic norms.

I wrote last week that “the raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago.” Trump confirmed that on Monday, making clear that his administration’s end goal is to seize control of election administration at the state and local level to prevent his party from losing power.

As Trump and the GOP became more unpopular, the tactics they’ll use to attempt to remain in control are sure to become more radical and extreme.

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Snowflake Trump Can’t Take Kennedy Center Heat

Donald Trump announced on Sunday night that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will close its doors for two years while it undergoes renovation, following artists calling off performances and ticket sales nosediving.

The cultural institution is scheduled to close on July 4, “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country,” to undergo “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” and become “the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” the president posted on Truth Social.

But it remains unclear what renovations need to be completed. The Kennedy Center underwent a $250 million expansion in 2019.

In his announcement, the president stated that “financing is completed, and fully in place.” The One Big Beautiful Bill Act set aside $257 million for “necessary expenses for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures” for the Kennedy Center—possibly, as he previously stated, to adorn the building with “24 karat gold” similar to his remodeling of the Oval Office.

Trump noted that his decision will be “totally subject to Board approval”—a Board that he took over after kicking out many Joe Biden appointees, handpicking replacements, and declaring himself chairman last February.

In December, the president renamed the Kennedy Center “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” As I wrote then, only Congress holds the authority to rename the building. President Lyndon Johnson in 1964signed a law that designates the arts institution as a “living memorial” to the late President Kennedy.

Members of Kennedy’s family condemned the decision to close the cultural center. The former president’s niece, Maria Shriver, ridiculed Trump Sunday on X, writing a “translation” of his announcement: “It’s best for me to close this center down and rebuild a new center that will bear my name, which will surely get everybody to stop talking about the fact that everybody’s canceling… right?”

Translation: It has been brought to my attention that due to the name change (but nobody’s telling me it’s due to the name change), but it’s been brought to my attention that entertainers are canceling left and right, and I have determined that since the name change no one wants… https://t.co/BDsjQeOAC9

— Maria Shriver (@mariashriver) February 2, 2026

“He can change the name, shut the doors, and demolish the building. He can try to kill JFK,” Jack Schlossberg, Kennedy’s grandson, wrote the same night on X. “But JFK is kept alive by us now rising up to remove Donald Trump, bring him to justice, and restore the freedoms generations fought for.”

In a Monday statement, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has jurisdiction over public buildings, and an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, said Trump’s year-long attempt to “commandeer the Kennedy Center as a clubhouse for his friends and political allies and install leadership who will satisfy his every whim” has led to the destruction of the cultural institution.

“With his hostile takeover leading to artists’ withdrawals and declining ticket sales, he is covering up his failures by shuttering a national landmark that belongs to the American people,” Whitehouse continued.

Whitehouse launched an investigation into corruption at the Kennedy Center under Trump-appointed interim president Richard Grenell following the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee obtaining documents revealing millions of dollars in lost revenue and luxury spending. According to Whitehouse’s Monday statement, Grenell has not provided financial transparency, despite public promises to do so.

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Something Unexpected Is Happening With Norway’s Polar Bears

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

Polar bears became the poster child for the peril of climate change for obvious reasons: They hunt seals from the ice, and as fossil fuels warm the planet, the ice where these bears live is melting.

For more than three decades, scientists have been warning that climate change could drive polar bear populations extinct. That message infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming.

But as scientists are continuing to learn, the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated.

In 2022, scientists published a study showing that polar bears in southeastern Greenland were able to use glacial ice instead of sea ice to hunt, sheltering them from some of the impacts of warming. And a study published late last year revealed some changes in polar bear DNA that may help them adapt to hotter weather.

“There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.”

Now, research in the journal Scientific Reports adds yet another wrinkle of hope for the species. The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute.

“I was surprised,” Aars told Vox from Svalbard. “I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.”

The new study makes clear that, in other regions, the loss of sea ice from warming is indeed linked to ailing polar bear populations. In Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, for example, researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s. Climate change remains the largest threat to these animals.

Yet, there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them.

Perhaps, then, polar bears aren’t the best mascot for the climate crisis—a point some advocates have been making for a while—especially when there are countless other species imperiled by rising temperatures.

Polar bears need fat to survive the harsh Arctic cold; that’s why they eat blubbery seals. Seals, meanwhile, need ice to rest and birth pups. Without that ice, polar bears have a hard time finding and catching them.

Since the late 1970s, the Arctic—the northernmost region of the planet, including parts of Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Russia—has lost more than 27,000 square miles of summer ice. That’s an area larger than the state of West Virginia. Some estimates suggest that the region could be ice-free by the middle of the century, even under optimistic emissions scenarios.

That melting ice is what’s harming polar bear populations in Canada’s Hudson Bay; the Beaufort Sea, located north of Alaska and the Yukon; and Baffin Bay in Greenland. And it’s why they’re listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, a global authority on endangered species.

But the story in Svalbard—an icy archipelago in the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia—is different.

Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the new study, measure a polar bear in Svalbard.Jon Aars/Norwegian Polar Institute

Between 1992 and 2019, scientists in Svalbard darted hundreds of polar bears from helicopters and measured their bodies. Then they compared those measurements to sea ice conditions, such as the number of ice-free days, and other climate variables.

Remarkably, the number of days with no ice in the region increased by roughly 100 during that period. And yet, as the authors found, the body condition of both male and female polar bears—i.e., how fat and healthy they are—increased from 2000 onward. Female bears were actually in worse condition when the sea ice lasted longer.

Often, the message about polar bears is “100 percent doom,” said Kristin Laidre, a polar bear researcher at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. “But that’s not true,” Laidre told me. “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.”

If polar bears in Svalbard are healthy, that means they’re finding food. So what are they eating?

One possibility, said Aars, the lead author, is that there may be higher densities of ringed seals, their primary food source, in years with less ice, so they’re easier to catch. Even if polar bears have less time to catch the seals—because there are fewer days with ice—they can put on loads of weight quickly and rely on that for months.

The bears may also be eating other animals on land that don’t require ice. Reindeer on the archipelago are increasing, for example, and Aars says he’s seen bears eat them. Walrus populations are increasing, too. Although polar bears can’t easily kill a walrus, they can scavenge their tusked, fat-filled carcass when walruses die from other causes.

“Bears in Svalbard are potentially changing their diet, and that might account for the increase in body condition,” said John Iacozza, a senior instructor and polar bear expert at the University of Manitoba. That’s a luxury that polar bears elsewhere might not have. “You wouldn’t see the same effect happening in Western Hudson Bay, just because the availability of other species is less,” said Iacozza, who was not involved in the new research.

While the Svalbard bears might be fine for now, researchers still worry about the long-term impacts of warming in the region. “We do think there’s a threshold,” Aars told me. “The difficult part is that we don’t know what it is.”

No other animal has been so closely tied to climate change as the polar bear. It was on the cover of TIME’s 2006 global warming issue. It was featured in Al Gore’s seminal documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which premiered the same year_._ It was used in funding campaigns for environmental groups. (One year, I even dressed up as a drowning polar bear for Halloween with a friend who went as a melting ice cap.)

The bear’s symbolism is rooted in good science. Those early studies were in places like Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, where these Arctic apex predators were clearly dying from melting sea ice. Media outlets amplified the most sensational conclusions—and they stuck.

That’s partly because the message is simple, Laidre said: Polar bears need ice, and warming is making it disappear. “The relationship between [climate and] an animal that needs a platform to eat is easy to wrap your brain around,” she said.

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Texas Democrat Flips State Senate District That Trump Won by 17 Points

A Democrat and union leader won a special election on Saturday to represent a Texas state Senate district that Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2024.

GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called the result, a 57-43 victory for Taylor Rehmet, “a wake-up call for Republicans across Texas” in an early Sunday post on X. Republicans currently hold every statewide elected office in Texas.

“Our voters cannot take anything for granted,” Patrick continued, calling out low voter turnout in special elections.

According to the Texas Tribune, Patrick gave $300,000 to the campaign of Rehmet’s opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, through his PAC, Texas Senate Leadership Fund. Trump also posted multiple get-out-the-vote messages on behalf of Wambsganss on Truth Social in the days leading up to the election.

Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and the leader of his local machinist’s union, spent $242,174—nearly 10 times less than Wambsganss—according to campaign finance reports reviewed by Fort Worth Report.

“It’s clear as day that this disastrous Republican agenda is hurting working families in Texas and across the country, which is why voters in red, blue, and purple districts are putting their faith in candidates like Taylor Rehmet,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “This overperformance is a warning sign to Republicans across the country.”

Wambsganss is the chief communications officer for Patriot Mobile, a cell phone company that calls itself “America’s ONLY Christian Conservative Wireless Provider.” Wambsganss and Patriot Mobile have helped Republicans place candidates supporting conservative Christian policies on North Texas school boards. This represents part of the state’s push for book bans and dedicated time for prayer in class.

Last November, Rehmet earned nearly 48 percent of the vote, just three percentage points shy of an outrightelection win, leading to Saturday’s runoff. In that election, he ran against two Republicans, who together split 52 percent of the vote. Rehmet’s victory in the run-off was that much more significant because he faced only Wambsganns.

Rehmet’s win adds to the recent record of Democrat victories in statewide elections—including gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia.

While Democrats have celebrated Rehmet’s win as a harbinger of what’s to come in this year’s midterms, some political observers have cautioned that the result may not signify a broader Republican reckoning.

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The Melania Movie Is an American Obscenity

Even in the Trumpian corner of New Jersey, where I chose to witness Melania, the $75 million Amazon-produced film about the first lady, I predicted that I would be watching alone. This is, after all, a historically bad time for theatrical releases, and initial forecasts for Melania‘s opening weekend had been dismal. Yet there they were, at least a dozen attendees at a 10 a.m. screening on a frigid Saturday morning. I appeared to be the only one who required breakfast wine for what was about to unfold.

What flashed across the screen over the next hour and 48 minutes can best be described as an interminable slog of airbrushed nothingness. After all, only so much entertainment can be wrung out of footage of a woman in snakeskin Louboutins traveling from Mar-a-Lago to New York and back again in the lead-up to the inauguration. And yet, for nearly two hours, the film turns on the premise that its subject is some kind of fashion genius, resulting in some of the most stultifying scenes I have ever seen committed to film. What other way is there to describe extended, drawn-out shows of Melania getting fitted for her inauguration wardrobe, only to be followed by scenes of her walking across gilded ballrooms in that very wardrobe? A few other pre-inauguration scenes follow, including a meeting between Melania and Brigitte Macron over Zoom. But they all appear brief, choreographed, and wooden. Throughout, Melania claims to have a leading role in the preparations for her husband’s inauguration, but there is scant evidence of actual decision-making by the first lady.

What an obscenity to hear this woman employ the language of shared humanity, as the Trump administration kills Americans and systematically kidnaps immigrants and their kids.

But Melania is more revelatory in its world-historical vapidness than it might seem. Consider that Melania appears to go out of her way to foreground her journey from Slovenian immigrant to American first lady, a story she says serves as “a reminder of why I respect this nation so deeply.” Similarly, the film gives rare space to the immigrants in Melania’s inner circle, including her chief interior designer, Tham Kannalikham, who opens up about her journey from Laos to now decorating the White House, as well as Melania’s father, who is seen beaming with pride in his American daughter. Absent in Viktor Knavs’ film debut is the context of the “chain migration” pathway through which he and his late wife became US citizens, the very same policy targeted by their son-in-law.

“Everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights,” Melania says at one point. “Never take them for granted, because in the end, no matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.”

What an obscenity to hear this woman employ the language of shared humanity, as the Trump administration kills Americans and systematically kidnaps immigrants and their children. But as galling as they were, the remarks were instructive of both how Melania views her American story and the same anti-immigrant sentiments with which some, in order to prove that they belong here, yank the ladder up from newcomers seeking the same opportunities. Such immigrants, like Melania, cast themselves as the “good immigrant” who came here the “right way.” But the first lady appears to do this despite reports, including our own, that she may have initially been working here without a visa. In other words, she may have violated immigration law. Meanwhile, the immigrants Melania now surrounds herself with, like Tham, are props for that very narrative—with zero mention of her husband’s endless cruelty. But why would there be in a piece of abject propaganda—backed by one of the richest men in the world as he prepares to gut the Washington Post—that many crew members asked not to be credited on?

As a purely cinematic experience, Melania, a ghastly parade of fun-house mirror herstory, will certainly be relegated to the footnotes of her family’s deeper atrocities. I would have asked what my fellow attendees thought, but not even a plastic cup of wine could help me stomach the film in its entirety. I left 15 minutes before the credits rolled in, incomplete as they were.

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Federal Agents Launch Tear Gas at Nonviolent Anti-ICE Protesters—Including Children

A peaceful protest in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday broke into chaos as federal agents deployed tear gas on demonstrators—including families with young children.

Thousands of protesters marched through the city and gathered in the blocks surrounding the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. According to the Oregonian, just minutes after the crowd arrived at the facility, federal agents launched tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades after some demonstrators approached the security gate.

Labor leaders from over 20 unions led the march to the ICE building, with many protesters participating as part of the “Labor Against ICE” rally.

Video shared with me by attendee at the ICE protest in Portland, OR earlier this evening where federal agents tear gassed peaceful protestors—including children, disabled and elderly:

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) 2026-02-01T04:09:52.219Z

Portland City Councilor Mitch Green wrote in a social media post that he was tear gassed in the crowd: “Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions. I expect to see enforcement of our city code prohibiting the use of tear gas.”

I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions. I expect to see enforcement of our city code prohibiting the use of tear gas.

— Mitch Green (@councilorgreen.bsky.social) 2026-02-01T01:23:34.948Z

Portland’s city code bans selling, furnishing, transporting, carrying, possessing, or using tear gas weapons within the city limits. The code does not apply to “members of the armed forces of the State of Oregon and the United States in the performance of their official duties,” but federal agents are not exempted under the statute.

The Portland Police Bureau posted on X on Saturday night that they closed a major street to prevent drivers from being affected by the tear gas.

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson released a statement late Saturday night, saying that it was a “peaceful daytime protest” that “posed no danger to federal forces.”

“To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave,” he continued. “To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children. Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets.”

Wilson said later in the lengthy statement that the city would carry out an ordinance that went into effect in January that imposes financial penalties on facilities where chemical agents are deployed.

The crackdown against protesters in Portland comes one day after a nationwide uprising where hundreds of demonstrations took place across the country to demand federal agents leave American towns and cities.

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In a Warming World, Winter Olympics Organizers Will Have to Adapt

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

With an icy white sheet still blanketing much of the Eastern United States after an intense storm this week, it’s hard to imagine a future with less snow at this time of year.

But over time, climate change has decreased snowpack by as much as 20 percent per decade in parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

This trend is already causing trouble for the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, global events reliant on snow to succeed. In a landmark 2024 study, researchers found that potential host locations are dwindling as temperatures warm.

Just weeks before this year’s Olympics-Paralympics events kick off in Italy, scientists published a follow-up study analyzing how the games can adapt. The most effective option: shifting when they are held.

Disappearing snow isn’t just affecting Olympians. Around the world, the warming climate is shortening recreational ski and snowboarding seasons, which could have cascading impacts for the towns that have long relied on this winter economy.

For more than a century, the Winter Olympics have been held almost every four years in snowy cities across the globe, from the first games in Chamonix, France, to the most recent in Beijing. The Paralympic Games take place in the same location shortly afterward.

Olympic competitions such as alpine skiing and snowboarding are dependent on consistent snowpack. Rapid levels of warming across the Northern Hemisphere disrupt that. In 2010, Vancouver saw a record-warm January, partially due to the weather phenomenon known as El Niño, and had to drive and fly in enough snow to fill 20 Big Bens for snowboarding and freestyle skiing events, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

Warm weather also threatens the quality of the snow already on the ground, as shown at Russia’s Sochi Olympics and Paralympics in 2014, which saw an uptick in injury rates compared with the previous games as athletes struggled in the slush.

With this in mind, the International Olympic Committee, which governs the games, recently commissioned a study to determine future climate impacts. Researchers analyzed 93 regions around the world that have previously hosted the Olympic Winter and Paralympic Games to determine whether they’d be “climate-reliable” by the 2050s. Under the most likely emissions scenario, only 52 locations met the criteria for the Olympics and just 22 for the Paralympics, given that it is slightly later in the season, according to their 2024 study.

But there are ways to adapt, according to co-author Daniel Scott, a climate expert at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In a follow-up study published last week, Scott and his colleagues found that shifting both the Olympic and Paralympic Games to earlier dates could increase the number of climate-suitable host countries, particularly for the Paralympics.

As I reported last year, experts have called for a similar timing change for the Summer Olympics to reduce the risk of extreme heat, which has harmed both competitors’ and fans’ health in recent years.

It’s a seemingly simple shift but comes with its own set of complexities. Moving the Winter Olympics up a few weeks would mean the games are happening right after the holiday season. Cities may struggle to secure pre-games housing, ensure there’s sufficient infrastructure, or find volunteers shortly after Christmas.

Another added nuisance, according to Scott: Television rights. Broadcasters and advertisers pay billions and plan years ahead for the rights to air the Olympics, which provides the financial foundation for the games. Changing the time of the games could disrupt this model, at least in the short term.

Other experts have pointed out that organizers must reckon with the Olympic Games’ own rampant emissions to secure a future less threatened by climate change. Cities often raze ecosystems to build new facilities, companies use copious amounts of energy to broadcast the competitions, and people travel from around the world in carbon-emitting planes to spectate.

For the Winter Games specifically, environmentalists are concerned about the growing amount of artificial snow cities must pump out to supplement dwindling natural supplies. In 2022, Beijing made Olympics history as the first host to use artificial snow almost exclusively to support the games.

It was a mammoth task. China pulled water from key reservoirs to help create a wintry snowscape in a historically dry city. But critics said the effort strained water supplies for local communities, disrupted soil and plant growth, and used large amounts of energy.

The 2026 Olympics is in a snowier region, the Italian Alps. But still, the International Olympic Committee told the Associated Press it has produced more than 2 million cubic yards of artificial snow for the upcoming games.

Since the last time Italy’s Cortina d’Ampezzo hosted in 1956, February temperatures have warmed in the area by 6.4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central.

Environmentalists have pointed to the climate feedback loop this can create: As places pump out more artificial snow, the emissions from this process—if fossil fuels are used—feed the climate change that will reduce future natural snowpack.

Artificial snow is becoming similarly important for recreational winter sports as temperatures rise. Some resorts have taken to stockpiling snow under giant insulating blankets to keep it from melting during warmer seasons, WIRED reports. But these efforts are costly, and it may soon become untenable for certain regions in the Northern Hemisphere, including some parts of the Northeastern US such as New York and Pennsylvania, to save or make enough snow for a lucrative ski operation.

Scott told me there will be “winners and losers” as winter resort towns face global warming. “As some of those businesses go out of business, the others are there to pick up market share, if demand stays the same,” he said.

Though Scott recognizes the energy and water required to produce machine-made snow, he believes the sustainability of snowmaking gets a bit of a bad rep. He noted that up to 90 percent of the water is returned to the same watershed once the snow melts, and the process likely has a lower emissions footprint than traveling farther to ski elsewhere or flying to watch the Olympics.

Nonetheless, winter sport enthusiasts—professional and amateur—will have to adapt to changing conditions. A survey of Olympic winter athletes and coaches from 20 countries found 90 percent had concerns about how climate change will affect the future of their sport.

“When it comes to the Olympics, you hope you deliver [athletes] the best conditions possible,” Scott said. “These people have trained their whole damn lives for these things.”

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In Scathing Ruling, Federal Judge Orders Release of Liam Ramos From Detention

A federal judge on Saturday ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from an immigration detention facility outside San Antonio. Ramos, in the blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, who became another symbol of the cruelty of ICE agents, was detained by federal agents earlier this month in a suburban Minneapolis neighborhood—an incident that has since drawn immense outrage.

Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas has ruled that the detention of Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was unconstitutional. They are both asylum seekers.

In a scathing opinion, the judge wrote that the father and son “seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law,” adding that immigration agents were “traumatizing children.”

The father and son’s case “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” the judge noted.

Biery wrote of the detainment: “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency.”

According to school officials in Minnesota, on January 20, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the father as he and Liam were on their way home from school pickup. Agents then reportedly used the child as “bait” to knock on his front door to see if anyone else was home, Zena Stenvik, the superintendent for the Columbia Heights Public Schools district, said. A photo of a federal agent holding onto the backpack of Liam went viral, sparking intense criticism.

Writing in the Washington Post, Phillip Kennicott noted, “This is an image of universal moral urgency, akin to a small number of photographs that once upon a time had the power to change our behavior, away from cruelty or indifference and in the direction of basic decency.”

Related

They Want to Tell You a Kid With a Spider-Man Backpack Is Evil

The father and son were quickly sent to the Texas detention center, where Liam reportedly has been sick, according to his mother.

Judge Biery accused the federal government of “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” and “that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment.” At the end of the ruling, he includes that now indelible photo of Liam with two Bible verses. Matthew 19:14, which quotes Jesus: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”

And John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”

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Trump’s SNAP Rules Are About to Imperil Food Access for Millions

Veterans, people aging out of foster care, and parents of teenagers are just a few of the groups who will face dire consequences from new work requirements for people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, on Sunday, February 1.

Expected to impact millions of Americans and cause around two million recipients to stop receiving benefits altogether, these changes stem from President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that passed in July. The GOP bill will reduce SNAP funding by approximately $186 billion over 10 years—a cut of around 20 percent.

SNAP currently helps provide food to more than 42 million Americans each month—more than two**–**thirds of whom are elderly, disabled, or children. To qualify for SNAP, households must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line —which, as of 2026, [stands][2] at $15,960 for a single person, $27,320 for a three-person household, and $38,680 for a five-person household.

Typically, adults who are eligible for SNAP can receive benefits for three months within a 36-month period before needing to fulfill additional work requirements, such as getting employment or attending a work training program. Many groups of people are granted exceptions to the work requirements depending on their abilities and life circumstances. The new requirements, however, target some of these groups.

Starting Sunday, February 1, able-bodied individuals between the ages of 18 and 65 without dependents must be working or attending a work program for 80 hours or more per month to receive benefits. Before the GOP bill’s passage, the age limit for work requirements was 55. And, while parents and household members with dependents under the age of 18 were previously exempt from the requirements, those exceptions will now only apply to families with dependents under the age of 14.

Certain other groups facing unique challenges were also able to receive benefits without fulfilling certain requirements, but will now be forced to comply with the new rules. These groups include veterans, people ages 24 and under who recently aged out of foster care, and people who are unhoused.

According to a Congressional Budget Office [report][3] from August 2025, these new provisions could reduce participation in SNAP by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month from 2025 to 2034.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took questions on the SNAP program on November 4, 2025.Andrew Harnik/GETTY

The power of individual states to provide benefits during difficult hiring periods is also being affected. Moving forward, state leaders can only temporarily extend benefits beyond three months if the unemployment rate in an area is at least 10 percent. The national unemployment rate is, according to a January [report][4] from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 4.4 percent.

According to the Trump administration, these new rules are aimed at eliminating what they say is fraud and “reflect the importance of work and responsibility,” as detailed on the United States Department of Agriculture website. The USDA is the agency that funds SNAP. Yet, according to an April 2025 [report][5] from the Congressional Research Service, “SNAP fraud is rare.” Sometimes, an occasional error may occur through bureaucratic mistakes such as duplicate enrollments—though this does not constitute fraud, the report explained.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has [lauded][6] the new rules, saying in an interview with Fox Business on Friday that “the American dream is not being on [a] food stamp program.” She added, “That should be a hand up, not a handout.”

People who receive SNAP benefits repeatedly have faced uncertainty recently, including during the longest government shutdown in American history last year, when millions of Americans didn’t receive their food benefits. Unlike during other government shutdowns, the Trump administration [opted not to][7] use contingency funds to keep SNAP operating while Congress worked on a deal.

The administration last year also [threatened][8] to withhold federal funding for food stamps for more than 20 Democratic-led states that refused to hand over sensitive personal data—such as Social Security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses—about their recipients, reportedly in an effort to root out fraud. Democratic leaders refused, in part, because they worried this data would be used for immigration enforcement.

Daytona Beach residents line up in their cars during a free food distribution for recipients of SNAP on November 9, 2025. The US Supreme Court said on November 7 that the Trump administration does not have to immediately pay SNAP food benefits defunded during the government shutdown. MIGUEL J. RODRIGUEZ CARRILLO/GETTY

Some people who are legally in the country but are not citizens have had access to SNAP benefits. These rules have also changed in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The GOP move will affect scores of people legally present in the US, including those who came to the country under asylum and refugee laws or had urgent humanitarian needs, such as being survivors of domestic violence or human trafficking. The new work guidelines risk adding more confusion to the mix.

“These work requirements aren’t really about promoting work. They’re about dehumanizing people and attacking the ‘other,'” Joel Berg, CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free America, [told][6] ABC News. “Most SNAP recipients are pro-work, and most SNAP recipients are already working, or children, or people with disabilities, or older Americans. So all this is sort of a diversionary debate.”

And now, he explained, “more Americans will go hungry.”

[2]: http://$15,960 for a single person, $27,320 for a three-person household, and $38,680 for a five-person household. [3]: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-08/61367-SNAP.pdf [4]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm [5]: https://www.congress.gov/crs%5Fexternal%5Fproducts/IF/PDF/IF10860/IF10860.7.pdf [6]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/new-snap-work-requirements-set-effect-feb-1/story?id=129698605&cid=social%5Ftwitter%5Fabcn [7]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/food-stamps-funding-lost-trump/ [8]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/usda-to-blue-states-hand-over-personal-data-or-lose-snap-funding/

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Get Out of Our Cities: Another Nationwide Uprising Against ICE

Many thousands of protestors across hundreds of demonstrations around the country on Friday once again took to their streets to tell President Donald Trump’s federal immigration agents a simple message: Get out of our towns and cities.

Friday’s nationwide mobilization is only the most recent in a string of demonstrations demanding justice for those targeted in the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing, and violent, operations. Many of them focused on the brutality in Minnesota, including the killings of two US citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents, and the apprehension of Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old boy with the Spider-Man backpack and the blue hat, who is currently sick in a Texas detention center after being picked up by DHS officials.

There’s no clear sign of when agents will leave the Twin Cities, as a US District judge on Saturday declined to order the Trump administration to immediately scale back its operations. As the Washington Post reported, she argued “Minnesota and the Twin Cities had not definitively shown that the administration’s decision to flood the state with agents was unlawful or designed to force local officials into cooperating with the administration’s objectives.” And, even if some agents leave Minneapolis, scores of immigration officials around the nation continue to target people in their cars, at home, and while working.

In addition to protests, the widespread actions included refraining from economic participation—no shopping, no working—and a school walkout, organized by students around the country.

Here are just some of the places where immigrants and their allies—many of them schoolchildren—took to the streets across the US:

Twin Cities

Protests in Minnesota have continued unabated for weeks as locals face subzero temperatures, yet come out en masse around the Twin Cities area.

Stephen Maturen/GETTY

Anadolu/GETTY

Stephen Maturen/GETTY

John Moore/GETTY

John Moore/GETTY

ROBERTO SCHMIDT/GETTY

California

Demonstrations took place in major California cities, including Los Angeles, where prominent journalist and former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested by federal agents late Thursday night in connection with his appearance at a church protest in St. Paul, which he reported on earlier this month.

Los AngelesGenaro Molina/GETTYProtesters descended on City Hall Friday, Jan. 30, 2026 as part of a nationwide day of action to stop funding for ICE and the shooting deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.

Los AngelesPATRICK T. FALLON/GETTY

San FranciscoSan Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/GETTY

PasadenaMediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images/GETTY

New York City

Starting at Foley Square near City Hall, a large crowd of demonstrators marched toward Washington Square Park. Earlier this week, dozens of protestors were arrested after going into the lobby of a TriBeCa hotel where they said federal agents were being housed.

Spencer Platt/GETTY

Spencer Platt/GETTY

NurPhoto/GETTY

Miami

Anadolu/GETTY

Anadolu/GETTY

Chicago

Anadolu/GETTY

Anadolu/GETTY

Boston

JOSEPH PREZIOSO/GETTY

JOSEPH PREZIOSO/GETTY

Livingston, Montana

As with previous nationwide mobilizations, residents of smaller cities or towns gathered near the side of a road to protest. These are demonstrators in Livingston, Montana.

William Campbell/GETTY

William Campbell/GETTY

Colorado

DenverMark Makela/GETTY

DenverTimothy Hurst/GETTY

BoulderMatthew Jonas/Boulder Daily Camera/GETTY

Charlotte, North Carolina

Peter Zay/Anadolu/GETTY

Peter Zay/Anadolu/GETTY

Washington, DC

Anadolu/GETTY

Anadolu/GETTY

Tom Brenner/GETTY

And, demonstrations are not just in the United States. Anti-ICE protests in cities around the world, including Paris and Milan, took place this week in solidarity with demonstrators in the United States. Those in Milan were focused on protesting the possible presence of ICE at the Olympic Games.

There’s another US-based nationwide mobilization planned for March 28. That action is being organized by the No Kings coalition, which has put on several mass demonstrations across the nation in the past year. Though it is unclear if another cross-country day of outrage will take place before then, as people remain ready to respond to whatever news alert about DHS comes across their phones next.

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Oregon Bill Would Tax Tourists to Protect Animals and Their Habitats

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

When Oregon’s short legislative session convenes in early February, conservation advocates will once again try to convince lawmakers to pass a major funding bill that could provide nearly $30 million annually to protect the state’s biodiversity.

The 1% for Wildlife bill, sponsored by state Reps. Ken Helm (D-Beaverton) and Mark Owens (R-Crane), would increase the state’s current hotel and lodging taxes by 1.25 percent, creating a new revenue stream for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to support long-neglected habitat conservation programs. Last session, the bill passed the House, but two Republicans blocked it in the Senate.

“The bill is a very innovative concept, and there are probably 49 other states that are watching closely to see if it’s successful.”

Oregon’s federally required State Wildlife Action Plan identifies species at risk of extinction or decline due to habitat loss, climate change, and other threats. In 2025, as the plan was being updated, dozens of species were added, including the Crater Lake newt, the California condor, and the North American porcupine, bringing the total to more than 300.

“It’s a blueprint of the most imperiled species and habitats in the state,” said Sristi Kamal, deputy director of the Western Environmental Law Center, which supports the bill. “But a plan is only as good as the funding to implement it.”

Though Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife Department receives some state funding, most of its budget comes from hunting and fishing licenses and federal taxes on guns and ammunition via the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937. The majority of Oregon’s federal funds, about $20 million annually, are earmarked for big game species and sport fish. Other federal grants primarily support species already protected by the Endangered Species Act. That means that Fish and Wildlife, like most state wildlife agencies, has little money to prevent species from becoming endangered in the first place. Between 2023 and 2025, it spent just 2 percent of its budget on wildlife conservation programs.

Increasing hotel and lodging taxes would leverage the state’s robust eco-tourism industry, which annually attracts tens of thousands of out-of-state and international visitors.

If the bill passes, Oregon’s statewide hotel tax rate would be 2.5 percent—the third-lowest rate in the US and less than half of what Washington, Montana, and Idaho charge. The 1% for Wildlife bill could provide a new model for state-level conservation funding, said Mark Humpert, director of conservation initiatives at the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which advocates for state agencies at the federal level.

“Ninety-five to 99 percent of species that states are responsible for have no dedicated funding from the federal government. We sometimes joke that state agencies have to offer bake sales to fund this work,” Humpert said.

Some states sell specialty license plates; others use a small percentage of sales taxes on outdoor equipment. The “gold standard,” Humpert said, is Missouri, where a state constitutional amendment dedicates one-eighth of 1 percent of its sales tax to its Department of Conservation.

According to a 2016 study by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and its partners, fully implementing every State Wildlife Action Plan in the country would cost around $1 billion annually. But for years, Congress has failed to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a bipartisan bill that would bolster states’ conservation funding.

Now, as the Trump administration slashes federal conservation and climate funding, advocates say that the 1% for Wildlife bill could provide the stable funding needed to implement Oregon’s wildlife action plan. “The bill is a very innovative concept, and there are probably 49 other states that are watching closely to see if it’s successful,” Humpert said.

In northeast Oregon’s high-desert region, Jamie Dawson, the Greater Hells Canyon Council’s conservation director, hopes the bill can fund wildlife crossings on Highway 82. “This section of the Blue Mountains is an absolutely critical habitat connectivity corridor—of continental importance,” Dawson said. Deer, elk and other species use it to migrate between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades Range in western Oregon and Washington. But the route is a wildlife collision hotspot, with hundreds of animals killed by vehicles over the past few years.

Elsewhere, the funding could support studies of migratory bird habitats like eel grass estuaries and wetlands, said Joe Liebezeit, conservation director for the Bird Alliance of Oregon. In spring 2025, local birdwatchers and radar data indicated that half as many birds as usual migrated through the state, though the reasons for this are unclear.

“The goal of this funding is to keep common species common, and that’s something sportsmen can get behind.”

As the state’s general fund waxes and wanes, so does the wildlife department’s budget, which is rewritten every two years. The lack of stable conservation funding prevents it from focusing on long-term solutions for species conservation, said Davia Palmeri, the agency’s federal policy director. “We do monitoring for these species when we can—when there’s a grant or short-term funding—to get pulses on species like reptiles or amphibians.”

For over a decade, advocates have fought to secure state funding for conservation. “At one point, there was a proposal to put a tax on birdseed,” said Danielle Moser, wildlife program manager at Oregon Wild. “There was the idea of a gear tax—things you buy at REI.” But none of these ideas would have raised enough, and ultimately, they fizzled.

Last year, two Republican senators, Daniel Bonham and Cedric Hayden, killed the bill by refusing to allow the final committee vote that would bring it to the governor’s desk. Now, conservation advocates from across the political spectrum are determined to pass it.

“You won’t always see all these logos on the same page,” says Amy Patrick, policy director at the Oregon Hunters Association, which is working with conservation groups like Oregon Wild to shape the bill. “The goal of this funding is to keep common species common, and that’s something sportsmen can get behind. There’s a real sense that this is an investment that will benefit all of our wildlife and habitats.”

The current 1.5 percent tourism tax funds the $45 million annual budget of Travel Oregon, which promotes the state’s tourism industry. Travel Portland, an independent nonprofit that works with Travel Oregon, opposes the bill, arguing that the additional tax would discourage large conferences and events. (Travel Oregon said in a statement that it does not take positions on bills.)

The Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association called the bill a “Pandora’s box” of future tax increases. “We don’t see an end in sight, with all the other state agencies that would love a new revenue source,” said Jason Brandt, the association’s president. Brandt and others note that the bill’s original text only provided a 1 percent tax increase for the wildlife agency, but amendments tacked on 0.25 percent for conservation efforts by other departments, including the Department of Agriculture’s invasive species management and anti-poaching efforts at the Department of Justice.

The association’s political action committee donated more than $17,000 to Bonham during his time in state office. Bonham, who resigned from the Senate in October when he was nominated to a federal position, did not respond to a request for comment.

Kamal and other advocates say the tourism industry’s opposition is ironic, given that revenue from the new tax would be reinvested in some of the state’s most popular attractions. Travel Oregon’s surveys show that scenic beauty is the top draw for 90 percent of out-of-state visitors.

“A lot of people come to Portland for business, but then they go to our beaches, or the mountains,” said Kamal. “The tourism industry is standing on the back of these natural resources. If you don’t invest in it, the pressures on these resources will make that legacy crumble.”

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How Trumpism Is Trickling Down to Your Town

Donica Brady lost her job after the Trump administration cut grant funding to bring solar power across the country, including to tribal nations. She picked up multiple jobs to make ends meet. That, in addition to caring for children, whittled down Brady’s free time. So she invited reporter Ilana Newman over when she found a quiet moment—while skinning a deer—to talk about what the loss of solar funding meant to her and her community.

“When the opportunity came up to work and help us get something established…it was huge,” she said.

Brady was one of many Indigenous people working to build energy sovereignty for tribal nations—work that continues despite the administration clawing back federal funds.

This week on Reveal, we’re diving into how small communities across the country are navigating the current administration’s policies and how they show up in everyone’s lives, no matter where you are in this country. We’ve partnered with The Daily Yonder to share a story about the solar energy hopes of tribal nations; The Tributary in Jacksonville, Florida, to learn how local and state DOGE are complicating efforts to run the city; and Idaho-based reporter Heath Druzin to hear how the Trump administration’s immigration policy is rupturing the state’s Republican Party.

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Federal Agents Just Arrested an Army Veteran—After He Protested ICE Outside a Church

On Friday, federal agents arrested Ian Austin, an Army veteran and ICE protester who was featured in a recent viral Mother Jones video.

Austin was among the dozens of protesters who, nearly two weeks ago, interrupted a service at a church in St. Paul, where a local ICE official serves as a pastor. Since then, federal officials have been targeting those involved in the demonstration—including, today, journalist Don Lemon—and arresting them on federal charges.

“It’s fucking emotional as hell, and it’s scary,” he said over the phone earlier in the week, “but I’m not going to live in fear.”

I met Austin last week outside the Whipple Federal Building, where ICE operations are based and where there has been a standing protest for weeks. I was struck by the honesty and vulnerability he brought to the conversation; he was brought to tears by how betrayed he felt by the government he had fought for.

“When they say, ‘Why would you be out here?’ How the fuck could I not be out here?” he said at the time. “My nation is under attack.”

A few days earlier, Austin had been tackled and arrested for peacefully protesting outside the same building. He was detained for several hours—in shackles—before being released without charges.

In the days after we met, as news broke that some protesters from the church demonstration had been arrested, I checked in with Austin. Was he worried that he’d be next? “It’s fucking emotional as hell, and it’s scary,” he said over the phone, “but I’m not going to live in fear.” He added, “You guys want to arrest me for protesting and expressing our First Amendment rights in a church?…I’ll go down with the ship.”

Austin was arrested on Friday outside the Whipple Building. Sarah Gad, a Minneapolis defense attorney who was there to see another client, happened to witness the arrest and was able to speak with him afterwards for a few minutes.

“Federal agents just kind of swarmed this young man,” she said. “He wasn’t shouting or being boisterous. It just seemed like they were looking for him and they found him and they just kind of pounced.”

Neither Austin nor Gad knew what he was being charged with. Austin is being held at the Sherburne County Jail, about 40 minutes from Minneapolis.

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January Was a Warning of Where Trump Will Go Next

As January comes to a close, it should not just become a harrowing memory. The past four weeks are a harbinger of what is to come under President Donald Trump, as the administration showed exactly the future it is building: One in which the laws are ignored, American life is cheap, and elections are hijacked by FBI raids. This month, Americans have witnessed a lurch toward authoritarianism that cannot be ignored. If January 2026 was any indication, the march toward dictatorship isn’t linear, it’s exponential.

The Trump administration has reached a point where they believe they can simply shoot you for opposing its agenda.

On January 3, the United States captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and brought him to the US to stand trial. This was illegal. It doesn’t matter that Maduro was a dictator himself; his capture was a show of lawless force. The US is now overseeing the sale of Venezuelan oil, the Qatari bank account that holds the proceeds, and the dispersal of some of that money to Venezuela. Fresh off this literal coup, Trump began saber-rattling about taking Greenland, threatening Europe that he would even take it by force. Trump backed down after Europe rebuffed him, but it’s unlikely that his desire to appear big and strong by taking territory or invading other nations is over.

Trump has not shied away from siccing an army on his own people.In Minneapolis, Trump’s immigration forces encountered organized and increasing resistance from protesters in the Twin Cities. In response, the government escalated their tactics. Thus far, armed federal agents have killed two American citizens, demonstrating that the price of opposing this administration can be your life. On January 7, Renée Good told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Jonathan Ross, “I’m not mad at you.” Seconds later, he shot her three times, and followed that by calling her a “fucking bitch.”

Outrage and a general strike across the Twin Cities followed. But the Trump administration didn’t back down. His Justice Department attempted to investigate Good, presumably to back up their smear that the mother of three with stuffies in her glove compartment was a domestic terrorist. As the protests continued, the administration grew bolder.

On January 24, a group of masked Customs and Border Protection agents shot Alex Pretti in what looked like a state-sanctioned execution from a distant totalitarian country. Pretti is on his knees, surrounded by officers, holding his phone, helpless, when he is shot in the back. At least nine more shots pierced his motionless body as it lay alone on the street. The Trump administration has reached a point where they believe they can simply shoot you for opposing its agenda. Then they set about smearing Pretti, an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, as a domestic terrorist.

The backlash was predictably fierce. When multiple Senate Democrats began announcing they would not back a DHS funding bill without reforms to ICE, the administration showed a smidge of contrition. It moved CBP commander and Nazi impersonator Greg Bovino, who defended Pretti’s murder with such brazen lies that he proved to be a liability, out of Minneapolis. Nearly a week after his killing, the administration announced it would launch a civil rights investigation into the CBP agents who shot Pretti. This is likely a PR stunt, to be run by the same Justice Department that has contorted the law to harass and smear the president’s opponents. There is no evidence that this administration has any desire to rein in or punish its immigration officers, and Americans should not be fooled by a few days of conciliatory talk. The administration is barreling full steam ahead.

For months now, ICE, CBP, and their leadership have played fast and loose with federal court orders. Bovino, for example, repeatedly lied to Sara Ellis, a Chicago-based federal judge—and she called him out for it. Notably, that was not the conduct that Bovino’s superiors had a problem with. Now, ICE appears to be disappearing people from Minnesota and refusing judicial orders to either defend the disappearances or return the people they have apprehended. On January 28, Patrick Schiltz, Minnesota’s chief federal district judge, issued an extraordinary order calling out ICE’s refusal to follow court orders. “Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases” in his state alone, he wrote. “The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges.” The violated orders are all habeas petitions, meaning the government has been asked to explain its arrest of an individual or to free that person, but it has simply refused.

Schiltz continued: “This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” ICE, he continued, “is not a law unto itself.”

But that’s exactly how this administration is determined to act. This week, I decided to look into how the Trump administration was ignoring Minnesotans’ Constitutional rights; the violations are innumerable, mounting to thousands per day. Federal agents are behaving like the First and Fourth amendments, in particular, do not apply to them; that witnessing and documenting their actions is a crime rather than a right; and that they can seize anyone they want—violently if they feel like it—rather than observe constitutional restraints on searches and seizures.

The administration is not stopping at arresting protestors. On Thursday night, it arrested two journalists, prominent former CNN anchor Don Lemon and, on Friday morning, independent journalist Georgia Fort, who had both documented a protest at a church in St. Paul. Notably, both journalists are Black. “The nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, posted on Bluesky of Lemon and Fort’s arrests. “But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.”

As if these facts weren’t alarming enough, the DOJ’s obsession with going after the two journalists led it on an unprecedented quest to convince federal judges to issue arrest warrants that the judges found frivolous. First, the government requested eight arrest warrants related to the protest. After a federal magistrate judge in Minnesota declined to issue warrants for Lemon, Fort, and three others, the DOJ asked the chief judge, Schiltz, to issue them. He refused, and the government went to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, asking it to force Schiltz to issue the warrants. The Eighth Circuit declined. Presumably, the government decided to get an indictment from a grand jury instead, but the source of authority for the arrests remained unclear as of Friday afternoon.

President Trump’s second administration has inspired a resurgence of interest in the idea of the “dual state,” a framework for authoritarianism created by German Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel to explain how life for many people in Nazi Germany appeared normal even as authoritarianism took hold. Fraenkel theorized that society had been bifurcated into a normative state, in which the rule of law appears intact, and a prerogative state, in which the state ignores the law to take on its enemies or further its aims. In the 1930s, most Germans could go about their lives assuming the general laws would apply, but the targets of the state, such as the Jews, saw their rights stripped away. At bottom, however, the dual state is only a useful mirage. It lulls people into complacency because their lives continue apace, but at any moment, they can be sucked into the prerogative state where they are at the mercy of the state.

University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq, who is at work on a book about the dual state, has pointed out several examples from Fraenkel’s time as a lawyer in Nazi Germany that may seem eerily familiar to Americans in January 2026. In one, Fraenkel won a financial settlement for his client against the regime, only to discover that the money had been deposited in the government’s coffers. In another, a man was acquitted in court, only for a Gestapo officer to seize him anyway.

Over the last month, the contours of such a dual state have emerged again and again. When ICE detains people and then refuses to comply with judges’ orders—which happened at least 96 times this month, as Judge Schiltz documented—it is signaling that the targets of its raids have been taken not just into detention but into the prerogative state, where the rule of law cannot not reach them. When the government arrested Lemon and Fort even though multiple judges believed the charges were frivolous and refused to issue warrants, it refused to take no for an answer. Then there’s Juan Espinoza Martinez, who was acquitted by a federal jury of bogus charges that he ordered a hit on Bovino. Rather than let him go home, ICE picked up Espinoza Martinez, a Dreamer who has lived in the US since he was five years old. As of a few days ago, his family didn’t know where he was.

The bedrock of a democracy is the people’s ability to pick its leaders. On Wednesday, the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing ballots from the 2020 elections. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present at the scene, despite having no domestic law enforcement authority. She has been investigating the 2020 election, in which Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, to prove it was corrupt.

But it would be naive to think that Trump’s obsession with his 2020 loss, and Wednesday’s raid, is just about the past. The administration is normalizing FBI raids on state and local election infrastructure. As election law expert Rick Hasen of the UCLA School of Law warned in Slate, the Fulton raid may be a “test run for messing with election administrators and the counting of ballots in the midterm elections in 2026.” The appearance of Gabbard at the raid is in line, Hasen points out, with election denier Cleta Mitchell’s suggestion that Trump could “declare a ‘national sovereignty crisis’ in a bid to take over the midterm elections.” Mitchell was on the famous 2020 call in which Trump demanded that the Georgia secretary of state “find” him the votes to win the state; this is not her first time trying to illegally overturn an election in Georgia. Trump attempted a chaotic and violent coup on January 6, 2021; it would be illogical to assume that he and his movement would relinquish power again.

It is fitting that January was also the month that the world took a look at Donald Trump’s America and saw it for what it is: A bully that cannot be appeased any longer. Through his illegal attack on Venezuela, open designs on Greenland, not to mention murders on the seas and punitive and arbitrary tariffs, Trump has alienated longstanding allies. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called on nations to turn away from the post-World War II world order in which the United States is viewed as a leader and protector. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he warned. America’s role at the head of international finance is also at stake, including Trump’s attempts to take over the Federal Reserve and US monetary policy, making the American dollar a risky bet for investors. The world is seeing Trump’s destruction of his own country for what it is; Americans should too.

January 2026 has given us a frightening look into a future if the Trump administration continues its plans apace. ICE is buying up warehouses to convert into mass detention camps, and deploying dystopian tech tools to identify and track protestors as well as immigrants. ICE and CBP, the president’s violent paramilitary forces, have advertised their a willingness to break the law, to violate people’s rights, to ignore judges’ orders, and now to execute their critics. When they shot a defenseless man in the back in broad daylight, they showed who they were, and where they plan to go next. We’ve been warned.

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Mamdani Announces New Settlement Securing Backpay for Delivery Workers

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Friday that his administration has secured a more than $5 million settlement with three delivery app companies. The money, which includes both backpay and civil penalties, will go to nearly 50,000 delivery workers who Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda underpaid in 2023 and 2024.

As part of the new deal, Mamdanisaid that Uber has also agreed to reinstate up to 10,000 workers who were wrongfully deactivated.

Mamdani made the announcement at a Long Island City food hall flanked by delivery workers. I spoke to the mayor briefly before the event and asked how he sees the settlement as supporting his affordability agenda.

“We have to lower costs to make this a more affordable city,” Mamdani said. “We also have to ensure that New Yorkers are earning what they’re owed. And the law, for far too long, especially when it comes to delivery workers, has been considered to be a suggestion as opposed to a requirement.”

During the interview, I also asked Mamdani about what he believes the city can do to ensure that New York’s largely immigrant delivery workers are protected from another potential threat: ICE.

“We have to inform every single New Yorker—and that includes delivery workers—of their rights,” the mayor said.

“When you get a knock at the door,” he added, “[and] someone tells you that they are an ICE agent, you do not have to let them in your home unless they provide you with a judicial warrant signed by a judge. It’s not instinctive. It has to be informed. It has to be taught. It has to be shared.”

“The law, for far too long, especially when it comes to delivery workers, has been considered to be a suggestion as opposed to a requirement.”

The new settlement comes after the Mamdani administration sued a delivery app called Motoclick and its CEO earlier this month for allegedly violating minimum wage requirements for workers. The city said that the app used “shocking tactics” such as “charging workers a $10 fee for canceled orders and deducting the entire cost of refunded orders from workers’ pay.” (The lawsuit aims to shut down the company in addition to getting backpay for workers.)

The efforts to protect delivery workers are being spearheaded by New York’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and its new commissioner, Samuel Levine. I asked Levine, who previously worked under Mamdani transition co-chair and former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, if he thought the lawsuit against Motoclick and the warning letters recently sent to delivery to ensure compliance with gig worker laws played a role in the city’s ability to secure the settlements announced on Friday.

“I think it does,” Levine said. “My general view…is that companies only will come to the table if you’re prepared to actually take them to court.” He added, “If they perceived [DCWP] as an agency that wasn’t actually prepared to go to the mat for workers, I’m not sure these settlements would have been reached.”

Along with the settlements, a new set of laws protecting delivery workers took effect on Monday after being passed by the city council last year. One set of laws expands minimum pay protections to cover workers who deliver groceries for companies like Instacart. Mamdani has embraced those protections, which were passed by the city council last year over the vetoes of former Mayor Eric Adams.

The law also now requires that customers be offered a tipping option when checking out. That is particularly significant in light of a recent report from DCWP that found that moving the tipping option until after checkout reduced UberEats and DoorDash delivery workers’ tips by more than $550 million.

Gustavo Ajche, a co-founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a worker-led collective founded during the pandemic, told me he’s been doing delivery work since coming to New York from Guatemala in 2004. He’s now mostly delivering for Uber and DoorDash.

We're out on the streets. If you're ordering food delivery, please be generous. The storm makes our job difficult, but we're here because we're passionate about what we do. We keep this city running. pic.twitter.com/VFTc0eIqQO

— Gustavo Ajche (@AjcheGustavo) January 25, 2026

Ajche is optimistic about Mamdani. “Fighting for better conditions for all workers can be a reality,” he explained. “Because he’s not playing a game—like used to be the case. Because as we were dealing with the last mayor, it’s like, one day he’s with us and the next day, eh.”

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RFK’s Overhauled Autism Committee Is Even Worse Than It Looks

Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism “by September.” That didn’t pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again—by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to “innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention” with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world.

Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine movement. Many of the 21 new members have previously worked in some capacity with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy founded. Others are parent advocates with little to no apparent scientific training. In keeping with IACC requirements, the committee has three autistic members; one of them is a high school senior. Many of the new committee members have been involved with movements that claim there is a biomedical “cure” for autism, a stance that is opposed by most autistism self-advocacy groups.

A few of the other committee members have an unusual specialty in common. Several have relationships with organizations that promote “spelling to communicate” a controversial technique that claims to help non-speaking autistic people communicate with the use of letter boards. However, several expert organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, warn that there’s scant scientific evidence that spelling to communicate works, that unconscious influence might be exercised by the person interpreting the speller’s apparent messages—often a parent or a caregiver—and that focusing on spelling might discourage caregivers from using more evidence-based interventions.

Here’s a non-exhaustive guide to some of Kennedy’s controversial picks:

Tracy Slepcevic is an “integrative health practitioner” who claims that she cured her son’s autism. In 2022, she was a speaker at Reawaken America, a MAGA-meets-evangelical Christian tour convened by former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn. As Kiera Butler wrote at the time:

Last year, Slepcevic was a featured speaker on the ReAwaken America tour where she hawked her new book, Warrior Mom: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Her Son With Autism, with an introduction by Andrew Wakefield. In December, Slepcevic was interviewed by [far-right live streamer] Stew Peters. She told Peters the story of her son’s “recovery” from autism with supplements and diets. In January, Michael Flynn promoted Slepcevic’s book, tweeting “check out this e-book for only $.99 cents on how one Mama Bear nurtured her son back to health from autism resulting from a jab!”

In 2024, as our colleagues David Corn and Dan Friedman reported, Slepcevic and her husband, Steve Slepcevic, hosted a fundraiser for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Steve was also present at the rally at the Capitol that preceded the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

Toby Rogers is an anti-vaccine activist and fellow at the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a libertarian think tank founded in 2021 which opposed Covid safety measures during the pandemic. Rogers has said he believes that vaccines are the primary cause of autism, and he often uses extreme rhetoric to express this view. Vaccines, he has said, are “genocidal,” and vaccine makers, he argued in an article last year on the Brownstone Institute website, “enslave society.” He believes that “no thinking person vaccinates.” In a 2024 tweet, Rogers argued that Anthony Fauci was “in the same league as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He must be arrested and prosecuted.” He also has a habit of waxing conspiratorial on X. Earlier this month, for example, he mused, “What if the entire Covid disaster—the design and release of SARS-CoV-2, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, censorship, the suppression of effective meds, Remdesivir, the toxic Covid shots, etc.—was engineered by AI to increase the power of AI?”

Ginger Taylor is a former marriage and family therapist-turned-anti-vaccine activist who “writes on the politics of autism, health, vaccination, informed consent and both corporate and government corruption from a biblical perspective.” She previously served on the “Spiritual Advisory Committee” for Children’s Health Defense. The founder of a Maine-based anti-vaccine group, she also runs NoDeception.org, a website on vaccines and Christianity where she writes about “the removal of religious exemptions to vaccine mandates” and what this “means for the Body of Christ.”

Elena Monarch is a neuropsychologist who does not appear to specialize in autism; rather she runs an independent clinic in Massachusetts for people who suffer from Lyme disease and the controversial strep-related neurological condition PANS/PANDAS. Fellow committee-member Sylvia Fogel, who has opposed efforts to eliminate religious exemptions for routine childhood vaccination requirements, works as a psychiatrist at the same practice. Monarch appeared at events with Kennedy during his presidential campaign, and Fogel was a recent guest on a Children’s Health Defense podcast.

John Gilmore is, like many of the others on the committee, a longtime anti-vaccine activist. He’s the co-founder of the Autism Action Network, which he created after his now-adult son was, according to him, injured by a vaccine. He, too, has ties to Children’s Health Defense and co-authored an editorial in 2021 with Mary Holland, the organization’s legal counsel and current CEO. (On Children’s Health Defense’s website, Holland is quoted as saying, “It is wonderful news that there are now people on this committee who are truly motivated to solve many of the existential autism issues, including prevention, treatment, education, employment opportunities, long-term care and housing.”)

Walter Zahorodny, Ph.D., is an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school. He appeared onstage with Kennedy during his first-ever press conference as HHS Secretary in April 2025. As Mother Jones reported at the time, Zahorodny has ties to researchers who deal in autism-related pseudoscience. He appeared in a 2018 video for the organization SafeMinds, which has falsely suggested that autism is caused by mercury exposure in vaccines. (In the video, Zahorodny didn’t take a position on mercury exposure, but instead talked about what he described as an increase in autism prevalence.) Zahorodny also co-authored a study in 2020 of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense.

Dan Rossignol is a family medicine doctor who runs autism clinics in Florida and California. Rossignol has advocated for “chelation” therapy, a debunked autism treatment. In 2010, he was sued by the father of a child for using “dangerous and unnecessary experimental treatments” on his son. (The outcome of that suit is unclear.)

Two people on the panel are nonverbal communicators. One of them, Minnesota community college student Caden Larson, communicates with spelling and serves on the board of an organization called the Spellers Freedom Foundation. Another person on the board, Elizabeth Bonker, an autism advocate, uses typing to communicate and is the executive director of Communication 4 ALL, a group which advocates for typing-based communication for nonverbal students, saying that they should be provided access to “spelling on a letterboard or typing on a keyboard with a communication partner.”

Honey Rinicella is the executive director of the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs (MedMAPS). While the organization looks, from a certain angle, like a professional medical body, it often shares decidedly pseudoscientific ideas that aren’t supported by actual medical organizations. Several of its experts previously worked with Defeat Autism Now! (DAN) , a program created by the Autism Research Institute that advocated for unproven “biomedical” interventions to “cure” autism, including massive doses of supplements and chelation therapy, a process that removes heavy metals from the blood; there is no evidence that either approach “treats” autism, and both have the potential to cause serious harm. (The Autism Research Institute stopped promoting DAN in 2011.)

Today, MedMAPS contributors often promote the idea that autism and other neurodevelopmental delays could be caused by vaccines; contributors have also made other pseudo-medical, vaccine-skeptical claims, including promoting the false idea that Covid vaccines were actually “gene therapy.” MedMAPS also uncritically cites other anti-vaccine, pseudomedical groups with anodyne names, including the National Vaccine Information Center.

Katie Sweeney is another self-proclaimed “autism warrior mom” who works as an executive support manager for MedMAPS, meaning that two people from the same pseudomedical organization are now serving on the IACC.

Krystal Higgins is the executive director of the National Autism Association, a small nonprofit whose board consists of people whose children have autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. The organization has expressed skepticism about vaccines: in a 2012 statement to a Congressional committee — before Higgins was the executive director — the NAA claimed that vaccines “can cause immune and/or inflammatory injuries to the brain that eventually manifest as an autism diagnosis,” which is not a thesis that is shared by any mainstream medical body. (Today, the NAA’s website does not seem to take a specific position on the debunked vaccine-autism connection.)

The organization also advocates for assisted communication, including S2C (Spelling 2 Communicate) and RPM (Rapid Prompting Method) both of which are controversial in mainstream medical bodies. The American Speech-Hearing-Language Association says, of RPM, “There is no scientific evidence supporting the assertion that messages produced using RPM reflect the communication of the person with a disability.” Higgins is, per her bio on HHS’ website, “a certified Spelling to Communicate (S2C) practitioner, and is a devoted mother to an adolescent with complex medical needs.”

In all, Kennedy’s selections are another startlingly blatant effort to stack HHS with people who distrust vaccines and, in many cases, have devoted long careers to promoting debunked medical misinformation about them, as well as people who promote unproven “cures” and treatments for the condition. In a statement, Alison Singer, the president of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF), a body that focuses on funding actual scientific research and evidence-based autism interventions, called the new committee “a complete and unprecedented overhaul, with no continuity from prior committees and a striking absence of scientific experts.”

“The IACC, created through the efforts of the broad autism community’s work with Congress and sustained for more than two decades by the dedicated service of leading scientists, advocates, and public servants, has been fundamentally compromised,” ASF added in its statement. “The current committee has been hijacked by a narrow ideological agenda that does not reflect either the autism community or the state of autism science. By sidelining rigorous, evidence-based inquiry, this shift will stall scientific progress, distort research priorities, and ultimately harm people with autism and all who love and support them.”

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The Church at the Center of Don Lemon’s Arrest Has Ties to Christian Nationalism

On Friday, former CNN anchor Don Lemon was arrested in Los Angeles for covering a protest that disrupted services at Cities Church in Minneapolis on January 18. The arrest drew widespread attention because of its infringement on Lemon’s First Amendment rights; journalism groups, including the National Association of Black Journalists, condemned it.

What got lost in the flurry of coverage was the connection between Cities Church and a Christian nationalist movement that has gained increasing clout and has strong connections to the Trump administration. Cities Church was founded in part by a pastor named Joe Rigney, a close associate of Doug Wilson, whose Christian nationalist fiefdom centered in Moscow, Idaho, has gained a national following.

Wilson is outspoken in his ultra-conservative beliefs. Well into his seventies, he is the unofficial patriarch of the TheoBros, a loose network of mostly millennial, extremely online Christian nationalist pastors, podcasters, and shitposters.

As I wrote about Wilson in 2024:

He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.

Wilson and his movement have ties to the Trump administration. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a Tennessee church in the denomination that Wilson founded, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, and he has been spotted at Wilson’s newest CREC church in Washington, DC.

In a piece last week for the Christian publication World, Rigney—the pastor at Cities Church and author of the recent book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits—wrote that he served for eight years at Cities Church before leaving for his current role at Wilson’s flagship Idaho church. In the piece, Rigney accuses Lemon of breaking the law by disrupting a religious gathering and calls on his fellow Christians to “grow in our ability to resist such intimidation.” He adds that Christians should “learn the tactics of God’s enemies and resist them with fortitude and joy, refusing to appease and placate the lawless mob.”

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Students Walk Out Across the Country to Protest ICE

Students at the University of Minnesota, united with hundreds of groups across the country, are imploring people, young and old, to join a general strike on Friday. No school, no work, no economic participation, all toward the goal of ceasing funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The strike comes after weeks of the Department of Homeland Security occupying the Twin Cities and targeting immigrants at school, work, and home. And after federal agents on this campaign shot and killed two US citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

As a part of the nationwide mobilization, students around the country are walking out of school to stand against President Donald Trump and DHS’s violent operations targeting American towns and cities.

Here’s a look:

I passed these amazing kids in Chamblee walking out of school to protest ICE. Bravo, future, bravo. #walkoutGA #walkout #studentprotest #protest #abolishICE

— MollyRoseWalker (@mollyrosewalker.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T06:33:42.793Z

HAPPENING NOW: KNOXVILLE/KNOX COUNTY students walk out to protest ICE (H/T @votegloriaj.bsky.social )

— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T16:07:59.407Z

Happening right now. Many schools, workplaces & businesses are joining in on a national day of protest called “ice out day of action.” Here are teachers and students at San Mateo high school before school this morning. Many students will walk out at lunch to join nearby schools pic.twitter.com/NdsChcPImO

— Will Tran (@KRON4WTran) January 30, 2026

@yvonnebravo1

Agua Fria High School District students are walking out today, joining high schools nationwide. They’re speaking truth to power and demanding action on immigration because silence is no longer an option!

♬ original sound – Greatest Hits Ever!

TODAY: Thousands at UCLA walk out of class, calling for solidarity with Minnesota and to demand ICE out of California. The walkout was organized by UCLA’s student government along with the Afrikan Student Union and other student clubs and organizations.

— BreakThrough News (@btnewsroom.bsky.social) 2026-01-29T00:27:25.320810254Z

@telemundo.az

En ASU los estudiantes protestan contra ICE como parte del Día de Paro Nacional. #tempe #asu #paronacional #walkout @valentinasr_news

♬ original sound – telemundo.az – telemundo.az

BREAKING: Hundreds of Asheville High School students walk out of class to demand a general strike, joining the national shutdown today to protest ICE operations and Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

— BreakThrough News (@btnewsroom.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T17:33:36.473017581Z

Happening now: Hundreds of students from Urban School of San Francisco walk out in protest of ICE.

— The San Francisco Standard (@sfstandard.com) 2026-01-30T21:14:48.042Z

Not your mother's protest here in Portland. High Schooler are out in force as part of the national strike.

— Tim Dickinson (@timdickinson.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T21:14:25.654Z

Today, hundreds of students from Webster Groves High School and Kirkwood High School joined a national walkout protesting ICE. I spoke to one freshman who said that seeing so many students around her gave her hope. @ksdknews pic.twitter.com/ZSZdwsONCE

— Justina Coronel (@JustinaCoronel) January 30, 2026

The scene outside Crockett HS in Austin this morning. Hundreds of students walked out of class to protest ICE enforcement. @cbsaustin pic.twitter.com/gTVBSUXoZ3

— Andrew Lamparski (@andrewlamparski) January 30, 2026

@detroitfreepress

Students at Detroit’s Cass Technical High School walked out at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30, 2026, to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a series of high-profile killings by the agency in Minneapolis and elsewhere. It’s one of several walkouts planned across metro Detroit and the United States, all while many small businesses closed for the day to participate in a national shutdown general strike following the ICE officers’ killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The agency was involved in the killings of at least six others last year, according to a tally compiled by the liberal American Prospect magazine and based on news articles. Other businesses said they would remain open, but issued anti-ICE statements. Detroit and Oak Park pizzeria Pie Sci wrote on Facebook that it does not support “the harm caused by current immigration enforcement practices” but will remain open. “Every day, ICE, Border Patrol and other enforcers of Trump’s racist agenda are going into our communities to kidnap our neighbors and sow fear,” the national shutdown organizing website reads. “It is time for us to all stand up together in a nationwide shutdown and say enough is enough!” Read more using the link in bio. Video by Violet Ikonomova, DFP. #protests #detroit #michigan #ice

♬ original sound – Detroit Free Press

_This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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Don Lemon’s Arrest Escalates DOJ Crackdown on Black Journalists and Activists

Don Lemon, the prominent journalist and former CNN anchor, was arrested by federal agents Thursday in Los Angeles on charges that he violated a law while reporting on a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month.

The saga represents a startling, ifnot new, turn in the Trump administration’s attacks on reporters and protesters.

President Donald Trump’s administration, via Attorney General Pam Bondi, arrested Lemon along with three others—Georgia Fort, an independent journalist who filmed last night as agents came to her home, along with Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy, both activists—who were at the church during the demonstration against federal immigration agents’ violent campaign in the Twin Cities. On January 18, protestors entered Cities Church in St. Paul, where a pastor was identified as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Lemon, said that the reporter had been picked up while covering the Grammy awards. “Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done,” Lowell said. “The first amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable.” Lemon is set to appear in court on Friday.

@donlemon

Minneapolis activists disrupted a church service where David Easterwood serves as a pastor, according to lawyer and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong. Easterwood is also the acting field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in St. Paul, overseeing enforcement and removal operations across Minnesota and neighboring states.

♬ original sound – Don Lemon

In total, the administration tried to charge eight people, including Lemon, under a law that protects people participating in services at their houses of worship. A federal magistrate judge who reviewed the arrests only approved three, throwing out the cases against Lemon and others. The Department of Justice then tried to convince a federal appeals court to force the judge to issue additional warrants for the arrests. The judge, again, declined to pursue charges. Still, the administration went after the journalists and activists.

When the DOJ arrested the three people that the judge signed off on, it invoked a federal felony statute from the Reconstruction Era, designed to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to do things like worship and vote amid terror and violence from the Ku Klux Klan.

Lemon, like several of the other people the administration arrested in connection withthe January 18 protests, is Black.

Related

Trump DOJ Uses Anti-KKK Law to Charge ICE Protesters With Felony

Conservative political strategist and lawyer Mike Davis lauded the move by Bondi on X, writing, “Nobody is above the law. Especially not today’s klansmen—like Don Lemon—who storm churches and terrorize Christians.” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the DOJ’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, reposted it. “We’re going to pursue this to the ends of the Earth,” Dhillon said during an interview with Megyn Kelly on Friday.

From January to December 15 of last year, at least 32 journalists were detained or charged just for doing their jobs.

The official X account for The White House boasted about the arrest on Friday, posting “When life gives you lemons…” accompanied by a chain emoji and a black and white photo of Lemon.

Lemon is also reportedly facing charges of violating the FACE Act, or the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, which was created to protect people trying to obtain or provide reproductive health services from violent or disruptive protestors. A section in that law also protects worshipers in religious spaces.

“Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump justice department is devoting its time, attention and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case,” Lowell, Lemon’s lawyer, said, referencing the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. “This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand. Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.”

Lemon is the latest in a long string of journalists being arrested at immigration-related protests.

From January to December 15 of last year, at least 32 journalists were detained or charged just for doing their jobs, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Twenty eight of the 32 were at immigration-related protests—a reality that is poised to become even more critical after the violent crackdown in the Twin Cities, and as federal agents continue their operations across the nation.

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Meet the Minnesota Students Behind Today’s National General Strike Campaign

“No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE.” That’s the rallying cry behind the campaign for a nationwide general strike on Friday, seeking to galvanize opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

This week, I went to the University of Minnesota, my alma mater, to speak to some of the students behind the effort that lists hundreds of endorsements from organizations and celebrities like Pedro Pascal and Hannah Einbinder.

Events are planned across the country, from New York to San Francisco, where businesses are announcing they won’t open their doors.

“We can do even more,” said Austin Muia, the vice president of the Black Student Union. “We want to bring it to the national stage and see it happen all over the country. We want everyone to feel that solidarity that we felt last week.”

“Let’s try to get people from the East Coast, West Coast, from the South,” said Pamela Gray, founder and president of the university’s Liberian Student Association.

Federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse and U.S. citizen, a day after the first general strike that sent thousands of Minnesotans marching in the frigid Minneapolis winter.

Students began organizing almost immediately for a second general strike, using their website to call on other states to join Minnesota in protesting Trump’s violent and increasingly unpopular immigration crackdown.

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Trump’s EPA Protects Big Business, Not People or the Environment, Critics Say

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

After a tumultuous year under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted a new, almost unrecognizable guise—one that tears up environmental rules and cheerleads for coal, gas-guzzling cars, and artificial intelligence.

When Donald Trump took power, it was widely anticipated the EPA would loosen pollution rules from sources such as cars, trucks and power plants, as part of a longstanding back and forth between administrations over how strict such standards should be.

“The notion you could be excused from a black letter law just by asking for it was startling to me—I thought it was a spoof. “

But in recent weeks, critics say the EPA has gone far further by in effect seeking to jettison its raison d’etre, forged since its foundation in 1970, as an environmental regulator. The EPA is poised to remove its own ability to act on the climate crisis and has, separately, unveiled a new monetary worth assigned to human lives when setting air pollution regulations. The current new value? Zero.

“The EPA was designed to protect public health and the environment and did a remarkably effective job of that,” said William Reilly, who was EPA administrator under a previous Republican president, George HW Bush.

“That record is now at risk and we will see the degradation of air quality in major cities. The administration seems to conceivethe purpose of the agency as solely promoting business, which has never been the agency’s mission. That’s revolutionary—it’s not been seen before.”

A vivid illustration of this, Reilly said, was when the EPA asked businesses last year to simply email a request to be exempt from air pollution rules. “The notion you could be excused from a black letter law just by asking for it was startling to me,” he said. “I thought it was a spoof. But it did happen.”

After returning to the White House, Trump vowed to “unleash” oil and gas drilling and the burgeoning AI industry by sweeping away environmental regulations that the president says only serve a “globalist climate agenda” and a “scam” clean energy sector.

The EPA under its current administrator, Lee Zeldin, has zealously followed this lead—initiating 66 environmental rollbacks in the first year, according to a tally compiled by green group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

This list includes paring back limits on pollutants such as mercury and soot coming from cars and power plants, cancelling grants for renewables and aid for communities blighted by toxins, squashing clean water protections, and deleting mentions of the climate crisis from the EPA website.

Two particular reversals have shocked former EPA staff and could fundamentally transform the agency. Last year, the agency announced it would rescind the so-called “endangerment finding,” a landmark 2009 determination affirmed by the US Supreme Court and outside experts that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide harm human health.

Removing the finding would essentially demolish all climate-related regulations issued by the federal government, a move cheered by pro-fossil fuel companies and Republican-led states that have urged Trump to take drastic action to remove any restraints on global heating.

Then, this month, the EPA said that it would no longer consider the cost to human health from two common air pollutants—but would still weigh the cost paid by industry for regulatory compliance.

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has said he wants to thrust “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”

This will hide the outsized economic as well as health benefits of reducing pollution—the EPA had previously calculated that reducing emissions of tiny soot particles, harmful to lung, heart, and brain functions when inhaled, would deliver $77 in benefits for every $1 spent by businesses to comply.

“This move ignores the incredible success we’ve had in reducing air pollution while growing our economy,” said Jenni Shearston, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It appears the EPA is putting more importance upon the cost to industry than the cost to the public. I’m worried this will mean more air pollution will be emitted as a result.”

An EPA spokesperson said the agency was “taking steps to update” the consideration of human health in regulatory decision making, adding that “legal decisions about standards are guided first by scientific evidence of health risk, not by whether benefits can be assigned a precise dollar value.” They did not clarify how EPA will model these impacts in the future.

The spokesperson also defended the decision to roll back the endangerment finding, a decision they said “is the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations.”

Reilly’s criticism was an example of the “out-of-touch, elitist thinking that failed American taxpayers and held back real environmental progress,” and it was a “propagandist narrative by outlets parroting far-left talking points” to suggest the agency will no longer assess the public health costs of pollution, the spokesperson added.

Zeldin, a Republican who was previously a New York congressman, has been an enthusiastic public champion for the Trump administration, appearing dozens of times on Fox News. However, unusually for an EPA administrator, Zeldin appears to be spending less time than predecessors telling Americans about efforts to cut their exposure to toxic air and water.

Instead, the EPA chief has said he wants to thrust “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” called for a revival of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, and demanded drivers opt for gasoline, rather than cleaner electric, cars.

In a novel move for an environmental regulator, Zeldin has even taken it upon himself to ensure that “making the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world” is a core priority for his agency. When asked on Fox in September whether he agreed with Trump’s attempt to shut down clean energy projects, Zeldin replied: “I am for whatever President Trump is advocating for.”

The EPA’s 16,000-strong workforce, meanwhile, has been shrunk through firings and early retirements by a quarter, with entire divisions of the agency—such as the EPA’s scientific arm, the Office of Research and Development—slated for closure. Enforcement actions against rule-breaking polluters have plummeted.

“We no longer use EPA’s authorities to safeguard our water resources—we use them to protect the interests of industry.”

The changes amount to “a war on all fronts that this administration has launched against our health and the safety of our communities and the quality of our environment,” said Matthew Tejada, the former director of the EPA’s environmental justice program.

“It is an attempt to completely eliminate EPA and just leave a symbolic husk,” said Tejada, who is now senior vice-president of environmental health at NRDC.

Hundreds of EPA staff have revolted at this agenda, signing an open letter last summer accusing the administration of “recklessly undermining” the agency’s mission and promoting a “culture of fear”—a protest that led to 140 staffers being suspended from work.

“He answers to capital and nothing else,” Justin Chen, president of AFGE Council 238, which represents EPA employees_,_ said of Zeldin. “The EPA isn’t fulfilling it’s mission and won’t be able to again until the boot is taken off the neck of dedicated civil servants to do their job.”

Anonymous testimonials taken from EPA staff by the union suggests a widespread sense of despair has taken hold. “To say that this year has been hard, insulting, demeaning, horrific, stressful…all would be a gross understatement,” said one.

Another said Zeldin’s tenure had been “Orwellian.” A third staffer, who works on Great Lakes water quality, added: “We no longer use EPA’s authorities to safeguard our water resources—we use them to protect the interests of industry.”

The EPA’s transformation will not immediately plunge the US back into the era that predated the agency’s foundation under Richard Nixon 55 years ago, a time when US cities were routinely shrouded in thick, choking pollution, lead was found in paint and gasoline, and rivers were so riddled with chemicals that they caught fire. But the next three years of the Trump administration threaten to erode much of the progress made since this time, warned Jeremy Symons, a former EPA policy adviser.

“EPA’s current leadership has abandoned EPA’s mission to protect human health and safety. Human lives don’t count. Childhood asthma doesn’t count. It is a shameful abdication of EPA’s responsibility to protect Americans from harm,” he said. “Under this administration, the Environmental Protection Agency is now the Environmental Pollution Agency, helping polluters at the expense of human health.”

The EPA said it rejects this criticism, pointing to a list of what it says are 500 environmental “wins” achieved in the first year of Trump’s term, including a “historic new agreement with Mexico to permanently tackle the Tijuana River sewage crisis, major action to regulate high-risk phthalate chemicals, accelerated enforcement to block foreign polluters, and billions of dollars directed toward reducing lead in drinking water.”

“Contrary to the suggestion that the administrator’s focus is misplaced, talking about affordable energy and technology leadership directly supports the EPA’s mission,” the EPA spokesperson said. “Clean air and water depend on stable infrastructure, reliable energy, and innovation that allows us to reduce pollution more efficiently. By cutting red tape, improving oversight, and ensuring sound use of taxpayer dollars, the Trump EPA is building the foundation for long-term environmental and economic health.”

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RFK Jr. Was Raw Milk’s Biggest Fan. Now He Won’t Return Industry Calls.

In May 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat in the White House and downed a shot of raw milk to celebrate the publication of the MAHA Report, a document full of AI slop and fake citations that was meant to present the Secretary of Health and Human Services’s solutions for chronic diseases and other ailments plaguing America. Kennedy had been a loud proponent of raw milk for years, promising in an October 2024 tweet that under his tenure the FDA, a key milk regulator, would stop “suppressing” the drink.

“Washington has become a three ring circus I don’t want to be associated with.”

According to Mark McAfee, the founder and CEO of Raw Farm, the country’s biggest raw milk company, Kennedy is a longtime customer. But less than a year on from the White House event, he complains that the HHS secretary won’t return his calls or texts.

“I emailed him, texted him, contacted the people who knew him, including Nicole Shanahan,” McAfee told me last week, referencing Kennedy’s former running mate, who visited Raw Farm during their 2024 campaign. “Nobody could get ahold of him and there was no response.” (HHS also did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

For all the drastic and often disastrous things Kennedy has done as HHS Secretary—unilaterally overhauling the childhood vaccine schedule, personally overseeing the placement of false anti-vaccine rhetoric on the CDC’s website, refashioning the food pyramid after the typical diet of “traditional masculinity” obsessed podcasters—he has thus far taken no action to advance raw milk.

Instead, the Trump administration has trumpeted their emphasis on whole milk as a bold change, posting endless weird memes on the subject. But raw milk, or milk which has not been pasteurized, is simply not the same as full-fat whole, and its proponents have been left angry and disappointed. Kennedy was confirmed in February 2025; by June, NBC News was already reporting that raw milk advocates were confused that he had not actively taken up their cause.

McAfee says he’s only had direct contact with Kennedy one time. “I received one text from him on my phone in March 2025, last year, and it basically said, ‘When Marty Makary is confirmed we’ll talk about raw milk,’ something like that,” McAfee says. (Makary, the U.S. Commissioner of Food and Drugs, leads the FDA.) “Marty was confirmed within two weeks of that text message and there was no further discussion.”

This is a disappointment to McAfee personally and the raw milk movement more broadly. When I profiled him in January 2025, McAfee was not only was being discussed as someone who might shape new, pro-raw milk federal policies, he also believed Kennedy’s impending confirmation was the only thing that could bring an end to his own long and rancorous fight with the federal government. “If RFK doesn’t make this, I don’t see making it,” he said at the time.

While McAfee stridently disagrees there is any health danger associated with his California farm’s products, raw milk carries inherent and serious risks, because pasteurization kills harmful dairy-borne bacteria and viruses, including E. Coli and campylobacter. Children who consume raw milk are especially at risk, because their immune systems are less developed.

For at least two decades, stretching back to when Raw Farm was called Organic Pastures, McAfee has feuded with the government and been sued by families who say that his products made them or their children sick. In 2023, Raw Farm entered into a consent decree with the feds to resolve accusations it shipped raw milk intended for human consumption across state lines, which is illegal under federal regulations.

Raw Farm has also settled cases with the families of children who say they became seriously ill after drinking its milk; some developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a potentially fatal blood and kidney condition. Mary McGonigle-Martin, for instance, became a food safety activist after her son Chris nearly died when he contracted E. Coli after drinking raw milk from Organic Pastures.

McAfee says all current lawsuits against Raw Farm have been resolved—“the insurance company has taken care of all of them, completely,” he says—including one from a man who said his cats died in late 2024 after drinking his milk. At the time, Raw Farm’s milk had been temporarily pulled from store shelves in a voluntary recall after the H5N1 virus, which causes bird flu, was found in tested samples. The company was also barred from shipping new products then under a state quarantine, which was lifted on January 10, 2025.

“Public health officials everywhere think raw milk consumption is a bad idea.”

The FDA’s policies and public guidance on raw milk have not been updated since 2024, and most related text on its website has remained the same since 2011. For McAfee, that amounts to the Kennedy-supervised agency still “denying the science,” he told me.

One of his most dedicated opponents disagrees. “FDA’s longstanding policy is based on the historical fact that most public health officials everywhere think raw milk consumption is a bad idea,” says Bill Marler, a Seattle-based food safety attorney who has repeatedly sued Raw Farm. “That’s what created the ban on interstate sales of raw milk.” Legalizing such cross-border sales would be a boon for McAfee and other raw milk producers’ business, Marler says—and it would also likely increase the number of people who end up sick.

“You might as well call it the ‘Bill Marler Full Employment Act,’” he says dryly. That’s because shipping raw milk over many miles “even in refrigerated conditions, can allow for the increase in the bacterial load,” he explains. “E. coli and salmonella populate. The farther you are from the actual production, the more likely it is that the bacteria can reach a point where it overwhelms your body’s immune system, especially if you’re a kid. I would be really worried about producing raw milk in California and drinking it in New York.”

McAfee says his goal is to make the safest raw milk possible. He notes that “no food is perfect, none,” pointing to E. Coli outbreaks in foods like romaine lettuce. McAfee also correctly says that pasteurized milk has caused illness and death. However, Marler, who has represented clients in such cases, points out that their illnesses were due to containers being contaminated after the milk was pasteurized.

McAfee is also the founder of a nonprofit called the Raw Milk Institute, which provides certification and training to other raw milk producers on how to make what their website calls a “low-risk food.” He says 65 farmers have so far been certified by the program, and argues that by not working with raw milk farmers to help create federal safety guidelines, the FDA is leaving it up to people like him to figure it out on their own.

“I want to be pragmatic and constructive,” he says. “At one point, that constructive participation was going to help RFK and Marty Makary with a problem we have with America, which is that there are no standards for raw milk.”

“I put this at the feet of the FDA,” McAfee says, of current federal raw milk policy. “They have paychecks that depend on it.” (Raw Farm’s website denounces attacks from the “corrupt” FDA and media—as well as an unnamed food safety attorney who seems to be Marler.)

As Kennedy’s silence stretches on, McAfee has become distressed by other Trump administration actions, specifically how brutal immigration raids have affected farmworkers, the vast majority of whom are immigrants.

“They build our houses. They take care of convalescent homes. They create our food,” McAfee told me, referring to immigrant workers. “They are America… The Trump administration and Noem and all those people involved with ICE are absolutely crazy.”

McAfee says he “was very disappointed” to have not gotten a call from HHS seeking his expertise last spring. “But since that time, I’m quite happy I didn’t participate. Washington has become a three ring circus I don’t want to be associated with. It’s ridiculous what’s going on with trade policy, Venezuela, Greenland. We don’t want to be associated with anything that poorly considered.”

At this point, McAfee says, if Kennedy were to finally break his silence, he’d have to figure out if and how it would be possible to work with the Trump administration. “I would be very reserved in jumping in right now to do anything,” he says. “I’d consider it, but it would not be an immediate yes.”

McAfee hopes that in an increasingly polarized time, he can still somehow be seen as a “middle of the road” person.

“I love all, serve all, and feed all,” he says. “I’m going to keep my humanity under my feet.”

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He Lost an Eye in the George Floyd Protests. Now He Represents the Ward Where Renée Good Was Killed.

It was Soren Stevenson’s third day in office on the Minneapolis city council when, in the middle of a strategic planning session, Mayor Jacob Frey rushed out of the room. Soon, the council learned why: Federal agents had shot and killed Renée Good. Stevenson hurried down to the site of the killing, on the edge of the ward he represents. The ward—one of the city’s most diverse areas, with mix of Latino, Somali, Black, and white residents—also includes the site of George Floyd’s murder.

For Stevenson, who is 31, the brutality is personal. Six days after Floyd’s murder, heeding the call for white bodies at the front of the protests, Stevenson was standing near a closed freeway ramp, arms linked with other protesters, when police fired rubber bullets without warning. Stevenson was shot in his left eye, and would lose his eye and most of his sense of smell. The city settled Stevenson’s subsequent lawsuit for $2.4 million.

Stevenson, whose background is in affordable housing, hadn’t considered running for office before the incident. But the experience served as an inflection point: He felt “a duty to be a part of building a public safety system in Minneapolis that treated everyone with dignity.”

When we spoke from his office last week, he was still learning his way around City Hall. His office walls were bare, and his office phone and email had just recently been set up. A few days later, agents would kill Alex Pretti.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Let’s start in 2020. How did you decide to get involved with the protests after George Floyd’s murder?

“’Force’ is a nice way of saying, ‘Ending someone’s life.’ A nice way of saying, ‘Shooting someone in the face and maiming them, breaking people’s bones, kicking people’s teeth out.'”

I had just graduated. It was Covid, I had lost one of my jobs. And at the time, Americans had been watching a steady stream of Black men be murdered by the police and no justice coming from it, getting no accountability. I was just one person who decided, “I’m not going to rest until George Floyd gets justice.” And I was joined by millions of other Americans. We were just sick and tired of seeing our neighbors, our fellow Americans, our fellow Minnesotans, be killed, and we weren’t going to go quietly.

I joined the protests, and six days later, I was at a peaceful protest before curfew, and a Minneapolis Police officer shot me with a rubber bullet. I lost my left eye and most of my sense of smell. And that put me on the trajectory to where we are.

How did that experience shape your understanding of the use of force against protesters?

It gave me a personal understanding of force. Is not this academic thing—it’s real human lives. It’s real stories. It’s real pain. It’s real blood. “Force” is a nice way of saying, “Ending someone’s life.” A nice way of saying, “Shooting someone in the face and maiming them, breaking people’s bones, kicking people’s teeth out.” And in the case of Renée Good, killing her.

What parallels do you see in the aftermath of the deaths of Good and Floyd?

“Something that has been really powerful is the organizing that’s happening around the schools: People patrolling schools, posted up on different corners, dropping kids off at school, taking them back, bringing groceries, taking people to appointments.”

The thing that I’ve been noticing the most is the way that the city ignited itself when our neighbor was murdered. When George Floyd was murdered, people got involved: street protests, starting organizations, neighborhood watches. I was somebody who stayed up on my porch. There was a Black church across the street from me, and I just stayed up part of the night, until my shift ended and my roommate took over, to make sure that it didn’t get burned down. After the murder of Renée Good, we’ve gone into overdrive. We remember how to look out for each other. We’re connected to our neighbors. A lot of people are like, “Hey, I haven’t seen you since the uprising. But here we are. We’re back.”

What has that reignition looked like lately?

Rapid response is a big one. [Saying] “ICE is at this place, come now,” and people show up quickly and are confronting ICE officers. That has worked to protect our neighbors. Every second that an ICE officer is bothered about someone blowing a whistle in their face is a second that they’re not taking one of our neighbors, and that’s time well spent. That’s a quote from [Minnesota Rep.] Aisha Gomez.

And something that has been really powerful in my ward is the organizing that’s happening around the schools: People patrolling schools, posted up on different corners, dropping kids off at school, taking them back, bringing groceries, taking people to appointments.

Speaking of which—what are you hearing from your constituents about how ICE is impacting kids?

“They thought that they were going to break our city. They were going to make us look bad.”

It’s having a huge effect. Elementary schools being battlegrounds is—I mean, just take that sentence in again. Elementary schools are battlegrounds. ICE is showing up to high schools and harassing students [when they’re] let out. We have a hybrid option available. A lot of kids who are afraid to go out, or whose parents are unsafe to go out—they’re at home doing hybrid learning. And I think any parent will know, school from home is not the vibe. We’re doing this because we have to—because a lot of families aren’t safe to leave their homes—but we’re not happy about it.

Why do you think ICE has targeted Minneapolis?

Minneapolis does not have the largest immigrant population of cities across the country, or remotely the most undocumented folks. I think the Trump administration picked a fight that they’re going to lose, and I don’t think that they knew they were going to lose. They thought that they were going to break our city. They were going to make us look bad. And while damage is being done to families across the city and across the state, ultimately, we are going to be successful because we are strong, and we’re organized, and we’re going to band together, and there’s more of us than there are of them.

What makes you say the Trump administration is going to lose?

“We are deciding right here in Minneapolis—in this country—are we going to have a democracy going forward, or are we not?”

They thought that they were going to come in here and play into this, “Minneapolis is a dangerous place that’s got all this fraud, yada yada,” and use racism against the Somali community or the Latino community. And I think they thought they were just going to come in, create some bad optics for the city, and leave. But in fact what’s happened is they’ve come in and they’ve found that we’re not just insane people who are going to light our city on fire. We are people who care about each other, and we want our neighborhoods to be thriving and successful. They’re getting a different fight than they expected. And we live here—it’s not like we can just quit at any point, because we’re going to continue to live here—but this invasion from ICE is temporary. It will end at some point, and we’re going to still be united. We’re going to still be looking out for each other when they’re gone.

For people who aren’t here, this can feel like a faraway problem. What are the stakes here?

This is really a question about: Do we want to have a democracy going forward or not? Are we going to accept that Donald Trump and the federal government can have completely unaccountable soldiers—secret police—who can do whatever they want to anyone at any time, or are we going to have a democracy where the government is by and for the people? Truly, I see this as a moment when we are deciding right here in Minneapolis—in this country—are we going to have a democracy going forward, or are we not? The stakes are no greater and no smaller than that.

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What Women Said “Melania” Director Brett Ratner Did to Them

In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, six actresses told the Los Angeles Times that a prominent Hollywood director was sexually violent toward them.

Natasha Henstridge said he forced her to give him oral sex. Olivia Munn said that he masturbated in front of her, then lied to others that they’d had sex. Jaime Ray Newman shared that he’d sexually harassed her on a flight. According to Katharine Towne, the director followed her into the bathroom at a party after making unwanted advances. Jorina King detailed hiding from him in the bathroom; seemingly in exchange for a speaking part in a film, she said that he went into her trailer and asked to see her breasts. Eri Sasaki said that, on set, he repeatedly asked her to enter a bathroom with him, and when she declined, he allegedly said: “Don’t you want to be famous?”

They were talking about Brett Ratner, who on Thursday will stand next to Melania Trump to celebrate the premiere of Melania, his eponymous documentary about the First Lady.

In a 2018 interview about the #MeToo movement, the First Lady told ABC News, “I support the women—they need to be heard. We need to support them. And also men, not just women,” adding that accusers “cannot just say to somebody … ‘I was sexually assaulted’ or ‘You did that to me.’ Because sometimes the media goes too far and the way they portray some stories, it’s not correct. It’s not right.”

Ratner, who was ushered out of Hollywood following the allegations, returns to the industry as the film’s director. He denies all sexual violence allegations against him and has not been charged or held liable in court.

Melania: 20 Days to History details the weeks leading up to the 2025 inauguration. Its Thursday premiere at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—to which President Donald Trump recently affixed his name—follows a black-tie White House screening for around 70 people—including Mike Tyson, Queen Rania of Jordan, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Apple CEO Tim Cook, New York Stock Exchange CEO Lynn Martin, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Jassy, according to the Hollywood Reporter, personally greenlighted Amazon spending $40 million to acquire the doc. The company is reportedly spending another $35 million on marketing.

Thursday’s event is the culmination of a yearlong re-integration into directing for Ratner, who directed the Rush Hour franchise and produced Horrible Bosses, among many other credits. His return is thanks in large part to President Trump—who, according to reporting from Semafor, personally pressured Paramount head and close ally Larry Ellison to revive Rush Hour 4—and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is reportedly friendly with the director and brought him as a guest to the United Nations. (Ratner emigrated to Israel in 2023.) With Trump and Netanyahu’s support, Ratner is now set to direct another documentary—this one on the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic agreement from Trump’s first term involving normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

After the 2017 allegations, Ratner was dropped by Warner Bros., which had a $450-million co-financing deal with his production company. Biopics he had in the works on Hugh Hefner and Milli Vanilli were put on hold and dropped, respectively. The fourth installment of Rush Hour, now once again moving ahead, was also halted.

His directing and producing career had been snuffed out—until the Trump family stepped in. Less than a month after Trump, who has been held liable in court for sexual abuse and has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women, returned to office, Ratner was granted the director role on Melania’s documentary.

An advertisement for “Melania” in Times Square. Richard B. Levine/ZUMA

Ratner, like the president, was also captured in a photograph in the portion of the Epstein files that has been released. The undated image shows him hugging a shirtless Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modeling agent and close Epstein associate who died by suicide in a prison in France in 2022.

“As millions of Americans and thousands of Epstein survivors continue to demand the full release of the Epstein files, Trump and his abuser buddies have instead chosen to release a vanity project wanted by no one,” said Elisa Batista of survivor advocacy group UltraViolet Action in a statement about Melania.

In his return to directing, Rolling Stone reports, Ratner has been difficult to work with, according to some workers involved in producing Melania. While no new sexual misconduct allegations have come out, one crew member put it like this: “I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this…but Brett Ratner was the worst part.”

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The Attack on Ilhan Omar and Trump’s Destructive Politics of Violence

My heart was in my throat as I watched the video emerging late Tuesday. A disturbed, angry man had just rushed Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar during a town hall in Minneapolis and assaulted her. He sprayed her in the chest with vinegar from a syringe, then was tackled by security and arrested. Omar reacted defiantly, kept her cool and carried on with the event. She was quickly hailed for her fortitude. All I could think was, thank God she’s not dead.

Initial media coverage referred to the attack by 55-year-old suspect Anthony Kazmierczak as “bizarre,” but it is worse than that. In more than a decade of reporting on violence prevention, I’ve studied many stalking cases and assassinations and the recognizable behaviors that precede them: the stewing grievances and desperation, the preparation, the final moment of action. The next assailant will just as easily have a knife or a gun.

In this era of surging political violence, even worse yet was the reaction from the president of the United States. ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott asked Donald Trump on Tuesday night if he’d seen the video. His response was to disparage Omar as “a fraud” and suggest the attack was staged: “She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.” (There is zero evidence of that, and the perpetrator appears to have shared Trump’s acrimonious views of Omar.)

America has felt on a precipice this cold January. Minneapolis has been ground zero, culminating with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by masked agents carrying out Trump’s mass deportation operations. Minnesotans have mounted an inspired campaign of mutual aid and constitutionally protected protest. A growing majority of Americans are with them.

Trump’s rhetoric may sound ignorant and unhinged, but more importantly, it is calculated.

But Trump continues to direct contempt and rage at immigrants in so-called blue cities—and at Omar, long a top target of his vitriol. Last November, he responded to an unrelated terrorist attack on National Guard soldiers in the nation’s capital by railing against “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” in Minnesota, claiming they “are ripping off our country and ripping apart that once great state.” Days later, he called Omar, who is Somali American, and her community “garbage” during a live-broadcast cabinet meeting. As Trump declared they should “go back to where they came from,” many in the room applauded and Vice President JD Vance pounded the table enthusiastically.

Trump was at it again in the very hours before Kazmierczak assaulted Omar. During a speech in Iowa on Tuesday, Trump said Omar exemplified immigrants who “hate our country.” Those who want to stay here, he said, “have to show that they’re not going to blow up our shopping centers, blow up our farms, kill people.”

That may sound ignorant and unhinged, and it is those things—but more importantly, it is calculated. Trump made anti-immigrant demagoguery the core of his 2024 reelection campaign, and he has exploited political violence throughout his first year back in office, as I documented recently. He does so, political historian Matt Dallek told me, to rile up his base and further justify his extreme policies, including the violent and lawless actions of ICE: “The narrative he creates says to all his supporters that what he’s doing is ‘destroying the enemy within,’ that he’s taking care of the scourge that he promised to address. I think it’s a mistake to discount just how powerful that can be.”

Powerful politically—and unpredictable as to where and when it will unleash more violence. That also has been a hallmark of Trump’s political career: stochastic terrorism, a tactic of incitement that allows room for deniability but makes violent attacks more likely. We don’t yet know much about Kazmierczak’s motive. (As of late Wednesday, the FBI had taken over the investigation, and it was unclear whether Kazmierczak yet had any legal representation.) But we do know, according to media reporting and interviews with his brother, that he was a right-wing Trump supporter with a long history of mental health problems and “a hatred of the Somali community.” A federal criminal complaint made public on Thursday included allegations that Kazmierczak had told “a close associate” years ago that “somebody should kill” Omar.

Minnesota was the site of another grim example last summer, when a pro-Trump extremist hunted two Democratic state lawmakers at their homes, fatally shooting former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. Trump’s response to that horror was no less appalling.

A new report from the US Capitol Police, released coincidentally on Tuesday, shows that threats against members of Congress have continued to soar. In 2025, the agency’s threat assessment section investigated nearly 15,000 “concerning statements, behaviors, and communications” targeting federal lawmakers, a more than 50 percent increase from the prior year.

GOP lawmakers “know how much worse his rhetoric has made things,” said a federal law enforcement source.

Omar has long faced a deluge of threats and has sometimes been assigned a 24-hour security detail from the Capitol Police, according to the New York Times. That added protection is at the discretion of the House speaker, but for the past year Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has not offered it to Omar, the Times reported. After the attack on Tuesday, Omar made a formal request for extra protection and Johnson agreed, the Times noted.

A federal law enforcement source familiar with Capitol Police operations told me that, as a matter of close protection, the attack on Omar was a catastrophic failure with an “extremely lucky” outcome. Even though Omar reportedly will now have additional security, the Capitol Police have been heavily strained on this front. Moreover, lawmakers from Trump’s party “know how much worse his rhetoric has made things,” said the source, who has direct knowledge of conversations in which some lawmakers have admitted that “they can’t or won’t go against” Trump, because they fear for their political standing or the safety of their families. Several Republicans who have quit Congress in recent years have cited such reasons, including former Trump devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The role of politics or ideology in an attack is often murky, the source emphasized. But the danger manifest again on Tuesday remains high, especially with Republican leaders cowing to Trump’s unrelenting politics of fear and contempt. “What does that mean for those individuals out there who are brittle, are in a tough place in life and have a lot of anger?” the source said. “Silence in the face of this can also be taken as permission.”

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Trump Is Still Posting About Arresting Obama and Prosecuting Election Workers

Amid multiple national crises, President Donald Trump spent Thursday morning posting—not for the first time—about how his predecessor Barack Obama should be arrested, and how Georgia election workers should be prosecuted, in both cases citing unsubstantiated claims.

Trump’s fixations on going after Obama and Georgia aren’t new, but they now come at a moment of intense backlash across the country over his administration’s violent campaign targeting both immigrants and citizens in Minneapolis and nationwide.

Trump shared a screenshot of a “breaking” social media post that accused the former president of attempting a “coup” and working with “CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence” and “erode Americans’ confidence in our democracy and President Trump’s LANDSLIDE VICTORY” in 2016. In that election, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly three million.

In another post sharing a screenshot, Trump switched to talking about 2020: “TRUMP WON BIG. Crooked Election!” he wrote over a post about the Georgia election results. During his second run for the presidency as a Republican, Trump lost the nation and the state of Georgia. In the more than five years since, Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed that he won the state—and attempted to interfere with election results, as when, in 2021, Trump pressured Georgia’s RepublicanSecretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find 11,780 votes.”

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Trump Called the Georgia Secretary of State and Demanded That He Find More Nonexistent Votes

The latest escalation took place Wednesday, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize records from the 2020 presidential vote in a move that legal experts called a historic attack on democratic norms.

That search happened not far from Fulton County Jail, where Trump was booked and had his mugshot taken in 2023 after being indicted by the county’s District Attorney Fani Willis on charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 vote in Georgia.

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From Minnesota to Georgia, Trump’s Plans to Interfere in the Midterms Are Becoming More Dangerous

While the country was still reeling on Wednesday from the killing of two Americans by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the Trump administration undertook one of its most blatantly authoritarian actions yet, deploying the FBI to seize ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, a heavily blue area in metro Atlanta that has been an epicenter of the president’s conspiracy theories about the election he lost. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump vowed in Davos last week. Fulton County appears to be the newest victim of Trump’s long-running retribution campaign.

The raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago. The capture of ballots in a large urban county in a key swing state is exactly what Trump contemplated when he tried to overturn the 2020 election—federalizing the National Guard to seize voting machines, something he now says he regrets not doing—and sets a chilling precedent for how his administration might interfere in the midterms should Republicans lose the House, Senate, or key state races.

“If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to vote.”

“The administration is using Fulton County as a blueprint to see what they can get away with elsewhere,” said Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, a pro-democracy group. “If they’re allowed to take ballots here, then what would stop them from seizing ballots or voting machines in any future election in a county or state where their preferred candidates lose?”

In the past week, the different tactics the administration could use to interfere in the midterms have come into sharp focus. The Fulton County raid came just days after Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota hand over its full, unredacted voter roll to the Department of Justice as a way to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” which Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon denounced as “an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”

On the multiple fronts, the administration is weaponizing the power of law enforcement, from the FBI to ICE to the DOJ, to target blue states and counties and coerce them into taking actions that benefit the administration and punish those who don’t comply.

“To make release of the voter rolls a condition for ICE withdrawing from the state in Minnesota demonstrates this is really about power and control,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me on Thursday. “The federal government is trying to impose its will on the states. It signals what they’ve already indicated, which is they want more control over the 2026 election.”

Bellows has experienced the administration’s strong-arm tactics firsthand. Maine was one of the first states the DOJ sued to demand access to its full, unredacted voter roll, which Bellows has strenuously refused to turn over. More recently, ICE launched a large-scale operation in the state last week, which led to more than 200 arrests. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who faces a tough re-election this year, claimed on Thursday that ICE had “ceased its enhanced operations” in the state.

“A cynical view of why they’ve exited Maine is concerns that the backlash might topple Susan Collins and cost them a majority in the US Senate,” Bellows responded.

She described the ICE raids in the state as “violent and chaotic” and said she worried that ICE operations targeting blue states could depress voter turnout in November. “If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to vote,” Bellows said.

She noted that Maine has a special election for the state House of Representatives underway right now in Lewiston, which has a sizeable Somali community that has been targeted by ICE, and has been urging people that are afraid to go to the polls to cast absentee ballots instead.

Bellows sees a connection between the DOJ’s demands for state voter rolls, ICE operations in Minnesota and Maine, and the seizure of ballots in Fulton County.

“They seem intent on trying to influence the outcome of 2026,” she says, “because they fear accountability by the voters.”

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