Dismay as Trump Officials Move to Dismantle a Key Ocean Monitoring System

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

The Trump administration plans to dismantle a $368 million deep-sea observation system that has for more than a decade provided crucial data on ocean systems and climate change.

In a notice, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it had “initiated descoping of the Ocean Observatories Initiative” (OOI), a vast ocean observation network comprising more than 900 instruments that collect data on ocean health, including current patterns, climate variability, and marine biodiversity.

The notice, issued on May 21, came just days after Trump fired all members of the independent board that oversees the NSF. A statement by NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope,” or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.

The move will bring to an end more than a decade of continuous ocean monitoring.

The notice describedplans to remove “all in-water infrastructure” from observation sites off the coasts of North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, as well as from the Irminger Sea, a marginal sea between Greenland and Iceland.

Some scientists expressed dismay at the plan, while Democratic lawmakers said they would fight it, including Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who called it a “shortsighted move” that would “end up costing American taxpayers more not less,” the New York Times reported.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said on X: “Fossil fuel is heating our oceans by the zettajoule, so Trump’s corrupt fossil fuel stooges want to turn off the monitors.”

Following the announcement, the OOI’s principal investigator, Jim Edson, said the NSF’s plan involves a phased recovery and infrastructure removal process expected to take place over the next 15 months. “As infrastructure is recovered from each array, the associated real-time data streams and observing capabilities at those locations will come to an end,” Edson said.

The move will bring to an end more than a decade of continuous ocean monitoring after the system first became operational in June 2016.

Describing the network as having “delivered the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems,” Edson added: “We are profoundly grateful for the extraordinary efforts of the scientists, engineers, operators, educators, students and partners who made this facility possible and who continue to advance its legacy through the use of its data.”

The dismantling of the OOI marks another step in the Trump administration’s rollback of science and climate initiatives. It also follows Trump’s push to expand deep-sea mining and loosen fishing regulations, a policy that has alarmed ocean scientists and climate experts.

Hilary Palevsky, a professor focusing on marine biogeochemistry and oceanography at Boston College, pointed to the significance of the data that will be lost, particularly given the sophisticated engineering required to deploy and maintain the instruments.

Eliminating data collection “makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do.”

“One of the real powers of this OOI and a lot of the collection of autonomous data is that scientists like me don’t have to have the expertise or the resources to be able to deploy this kind of infrastructure ourselves,” Palevsky said. “Being able to have instruments, both actually out in the atmosphere floating in the surface ocean, as well as surviving through the really deep mixing and waves in the subsurface.”

She said: “Over the more than 10 years that these things have been deployed, they’ve just gotten better and better at it. And so the data return has also gotten better and better over time…the scientific community was really just getting to the point of being able to capitalize on the data that had been collected so far…I’m really disappointed for the continuation of this important data set.”

Palevsky also warned that rebuilding such a network in the future would be difficult, saying: “If we want to put [the instruments] back out again, we need people who know how to do it and the team that knows how to do it is being dismantled along with the infrastructure program itself.

“We’re potentially at risk of having a gap in our ability to regain the expertise to do things that we had sort of just figured out how to pull off.”

For Palevsky and her students, OOI data has helped shed light on biological production in the ocean and its role in carbon sequestration—the process by which carbon dioxide is captured and stored—as well as deep-ocean processes, marine ecosystems and fisheries.

Data from the OOI has also contributed to research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents that studies suggest may be more vulnerable to collapse than previously thought, with potentially severe consequences for the global climate.

“One of the important processes in the AMOC is what we call convection, this really deep mixing of surface waters into the deep ocean that happens in winter, basically driven by the surface ocean getting really cold because the atmosphere gets super cold in winter and big, windy storms blow across the surface ocean,” Palevsky said.

“We have gained some really important insights into both how that happens in the Irminger Sea in particular, and how the drivers of that process vary from year to year from the observations that have been gained at this site,” she added.

For scientists like Palevsky, the consequences of dismantling the OOI extend far beyond ocean researchers, particularly as climate change intensifies extreme weather events around the world.

“As we reduce the amount of data that we have, the observations, as well as the science more generally to understand what’s happening in the climate system, it makes it much harder for us as a society to understand what we’re facing and what we need to do to plan for and adapt to it,” she said.

In a statement to the Guardian, the NSF head of media affairs, Mike England, said the program was not being cancelled entirely: “The NSF is not cancelling the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The decision to descope aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”

Continue Reading…

The Obscure Word That Helped Novelist Jesmyn Ward Process Her Grief

When I buried my father, a man who bequeathed me his entire face but very little of his time, I turned to words from Jesmyn Ward. I didn’t feel appropriately shaken, and certainly this was a problem. By my late 20s, half my family spanning four generations were dead, each person lost to some calamity of health or circumstance, so I had learned to turn shock into productivity, action. I could not stop the bullet that killed my sister or the fire that took my uncle, but I knew where to get good card stock for an obituary.

When I picked up Ward’s 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, I wasn’t trying to feel so much as understand. Our society is built to incentivize the ephemeral, and as a millennial at the dawn of the Instagram era, I worried about my ability to compartmentalize and move on; to turn the active, lifelong work of grieving into a concrete task to be checked off on a to-do list. I could no longer remember my grandmother’s voice, and shouldn’t that fact make me cry?

It didn’t, but reading the prologue of Men We Reaped got me close. In it, Ward lists the five young Black men in her life who died in a brutal four-year span and described how the weight of those tragedies nearly silenced her until she found an escape through her own form of productivity: her work. “My ghosts were once people,” she wrote, “and I cannot forget that.”

I suddenly didn’t feel so guilty about not crying. I recognized the work of writing and remembering as their own daily rituals of grieving, of paying homage. Recently, I spoke with Ward about her new book, __On Witness and Respair_, a collection of nonfiction essays spanning more than a decade. The collection takes its name from a viral essay she wrote for Vanity Fair at the start of the pandemic about losing her partner, then learning to reckon with that loss as the world began to tally its own. Our conversation touched on creative form, the process of writing, and why place—in this case, Mississippi—has become so central to her own narrative.

A lot of your writing deals with loss, including the sudden passing of your partner in 2020 and the death of your brother 20 years ­earlier. How has your grief shifted over time?

I knew from losing my brother that the first two years were basically lost. It’s just a haze. Waking up every day with the shock of someone’s absence as the first thing you encounter. After that, you move into the work of grief. For me, that’s learning how to carry the love you still feel for someone while navigating your life. It’s been six, going on seven years since my partner died, and I’m still in that phase. It’s the small things. Cooking is different, sleeping is different, laundry is different. You have to figure out how all of that will change and reconcile yourself to it. The longing doesn’t go away. You just learn how to live with it.

“The longing doesn’t go away. You just learn how to live with it.”

Your new essay collection, On Witness and Respair, contains an unusual word most of our readers would have never heard of—“respair,” meaning “fresh hope.” Where did you find that?

On Twitter, actually, in a poem by a Black poet. I looked it up and realized it meant the opposite of despair. I couldn’t use it yet when I found it because I was still in the first hot press of grief. But I wrote it down. When I wrote the Vanity Fair essay about the George Floyd protests and losing my partner, it felt like the right place. Like maybe using that word was the first step out.

The collection spans your entire writing life, including a 2008 piece about surviving Hurricane Katrina. What did it feel like to read it all at once?

Strange. I went back to the Katrina essay, which I wrote so long ago, and I was honestly surprised. I tell my students all the time that they’re always doing something right, but I don’t always apply that to myself. I struggle with confidence and self-doubt as a writer. Going back, I found these flashes of wisdom, moments of lyrical language that moved me. I was like, Oh, I was doing some stuff!

Nonfiction seems to demand something different of you than fiction. What is it?

It’s harder. With fiction, I have the whole world to work with, which is freeing. With nonfiction, the boundlessness of real life overwhelms me, so I outline obsessively. I have to know exactly where I’m going before I begin. But the rewards are unlike anything else. So many of these essays taught me something I didn’t expect—about myself, about the people I love—just because I committed to sitting inside a moment that was uncomfortable or dark. That’s where I feel most exposed. And most changed.

After years of living in other places for school and work, you’ve made a deliberate choice to settle in Mississippi, where you grew up. Why?

It keeps me honest. If I weren’t rooted here, it would be easy to navel-gaze, to become shallow. But I also wrestle with it. It’s hard to live as a Black progressive in a place where people may be cordial to your face but fundamentally don’t believe you’re fully human. That double consciousness is real. I have no illusions about Mississippi. But this place—the people, the community, the language—it’s what inspires me. The way I describe rain, because I’m from southern Mississippi, is completely different from how someone in California would. This place informs the way I use language.

“The way I describe rain, because I’m from southern Mississippi, is completely different from how someone in California would.”

You’ve talked about wanting to root your children in the way you were rooted. What does that mean to you?

My editor tells me most people don’t grow up where their family has lived for generations—where your people stretch back into the 1800s. That felt rare and important to me. I wanted my kids to have that, even knowing they’ll probably leave one day, the way I did. Maybe they return, maybe they don’t. But I wanted them to have something to leave from.

How has motherhood shaped how you think about legacy?

My oldest says she hates reading, which feels like a personal attack. My 9-year-old loves it. My 3-year-old—jury’s still out. They’re not flat, they’re not foils; they’re little complicated people. I’m not the perfect mother. I know I’m going to do harm, right? But I do think that because writing requires empathy and also fosters empathy, it goes hand in hand with the kind of parenting that I try to do. When I think about legacy, I hope that when my kids are grown—especially when I’m no longer here—they can look at the work and understand what was underneath it. That the storytelling, the empathy, all of it was an attempt to make the world a little easier for them to move through. Especially in the nonfiction and the writing that’s about them or around them, I hope they’re able to see beyond the surface and understand the intent behind the work.

Continue Reading…

Could Democrats Be Iced Out of This California Congressional Race?

While most California races were called by the morning after Election Day, a handful of key holdouts remain. “This is normal,” Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, who was on the ballot herself, emphasized in a press release. “I would call on all Californians to be patient.”

That’s a hard ask, at least for Richard Pan, a Democrat who is running third in one of the state’s tightest races: the Sixth Congressional District.

In California’s open primary system, the top two finishers in a given race advance to a general election runoff regardless of party affiliation. The Sixth leans blue, but if Democratic votes are split among a large pool of contenders, Democratic candidates could be iced out.

The Republican now in contention to advance to the general election didn’t even run a campaign.

That’s how things were looking in the Sixthas of mid-afternoon Wednesday. With 48 percent of votes counted, Rep. Kevin Kiley—the Third District Republican incumbentwho recently renounced his party to run as an independent in the Sixth—was aheadwith more than a quarter of the vote. In second place was Republican Michael Stansfield, whose bid isn’t serious. (He doesn’t even have a campaign website.) Running a close third—just one percentage point behind Stansfield—is Pan, the outspoken pediatrician, pro-vaccine warrior, and former state senator I profiled for Mother Jones in April.

If this trend holds, Pan, who is perhaps best known for having authored some of the country’s toughest state vaccine laws, would be headed straight back to the clinic.

Stansfield’s success as the only Republican on the ballot highlights the unintended consequences of Prop 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting plan that voters approved last November. After the state congressional map was redrawn to help more Democrats win seats, the new Sixth remains blue, but less so than before, as it has absorbed conservative regions carved fromother districts.

The close race seems to have surprised Stansfield, a 50 year-old tech worker who received no donations and did essentially no campaigning. He only ran, he told US News, to send a message to the religious right about peace in the Middle East. “I wasn’t necessarily going after it to win,” Stansfield said.

And he might not. Many of the remaining votes are from northern Sacramento and the adjoining suburbs, a region that so far has favored Pan. And votes counted later may have a different skew. In California, early ballot returns were up among Republican voters for this cycle, and lagged for Democrats relative to previous years.

“I think [Pan is] going to eke it out,” Sacrament0-based Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio told the New York Times. “But it’s going to be close.”

Continue Reading…

“We Are Being Made to Look Like Fools”: How Trump Is Weaponizing World Cup Visas

The FIFA Men’s World Cup starts next week—and some players still don’t know whether they’ll be able to travel to their matches.

On Wednesday, Switzerland’s main goalscorer, Breel Embolo, applied for a visa at the US embassy in the country’s capital after US officials blocked him from boarding a flight with his teammates to their World Cup training camp in San Diego the day before.

The Swiss soccer federation stated that the US has been reviewing Embolo’s criminal conviction after a 2018 altercation in Basel, Switzerland. The verdict was finalized in April.

“The embassy’s inquiries focused specifically on whether any physical violence had been involved. This was not the case,” the Swiss soccer body said in a statement. According to Swiss outlets, Embolo was sentenced to a fine of roughly $165,000, conditional on two years of probation, for making multiple threats during an argument.

Meanwhile,the men’snational team of South Africa, a frequent target of the Trump administration over “white genocide” claims, had to delay their Saturday flight from Johannesburg to Mexico City because at least 20 people in their traveling group—mainlyplayers—were still trying to get the US embassy in that country to process their visas.

On Sunday, Gayton McKenzie, South Africa’s sports, arts and culture minister, announced that all of the national team players had received their visas to travel to the US, but that an assistant coach, team doctor, the head of security, and one team analyst were still waiting. McKenzie criticized the situation earlier that day, calling it “embarrassing & grossly unfair towards the players & coaching staff.”

“Action must be taken against those responsible for this mess,” he continued. “We are being made to look like fools.”

This @SAFA_net travel & visa debacle is embarrassing & grossly unfair towards the players & coaching staff. I have informed @SAFA_net that I need a report and action must be taken against those responsible for this mess. We are being made to look like fools.

— Gayton McKenzie (@GaytonMcK) May 31, 2026

News24, a South African news platform, reported that the team arrived on Tuesday morning but that the assistant coach and head of security arrived late after their visas were finally approved. On Monday, McKenzie notably apologized for his criticisms, posting on X that “the fault is entirely on our side,” and that US embassy workers in South Africa were “only too helpful” and “even worked on a Sunday for the first time ever.” McKenzie did not elaborate on what mistakes South Africa made.

The Trump administration has a record of denying international athletes visas, including members of an Ethiopian delegation to the World Athletics Cross Country Championships, whose 44-year medal streak was broken by a mass visa denial in January. Multiple Cuban sports delegations have also been locked out of sports competitions since 2025 by the US’ refusal to grant them visas—including Olympic qualification events. And according to Television Jamaica, Javontae Smith, a shotput and discus thrower from Munro College in Jamaica, was denied a US nonimmigrant visa last month to compete in the Penn Relays in Philadelphia.

Iran’s national team is set to leave for Mexico on Saturday. The team’s initial three matches will take place in the US, but the country’s soccer federation won FIFA approval in May to move its training base from Tuscon, Arizona, to Tijuana, Mexico, due to security concerns amid the US and Israel’s ongoing war in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.

According to Al Jazeera, the federation has not yet said whether the players had received all necessary visas for both Mexico and the US, though Mehdi Taj, Iran’s football federation chief, said on Monday that they expected to receive visas for Mexico on Tuesday or Wednesday “and then a US visa will be issued quickly.”

The delays have created unprecedented uncertainty for many national team players and sparked outrage amongtheir fans, who now have to worry about whether they can even get to the tournament—let alone whether their team will play well in it.

Continue Reading…

Jared Kushner’s Albanian Resort Faces a Corruption Probe and Mass Protests

This story was originally published by Popular Information, the author’s substack publication. Subscribe here.

Jared Kushner’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Iran War are not going well. But he is only moonlighting as one of the Trump administration’s top diplomats. Kushner is also having problems at his day job as the founder of Affinity Partners, a private equity fund bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments.

Along with his wife Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Trump, Kushner is developing a multibillion-dollar resort on Sazan Island in Albania and nearby coastline. In an interview with the David Senra podcast published Sunday, Ivanka Trump described the project dreamily:

It’s an unbelievable, beautiful, 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean. We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated, and it stayed with us ever since. And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful that, really, the architecture has to be fully integrated into it, almost rise from it.

She also said the project is “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly want to live.”

But the reality of the massive project, which includes 10,000 hotel rooms and is located in one of Europe’s most environmentally sensitive areas, is a lot messier. In 2024, the Albanian government changed the law to allow the area, which was previously part of a protected national park, to be developed. After Trump’s election in November 2024, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners, an LLC linked to Kushner, “strategic investor“ status, clearing the way for permits.

Kushner’s LLC was granted that status “just weeks before the new US president’s inauguration, even without a business plan or feasibility study for the construction of a luxury resort on an uninhabited island once used by the army for shooting practice.”

On Monday, Albania’s Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, known as SPAK, confirmed it was investigating Kushner’s project. The investigation will probe the changes to the land’s protected status and how Kushner-controlled entities obtained rights.

An investigative report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network found that the project involved a “network of shady individuals and companies“ including “a businessman accused of links to the Italian mafia, a former judge who resigned due to the vetting process, the daughter of a lawyer accused of forgery, the company of a murdered businessman and individuals linked to one of Albania’s biggest oligarchs, Shefqet Kastrati.”

In January, 41 environmental organizations from 28 countries wrote to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and called for “the immediate suspension of any decisions advancing the project.” The groups said the resort posed “serious risks to the biodiversity and critical habitats of the area,” including “crucial habitats for some of the world’s most endangered marine species.”

Rama, however, has continued to defend the project. “There is not a single chance it will be stopped for as long as I am here,” Rama said at a press conference Tuesday.

On Senra’s podcast, Ivanka Trump said she was “just there [in Albania] walking the lands” to “sort of be with it and experience it alongside some of the greatest living architects of our time.” She did not mention that the property has been subject to mass protests.

On April 29, government officials allowed barbed wire fencing to be constructed around the coastal portions of the resort property. This cut off miles of beach from the public. Heavy machinery was brought in to construct access roads.

The actions prompted regular protests by Albanians objecting to handing Kushner a public asset to develop into an ultra-luxury resort. Video captured private security guards dragging a protester across the ground.

ABENDREPORT aus Europa
1/7
Das darf nicht wahr sein. In Europa, wo alles und jeder unter Schutz steht:
Jared Kushner und Ivanka Trump wollen Albaniens geschützte Südküste in ein 1,4 Milliarden Euro Luxusresort verwandeln – Insel Sazan und Küstengebiet bei Zvernec.
Die… pic.twitter.com/0bJt2wxKMO

— Anna (@AnnaDeMilanese) May 30, 2026

After the incident, “authorities revoked the licenses of two private security firms involved in the incident, arrested one guard and stripped the local police chief of his duties.” Fifteen protesters were charged with crimes.

This week, protests expanded to Tirana, Albania’s capital, with thousands chanting “Albania is not for sale” and demanding Rama’s resignation.

In December, Kushner’s plan to build a Trump tower in Belgrade collapsed after the project became enmeshed in a criminal corruption scandal involving Serbian government officials. Prosecutors allege that government officials forged documents to remove cultural protections from the land where the tower was to be constructed.

Continue Reading…

“The Waste Is Heartbreaking”: Fired Scott Pelley Accuses CBS of Courting Trump in Scathing Letter

“The principles I hold dear are gone,” 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley said after getting fired Tuesday night for criticizing Bari Weiss’ leadership at CBS News the day before as submitting to President Donald Trump’s whims. “And so I must leave.”

In his statement, he detailed how the program’s new management repeatedly instructed him to “inject falsehoods and bias” and “include assertions that are unverified.” Though Pelley refused to do so, he said network leadership allowed politicians to pick their own interviewers—“giving politicians control” and destroying the broadcast’s integrity.

You can read Pelley’s full statement below:

View this post on Instagram

As I wrote last December, CBS has previously pulled 60 Minutes segments, including one that was critical of the Trump administration deporting people from Venezuela to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

At the 47th News and Documentary Emmy Awards last Wednesday, Scott Pelley handed Santiago Campos, a high school senior, a $10,000 scholarship from CBS News for a submission that reflected on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns through the story of his own family. Campos condemned CBS News in his acceptance speech, stating that the network’s new editorial direction “stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.”

CBS News’ downfall comes as David Ellison—son of Oracle co-founder and centi-billionaire Larry Ellison—took over Paramount, the company that owns the network.

“God, we need young people like you right behind us.” Pelley said to Campos after his acceptance speech. “I know that Mike Wallace is looking down at you with pride at this very moment.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Congratulated Him on His Freedom. Alligator Alcatraz Left Him With a Stroke.

On a recent Wednesday at 11 p.m., Arianne Betancourt’s phone rang. It was her father, Justo Betancourt, who had spent much of the last six months at the notorious Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention facility in Florida. ICE had just transferred him to Krome, a differentfacility in Miami, and with little warning, he was being released in the middle of the night. Still in her pajamas, Arianne asked a friend to take her. “I was too nervous to drive myself,” she told me a few days later.

Their reunion at Krome included no hugs or warm greetings. Once 55-year-old Betancourt got in the car, guards ordered them to leave immediately. Under the fluorescent lights of a nearby gas station, the father and daughter finally embraced for the first time. Arianne noticed “the toll that that place took on my dad.” He had lost about 50 pounds. His wrists and ankles were bruised from the shackles he wore during his detention, and his speech seemed slurred.

“Welcome home to Justo Betancourt, whose Daughter, Arianne, fought very hard to free her father from Alligator Alcatraz. Enjoy your Freedom together!!!”

They headed to his son’s house in Miami, where the family gathered and stayed up most of the night. Betancourt drank Cuban coffee for the first time since his arrest and saw his 15-month-old granddaughter, who could now walk, toddling around the living room.

By the weekend, Arianne noticed her father’s speech had worsened. She drove him to a nearby emergency room, where he was admitted, and doctors confirmed he had suffered a stroke while in detention. Justo, who is diabetic, had not received the proper amount of insulin he needed at Alligator Alcatraz, Arianne told me, and he will need speech and physical therapy to recover. His medical condition, however, is only part of the effects of his ordeal. “What Mr. Betancourt has experienced shows that folks who are caught up in this cruel deportation machine are suffering, and that their suffering doesn’t end upon release,” said Miriam Haskell, a senior attorney with the Community Justice Project, a legal nonprofit in Miami. She represented Betancourt pro bono and filed the Habeas Corpus petition that resulted in his release. “People have endured great hardships, and getting out doesn’t solve all of the problems.”

An unexpected expression of support for Betancourt’s release came from President Donald Trump, whose draconian immigration policies were responsible for his incarceration in the first place. On a Sunday night Truth Social post, the president wrote, without any apparent irony: “Welcome home to Justo Betancourt, whose Daughter, Arianne, fought very hard to free her father from Alligator Alcatraz. Enjoy your Freedom together!!!”

Arianne Betancourt at a Sunday vigil in front of Alligator Alcatraz.Jose Mejia/Owl Media

Justo Betancourt at a Sunday vigil in front of Alligator Alcatraz.Jose Mejia/Owl Media

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration erected the makeshift detention camp in the Everglades last summer when the Department of Homeland Security needed more beds to house immigrants pending their deportations. Over the last year, the center has come under fire for its living conditions, its environmental impact on the Everglades, and its location on sacred tribal land. Nearly 22,000 people have been detained there despite reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, and lackluster food. The venture has also been costly, requiring more than $1 million a day to run the facility.

Recently, reports circulated that Alligator Alcatraz will be closing soon.Federal and state officials haven’t announced any official plans. Still, signs of an imminent closure are emerging. Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Orlando, learned during a visit to the center on May 27 that only 655 people remained there, half the population reported earlier this year. Contractors were also told that operations would be winding down in early June, the New York Times reported.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty and lack of information and transparency here,” said Carmen Iguina Gonzalez, Deputy Director for Immigration Detention at the ACLU. “That makes a lot of people nervous because they have no certainty as to what is going to happen to them.”

Last week, I asked the Florida Division of Emergency Management, the state agency that manages Alligator Alcatraz, when the facility was closing and how many people were currently being detained. A spokesperson referred me to DeSantis’s May 13 remarks during a press conference, in which the governor said that the responsibility for sending immigrants to Alligator Alcatraz rested with DHS. “I have not gotten any official word that they’re not going to be sending illegal aliens there,” DeSantis continued. When I reachedout to the Department of Homeland Security for more information, a spokesperson replied in an email,“Daily operations at Alligator Alcatraz continue as usual.”

a Sunday vigil in front of Alligator Alcatraz.Jose Mejia/Owl Media

I wrote about Arianne and her father back in March, when I first learned about his story. Justo Betancourt came to the US from Cuba more than 35 years ago, and had an order of removal following his release from prison in 2020 after serving time for drug-related charges. Betancourt reported to his check-ins with immigration and was issued a work permit, court filings state.He wasarrested in Miamiduring a routine immigration check-in appointment in October and wastaken to Alligator Alcatraz. In January, he was transferred to a Texas detention center and then forced to present himself for deportation to Mexican authorities at the border. But due to his health problems, including diabetes, Mexican officials turned him away. ICE transferred him back to Alligator Alcatraz, court filings state.

Since her father was detained, Arianne has become a firebrand within the immigrant rights movement. As I wrote in March:

Before her father’s arrest, Betancourt, a 33-year-old Miami native, spent her days guiding tourists through the city’s most iconic sites like Little Havana and South Beach. Now, she is holding a microphone and a bright orange sign that reads, “Give Justo Betancourt the right to due process.” She peered across the crowd of about 100. When she came to the weekly vigil for the first time, Betancourt told them she was “absolutely broken.” She then added, “Week after week, I’ve come here, and I’ve felt stronger. I feel love, I feel empathy, compassion from absolute strangers.”

Her activism began at the weekend vigils held outside the detention camp’s gates. She protested in Minneapolis and Chicago and shared her family’s story with local and national news outlets. In March, sheattended then US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s testimony at a Senate oversight hearing. Her advocacy led to a career change; she quit her job as a Miami tour guide and was hired as an organizer for the Workers Circle, a Jewish social-justice organization that has taken the lead in coordinating the Alligator Alcatraz gatherings. Most recently, she contributed to the launch of a new pro bono legal program for Alligator Alcatraz detainees.

I spoke to Justo for the first time this week. He was out of the hospital and living with Arianne. Despite his slurred speech, he sounded upbeat. While thrilled to be with his family, he is worried about the friends he left behind. He described the frozen bologna and cheese sandwiches eaten during 15-minute meal breaks, the mosquito and spider infestations that left detainees covered in bites, and the anxiety of waiting hours to make one phone call to Arianne and his two other children. He witnessed fights break out, and people trying to take their lives. “We were 32 people in one cage,” he recalled.

For months, he said, he went without insulin. He spent much of his time at the medical unit shackled to a bed and escorted to the restroom by guards. “Alligator Alcatraz has scarred me like nothing else in my life. It broke me mentally and emotionally,” he added. “Some people may say I’m exaggerating…but I lived through those moments.”

On Sunday, Justo joined Arianne at the vigil outside Alligator Alcatraz, where week after week, she showed up to advocate for him. They held hands and faced the detention camp that had separated them for more than six months.

“Nobody deserves what’s happened to them and what’s continuing to happen inside of Alligator Alcatraz,” Arianne said. “And if the government and DeSantis can be proud of having an operation like that, then I should be proud of all of my efforts to get it shut down.”

Continue Reading…

Six States Are Suing the Trump Administration Over Its Deal to Kill an Offshore Wind Project

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

Six states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its decision to cancel a major offshore wind lease off the coast of New York.

In March, federal officials announced they would pay nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to French energy firm TotalEnergies in exchange for the company killing plans to erect two offshore windfarms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies agreed to terminate the projects and pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States, while investing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and gas projects.

The deal was unlawful, says the lawsuit, led by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. “The Trump administration is once again trying to kill clean energy projects and destroy good-paying jobs for New Yorkers,” she said in a statement to the Guardian.

The administration’s agreement with TotalEnergies came after federal judges repeatedly struck down the president’s executive orders and stop-work directives which aimed to halt offshore wind development, ruling them unlawful and arbitrary.

“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” said James. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”

In the lawsuit, James and the attorneys general of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont assert that the deal violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which restricts the Interior department’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases. It also breaches the Judgment Fund Act—which regulates appropriations used to pay court judgments, awards, and compromise settlements—they said, among other allegations.

The plaintiffs are asking a court to strike down agreement, halt the lease cancellation and prevent Donald Trump officials from taking further steps to implement the deal.

In March, Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, hailed the deal as “another win for President Trump’s commitment to affordable and reliable energy for all Americans.” Burgum added that offshore wind is “expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent” and had been forced on US taxpayers.

Green groups defended the worth of offshore wind. Sam Salustro, a senior vice-president of pro-offshore wind group Oceantic Network, said: “Paying to remove affordable, homegrown energy out of the equation leaves American consumers struggling to pay their electricity bills.”

Continue Reading…

The Revolutionary Roots That Inspired Tupac Shakur

It’s impossible to overstate rapper Tupac Shakur’s influence on music and culture in the 1990s. One of the era’s bestselling musical artists, Tupac helped define West Coast hip-hop through vulnerable, introspective lyrics and Black power politics. His death in 1996 at just 25 years old sparked conspiracy theories for decades and left his fans wondering what might’ve been.

By his own admission, sports writer Jeff Pearlman is not the rapper’s likeliest biographer. Pearlman typically profiles athletes like Barry Bonds or Brett Favre. But as he waited for what he called “the big, fat biography” of Tupac, his impatience and long-standing fascination with the rapper got the best of him. So he set out to write it himself.

“Tupac Shakur…was profoundly smart and in many ways incredibly enlightened, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t have his 12th Academy Award now,” Pearlman tells More To The Story host Al Letson, adding that both Tupac’s music and movies still resonate because they were a compelling combination of hip-hop and Black Panther.

On this week’s episode, Pearlman talks about his book Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur; discusses how Tupac’s Black Panther mother, Afeni Shakur, shaped her son; and examines the nuance and mystery surrounding Tupac’s life and death almost 30 years later.

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

Continue Reading…

ICE’s Delaney Hall Is Being Slammed With Lawsuits

As protests inside and outside of Newark’sDelaney Hall continue into their second week, federal, state, and local officials are vying over the future of the privately-run ICE detention center and former prison in New Jersey.

This morning, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka held a press conference, calling for the facility’sclosure and threatening further legal action against GEO Group,the company that operates it. A few hours later, the state of New Jersey also sued theprivate prison giant, seeking a court order for full access by health inspectors, who since Wednesday have lacked it.

ICE and Homeland Security agents beat and arrested dozens of protesters outside Delaney last week, until state police took over the area on Friday, eventuallypushing protesters blocks away into a designated ‘protest zone’ as New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill implored activists to “lower the temperature.”

Baraka also pointed to conditions inside Delaney, referencing a detained person who had a miscarriage and was not given medical attention.

Beginning Sunday, under Baraka’s orders, the city of Newark established a curfew for the half-mile radius around Delaney Hall—and that evening, state police promptly tear-gassed and arrested even more protesters and members of the press than ICE agents had done earlier in the week. Meanwhile, people detained inside said they experienced physical violence from guards as retribution for speaking out.

At aTuesday press conference outside Delaney Hall, Baraka remarked that state police’s “training was not appropriate for what was happening in this area at the time” and objected to tactics that “kind of resembled what ICE was doing in the first place.”

Baraka announced that Newark municipal police, who the mayor contended are “more trained in de-escalation,” would be taking over the area. “I might say that we probably should have done that earlier, jumped in and had a louder voice,” he said.

The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to questions on why local government delayed involvement.

“I think it was escalated the minute ICE showed up on the scene,” Baraka, who was arrested last year while attempting to enter the facility, added. “We obviously thought that the interactions between ICE agents, Homeland Security, state police and residents were troubling.” He also pointed to conditions inside Delaney, referencing a detained person who had a miscarriage and was not given medical attention.

The city of Newark has been fighting in court for the past year to shut down Delaney Hall, alleging that GEO Group failed to get the proper permits to reopen the facility as a detention center in 2025. Now, Baraka said, the cities plans to expand that lawsuit to include safety violations. “This is not just…a code enforcement dispute,” Baraka said. “This is a dispute about human lives.”

Hundreds of Delaney Hall detainees have been engaged in hunger and labor strikes for nearly two weeks. They’ve turned down GEO Group–provided food and refused to work as janitorial, maintenance, and kitchen laborers within the facility—work for which they are paid as little as a dollar a day. They have four main demands: an end to coercive pressure from ICE agents to “self-deport,” a review of their immigration cases and habeas corpus petitions, an opportunity to speak with Gov. Mikie Sherrill in person inside Delaney Hall, and ultimately, their release from ICE custody.

New Jersey officials have largely not acknowledged these demands—including Baraka, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Sherrill, who has not met with immigrants inside Delaney Hall or fully funded their legal defense. Regardless, activists say their organizing inside and outside the facility has led to some victories.

Cosecha New Jersey, an advocacy group in communication with people inside Delaney Hall, posted on Instagram that “an increased number of people have been released from detention,” since the strike began, including all pregnant people incarcerated there, “thanks to the urgency and pressure from families and the public.” About a thousand people, however, remain locked inside.

In a social media post Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security characterized New Jersey’s lawsuit against GEO Group as “frivolous.”

“Just last week on May 28, four representatives of the New Jersey State Health Department arrived at approximately 11:00 AM,” the DHS X account posted. “They entered the facility and inspected the foodservice department.” That inspection, however, left out the medical unit, sleeping areas, and toilets, according to a press release from New Jersey’s Attorney General—and the state’s lawsuit stipulates that officials must be allowed to inspect the whole building.

“We believe that the way GEO Group opened up Delaney Hall was in contravention to municipal laws and state laws from the very beginning,” Baraka said in his Tuesday press conference. “We’re going to argue even further that this should be closed because of health and human safety.”

Continue Reading…

Bill Pulte Lacks Intelligence Qualifications. He’s Perfect for the Job Trump Just Gave Him.

President Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that Bill Pulte will serve as acting Director of National Intelligence—taking over the post from the embattled Tulsi Gabbard—makes a weird kind of sense.

Pulte, who currently serves as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no experience that prepares him to oversee the 18 intelligence agencies that the DNI is supposed to manage. But he has used his traditionally low-profile job overseeing the home mortgage industry to help launch dubious criminal probes relating to supposed mortgage fraud by Trump critics and foes. Working closely with Ed Martin, the former head of the Trump DOJ’s “weaponization” task force, Pulte spurred investigations of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, as well as an ill-fated indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Gabbard, who left the DNI job last month, was largely sidelined from intelligence matter as Trump launched attacks against Venezuela and Iran. But she, too, used the role to pursue Trump’s political grievances, declassifying and misrepresenting documents to make the wild claim that former President Barack Obama led a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump after the 2016 election and to prompt a questionable criminal investigation of national security officials who served during the Obama administration. She also seized voting machines in Puerto Rico and bizarrely showed up in person in Fulton County, Georgia, to watch FBI agents seize 2020 ballots. Pulte may not know anything about overseeing the CIA, but he seems well equipped to carry on the mission of using the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to target Trump’s critics. That’s clearly the job the president has in mind.

“William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform. The president said Pulte will also continue running FHFA.

Pulte’s experience at the FHFA, and in prior work, has raised serious questions about his own conduct. The Government Accountability Office—an investigative arm of Congress—is probing whether Pulte misused federal resources to launch politicized attacks. And even as he has pursued Trump critics for what in many cases appear to be paperwork mistakes, Pulte has substantial baggage of his own.

Pulte, a third-generation heir to real estate fortune, in 2023 gave $65,000 through a foundation he controlled to a supposed charity to support the poor, called One World Love. We found no indication a nonprofit with that name exits. Instead the funds appear to have gone to a Wyoming LLC tied to the Binnall Law Group—which represented Trump in various matters, including his effort to avoid paying damages after the January 6 attack. Pulte and Binnall have not responded to questions about the transaction.

“These facts raise serious concerns that Team Pulte Inc. may have illegally funneled cash out of a charity to support President Trump,” Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) wrote in a letter last month questioning Pulte about the transaction.

In a separate 2021 transaction, Pulte and his wife, Diana, appear to have used an LLC they controlled in Delaware to funnel a $500,000 contribution to a pro-Trump PAC. An FEC investigation into the gift ended last year without faulting Pulte. A spokesman told Mother Jones Pulte “was 100 percent compliant” and “anything else is Fake News, an attempt to smear Director Pulte.”

Pulte has also drawn notice for promoting a memecoin created by a social media influencer who the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission later accused of defrauding investors in the coin of at least $114 million through a pump-and-dump scheme. That case is scheduled to go to trial in Texas next year.

Last year, Mother Jones also reported that Pulte, even as he pushed for criminal investigations based on apparent paperwork errors, had failed to file a required SEC disclosure form. Pulte filed the form the day after our report.

Continue Reading…

Nike’s Recycled World Cup Uniforms Sound Groovy, But the Reality Is Complicated

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

In June, athletes from 16 countries will kick off the World Cup wearing other people’s used clothing.

Well, maybe. They’ll be sporting uniforms made from recycled fabric, potentially including a mix of scraps and old clothes. It’s the latest initiative from Nike, one of the world’s largest apparel companies, to incorporate more recycled material into the attire it makes. This time, the garment giant said it used “advanced chemical recycling” to produce its first elite performance apparel from 100 percent textile waste.

Rather than easing up on production, Nike and many rivals have pledged to boost the “circularity” of polyester.

Nike executives and some media coverage have implied that the outfits represent a turning point for sustainable fashion—that “circular” clothing, capable of being recycled over and over again, could soon reach everyday consumers.

The real picture, as you might expect, is a bit more complicated.

Nike has indeed signed deals with two chemical recycling companies, but no one is saying much about their technology or how scalable it is. Despite increasing investments from fashion brands, experts said not to expect to find sales racks lined with chemically recycled clothing anytime soon.

“Yeah, it’s technically possible,” said Veena Singla, an environmental health researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “But is it going to happen in reality?” She and others who study chemical recycling don’t think so—at least not in any way consumers might expect. The day when they can buy chemically recycled clothes, wear them, then return them for another trip through the cycle isn’t nigh.

What seems more likely is the fashion industry expands its use of this recycling technique with industrial scrap fabric—and at nothing approaching the level needed to address projected increases in textile production.

Nike is right that the fashion industry has a sustainability problem. Apparel companies produce more than 100 billion articles of clothing every year. In the process they generate up to 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and an unfathomable amount of waste; the vast majority of textiles are eventually landfilled, incinerated, or sent to unofficial dump sites in poor countries. And all of this is made possible by fossil fuels, with nearly 70 percent of clothes made from oil-derived fabrics. The most common is polyester, a type of plastic also used in water bottles.

Rather than easing up on production, Nike and many of its competitors have pledged to boost the “circularity” of polyester—mostly through recycling.

The push to do so through chemical means is a response to the shortcomings of other strategies they’ve tried. Traditional mechanical recycling through shredding and grinding causes fibers to break down. The resulting fabric must be blended with 70 to 80 percent virgin material so anything made with it doesn’t pill and tear.

The much more prevalent strategy involves turning discarded plastic bottles into new polyester. Patagonia pioneered this approach in the early ‘90s, and by the start of this decade virtually all recycled polyester was sourced from old bottles. Today, however, companies have increasingly faced lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny from those who would rather see bottles turned back into bottles.

“If we wanted it to work, we would have to have our clothes…be 100 percent polyester, and we’d need to get rid of so many toxic chemicals.”

Chemical recycling is supposed to be the next best thing. The term refers to using solvents to dissolve fibers into their base chemical units—building blocks that can be spun into new fabrics. On its face, this is a truly “circular” solution, because it doesn’t depend on bottles, and proponents say it can turn your used polyester shirts or running shorts into new ones over and over again, with no loss in fabric quality.

That’s the vision now being promoted by fast-fashion brands like Gap, H&M, and Levi’s, many of which have signed multi-year agreements with a handful of chemical recycling startups. Last fall, Nike agreed to source “circular” polyester from two of them: the Swedish firm Syre and Loop Industries here in the United States.

Research does bear out some of the hype. Technically, chemical recycling can produce virgin-quality polyester, and at least one method, called methanolysis, is capable of preserving that quality through repeated rounds of recycling. But there are significant constraints.

Diana Ferreira, a textile researcher at the University of Minho in Portugal, said textile-to-textile chemical recycling remains limited by the availability of suitable fabric to work with. “If we are dealing with clean, well-sorted, polyester-rich waste streams, chemical recycling can in principle produce material with properties comparable to virgin polyester,” she said. “However, if we are talking about post-consumer textile waste, the situation is much more complex.”

In other words, chemical recycling works best with industrial scraps, which are more uniform than piles of used clothes. The latter may include blends of cotton, nylon, wool, spandex, and acrylics, not to mention dyes, chemical coatings, thread, labels, and zippers. All of this stuff makes chemical recycling much less feasible—at least, not without meticulous sorting and repeated rounds of pre-treatment to chemically remove all of those contaminants.

One expert said Syre’s goal to produce even 3 million metric tons by 2032 is “too aggressive.”

“If we wanted it to work, we would have to have our clothes…be 100 percent polyester, and we’d need to get rid of so many toxic chemicals,” Singla said.

Beth Jensen, of the nonprofit Textile Exchange, is more sanguine. She said “all solutions,” including chemical recycling, are needed to reduce the fashion industry’s dependence on fossil fuels. But she agreed that establishing the infrastructure required for companies to accept used clothing and use technologies like methanolysis to make it into new apparel remains a ways away. Plus, it’s not clear who will build it. Companies like Nike? Governments? Recyclers? Some combination of those entities working collaboratively?

Even if the industry can hit its optimistic targets for chemically recycled polyester by the early 2030s—whether from scrap or from people’s old clothes—production of “circular” fabric would likely pale in comparison to the more than 169 million metric tons of polyester projected to be manufactured annually by then. Dionisios Vlachos, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Delaware, said Syre’s goal to produce even 3 million metric tons by 2032 is “too aggressive.”

Instead, companies need to “reverse the trend of fast fashion,” said Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the nonprofit Changing Markets Foundation. That means making less clothing overall, whether it contains recycled or virgin materials. Last year, growth in recycled polyester—mostly from bottles—was dwarfed by an even larger increase in the production of fossil fuel-based polyester.

Urbancic sees chemical recycling as “an excuse to keep producing plastic clothes” and advocates for a shift away from polyester altogether; the material sheds microfibers and may expose consumers to hazardous chemicals.

Nike, Syre, and Loop Industries did not respond to interview requests or detailed lists of questions, highlighting a transparency problem flagged by Singla, Vlachos, and others Grist spoke with. Industry confidentiality makes it difficult to know what’s actually going on in these firms—and whether “#TheGreatTextileShift” they promise will be different from failed chemical recycling initiatives in the past.

It’s worth noting that Loop Industries has never turned a profit since its founding in 2010. The company is under investigation by the SEC following a 2020 report accusing it of systematically misrepresenting its technology to regulators and investors, and in 2022, it settled a class-action lawsuit over similar accusations. Syre, for its part, has not said how the “gigascale” factory it plans to build in Vietnam will be able to process consumers’ old clothes, given the country’s ban on used apparel imports.

“It remains to be seen whether [Nike’s announcement] amounts to anything,” Singla said. For the foreseeable future, it seems chemically recycled polyester will be limited to niche products like World Cup uniforms.

Continue Reading…

They Were Detained by ICE. Then They Vanished.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook.

For about five days in December, Abdullahi Mohamed seemingly vanished into the US immigrant detention system. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had detained him near Portland, Maine, and held him for more than seven weeks in Massachusetts. Then, without warning, ICE began moving him repeatedly across the country, from state to state and facility to facility, faster than his family could keep up. News of his whereabouts came to them in fragments: an email from his lawyer that he was in Mississippi; a phone call from the wife of a fellow detainee who said he was in Louisiana; and at one point, a call from Mohamed himself—that lasted for about two minutes—from an undisclosed airport.

His lawyer laid out what was happening. “They are doing this now more and more—moving people without any notice,” he wrote to the family in an email. The transfers, he explained, can block people like Mohamed from speaking with an attorney and make it difficult to file legal petitions in the right jurisdiction, while distressing families. “This is cruelty,” he wrote.

Quick and repeated transfers have become more common in President Donald Trump’s second term, a Marshall Project investigation has found. From the final year of the Biden administration to the first year of Trump’s latest term, the number of people transferred five or more times more than tripled. The number of people transferred out of state within 24 hours more than doubled, according to a Marshall Project analysis of ICE detention data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

Immigration lawyers say the many transfers not only cause undue suffering for people being detained and their families but have significantly undermined due process protections. Because detainees have limited access to phones while in transit, and ICE’s detainee locator does not always reflect their real-time location, immigration attorneys say rapid transfers can leave people unreachable for hours or even days. Families can lose track of their relatives, while lawyers struggle to locate or speak with clients.

During those gaps, attorneys say, some detainees have been pressured to sign forms affecting their immigration cases before they can speak with counsel.

“What often happens is that a lawyer or family member will show up to see somebody and be told, ‘That person’s not here, and we don’t know where they are,’” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an Ohio State University law professor who focuses on the intersection of criminal and immigration law. “Effectively, that person has just disappeared while in the custody of the US government.”

“Effectively, that person has just disappeared while in the custody of the US government.”

In an emailed response to written questions, an ICE spokesperson said claims that transfers are being “weaponized” are “categorically false,” and that “all detainees receive full due process.” The spokesperson also said detainees have access to phones for contacting relatives and lawyers, receive a court-approved list of free or low-cost attorneys, and can be “easily” located by relatives, lawyers, and media through ICE’s online locator.

“Despite a historic number of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly and overtime to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final destination—home,” the spokesperson said.

Mohamed came to the US from Somalia in 1999 and applied for asylum, he told The Marshall Project. Federal records show that an immigration judge ordered his removal in 2001, and that his appeal was dismissed in 2002. Mohamed was allowed to stay in the US for years during a period when deportations to Somalia were difficult to carry out, as the country had no functioning central government and remained fractured by civil war. Under an order of supervision, he had to check in regularly with ICE for more than two decades to keep a valid work permit. He paid his taxes and had no criminal record, his family said. Eventually, he got married and settled in Maine, where he was working as a cab driver by fall 2025. ICE seized him in October when he showed up for a regular check-in.

After several weeks in detention, he vanished. The decades Mohamed had spent building a life in the U.S. unraveled in less than a week. When his family spoke to him next, he was calling from Somalia. He had been deported. For his sister, Saynab Mohamed, and her daughter, Eza Nour, each update arrived too late and never from ICE itself. “I think the whole point was to traumatize us,” Nour said, “and leave us with a lasting scar.”

“I think the whole point was to traumatize us, and leave us with a lasting scar.”

Transfers have long been a feature of immigration detention. ICE uses a network of hundreds of facilities across the US and has broad discretion to transfer people for bed space, medical care, security and other operational reasons. But during the past year, attorneys say, those moves have carried higher stakes because the legal landscape around detention has changed dramatically.

In July 2025, the Department of Homeland Security adopted a new interpretation of a 1996 immigration law: ICE could now treat people who had come into the US without being formally admitted by immigration officials as if they were “arriving aliens” still seeking admission at the border, even if they had lived here for years before being detained. That made them ineligible for bond hearings before immigration judges. Before this shift, people could ask a judge to decide whether they were a flight risk or a danger to the community, and if they could be released while their immigration case continued.

Then, in September, the Board of Immigration Appeals—an administrative body within the Justice Department that sets precedent for immigration courts—made that interpretation binding nationwide, largely cutting off immigration judges’ ability to grant release and allowing ICE to detain people indefinitely.

Lawyers turned to federal court to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge whether the government had the authority to keep their clients detained. Earlier this year, more than 200 petitions were being filed every day across the country. However, habeas petitions generally must be filed in the federal district where a person is detained. If someone is moved before a lawyer files, the petition has to be filed in the new location, setting up a cycle where lawyers may struggle to file before their clients are moved again.

At the same time, federal courts are divided regarding the legality of the government’s new detention policy. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi and is widely regarded as one of the most conservative federal appeals courts, is one of two that have backed the administration on the policy. Those three states are also home to “Detention Alley,” a cluster of sites that include 14 out of the 20 largest detention facilities in the country. Many are located in remote, rural areas, and together they have helped make the region a major hub for detention and deportation in the south. In the first year of Trump’s second term, nearly three-quarters of the people ICE deported were last detained in a state covered by the 5th Circuit.

Transfers can now carry immediate legal consequences, attorneys say. The location where ICE sends someone often determines where a habeas petition is filed and which court gets to hear it. “They’re trying to get as many people to the 5th Circuit as possible,” said Dan Gividen, a Texas-based immigration lawyer who was deputy chief counsel for ICE from 2016 to 2019. “It’s in no way surprising that ICE, [which] in many ways gets to forum-shop, gets to choose the judge, is sending people to this circuit.”

In July 2025, the Department of Homeland Security adopted a new interpretation of a 1996 immigration law: ICE could now treat people who had come into the US without being formally admitted by immigration officials as if they were “arriving aliens” still seeking admission at the border, even if they had lived here for years before being detained. That made them ineligible for bond hearings before immigration judges. Before this shift, people could ask a judge to decide whether they were a flight risk or a danger to the community, and if they could be released while their immigration case continued.

Then, in September, the Board of Immigration Appeals—an administrative body within the Justice Department that sets precedent for immigration courts—made that interpretation binding nationwide, largely cutting off immigration judges’ ability to grant release and allowing ICE to detain people indefinitely.

Lawyers turned to federal court to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge whether the government had the authority to keep their clients detained. Earlier this year, more than 200 petitions were being filed every day across the country. However, habeas petitions generally must be filed in the federal district where a person is detained. If someone is moved before a lawyer files, the petition has to be filed in the new location, setting up a cycle where lawyers may struggle to file before their clients are moved again.

At the same time, federal courts are divided regarding the legality of the government’s new detention policy. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and is widely regarded as one of the most conservative federal appeals courts, is one of two that have backed the administration on the policy. Those three states are also home to “Detention Alley,” a cluster of sites that include 14 out of the 20 largest detention facilities in the country. Many are located in remote, rural areas, and together they have helped make the region a major hub for detention and deportation in the south. In the first year of Trump’s second term, nearly three-quarters of the people ICE deported were last detained in a state covered by the 5th Circuit.

Transfers can now carry immediate legal consequences, attorneys say. The location where ICE sends someone often determines where a habeas petition is filed and which court gets to hear it. “They’re trying to get as many people to the 5th Circuit as possible,” said Dan Gividen, a Texas-based immigration lawyer who was deputy chief counsel for ICE from 2016 to 2019. “It’s in no way surprising that ICE, [which] in many ways gets to forum-shop, gets to choose the judge, is sending people to this circuit.”

Kaylynn Kim for The Marshall Project

Rapid out-of-state transfers have become more common. In Trump’s first year back in office, ICE transferred nearly 41,700 people to another state within 24 hours, more than double the number the previous year, according to a Marshall Project analysis of detention data. The agency rapidly transferred more than 1 in 10 people out of state within the first day of being detained.

Lawyers can be left with little time to respond, said Cassandra Charles, a senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. “It seems that people are being transferred out of more favorable jurisdictions to less favorable ones,” she said. “That puts the attorneys in positions where they have to file very quickly.”

By the time a lawyer is ready to act, the case may already belong to a different court. “It’s like having the rug pulled out from under your feet,” she said.

One move after another kept shifting the ground beneath Diana Elizabeth Cartagena Hueso’s case. Hueso and her husband were detained in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on January 27 while on their way to a doctor’s appointment, according to a February 26 federal court opinion granting her release. Hueso, a 29-year-old citizen of El Salvador, had passed a 2016 credible fear interview, a screening that allowed her to continue pursuing protection in the US. She filed an asylum application in 2017, according to her lawyer, Noemi Simbron.

Hueso hired Simbron as her attorney a few weeks after being detained. “[Because] they move people really fast, I make a commitment to the clients [who] retain me that I file a habeas within 24 hours,” she said. Simbron filed the petition from a plane on Feb. 13.

Four days later, a federal judge in New Jersey ordered the government to give Hueso a bond hearing within 10 days and in the meantime barred ICE from transferring her out of state.

But it was already too late. ICE had transferred her to Oklahoma the day before the judge’s order, according to court records. On February 17, the same day the court said she could not be moved—she was transferred again, this time to Texas. Two days later, ICE again sent her to Oklahoma. Simbron said Hueso was moved two more times within Texas after that, for a total of five transfers before she was finally released. She was detained for about a month.

In the ruling, the judge criticized the government’s handling of Hueso’s transfers, noting that officials never clarified why she had been “transferred three times in two days.” Her case, he wrote, reflected a broader pattern of immigrants being “shifted repeatedly around the country without warning or explanation.” The government’s conduct “can now only be deemed intentional,” the judge concluded.

During Hueso’s transfers, her lawyer and family had little idea where Hueso was, Simbron said. “She was moved away so many times, it was just so scary, like how fast they were moving her,” she added. Simbron repeatedly refreshed the detainee locator, called the U.S. attorney’s office, and waited for a call from Hueso. At one point, Simbron said, Hueso managed a single three-minute phone call to her family to say she had been moved. But as her lawyer, Simbron didn’t get the chance to talk to her during these transfers, she said.

Hueso declined to speak with The Marshall Project because her immigration case remains active. Simbron spoke on her behalf, explaining that after her release, Hueso said the repeated shuffling caused fear and frustration. Hueso had known about the judge’s order and kept bringing it up to officers, who told her she was “going home,” Simbron said. At first, she thought they meant New Jersey. Eventually, she realized they meant El Salvador.

“It was like mind games and gaslighting her.”

“It was like mind games and gaslighting her,” Simbron said.

Communication gaps can carry serious consequences if ICE is asking people to make fundamental decisions about their cases—including whether to keep fighting, accept deportation or sign documents they may not fully understand— while not able to speak with a lawyer.

“If an officer is saying, ‘Yeah, you don’t have any chance of staying in the US, this is the best option you have,’ [detainees] don’t have a lawyer who can actually look at the facts of their immigration case and tell them, ‘OK, here are your options,’” said Tess Hellgren, a supervising attorney at the National Immigration Project. “It deprives them of agency over their case so much, and they’re not getting the correct information about what their different choices are.”

In an Oregon case last fall involving farmworkers detained in and near Woodburn, attorney Kelsey Provo wrote in a federal court declaration that she and her colleagues raced to advise detainees because, from prior experience, they knew that “ICE transfers people out of the facility quickly.” Provo added that “both prior to and after transfer, ICE pressures people to sign documents waiving important rights.”

One of those detainees was a woman identified in court records as M-J-M-A, a 45-year-old Mexican citizen arrested on October 30 on her way to work. She and more than two dozen others were taken to the Portland ICE facility, where Provo and her colleagues waited about an hour before meeting with the first detainee. M-J-M-A had entered the country legally in January 2025 and overstayed her visa, the government said in a court filing. In her own declaration, she wrote that she feared returning to Mexico and intended to apply for asylum.

By the time Provo and her colleague met with her at noon, M-J-M-A had already been forced by an ICE officer to sign a document she didn’t understand, according to her declaration. The officer also told her that if she didn’t agree to be removed voluntarily, “it would take a very long time for [her] to leave.”

The document she signed was in Spanish. It is a routine form that detainees and those undergoing immigration proceedings are asked to fill out. It lays out a detainee’s rights and asks them to choose how they want their case to proceed. M-J-M-A selected the option on the form that waived her right to an immigration court hearing and requested that she return to her home country as soon as possible.

Provo said a person has a right to consult a lawyer when answering the questions on the form “because they are making important decisions about the future of their rights and what rights they want to exercise and what rights they want to give up.”

Weeks later, at an evidentiary hearing, the ICE officer who had presented the document to M-J-M-A “was unable to translate lines from the form that he claimed to have discussed with and explained” to her, the judge wrote in a later order. The officer’s testimony raised “significant doubts about the quality and depth of communications” with M-J-M-A “as she considered her due process rights and made vital decisions,” the judge wrote.

When Provo and her colleague finally met with M-J-M-A, they had about 10 minutes before an officer ended the meeting, Provo said in her declaration. Shortly after, ICE officers shackled M-J-M-A and loaded her onto a bus headed to Tacoma, Washington. Nearly a full day would pass before she appeared in the detainee locator, and the earliest her lawyers could meet with her was about two days later.

At that point, Provo was growing increasingly concerned that M-J-M-A, without access to legal advice, might sign documents affecting her case.

But because M-J-M-A’s lawyers had filed a habeas petition just eight minutes before she was moved out of state, the case remained before a federal court in Oregon. Hellgren, who worked with the legal team at the time, said that meant M-J-M-A could be released and that it was still possible for a court to step in and scrutinize what had happened to her. Without that intervention, what happened in her case may have stayed hidden, Hellgren said.

Mohamed was moved so rapidly during the final days of his detention that the narrow options his lawyer and family were pursuing never had a chance to materialize. They were no longer trying to reopen the case involving his old removal order, but were instead trying to get him released from detention long enough for him to get his affairs in order before leaving the country. In emails to the family in mid-December, his lawyer wrote that ICE had not responded to those requests despite weeks of calls and emails. He also didn’t know whether the government had secured the travel documents needed to deport Mohamed, even as the family tried to determine if there was still time to file a habeas petition.

Then, suddenly, ICE started moving Mohamed around the country. He eventually called his family from Mogadishu and relayed his deportation journey. In about five days, he told them, ICE had sent him from Massachusetts to Mississippi to Louisiana and then to Texas. From there, he boarded a deportation flight that crossed several countries in West, Central and East Africa, until he finally landed in Somalia. He said he had been beaten and shackled, and had endured long stretches without food or water.

In about five days, ICE had sent him from Massachusetts to Mississippi to Louisiana and then to Texas. From there, he boarded a deportation flight that crossed several countries in West, Central and East Africa, until he finally landed in Somalia.

“There is no family for me here,” Mohamed told The Marshall Project from Mogadishu. “Nothing. No future.”

Since his deportation, his wife has been in hiding due to her own immigration status. She spent hours on the phone with Mohamed, trying to figure out how to help him and what was left of the future they planned together, Saynab Mohamed said. “When your partner for life is gone, you feel kind of lost,” she said.

Abdullahi Mohamed said he has no way to support himself in Somalia, a country he hasn’t lived in for decades. His parents are dead, and Saynab Mohamed, his only living sibling, is the main reason he had built a life in the U.S. To help offset medical and legal costs, his family has set up a GoFundMe.

In the first year of Trump’s second term, ICE detained and deported 13,500 people in much the same way as Mohamed. Within a week, they were first transferred from the facility where they had been detained for a lengthy period and then sent to a series of other facilities before being deported. This represents more than twice the number of people the US government had similarly deported during the previous year, an increase that far outpaced the growth in the overall number of people the government detained.

According to the agency’s 2025 national detention standards, when deciding on a transfer, ICE takes into account whether a detainee is represented before the immigration court. ICE will consider alternatives to transfer, especially if the lawyer is nearby and court proceedings are underway. The standards also say detainees are not told about a transfer until just before they leave the facility, when ICE notifies them they are being moved to another facility in the U.S. and not being deported. They are then given the new facility’s contact information in writing, and the standards say ICE will contact the attorney of record.

But much of the process that ICE uses to decide when and where to move someone remains opaque, attorneys say.

“The rules are absolutely not clear,” said Hellgren, who was part of the legal team that sued ICE last year for records explaining how the agency decides where to detain and when to transfer those in its custody. “We don’t even know what all their own policies are because of the lack of transparency here,” she said.

During the litigation last year, ICE ultimately produced a limited set of documents, including a three-page “detainee transfer checklist” used when the agency moves someone outside the “area of responsibility,” meaning the geographic region overseen by a local field office. The checklist directs officers to document whether the detainee has an attorney of record in that region, immediate family ties, or a pending court case. If any of those factors apply, a senior official must approve the transfer. The form also says attorneys are to be notified of a transfer “as soon as practicable” and no later than 24 hours after it happens.

In her experience, Hellgren sees no evidence that those factors are being considered. “The speed of transfers is so extreme,” she said, “it’s hard to understand how they could be considering these factors.”

In late March, a federal judge in Minnesota extended an order that barred ICE from transferring people out of state during the first 72 hours of detention, a restriction meant to stop rapid transfers from cutting detainees off from their lawyers. The order also required ICE to ensure that the locator stays updated, and required that it provide free, private phone access to detainees while informing them where they would be transferred. Attorneys say broader reforms could follow the same logic by requiring ICE to give people notice of available legal help as soon as they’re detained, and to provide the time and private space for meeting with lawyers, interpretation when needed, and access to relevant arrest and detention paperwork before they are transferred.

After Mohamed’s sudden removal, his family flew to Maine to retrieve his car and drive it back to North Carolina, where they live. They had to sort out the title and the rest of his belongings, Nour said.

On the drive, they called Mohamed so he could guide them through the roads from memory. “He’s American, he’s telling us the roads,” Nour said. “He knows it better than we do.”

Methodology

The Marshall Project analyzed detention stint data from ICE obtained and processed by the Deportation Data Project.

Each row of data represents a detention stint, a person’s period of confinement in a single facility. Many people have multiple detention stints as they are transferred from facility to facility throughout their stay in detention. The data includes a unique identifier for each person. Some people were detained for multiple stays in the period covered by the data.

We began our analysis by grouping the stints into stays, counting the stints and then calculating the time between the book-in and book-out dates of the person’s stay, as well as the book-in and book-out of each stint.

The Deportation Data Project’s data contains records for people in detention between October 1, 2022, and March 11, 2026. We analyzed detention stays with book-in dates during the first year of the second Trump administration (January 20, 2025, through January 19, 2026) and the last year of the Biden administration (January 20, 2024, through January 19, 2025).

To identify detainees rapidly transferred to a different state, we ordered stints within stays by book-in date and identified the first stint that was in a different state than the initial stint. We then calculated the duration between the stay book-in date and the book-out date before they were first transferred to another state. If that duration was less than a day, the stay was included in the count of rapid transfers. We counted the unique identifiers within that set of stays to determine the number of people who experienced the rapid out-of-state transfers.

To identify people who were rapidly transferred leading up to deportation, The Marshall Project identified stays where the release reason listed deportation. We then identified the longest stint of at least 30 days and calculated the duration between the book-out date and time of that stint and the book-out date and time of the entire stay. If that duration was less than seven days and the person was detained in at least two facilities after their longest stint, they were included in the count.

We also analyzed the entire time period covered by the data, comparing all available book-ins before the beginning of the second Trump administration to all book-ins after, and found similar trends.

Continue Reading…

The Senator Who Won’t Shut Up about Climate Change

This story was originally published b_yYale e360 a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For the last 15 years, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, has been Congress’s most outspoken member on climate change. In 2012, he had a sign made up that showed the Earth as seen from space. “Time to Wake Up,” it said. The sign became a prop for a series of speeches the senator delivered on the urgency of the climate crisis. Not long ago, Whitehouse gave his 307th “Time to Wake Up” speech on the Senate floor.

Over the last few months, Whitehouse has been speaking out against the notion that Democrats shouldn’t talk about climate change ahead of the midterm elections. (Some pollsters and academics have been advocating this sort of silence, which has become known as “climate hushing.”) Recently, Whitehouse spoke to e360 contributing writer Elizabeth Kolbert about how climate change is affecting red state voters, why for many Americans it is becoming a pocketbook issue, and how he would frame the issue to give it more bipartisan appeal.

“This story has literally central-casting-quality villains, mustache-twirling quality villains,” Whitehouse said. “People don’t like to be fooled and defrauded, and they sure don’t like dark money. That’s bipartisan and fiercely powerful.”

You’ve been speaking out recently about a phenomenon you call “climate hushing.” What do you mean by that?

Climate hushing is the term that’s been used by people who don’t understand climate to encourage Democrats not to talk about climate. It’s sort of like a bad conclusion drawn by bad pollsters and people who follow polls. It just means don’t mention climate change.

Why do you think that’s a bad idea?

It’s a terrible idea because it forecloses really powerful arguments, particularly ones around home insurance costs, which are top of mind concerns in battleground states like Florida and Texas. And it forecloses arguments like your electric rates are going up on purpose because Trump is so corrupted by the fossil fuel industry that he’s meddling to keep cheap energy off your grid.

One argument being made is “Don’t talk about climate change, just talk about affordability.” Just say, “Well, your energy bills are too high.”

Then you’re missing the punchline. If you just want to do the cost part, and there we are sitting around commiserating, “Oh, your electric rates are too high,” then we’re not in there punching and saying, “And the reason your electric rates are too high is because the fossil fuel industry has corrupted the Trump administration and is using the powers of government to keep cheap clean energy off your grid.” You’ve foreclosed that argument.

“My least favorite word in the climate conversation was ‘ambition.’ I don’t give a damn about your ambition. What are you doing?”

Ditto, your home insurance costs are too high. And the other side isn’t going to do a thing about it, because it comes back to climate-driven extreme weather, and their pockets are stuffed with fossil fuel money, so they can’t talk about that. Ninety-two percent of Texans see homeowners’ insurance as a cost concern. That’s a higher response than groceries got. That’s a higher response than health care got.

When the issue is so important to red-state Texas that people who aren’t homeowners are telling pollsters they’re concerned about home insurance costs, you know that is a flaming hot issue. And 66 percent of Texans connect the home insurance cost concern to climate-driven extreme weather.

Whitehouse delivering his 307th “Time to Wake Up” speech in the Senate earlier this month. Courtesy of Sheldon Whitehouse

You’ve said that Democrats’ messaging and environmental group’s messaging on climate change has been “crap.” What’s been wrong with it, and what should the messaging be?

The worst part of it has been that we’ve left the villain out of the story. Every story is better with a villain. This story has literally central-casting-quality villains, mustache-twirling-quality villains. The two big villains are the climate denial fraud operation that the fossil fuel industry runs, and the dark money corruption operation that the fossil fuel industry runs. People don’t like to be fooled and defrauded, and they sure don’t like dark money. That’s bipartisan and fiercely powerful.

When we just don’t bother to talk about those aspects of it and act as if climate change is something about polar bears and somebody else’s green job, you’re missing the story. You’re missing what’s really going on. What’s really going on is that the American government has been sickeningly corrupted by the fossil fuel industry, and people get that. We just saw polling that came out the other day that said the top three concerns of undue influence are billionaire CEOs, wealthy donors, and large corporations. And the top industry Americans are concerned about abusing its influence is oil and gas companies.

There’s another area where climate hushing may be going on—news coverage of climate change. That coverage is way down. Major US TV networks reduced their airtime devoted to climate change by 35 percent last year. What’s going on there?

There’s enough right-wing media ownership that they’re trying to suppress it. But my personal experience is that there’s massive public interest in all of this.

Sinclair [the conservative broadcasting group] asked to do a story with me about home insurance and climate risk. And my office went to DEFCON 2 [high alert] that this was going to be a [hatchet] job—they were going to set me up, the whole thing was going to be phony baloney. We decided it was totally worth doing it, but we were on high alert for this being basically a sham interview designed to try to do “Gotcha.” Not at all. Not only was it completely straight up, but after it ran, they kept going back to segments of it and re-plugging it.

Interesting.

Sinclair does not like the climate change topic. They were going back to it because they were getting the clicks and the eyeballs when they went to it. So there is huge, huge, huge media opportunity out there with the public. And if the media isn’t meeting it, that’s on them. Our experience is that the public is really interested in these topics because it’s now landed in their homes through their mail slots in the form of an insurance non-renewal or an electric rate hike.

Media Matters for America/Yale Environment 360

You’ve certainly been out there. I believe you’ve just given your 307th speech in the Senate about climate change. Don’t you sometimes feel frustrated at this point? I mean, is this message getting out there?

I’ve felt frustrated on this issue for 15, 16 years now. I’ve felt extremely frustrated ever since Citizens United. I was in the Senate before Citizens United when climate change was a bipartisan issue, before our captive Supreme Court delivered the immense political weaponry to the fossil fuel industry of unlimited dark money, and then they came in and hammered my colleagues on the Republican side into the ground like a bunch of tent pegs until no head was standing to talk about climate. And then they said, “Oh, it’s a partisan issue.”

So you’ve been frustrated for a long time. What are you feeling now?

If I had to have a motto, it would be “Persist through frustration.”

We also see this huge retreat by businesses that used to be out there touting their commitment to reducing their carbon emissions, to getting to net-zero. They’ve really gone silent. What’s that about?

I would say two things. One is, chickening out in front of a Trump administration that is run from the inside by the fossil fuel industry and is willing to exact punishments. And two is, there was a lot of hot air in the world of corporate promises and goals and ambitions and benchmarks that was the narrative of climate action.

One of my frustrations is that we were very often satisfied with expressions of ambition rather than actual acts—rather than things like putting a price on carbon so it’s not free to pollute, things that would actually make a difference in the real world. A lot of these corporate pledges, many of the financial pledges, a lot of this was like a big, fat, inflated souffle that was full of corporate hot air, full of enthusiasm, but not real because the stuff to actually accomplish those benchmarks and goals wasn’t being done.

And one of the failures of the climate movement has been to be satisfied with that all along and not calling out that most of this stuff is bullshit. My least favorite word in the climate conversation was “ambition.” I don’t give a damn about your ambition. What are you doing? I have an ambition to be an Olympic athlete in 2028, but I’m sitting around eating donuts. So how serious is my ambition? Nobody wants to hear about my ambition. Are you on the bike? Are you running the miles?

We seem to be in a moment where people are generally acting like maybe this is just going to go away.

Yes, which is idiotic in the extreme. When you’re not listening to the head of the Federal Reserve, the former chief risk guy at Goldman Sachs, the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the International Financial Stability Board, the Mortgage Bankers Association—the warnings abound, and they’re backed by actual facts. Florida did in fact lose more real estate value last year than any other state. And this year it’s predicted to lose even more with some counties predicted to lose double-digit percentages. It’s happening. You can see it. You can measure it.

It’s a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad time for corporate credibility and corporate leadership. There’s a lot to apologize for, and I think the notion of corporate leadership is being irrevocably damaged by corporate leadership right now.

The war in Iran, high gas prices, how does that play into things?

It puts a sharp glare on a lot of things. One is that American oil companies are more than happy to ride international oil prices up and pocket obscene profits at the expense of the customer at the pump. The notion that fossil fuels can make us energy independent is completely belied by the grasping greed of our domestic fossil fuel industry. Solar prices didn’t go up. Wind prices didn’t go up. Battery prices didn’t go up, because those are real markets with real products that aren’t a cartel that is responsive to OPEC and to international incidents. That all becomes crystal clear.

Okay. How do we ever break this logjam? Can we ever do something to make climate change a bipartisan issue again? There’s so much research that shows how hard it is to change someone’s mind if they have to change their whole tribal identity. And this has become sort of tribal at this point.

I think that as the cost problem associated with fossil fuel becomes more and more apparent to people, you create an incentive for some people to defect and to be different.

You see places like Louisiana where they’re just in huge trouble and where local universities are doing studies about how fast land loss is happening to sea level rise. The home insurance problem in Florida is the worst. Louisiana is one step behind. Louisiana is really suffering from this. And when people are suffering economically, when homes can’t be sold, when people are having to abandon homes, in some cases, whole communities, there’s only so long that the fossil fuel industry can prop up a campaign of lies about that stuff.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Continue Reading…

Trump’s Top Economic Adviser Doesn’t Seem to Get That People Are Struggling

On Fox News Sunday morning, President Donald Trump’s lead economic policy adviser, Kevin Hassett, dismissed Americans’ struggles to cover the rising cost of living by noting that people are “spending more.”

But Kevin, isn’t that the problem?

When the host questioned Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, on why folks are delinquent on credit card payments at the highest rate in 15 years, he replied, “People are spending more on gas, but they’re also spending more on everything else. Not just groceries but restaurants.”

“That’s a sign that you would see when people are optimistic about the future,” Hassett continued, noting that people usually spend less money when they’re worried about job security or affording rent.

Hassett: "People are spending more on gas, but they're also spending more on everything else — not just groceries, but restaurants and so on. I think that's a sign you see when people are optimistic about the future."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-05-31T15:24:18.844Z

In fact, when measuring non-necessities, it may be the optimism of higher-income Americans that’s propping up the spending numbers. Moody’s Analytics reported, based on its analysis of federal data, that the top 10 percent of earners were behind much of last year’s consumer spending. And although Moody’s numbers have been questioned by some economists, a roaring stock market—the S&P has gained 25 percent since Trumpreturned to office—has channeled truckloads of cash into the coffers of the richest 10 percent of Americans, who, according to data from the St. Louis Fed, own more than 87 percent of all public equities and mutual funds. (The bottom half of US families only own about 1 percent of those assets.)

So, even as Hassett downplays Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that inflation is increasing faster than wages, and President Trump dismisses the notion of affordability as a “hoax” and a “con job,” US consumersare feeling the effects.

Part of his response to the Fox host’s question on credit card delinquency data seemed particularly telling as to the administration’s priorities: “We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time and we do see some increased stress,” he said, but “there’s not any kind of financial threat to the credit card companies.”

BREAM: The Journal says percentage of delinquent credit card balances is 13%, the highest in 15 years. People are using them for necessities. Your message to them?HASSETT: We talk to CEOs of the credit card companies all the time, and there's not any threat to them. People are taking a bit longer.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-05-31T15:19:56.658Z

Continue Reading…

How an Obscure MAGA-Linked Firm Lined up $1 Billion in Balkan Energy Contracts

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

On a graffitied Sarajevo backstreet, a path leads past an overgrown patch of garden to a white door. Beyond is the registered office of a company that is on the brink of winning contracts worth more than $1 billion.

AAFS Infrastructure and Energy is close to securing a concession to build and operate a pipeline across the Balkans to allow fossil gas shipped from the United States to replace supplies that come from Russia. “This could be the most important infrastructure project ever in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” says one of the country’s top officials, who, like others, asks to remain anonymous to discuss sensitive negotiations.

The company has no record of even attempting anything close to this scale. What it does have is personal connections to Donald Trump.

One of AAFS’s representatives is a Washington lawyer who has acted for the Trumps in political cases. The other is the brother of the president’s former national security adviser. Both were part of a campaign that is close to Trump’s heart: the effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

A Guardian investigation, based on interviews with current and former Bosnian and US officials, leaked documents and corporate paperwork, has examined the obscure company that has been thrust into the global struggle for energy supremacy. It offers a glimpse of how international relations are changing under a presidency that blurs the line between government policy and the enrichment of the ruling family and those around it.

“There is a logic, in our current world, of having administration-connected people involved in big economic projects or investments,” says a former senior US official in the region. “It is unsavory but so much of my country’s politics is unsavory these days.”

In the former Yugoslavia, the stakes are higher than just who might get rich. US intervention could undermine the peace deal it brokered in 1995 to end a war that killed 100,000, many of them Muslim Bosniak civilians massacred by Serb paramilitaries. A generation on, Bosnia’s ethnic leaders are still manuevering for advantage.

US officials have left Bosnia’s leaders in no doubt about what the Trump administration wants: the go-ahead for AAFS’s pipeline.

When the Guardian knocks at AAFS’s Sarajevo address, a woman calls down from an upstairs window that its local representative will be back soon. Amer Bekan arrives a few minutes later. A large middle-aged man, he says AAFS’s office will be moving to a big building with 100 employees.

Bekan’s online CV calls him an “investor and entrepreneur with extensive experience.” He has tried politics as well. After coming last with 116 votes in a 2016 run for mayor in central Sarajevo, another campaign in 2020 led to him being accused of abusing the elections for personal gain, an allegation he denied.

No one wants to anger Trump, even if it means entrusting their hopes for a vital new energy artery to a venture with no demonstrated ability.

Bekan registered a Bosnian company called AAFS in 2021. It was only after he brought in his American partners last year that it hit the big time. Neither he nor they will say how they were introduced.

Bekan’s AAFS is now owned by a US company of the same name that was registered in November. Located in a tourist district by the Potomac River, the address AAFS gives for its Washington office sits between a Lebanese restaurant and an Irish pub. A sign identifies it as the premises of Binnall Law Group.

Jesse Binnall is a leading lawyer fighting the MAGA cause. He was an aide to the 2016 campaign that carried Trump to the White House. In 2020, he was a leading voice undermining Joe Biden’s victory. He declared: “Donald Trump won…after you account for the fraud and irregularities that occurred.” He defended Trump and his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, against a lawsuit that sought to hold them responsible when rioters tried to overturn the result by storming the Capitol building.

Since Trump’s return to power last year, Binnall has secured a $1.25 million settlement from the justice department for Michael Flynn, who was briefly national security adviser in the president’s first term. Despite having admitted lying to the FBI about covert contacts with Russia, Flynn alleged wrongful prosecution.

Binnall also came to know Flynn’s brother Joe, a healthcare entrepreneur. They were fellow campaigners in the effort to discredit Biden’s victory. Flynn served as president of one of the movement’s best-funded vehicles, the America Project. And he was an adviser to Trump’s 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns.

The White House referred questions to the state department, which said: “The Southern Interconnection gas pipeline, which has been a [US government] priority for the past three administrations, will expand and diversify Bosnia and Herzegovina’s energy sector, giving BiH greater control over its energy supply by providing access to market-based natural gas and reducing dependence on a single, unreliable source.”

Flynn and Binnall’s qualifications for a Balkans infrastructure venture are not immediately apparent. But since they joined, the project has enjoyed the full-throated support of the Trump administration.

Binnall, Flynn, and Bekan’s initial discussions with Bosnian officials last autumn were about a $300 million renovation of two airports. Then the Bosnian officials suggested they take on a much more significant project: the Southern Interconnection pipeline.

The US has long supported the plan to connect Bosnia to a gas terminal on Croatia’s coast, which would reduce Vladimir Putin’s influence in southern Europe. During Biden’s time, the idea was for Bosnia’s state gas company to run the project. But the competing interests of Bosnia’s ethnic factions caused delay after delay.

While some Bosnian officials were wary of handing the project to foreign private interests, others saw enlisting a company connected to Trump as a chance to break the deadlock.

Time was running short. Bosnia is a candidate to join the EU, and Brussels has set a September 2027 deadline to cease buying gas from Russia, the source of Bosnia’s entire supply.

Dodik wants Trump’s people “to embrace his larger agenda. In order to get that, he can’t screw with the pipeline.”

Some senior Bosnian figures calculated that commissioning an American company could help not just energy security but safety more broadly in a region where war is a living memory. As Bekan says: “The US government protects its investments.”

Yet some analysts fear Bosnia risks swapping one bully for another. No one appears to want to risk angering Trump, even if it means entrusting their hopes for a vital new energy artery to a venture with no demonstrated ability to get it done.

Asked who AAFS’s shareholders are, Bekan says Binnall and Flynn plus others he declines to name. He suggests financing could come from “investment funds in the United States,” but says he cannot provide more information.

Binnall says: “We are the right team for this. No other group combines on-the-ground presence in Bosnia with strong support in America. And we’re excited to take the leap because we believe Bosnia Herzegovina is the future.”

A confidential AAFS proposal seen by the Guardian says the pipeline will cost $350 million and another $1.05 billion for three power plants, with funding coming not from the Bosnian state but equity and debt. It does not specify what returns Flynn, Binnall, and others involved expect for themselves.

In March, new Bosnian legislation stipulated that AAFS should be the pipeline contractor. There has been no competitive tender, the usual way to ensure contracts go to a competent bidder for a fair price.

Transparency International said: “Establishing such a practice in a country with one of the highest levels of corruption in Europe would lead to catastrophic consequences in the implementation of strategically important projects such as the Southern Interconnection gas pipeline.”

Days later, as the Guardian revealed, the EU’s ambassador sent Bosnia’s leaders a private warning that they should be consulting with Brussels on any changes in energy policy to “avoid missing out on opportunities for further integration, as well as financial opportunities.”

The US is undeterred. “This partnership strengthens energy independence and ends reliance on Russian gas,” its Sarajevo embassy posted on X in April. “A new era for energy security in the Western Balkans has begun.”

Yet any new era will not begin until the Southern Interconnection is built. For that to happen, the Trump administration will need the friendship of the man who wants to break the country up.

Milorad Dodik, the ultranationalist leader of Bosnia’s Serbs, was until recently treated as a pariah by Washington.

Biden’s administration accused Dodik of abusing public office “to accumulate personal wealth through graft, bribery, and other forms of corruption” and expanded sanctions against him and his family. “His divisive ethno-nationalistic rhetoric reflects his efforts to…divert attention from his corrupt activities,” a US Treasury statement said. Dodik called the sanctions “lies.”

“Americans here have a number one priority and that’s the pipeline. They are very, very keen on this,” says a senior Bosnian Serb politician.

When Trump retook the presidency, Dodik embarked on a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to cultivate the Trump administration’s support and have the sanctions lifted. The lobbyists styled Dodik’s Serb nationalists as Trump’s allies against Islam. One of them was Michael Flynn, who earned $100,000 for a month’s work.

In October, without explanation, the Trump administration cancelled the sanctions. On April 7, Donald Trump Jr., the custodian of the family business empire, landed in Banja Luka, the main city in the Serbian half of Bosnia, for an event in his honor.

Dodik’s son, Igor, gave Trump Jr a warm welcome. “Your presence speaks volumes,” he said. “We depend on you and we rely on you. In return, you, America and the Republican administration led by your father will have a reliable, truthful and Christian ally in this part of the world.”

Michael Murphy, a former US ambassador to Bosnia, says Dodik is currying favor in Trump circles as he seeks to rip up the 1995 peace accord by declaring the Serb region independent. “He wants them to embrace his larger agenda. In order to get that, he can’t screw with the pipeline.” Those embracing him, he adds, are “playing with fire.”

Under Bosnia’s power-sharing arrangement, the Serbs could veto the pipeline. Dodik, who remains their leader despite giving up his official position, has every reason to do so. Like the recently defeated Victor Orbán in Hungary, Dodik is an ally of Putin. Not only does Bosnia’s existing pipeline bring Russian gas, magnifying Putin’s leverage in the Balkans, it also runs across the Serbs’ territory, giving them sway over energy supplies.

But a senior Bosnian Serb politician says: “I saw this myself: Americans here have a number one priority and that’s the pipeline. They are very, very keen on this. Dodik, like everyone else, was told: Don’t play around with the project.”

Trump Jr. did not mention the pipeline or AAFS during his event. But he extolled the benefits of buying American gas. “That’s a no-brainer,” he said. “You can solve so many problems, both business-wise and, frankly, geopolitically on this one issue. I think it’s a major opportunity.”

On April 21, shortly after Trump Jr.’s visit, Dodik indicated he would not obstruct Binnall and Flynn’s plan. That leaves the Trump associates’ takeover of a crucial European energy project close to complete.

Additional reporting by Joseph Gedeon in Washington

Continue Reading…

New Jersey Officials Impose Curfew to Stifle Anti-ICE Protests at Delaney Hall

At midnight on Sunday, New Jersey officials chose to help federal agents suppress the ongoing rallies at a New Jersey ICE detention center rather than acknowledge the concerns of hundreds of detainees and protesters gathered there.

Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, citing an “increasing need for police intervention,” declared that “immediate action is required to protect public safety.” Thus, he ordereda mandatory curfew within a half-mile radius of the detention center, Delaney Hall. Until further notice, the announcement noted, the curfew will remain in effect from 9 pm to 6 am; vehicular traffic will be restricted in the area, and violators are “subject to enforcement actions.”

Later on Sunday morning, Gov. Mikie Sherrill issued a statement on X saying a group of protesters “began aggressive and dangerous actions against Newark and New Jersey State Police”—actions that “detract from New Jersey’s dedication to ensuring public safety, keeping people safe from ICE, and that the people detained inside Delaney Hall are treated with dignity.”

Baraka’s curfew comes on the 10th day of a hunger and labor strike initiated by roughly 300 people being held at Delaney Hall. The strikers made four demands: an immediate in-person meeting with Gov. Sherrill; the immediate release of all detainees—including the elderly, pregnant women, and people with serious medical conditions; a meaningful review of their immigration cases; and an end to pressure from ICE agents to self-deport.

Sherrill has not met with the strikers. Federal officials have denied her entry to Delaney Hall, saying she does not hold the same oversight authority as federal lawmakers who have visited the facility, including Sen. Andy Kim and Rep. Rob Menendez. Despite being barred from entering, Sherril has opted to work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), deploying state police on Friday night to help “secure the area.”

“Thank you @GovSherrillNJ for cooperating with us to help restore law and order,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted on X Saturday morning. “We hope to build on this partnership and work together to remove the worst of the worst from New Jersey communities.”

The governor’s submission came after DHS dismissed New Jersey officials showing up at Delaney Hall on Memorial Day weekend as a “political stunt.” And the agency continues to insist “there is NO hunger strike.”

Meanwhile, as journalist Amanda Moore reported in a Mother Jones video posted on Friday, ICE has been cracking down violently on protesters, using chemical suppressants, tasers, and “nonlethal” rounds.

By all appearances, it is not they who are, as Sherill says, endangering public safety and detracting from the goal of ensuring the “people detained inside Delaney Hall are treated with dignity”—but rather the New Jersey officials themselves.

Continue Reading…

Fortress Europe: The Fight for Refugees in Greece

In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe.

Today, Olsen is a wanted man in Greece, caught up in a crackdown on refugees and people trying to defend their right to asylum.

“I didn’t know what I walked into,” Olsen says.

Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, has condemned Greece’s harsh migration policies and the way its government is targeting activists like Olsen. But she says Europe as a whole is also to blame.

“The whole notion of migration is a dirty word now,” she says. “The whole notion of refugees is a dirty word now.”

This week on Reveal, reporters Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk from the Berlin podcast studio Slowly Media take us to Greece, where refugees and human rights defenders face legal and sometimes physical attacks from authorities trying to seal the country’s borders.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in January 2025.

Continue Reading…

Greg Bovino Keeps Posting to Get His Job Back. No One Is Listening.

Greg Bovino, the Nazi-garbed former Border Patrol commander, was ousted in January after CBP and ICE agents during his tenure killed Minneapolis protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

These days, Bovino has a lot of time on his hands, and he’s using that time to post about wanting his job back—and offering to go to New Jersey to “handle it himself.”

For the past week, work and hunger strikers detained at ICE megajail Delaney Hall in New Jersey—and their supporters on the outside—have protested for safer conditions and, ultimately, for their freedom.

Allegations of ICE agent violence, expired food, and refusal to provide medical care continue streaming out of the detention center, where most people detained have not been charged with a crime. 300 people detained at Delaney Hall signed a letter earlier this month saying they are “tortured physically and psychologically” at the facility.

ICE agents—and, later, New Jersey state police—have met protesters inside and outside Delaney Hall with violence, pepper-spraying people, beating them with batons, tasering them, and in one instance, pushing one person into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

To Bovino, though, that’s not going far enough. During an apparent layover at Newark Airport on Thursday, he asked his followers: “Should I just handle this myself?”

Hey everyone, that’s me at the airport pointing to the next flight to Newark. Flight 3450, 2:27 PM, on time.@SenMullin and the rest of them have been trying to handle these riots and… well, let’s just say it’s not going great.

For those of you in the comments section, give a… pic.twitter.com/CC12CwlPzw

— Gregory K Bovino (@GregoryKBovino) May 28, 2026

Between posts, he admired Hunger-games themed fanart of himself and replied “Yep” to accounts begging that he be returned to his old gig.

“ICE Agents at Delaney, hang in there,” he wrote Friday. “Every one of us wants to be shoulder to shoulder with you.”

“Give them hell, and live the moment!!!”

ICE Agents at Delaney, hang in there.

You have the world watching and supporting your efforts to hold the line.

Every one of us wants to be shoulder to shoulder with you.

In speaking with the Mean Green Team, they send you support and are wishing you the best.

Give… pic.twitter.com/nfm0qBgYC1

— Gregory K Bovino (@GregoryKBovino) May 29, 2026

Neither DHS nor any other leaders actually in charge seem to be listening to Bovino. On Friday, New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that she would be sending in state police to “lower the temperature” and create protected protest zones at Delaney Hall.

”We all need to do everything we can to cool things down now,” Sherrill, who has repeatedly called for Delaney Hall to be shut down, said at a press conference announcing the state police takeover. “I will not give ICE the pretext to expand operations in our state.”

But conditions inside and outside Delaney Hall remain dangerous. Last night, state police “lived the moment,” as Bovino would say, by moving in on horseback and pushing protesters back with riot shields and, reportedly, pepper balls and rubber bullets. The work strike inside Delaney Hall, according to organizers with the No ICE In North Jersey Alliance, is ongoing. And Greg Bovino is still unemployed and posting, but state violence pushes on with or without him.

Anyone who works in digital media knows two painful truths. First, depending on how your billionaire boss is feeling, you could wake up jobless anytime. Second, as fun as posting online might be, it rarely changes anything in the real world; you have to go outside to do that. But Bovino doesn’t seem to have learned what every former Buzzfeed listicle laborer knows just yet.

Continue Reading…

Troops Must Be Fit and Tall to Attend Trump’s UFC Fight

In preparation for President Donald Trump’s UFC fight on the White House South Lawn next month, Pentagon officials are hoping to lure hundreds of troops to attend the event. The catch? Troops need to meet strict physical requirements, including weight and height standards, in order to be eligible.

That’s according to internal memos seen by the _Washington Post,_including one demanding that troops “MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO” and wear short-sleeved uniforms. Another memo revealed that the Pentagon is soliciting only junior-level officers. In other words: No heavyweights. You better be jacked. And no old people.

The report comes as construction for the cage fight begins to take shape, with the beginnings of a beastly octagon-shaped arena popping up on the South Lawn this week. The effort to attract a very specific kind of soldieris something of a theme for the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has effectively gone to war with “fat troops” and what he has deemed as “unacceptable” physical appearances in the military.

“Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth said in October. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”

Similarly, Hegseth has targeted certain hairstyles. “No more beards, long hair, superficial, individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards and adhere to standards.”

It’s unclear how many troops will meet the requirements to attend the president’s cage fight. But the guidance comes as Trump insists that there’s unprecedented demand to attend his birthday beatdown.

“I have never seen anybody want anything so much as people want those tickets,” he said.

Continue Reading…

What Americans Really Think in These Troubled Times

These may be confusing and difficult times in America, but I consider myself pretty lucky. Most weekends, I get to hang out with an extraordinary group of people from around the country and see things their way. These folks are complicated, wise, and funny—and they’ve all been through a lot.

There is Sammy from rural Missouri via Chicago, a former teen gangbanger turned social worker, who helps troubled young men exit from hate groups. He learned in prison about “showing people empathy when they least deserve it,” after a therapist pulled him from the brink in solitary confinement. “A lot of folks mistake listening for conceding,” Sammy told me, “But when you stop listening, that’s conceding—’cause then there’s no pathway for them to walk out of the place they’re in.”

There is Braden, a twenty-something forestry worker from Colorado, who wanted to pry his blue-collar work buddies away from the lies of far-right talk radio. Political arguments and his efforts to blend in with a “big-ass truck and getting all dieseled out at the gym” didn’t work. What convinced them, he found, was just being his jokester self and enduring long work days with them: “I’m a Christian, a Socialist, a Zoomer with a Jesus Piece earring and a Zebra T-shirt on. They’re still like, ‘you’re a kook.’ But I’m a kook they trust.”

There is Margaret, a septuagenarian South Carolinian who discovered her ancestors were some of the biggest slave-traders in Charleston’s history—and who decided that was worth publicizing to all of her genteel friends in town. Why? “Shame doesn’t do anything. But if we can’t talk about the past, we can’t move forward together.”

A couple of nights a week, I embody these people onstage, along with various others including election organizers, a trio of barbers, a troubled Iraq War vet, and a survivor of a mass shooting. They are the focus of my latest solo show of journalistic theater, “Takes All Kinds,” about the politics of persuasion and change. I recreate my time spent with them and depict their personal stories. It’s a privilege and a challenge. The experience of communing with an audience to draw inspiration from these subjects’ lives never ceases to feel powerful.

In Charleston, I had the profound experience of embodying Polly Shepherd—a survivor of a racist gun massacre—in front of her and her community.

I traveled the country in 2023 and 2024 for field research, or what I like to call “the journalism of hanging out.” I do a lot of audio recording and go well beyond interviewing. Once things get rolling, there are plenty of jokes and laughs as I spend time observing how they interact in different contexts. They take me to a retirement party for a co-worker, or to an Atlanta Braves game, or to an old neighborhood steeped with memories from their childhood. I also collect ambient sounds for the show: the chatter in the bar where I first met the gravelly voiced combat vet, the thumping bass and whine of razors inside the Las Vegas barbershop, a whooshing torrential downpour while on a house porch in Charleston.

Now I find myself thinking about their collective story as the midterm elections approach. For me and theater audiences, these people show how complex and often contradictory Americans’ views really are—they don’t plug easily into partisan categories or poll numbers. Elevating their experiences onstage tends to leave audiences feeling “oddly hopeful,” as I often hear afterward.

So many Americans these days are talking past each other. We burn up so much time on “social” media that mostly leaves us outraged and alone. We seem to consider less what might be behind the complicated views of others. When I went back recently to talk with the guys at the Vegas barbershop, Danny, the elder in the crew, told me that he disliked the ICE raids in LA and Minneapolis but also said that “being profiled for being brown, that’s nothing new, homie.” And he clapped back at the notion that it’s all on Trump. “I’m Latino, but I’m not an immigrant,” he said. “Shit, my people were chillin’ in New Mexico eating green chile way before y’all white people got here.”

In June, I’ll perform the show for the first time in Washington, DC—maybe an elected leader or two might even catch it—and in New York City and Sacramento. The director of the show, Aldo Billingslea, and I plan to keep taking it around the country. We’ve already had the joy of bringing the show back to some of the places and people whose stories it includes. In Charleston, I had the surreal and profound experience of embodying Polly Shepherd—a survivor of the racist gun massacre in 2015 at the Mother Emanuel AME Church—in front of her and her community. Seventy-nine years old and soft spoken, Polly had endured unspeakable horror and loss. Onstage together after the show, we did a talk-back with the audience. “A lot of people have tried to tell my story,” she remarked. “You got it right to a T. It was beautiful.”

Collective witness is often understood in a religious sense, but it can also refer to making meaning out of trauma or pain.

I loved getting to know these people, and now I get to honor that as a hundred or so strangers a night also have that experience**.** For me, this work models a way of listening and attending to each other. It’s more than just tolerating each other’s viewpoints. It’s about relishing eccentricities and celebrating connections. And it’s not downplaying the divides in a simplistic or kumbaya kind of way. The work of embodying these people onstage took two years of gathering their stories and honing in on the nuances of who they are.

So for about 75 minutes in the dark each night, audiences and I revel in their stories. It’s a shared experience of curiosity, joy, and uncertainty about what might be ahead. Or, as an election organizer named James says on an Atlanta street corner while hustling to register voters: “It’s not always pretty, but right now, bro, it takes all kinds.”

Dan Hoyle is an actor, playwright, and journalist based in Oakland, California. His solo show, “Takes All Kinds,” is touring nationally through fall 2026.

Continue Reading…

Our Power Grid Is in Better Shape This Summer, Thanks to Solar and Batteries

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

It’s set to be an abnormally hot summer this year—but the US grid appears to be in decent shape to handle the heat. The credit goes to a boatload of new solar and storage and a handful of new gas plants.

That’s the upshot of the new summer reliability assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which oversees the US and Canadian electric systems. “Record resource additions have strengthened readiness for the summer season,” NERC highlighted, including ​“a substantial influx of solar and battery” resources—the most prevalent and lowest-cost new sources of grid power—as well as ​“some new natural gas-fired generators.”

The report contradicts the Trump administration’s claims that aging fossil-fueled plants are needed in order to prevent blackouts. Over the last year, the Department of Energy has forced five coal plants and one oil- and gas-fired power plant to stay online past their planned retirements, citing an energy emergency that grid experts say does not exist. The approach is now being challenged in court.

However, it’s not the presence of expensive old fossil-fueled power plants that has put the grid in a good position heading into the summer—it’s the rapid expansion of solar and energy storage.

In fact, NERC’s latest summer assessment reached its conclusions without including any of the power plants forced to stay open by the Trump administration. ​“These plants and units were not incorporated into the anticipated resources of their corresponding assessment areas for Summer 2026,” the report notes.

“This report reflects the conclusion that renewables are significant contributors to reducing risk on the system today.”

“NERC’s summer reliability assessment confirms what we’ve known all along,” Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a Thursday statement. ​“Delaying the retirement of outdated coal plants that require millions of dollars in upgrades and maintenance to keep them operational only prevents more reliable sources from being added to the grid.”

To be clear, some regions still face an elevated risk this year.

NERC’s report says New England, the Pacific Northwest, West Texas, and Canada’s Saskatchewan province could face potential electricity shortfalls under ​“abnormal summer conditions,” like elevated temperatures that push up air-conditioning demand. The Pacific Northwest is also facing drought conditions that hampered the hydropower it relies on.

Still, that’s a big improvement from the assessment for the summer of 2025, when NERC projected elevated risk during abnormally hot and dry summer conditions in six US regions, including a wide swath of the middle of the country from Texas to the Canadian border.

Those areas no longer at risk include the 15 US states from Louisiana to North Dakota and the Canadian province of Manitoba, whose grid is managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which provides power to about 45 million people. Notably, MISO is host to several of the coal-fired power plants in Michigan and Indiana that the DOE has forced to stay online.

While NERC did track about 7 gigawatts of new fossil gas generation added since last summer, that was eclipsed by the 30.5 gigawatts of solar generation capacity added in the same period, according to the report.

Solar doesn’t provide its full nameplate generation capacity during morning and evening hours or when it’s cloudy, and of course it generates nothing at night. But it does generate a lot of power during the hottest hours of typical summer days. NERC found that the 30.5 gigawatts of new solar are contributing 16.4 gigawatts of capacity at times of peak summer demand.

Batteries that can store excess solar power for use later in the day have also come online at a rapid clip. NERC tallied more than 16 gigawatts of battery capacity added since last summer.

Most of those batteries have been built in Texas and California, as well as in other parts of the US West, the report notes. Solar-charged batteries have been saving the California and Texas grids from summer shortfalls in recent years, helping to dramatically reduce the risk of heatwave-driven blackouts.

But solar and batteries have also bolstered other regions. “MISO’s capacity resources have improved since Summer 2025,” the report says, with the new additions ​“made up of predominantly solar resource installations, along with smaller amounts of natural gas, wind, and battery storage resources.”

The assessment underscores the fact that solar and wind make the grid more reliable even though the Trump administration likes to argue otherwise, said Jessi Eidbo, a senior adviser at the Sierra Club and member of NERC’s Large Loads Working Group.

“This is not a conversation about renewables being tied to reliability risk,” she said. ​“This report reflects the conclusion that renewables are significant contributors to reducing risk on the system today.”

To prove the point, Eidbo highlighted the section of NERC’s report that calculates what proportion of the total capacity of solar, wind, hydropower, and battery storage is available to serve the peak demand hour in a given area. That’s an important metric to determine how helpful different resources are during crunch time for the grid.

NERC found that the 20.4 gigawatts of solar available in MISO are capable of providing 60 percent of their nameplate generation capacity during peak hours. NERC’s assessment of the peak load contribution of MISO’s fleet of roughly 3.6 gigawatts of battery storage was even higher, at 97 percent.

NERC found similar, if slightly lower, values for solar and batteries to meet summer peak hours in the Southwest Power Pool, a grid operator serving 14 Midwest and Great Plains states. The report assigned a 54 percent peak contribution rating to SPP’s 3.9 gigawatts of solar, and an 84 percent peak contribution rating to the region’s 1.3 gigawatts of battery storage.

Both of those regions have fallen from ​“elevated” risk to ​“normal” risk from summer 2025 to summer 2026, Eidbo noted—and both ​“have very high percentages of nameplate capacity from energy storage systems.”

This is a good sign that solar and batteries, both of which can be built more quickly and cheaply than gas plants, can also serve the grid when the summer heat hits and demand goes through the roof.

Continue Reading…

Washington Protesters Convicted of “Conspiracy to Impede” ICE Agents

On a Wednesday afternoon last June, Bajun Mavalwalla II, Jac Archer, and Justice Forral gathered with hundreds of others to protest outside an ICE office in Spokane, Washington. Word had spread on social media that two young Venezuelan immigrants—both of whom came to the United States legally—had been detained at a routine ICE check-in.

Mavalwalla, Archer, and Forral—now known as the “Spokane Three”—were charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure” officers of the law for participating in that protest, in which people attempted to block an ICE vehicle from exiting the field office.

All three were found guilty on Wednesday of “conspiracy to impede or injure an officer” or “aiding and abetting another to conspire,” felony convictions with the potential for significant prison time. It’s a significant defeat for protesters following Trump administration prosecutors’ repeated failures to convict people who attend anti-ICE rallies.

Videos from the day show brief scuffles—protesters and ICE agents pushing each other—but no evidence of serious injury to anyone. “None of the protesters were hurt. Fortunately, none of the law enforcement officers were hurt either,” Richard Barker, then the acting US Attorney for eastern Washington, told PBS in March. Yet local police arrested more than 30 people on the scene.

The Spokane Three were among the first ICE protesters to be brought up on conspiracy charges, which carry up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine. It’s become a common prosecutorial tactic: in the Chicago area, the “Broadview Six” had similar conspiracy charges dismissed in April; in July of 2025, another conspiracy case against Los Angeles protesters crumbled.

During DHS’ high-profile occupations of cities like Minneapolis, Barker and almost 100 other federal prosecutors came under severe Trump administration pressure to prosecute ICE protesters. It was an order Barker resigned rather than carry out. In that March interview, Barker told PBS he “didn’t feel in this case that a conspiracy charge that would carry a six-year term of incarceration was true to who I was or who I wanted to be as a federal prosecutor.”

But his successor did, charging Mavalwalla, Archer, Forral, and six other people with conspiracy felonies and sending FBI agents to arrest them. Six of the nine took plea deals, but Mavalwalla, Archer, and Forral—a military veteran and two organizers with the local group Spokane Communities Against Racism—decided to fight. The government’s case, they thought, was weak: the protest sprang up from a single outraged Facebook post by a former city councilor who was legal guardian to one of the two Venezuelan men detained.

It was the “most spontaneous action that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Hadley Morrow, a friend of Archer and Forral, said. “It’s really hard to imagine where the conspiracy is.”

And the case was marred by allegations against some of the officers involved: one sheriff’s deputy who was on the scene was captured on body camera saying “I want to hit someone with a stick today,” while an ICE agent who testified at the trial also spewed racist and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in Facebook posts, local media outlet Range revealed.

“Conspiracy” legally entails a group of people who “agree to commit an illegal act,” legal scholar Steffen Seitz, who studies the use of conspiracy charges against social movements at the University of Denver, said in an interview. But it’s easier to convince a jury there’s “some kind of mutual understanding lurking in the background” when people show up with similar signs and make similar social media posts, Seitz added.

“If people become chilled from engaging in them because of the threat of this kind of vague criminal liability, then we’re all worse off,” Seitz said.

The government’s exhibits, meant to prove that conspiracy, include images of Archer holding a clipboard and megaphone, Forral pointing at a car, Mavalwalla linking arms with others; and a video of Mavalwalla holding an umbrella—all things one might expect attendees of a protest to do. “If those tools are decided to be evidence of conspiracy, then the tools that we have as organizers to keep each other safe in protest have been criminalized against us, and that is really scary,” Morrow said.

“They’re calling reading and reacting to a Facebook post a conspiracy,” Morrow told me before the case began. Archer, Mavalwalla, and Forral all plan to appeal, and to file a motion asking the judge to discard their guilty verdicts.

“While we respect the decision of the jury, this matter is not over,” said La Rond Baker, legal director of the ACLU of Washington. “We remain concerned about the chilling effect that the Department of Justice’s charging decisions will have on protest and free expression in this country. The Administration has a demonstrable history of using the Department of Justice to silence and punish its critics. Using the power of government to deter criticism is undemocratic and counter to the values of our state and the country.”

Continue Reading…

Watch: Is Trump’s Party Stranglehold Actually a Death Grip?

It pays to earn an endorsement from Donald Trump.

Across 118 endorsement, the president boasts a perfect score in 2026’s midterm primaries, ousting a number of longtime Republican lawmakers (and Trump-irritants) in the process.

In Texas, election-denier Ken Paxton took out Sen. John Cornyn. In Kentucky, Trump-backed Ed Gallrein unseated Rep. Thomas Massie—one of the members of Congress who forced the release of the Epstein files—in the most expensive House primary in history. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger—the secretary of state who refused to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump in 2020—lost his gubernatorial bid to two election deniers.

On paper, Trump is winning.

But these victories might, just might, be losses in disguise. In Georgia, more Democrats than Republicans voted in the primary for the first time since 1998. Texas saw a similar Democratic turnout surge a few months ago, helping James Talarico secure his party’s nomination for US Senator.

What’s clear is that the base of the Republican Party is still deeply loyal to president Donald Trump—despite the war in Iran, broken promises, rising gas prices, and an uneven job market. What’s unclear is how much that loyalty will cost Republicans, who are now anchored to a slate of election-denying Trump loyalists, this November.

Watch the full breakdown here:

Continue Reading…

Watch: The Violent ICE Crackdown Comes to New Jersey

For the past week, anti-ICE activists have been protesting at Delaney Hall, an immigration detention facility where detainees have reportedly engaged in a hunger strike. As journalist Amanda Moore explains in a new Mother Jones video, the demonstrators have erected barricades and are attempting to stop law enforcement vehicles.

The feds have responded with force, using vast amounts of noxious pepper spray and driving demonstrators into a road full of semis and buses. “ICE agents regularly push protesters into the street, even when trucks are driving by,” Moore reports. One protester “was shoved into the wheel well of a truck, which then ran over his foot.”

You can watch Amanda’s shocking story here, and be sure to follow her for more reporting as the situation develops.

Continue Reading…

Everyone’s Fleeing Trump’s Freedom 250 Concerts

It hasn’t even been two days since Freedom 250, the Trump-tied group organizing a bunch of celebrations ostensibly in honor of America’s 250th birthday, announced the lineup for its Great American State Fair concert series. But the series already appears dead on arrival, with more than half of the scheduled performers fleeing.

The latest? Bret Michaels of Poison fame, who announced on Instagram:

“Unfortunately, what was presented to us as a celebration of our country has evolved into something much more divisive than what I agreed to be a part of. Concerns have also been raised regarding the safety of my fans, band, crew, family and myself, including threats that are completely unfounded and unforgivable. Because of that, I have made the difficult decision to step away from this performance.”

As of this writing, Michaels is now one of six of the originally scheduled nine acts to pull out. Some cited the overwhelmingly negative response to their participation in the Trump-backed events; others claimed they didn’t realize the events would be politically charged. They include Milli Vanilli, Martina McBride, Young MC, The Commodores, and Morris Day & The Time. Somewhat up in the air is C+C Music Factory, after its lead vocalist complained on social media that he “doesn’t fuck with Trump.” For now, Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida remain steadfast in their commitments, but anything can change.

So, what other bottom-of-the-barrel performers might we expect to save the fledgling series? Kid Rock? The Village People? Can a country’s humiliation get worse? Yes, it seems so.

Continue Reading…

The GOP Is Targeting Black Voters in the Former Confederacy With Surgical Precision

Republican attempts to erase Black representation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act have hit a few roadblocks in recent days. A federal court found that Alabama’s map, green-lit by the Roberts Court, intentionally discriminated against Black voters and blocked it for November. And the state senate in South Carolina adjourned a special session without passing a map that was designed to oust Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state’s lone Democratic House member and the first Black Congressman elected from South Carolina since Reconstruction.

But that shouldn’t distract from the damage that the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision has done to multiracial democracy. Republicans are already moving to eliminate at least half a dozen majority Black districts in the Deep South between now and 2028. That would trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. On Thursday, the Louisiana legislature was set to pass a new gerrymandered map eliminating the district of Black Democrat Cleo Fields.

Watch our new explainer to learn how Republicans are reviving Jim Crow by targeting Black voters with surgical precision in the former Confederate states.

Continue Reading…

Wildfire Smoke Is Affecting People’s Sperm and Embryos, Studies Show

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

Fertility isn’t a topic that tends to come up in the macho, male-dominated world of wildland firefighting—at least not according to Jasper Kehoe, 23, who served as a Colorado wildland firefighter for four summers.

But whenever Kehoe talked about his job in the off-season—working as a student researcher at Colorado State University to assess the impact of wildfire smoke on semen—his colleagues’ ears perked up.

Even more surprising to Kehoe, they wanted to get involved: When he posted about the study in an industry Facebook group, he received more than 150 messages from firefighters who wanted to participate.

“After you get over the stigma of talking about fertility, somewhat of a taboo subject in our community,” Kehoe said, “these firefighters are concerned with the ability to conceive.”

Kehoe helped recruit 144 wildland firefighters to submit pre-, mid- and post-fire season semen samples over the past year. He hopes that his work helps lead to a greater understanding of smoke’s health consequences, as well as more protections for wildland firefighters and others.

“It’s not yet understood whether these impacts on sperm may translate to a change in pregnancy.”

When it’s published later this year or the next, the firefighter study will join a new body of research on how wildfire smoke influences human fertility. In comparison to smoke’s effects on pregnancies, it’s a topic that’s been understudied. But with climate change causing more fires, especially in the West, and infertility affecting 1 in 6 people worldwide, interest in the field is growing. And so far, the results hold some warning signs for Westerners who want to have children.

Several recent studies involve episodes of poor air quality in the Pacific Northwest. Portlanders, for example, suffered from 10 days of severe smoke from nearby wildfires in 2020. At the time, the city’s air quality index, or AQI, almost went off the current scale altogether, with ratings near 500—the highest and most dangerous level, indicating a health serious health hazard.

When researchers at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) studied the situation later, comparing before-and-after semen samples from men who’d been undergoing fertility treatment, they discovered that the men’s sperm quantity and motility had dropped in the months following the smoky air’s sudden arrival.

Another study, published earlier this year, analyzed semen samples from 84 men before and after smoke events in Seattle in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Following the exposures, the researchers found that most men’s sperm quality and count declined.

“The changes we found were fairly subtle, and it’s not yet understood whether these impacts on sperm may translate to a change in pregnancy or truly a change in fertility,” said Tristan Nicholson, an assistant urology professor at the University of Washington and senior author of the paper. “But I think this has really motivated, for me and others, an interest in expanding this as [an area of] study.”

The male side of infertility has historically gone underexamined, Nicholson said, and she hopes her research will draw much-needed attention to it.

“Men, my patients, are often the forgotten partner,” she said. “There’s been a lot of focus on infertility being a women’s problem, and I think it really is beneficial to raise awareness that the male partner has an important contribution.”

During that same period of hazardous air in Portland in 2020, OHSU researchers also examined whether wildfire smoke had any impact on embryos made during in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

As part of that process, female patients undergo about two weeks of drug treatment before their eggs are retrieved and fertilized with sperm. After roughly five days, any resulting embryos are mature enough for transfer into the patient’s uterus.

For this retrospective study, the researchers grouped IVF patients according to when in their cycle the smoke episode occurred: in the weeks prior to their egg retrieval, during their embryos’ development, or after their embryos had already matured.

The patients whose embryos developed during the period of hazardous air were far more likely to find that none of their embryos did well enough to be suitable for transfer. Those whose embryos did mature ended up with a median number of two—55 percent fewer than those whose embryos had finished growing prior to the episode.

“I would advise [families trying to conceive] to avoid wildfire smoke exposure, given what we know so far.”

Even though the lab had several filters, its air still smelled faintly of smoke, said Molly Kornfield, an IVF doctor and the study’s lead author. Her new lab has a “submarine mode” that can prevent outside air from entering at the press of a button.

Kornfield said it’s well-known that long-term exposure to bad air can harm fertility. But she was alarmed to see that “even this acute episode of only 10 days—which, of course, is really severe—can have a negative impact.”

Still, she cautioned that the study had a small sample size. And some of the results were unexpected: Patients who had been exposed to poor air during the weeks before their eggs’ retrieval did not see significant harm to their embryos’ development. Kornfield, who was surprised by that finding, said it underscored the need for more research.

Nicholson agreed. One big question, she said, is whether fertility can bounce back following severe smoke events—and if so, how long it takes. Such information, she said, would help aspiring parents know just how cautious to be.

At the moment, the government’s air-quality recommendations have stricter guidelines for “sensitive groups,” a category that includes children, older adults, pregnant people and those with heart or lung issues.

“What I wonder, and I don’t know yet, is whether people who are trying to conceive, who are trying to start their families, should fall into that category,” Nicholson said. “But I would advise patients to avoid wildfire smoke exposure, given what we know so far.”

Regardless of fertility goals, Westerners should monitor air quality using a reliable data source like airnow.gov. To reduce exposure to unhealthy air, consider limiting outdoor time, keeping windows and doors shut, and wearing an N-95 mask when venturing out.

People who live in smoke-prone areas should consider investing in an indoor air purifier and changing the filters regularly. If that’s not financially possible, some cities have programs that help residents buy or borrow purifiers for fire season. It’s also relatively easy to build an air filter using a box fan and other materials.

After spending years researching the impacts of smoke as an undergraduate student, Kehoe started washing his hands and face as often as he could while on the fire line. He also tried to avoid getting into his sleeping bag when he was dirty. Back home in Kansas City, Missouri, he now has air purifiers running 24/7.

There’s still a lot left to learn. But one thing has come through the smoke: Breathing it in doesn’t seem great for anybody.

Continue Reading…

The Kennedy Center Was Part of DC Life. Trump Destroyed It.

On a glorious Sunday morning in May, a friend and I arrived at a Metro station in Northwest Washington, DC, to board a special coach organized by the Washington National Opera. Its destination was Baltimore, and we were going to their production of West Side Story. Ticketholders had received conflicting emails, and the last one said the bus would leave promptly at 11 a.m. But when 11 a.m. rolled around, and all the elderly patrons had loaded their walkers into the hold, and most of the seats were filled, an opera employee said they’d wait until 11:30 to accommodate a few stragglers. A revolt ensued; we had pre-theater brunch reservations! The mutineers prevailed, and the bus finally headed up I-95 about 15 minutes late.

I couldn’t blame the WNO for the delay. After all, it is an opera company, not a travel agency. No, the inconvenience was President Donald Trump’s fault. For 44 years, the WNO had performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, adjacent to the infamous Watergate by the Potomac River. But after Trump single-handedly destroyed the capital’s premier arts venue in just a few short months, the WNO decamped, along with most of the Center’s donors, patrons, and scheduled artists. Trump plans to shutter the venue for good in July, under the guise of “renovations.”

That’s why I was on a bus heading to Baltimore’s Lyric Theater, 40 miles away, where the WNO would be performing a show that would have been an easy walk for me only a few months earlier. When the WNO offered us a ride, my friend and I thought it might be fun—an opera party bus! Instead, it became yet another depressing reminder of all we have lost in our city during Trump’s second term in office.

I’ve lived in DC for more than 30 years, and for those of us who live in the metropolitan area, which includes suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, the Kennedy Center isn’t just another white-marbled national monument. It’s our beloved, if stodgy, local arts venue, as parochial as Salt Lake City’s Capitol Theater or Proctor’s in Schenectady, but with the world-class offerings of Lincoln Center. It’s where we would go for the annual free tuba Christmas concert, take out-of-town guests to see a Broadway musical, and the place where my kids learned to love the arts. Which is why Trump’s destruction of it feels so intensely personal.

It’s where we would go for the annual free tuba Christmas concert, take out-of-town guests to see a Broadway musical, and the place where my kids learned to love the arts. Which is why Trump’s destruction of it feels so intensely personal.

As our chariot left DC and the Mormon Temple loomed on the horizon, I thought about how much the Kennedy Center has been part of my life, and the lives of my children. I took my daughter there for the first time on a preschool playdate. During the day, when the stages are dark and the weather bad, the building was an informal gathering place for city toddlers. Escaping the deluge of rain outside the massive lobby windows, my daughter and her friend wore themselves out running up and down the tatty red carpet, past the giant head of JFK, while their parents spread out picnic blankets on the floor and opened snacks.

I have lost count of how many Nutcrackers our family has seen at the Kennedy Center. But I can’t forget the first one, when we made the epic mistake of bringing a three-year-old to the Balanchine matinee. I grew up in Ogden, Utah, and my mother was a ballet lover. She started taking me to the Ballet West Nutcracker on the campus of Weber State College when I was about five years old. Later, we would see it in Salt Lake at the Capitol Theater.

But a Nutcracker matinee in Utah is kid-centric. At the Kennedy Center, we ended up sitting behind NPR’s Supreme Court reporter extraordinaire Nina Totenberg, who was wearing a fur coat. She was not even slightly amused when, as the curtain rose, my daughter cried out, “I have to go to the bathroom!” We watched that one on the TV screen in the hallway.

Later, we ferried the kids and their stuffed animals to the National Symphony Orchestra’s Teddy Bear concerts, complete with instrument petting zoos, and countless family theater productions. The center has long partnered with DC public schools for all sorts of free arts education programs, a setup that saw my husband once walking a class of first-graders there for Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny. In 4th grade, my daughter’s ukulele class played Bruno Mars’ “Count on Me” in the lobby. Even as a college junior, she still thinks of the Kennedy Center as a “magical place,” especially the gift shop full of ballerina Christmas ornaments that now grace our Christmas trees.

When my son’s middle school teacher assigned the class to see a cultural event and write a paper on it, he went to see the National Symphony Orchestra perform the Saint-Saëns organ symphony on the center’s 4,972-pipe Casavant Bros. pipe organ—a work that can be performed in only a handful of US venues. He’s now a regular patron of organ concerts.

During my son’s years of singing with the Children’s Chorus of Washington, he performed Carmina Burana with the NSO on the Kennedy Center main stage. The chorus also had a joint performance at the Millennium stage, the center’s free venue, with the local Sticks & Bars Marimba Youth Ensemble—the sort of annual event Trump dubbed too “woke” and quickly eliminated from the schedule when he took over.

And then there were the musicals: Matilda, Moulin Rouge, Les Misérables, the Girl Scout trip to see Back to the Future. We saw the Phantom of the Opera swing from the massive chandelier, though we passed on Trump’s favorite, Cats. During the holidays, we once took my parents to see the British musical Choir of Man, fresh off the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My daughter and I saw a weird Royal Swedish Ballet production of Romeo and Juliet where dancers rode Segways to the Tchaikovsky score.

The first time I ever sang in a choir was at the Kennedy Center for the Martin Luther King holiday’s free “Let Freedom Ring” concert, headlined by Aretha Franklin. Hosted by Georgetown University, the impromptu community chorus was conducted by the amazing local talent Nolan Williams Jr., who let amateurs like me join without so much as an audition and somehow managed to turn us into a beautiful, unified voice. The concert had been a fixture of the King holiday for 23 years. That is, until this year, when Georgetown joined the Trump-instigated exodus of performers and directors and moved the event to Howard University.

A month after I sang on the King holiday, Williams brought our chorus back to perform in a special event at the Kennedy Center to celebrate the birthday of his friend Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). The surprise special guest turned out to be the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama, who led the audience in “Happy Birthday” as Kennedy beamed from his seat. The lion of the Senate died six months later of a brain tumor.

Segway ballets aside, the Kennedy Center was never the venue for risky new productions. For those of us who live in the community, it was like an old shoe, a well-worn place to enjoy the classics, expertly performed by some of the greats, where you might just as easily see a Supreme Court justice or a president as bump into someone you know.

Until Trump came along, Washingtonians took for granted that the Kennedy Center was an institution in the most literal sense, both an edifice and a fully-engaged part of the community that was impervious to change. It is, or was, kind of stuffy, a venue where you’re likely to be shushed for crinkling a candy wrapper or singing along to the music of the night. Fierce ushers in red blazers, affectionately known as the “red meanies,” kept latecomers corralled until the appropriate break in the action, and ensured adherence to various house rules.

Trump was not wrong when he observed the Kennedy Center can feel a little down at the heels, a place where patrons in evening wear trod over crushed red carpet that occasionally bunches up from wear. But it was far from “on the verge of collapse” as Trump claimed when he took over, and its shabby chic is hardly justification for shuttering, gutting it, and slapping uncomfortable marble armrests on the red-velvet seats.

President Donald Trump participates in a guided tour and leads a board meeting on March 17, 2025 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty

During the ride to Baltimore, my friend and I lamented the absurdity of our situation. In August 2025, we’d purchased a three-show opera subscription for nosebleed seats at the Kennedy Center. By then, it was already in trouble. In February last year, Trump admitted that he’d never seen a show there. Nonetheless, he announced that he was taking it over. “We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center, and we don’t need—some of the shows were terrible,” he told reporters. “They were a disgrace that they were even put on.”

“We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center, and we don’t need—some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on.”

He crowned himself chairman and ousted the center’s president, the bipartisan board, and much of the experienced staff. He installed one of his minions, former US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, a man with no arts management experience, to run the place. Soon after, Hamilton yanked its 2026 run. People had started boycotting long-planned shows and cancelling subscriptions.

Many Washingtonians faced a tricky choice: we didn’t want to endorse the changes, but we also wanted to support the artists. My friend and I also wanted to see the opera—so we bought a subscription and hoped for the best.

In early November, everything seemed almost normal for the performance of Verdi’s Aida. But when we went back for Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro a few weeks later, the Kennedy Center had the quality of a stately old home where the patriarch had recently died. The windows that normally offer a panoramic view of the terrace overlooking the Potomac River had been blacked out.

The lobby outside the Eisenhower Theater looked like a storage unit, full of cheesy white leather couches stacked up in piles surrounded by marble-topped tables. The changes, we realized, were preparations for Trump’s last-minute move to host the final FIFA draw for the World Cup. The event would occupy much of the space—for free—for three weeks and displace planned holiday concerts and symphony performances, so the soccer teams could be chosen in DC.

That was the last time I went to the Kennedy Center. In December, Trump plastered his name on the building and immediately sent the venue into a full-on death spiral. WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello had seen what was coming. In November, she intentionally triggered a crisis by giving an unauthorized interview to the Guardian in which she disclosed that thanks to Trump’s takeover, 40 percent of the season’s tickets had gone unsold and donors were fleeing.

“They say things like: ‘I’m never setting foot in there until the “orange menace” is gone.’ Or: ‘Don’t you know history? Don’t you know what Hitler did? I refuse to give you a penny,’” she told the Guardian. “People send me back their season brochure shredded in an envelope and say: ‘Never, never, will I return while he’s in power.’”

Zambello said the WNO was thinking about leaving the Kennedy Center. Within days, Grennell had kicked them out, liberating the opera from Trump’s sinking ship. The WNO became itinerant. We got a refund for the last performance in our subscription, but then the WNO offered us tickets to see the show in Baltimore, so we reupped, and even got a ride.

After lunch, we hustled back to the Lyric with about 10 minutes to spare, only to discover that dozens of people were still waiting just to get inside the building. Unlike the Kennedy Center of old, the smaller Lyric entrance was set up with metal detectors. Opera patrons unused to toting clear plastic purses got stuck in security checks. Once we got through, the lobby was still packed with people, some buying popcorn from the—gasp!— snack bar, which, to be fair, had far better offerings than the meager fare offered by the black-tie-clad waiters at the Kennedy Center. Others made a mad dash to the restroom, which, unlike the Kennedy Center’s, was big enough to handle a crowd.

The show had already started by the time we entered the theater, despite the dozens of people standing in the back, grousing and jostling for a better view of the stage. Overwhelmed ushers tried to figure out how to let them find their seats without disrupting the performance.

Once we sat down, I was briefly annoyed by a woman kicking my seat, fuming that such a thing would never happen at the Kennedy Center. Channeling the red meanies, I turned and gave her the stink eye. Afterwards, I discovered that she was wearing an “opera mom” button. She had come from New Jersey because her daughter was in the show. She was so excited she’d been tapping along to the music. We apologized to each other.

After the final bows, we shuffled out to the bus and discovered it had started to rain. And got stuck in I-95 traffic. An older woman sitting behind us took a phone call and learned she had been fired. She had a complete meltdown, sobbing loudly all the way home. It somehow seemed fitting. We envied the intrepid folks sitting in front of us who’d brought a little cooler with box wine and their old plastic take-home Kennedy Center cups. Finally, we made it back to the Metro and boarded a train for home. The show had been good, but the nine- or 10-hour adventure left us deflated.

In the big scheme of Trump administration horrors, the Kennedy Center’s demise is admittedly a small one. No one has died because Hamilton got cancelled. At the same time, Trump’s assault on the Kennedy Center just heightens the feelings of powerlessness in a city long known as “the last colony,” whose disenfranchised residents are already subject to the whims of a Congress that doesn’t represent us. Trump’s finger is in many local pies: taking over the public golf courses, installing racist statues in Freedom Plaza, deploying the National Guard in our neighborhoods. And that doesn’t even include all our public servant friends and neighbors who’ve been DOGE’d out of federal jobs and are trying to figure out how to survive in an expensive city with a perilous job market.

My friend Amy Austin is the CEO of Theatre Washington, a local nonprofit that sponsors the Helen Hayes local theater awards. “Here, in our home,” she said, speaking for many of us at the event earlier this month, “armed soldiers have walked the streets for months now. Institutions and careers we once believed were permanent and critical have vanished seemingly overnight. We feel what’s happening, and it’s not something that we will shake off.”

Continue Reading…

A Bernie-Backed Community College Professor Fights for the Soul of the Democratic Party

At campaign stops across California’s Central Valley, Randy Villegas asks a simple question: Do you or someone you know drive to Tijuana to get medicine or fix your teeth? Almost inevitably, hands go up.

For Villegas—a 31-year-old community college professor running for Congress in a largely Mexican American district—the outrage has a personal dimension. In the wealthiest nation in the world, many of his neighbors are forced to seek healthcare from the country his own parents left behind.

I first heard Villegas ask about the trips to Tijuana during a forum in Stratford, an unincorporated community about 40 miles south of Fresno. The border is more than six hours away, but, in an area where the poverty rate exceeds 30 percent, people still make the journey. The solution, said Villegas, who has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, is Medicare for All and a recognition that healthcare is a human right.

“Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell you who you are.”

This is not the typical message in the 22nd Congressional District, which includes parts of the city of Bakersfield, as well as vast rural tracts that are well known for sending moderates from both parties to Sacramento and Washington. That describes Villegas’ Democratic primary opponent, State Assembly Member Jasmeet Bains, a family doctor attuned to the realities of representing an area where the local economy is often dominated by agricultural giants and oil companies. It also describes Rep. David Valadao, the Republican incumbent in what political analysts say is one of the most competitive House races in the country.

Voting is already well underway in advance of the June 2 primary. The intraparty contest gets at some of the biggest questions now dividing Democrats in races across the US. Is Sanders-style progressivism or pragmatic centrism a more promising strategy for winning back working-class and Latino voters who have abandoned Democrats in recent years? Should Democrats speak out against Israel’s actions in the Middle East, even if it means inviting opposition—and massive negative ad buys—from groups aligned with AIPAC? Should party leaders in Washington continue to elevate moderates over populist candidates on the left?

Volunteers chat after a morning of canvassing in Bakersfield.Adam Perez

Just before I arrived in Bakersfield earlier this month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the party’s official campaign arm for House races—formally backed Bains over Villegas. Later that week, the super-PAC Democratic Majority for Israel started buying commercials on local stations attacking Villegas. Neither development was good news for Villegas, though they play directly into the slogan he uses in ads and campaign stops to emphasize his independence from the party establishment:“Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.”

“Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell you who you are.”

No one I spoke with felt confident predicting who would win the primary. They assume the race is close, but there’s hardly any public polling. Whoever prevailswill have the best chance of unseating Valadao since 2018, when the congressman lost by less than 900 votes before staging a comeback two years later.

Support for Donald Trump surged in the district in 2024—one of many places around the country where Republicans made inroads with Latino voters. But Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump veteran of the California GOP and a leading national expert on Latino politics, is betting that Democrats will win again in November, regardless of who emerges from the primary. The backlash to the president is simply too great. “I’ve been asked about this district…a hundred times in the past decade,” Madrid told me. “The only other time I said that Valadao was going to lose was 2018.”

If Madrid is right that a Democrat will win—and there’s no guarantee he is—the bigger question will become: What kind of Democrat? Villegas sees the race as a fight for the “soul” of the party, while Bains rejects that premise entirely. “You’ll never hear me say that,” she told me over the phone. Nor, she noted multiple times, would voters hear her “whine” about who is endorsing her opponents, which is how she describes Villegas’ complaints about the party’s campaign committee. “You’re going to see Dr. Bains doing a press conference on the things that matter to voters,” she added. “It is a point of privilege to have so much time in your life that you’re going to put things together to whine about endorsements. That is sick.”

California’s Central Valley makes up less than 1 percent of the nation’s farmland but produces a quarter of its food.Adam Perez

The Central Valley has long been a place where migrants accustomed to country life come to find a more prosperous version of home. Over the years, there have been shepherds from Basque country, Okies escaping the Dust Bowl, and African Americans fleeing the South. All three candidates in this year’s contest are children of immigrants. Valadao’s parents were part of a wave of Portuguese migration to the valley from the Azores. Bains’ parents are Sikhs from Punjab in India. Villegas’ family comes from the Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoacán.

Latinos make up most of the Central Valley’s population, including about 75 percent of residents and 65 percent of voting-age citizens in the 22nd District. It’s one of the youngest congressional districts in the country, as well one of the poorest. Despite making up less than 1 percent of the nation’s farmland, the Central Valley produces a quarter of its food. But the money often doesn’t stay where it’s made.

The Democratic Party “needs to stop picking candidates and pushing candidates out. It needs to focus on bringing voters in.”

In theory, these economic inequities—combined with Trump’s attacks on immigrants—should have galvanized Democratic power in the region. Instead, the party’s support among Latino voters collapsed between 2016 and 2024. Consider Arvin, a city near the site of a New Deal project that once housed Depression-era migrants and features prominently in The Grapes of Wrath. In 2016, voters in Arvin, which is now 95 percent Latino, backed Hillary Clinton by a 67-point margin. In 2020, Trump closed that gap by 15 points. In 2024, he improved by another 32 points—finishing with more than three times as many votes in the city as he did during his first run. A similar story played out across the valley.

I saw that firsthand during the final days of the 2024 campaign. Voters there told me over and over that they were frustrated by the economy, especially the rising cost of living. They decided to go with Trump, whom they often credited with delivering something closer to prosperity during his time in the White House.

One of the most insightful people I spoke with at the time was a Democratic consultant named Pedro Ramirez. He told me that he was encountering a strange phenomenon: young Latino Democrats who wanted to know if local Democratic candidates were backing Trump—and who were hoping the answer was yes. It happened so many times that Ramirez had to double check to make sure the voters on his lists really were Democrats.

A canvasser with the Community Water Center Action Fund in BakersfieldAdam Perez

Earlier this month, I met with Ramirez again at his office in Fresno. In a reflection of what polls show nationwide, he’s now seeing Latino voters revolt against Trump and his broken promises to control the cost of living. He added that the president’s persecution of immigrants has been particularly salient among the young Latino men who moved right in large numbers in 2024; he attributes that partly to social media making the reality of Trump’s crackdown more stark than the TV news programs favored by older generations.

Esmeralda Soria, one of Bains’ fellow Central Valley–based Democratic Assembly members, has seen a similar anti-Trump shift among her own constituents. Like Ramirez, she attributes it to economic turmoil and horrifying immigration raids like the ones launched in the valley by former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino shortly after the 2024 election. Operation Return to Sender, as Bovino called it, was a wake-up call for locals who’d voted for Trump under the assumption that his administration would mostly target violent criminals, Soria said. “Oh my God,” she continued, summarizing the response, “what did we do?”

Soria has endorsed Bains, while Ramirez has stayed neutral. Ramirez says he is happy to see a competitive contest that he hopes will produce the strongest possible challenger to Valadao. He wishes the national party hadn’t chosen sides, though the move did not surprise him. Madrid was also critical. “They need to stay the hell out of it,” he said about the party’s campaign committee getting involved in the race. “Any party needs to stop picking candidates and pushing candidates out. It needs to focus on bringing voters in.”

In the Central Valley, Democratic support among Latino voters collapsed between 2016 and 2024.Adam Perez

By early May,Villegas had his stump speech down to a tight two minutes. Son of Mexican immigrants. Political science professor and small business owner. Make gas and food more affordable. Running against opponents who accept money from big corporations and a congressman who voted to cut Medicaid. Endorsed by Sanders and labor leader Dolores Huerta. “Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.”

Despite forswearing donations from corporate PACs, he’s managed to outraise Bains, a two-term Assembly member with half a million constituents and a record of supporting wealthy Central Valley industries. He’s been showing up at events all over the district, while Bains has been less visible on the campaign trail and has declined to debate Villegas.

After the forum in Stratford, I joined Villegas for the city of Hanford’s weekly night market. I had expected something relatively small but arrived to a massive event with a carousel, live music, and thousands of attendees. The first person I spoke with had just voted early for Villegas. His reasoning was straightforward: He didn’t have much time to decide, so he went with the guy who was most obviously like him. “I’m going to be honest, he just appealed to me because he’s Latino.”

As the event wrapped up, two young men recognized the candidate. They said they had just turned 18, and Villegas wasted no time in showing them how to register to vote. The more talkative of the two, Emmanuel Peña, was wearing a Stussy T-shirt and gym shorts. He knew Villegas was running for something but he wasn’t sure what.

A switch seemed to flip on in the professor. There are two national legislative bodies, he explained: the House and the Senate. He’s running for the House.

“The House of California, though?” Peña asked. “Not like the country?”

No, the whole country.

“Oh, shit,” Peña replied. “David Valadao is that big?”

Peña wanted to know if Villegas identified as a social Democrat and appeared skeptical when the candidate didn’t immediately embrace the label.

“Basically, it’s us against them.”

Instead, Villegas called himself a populist. “Basically, it’s us against them,” he said. “I’m endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders—I love Bernie, he’s like my political hero—but I’ve talked to people at the door who were Republicans who were like, ‘Yeah, gas is crazy. Why are we spending a billion dollars a day in Iran?’”

“It’s the top vs. the bottom,” a won-over Peña interjected. “There’s no war but the class war.”

Peña said Sanders had been robbed in 2016 by the Democratic establishment. He was only 8 years old at the time, but it was clearly central to his understanding of the party. Four years later, Sanders defeated Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary in the Central Valley and in other heavily Latino parts of the country. Now, in his first election as an adult, Peña has the chance to support a fellow Mexican American who’s been inspired by the Vermont senator.

California’s 22nd Congressional District, which includes the city of Arvin, comprises vast rural tracts that are well known for electing moderates from both parties.Adam Perez

In the booth of a brightly lit Mexican restaurant a few minutes away, Villegas described a journey not all that different from Peña’s. After immigrating from Mexico, his father worked as a car mechanic. In 2006, he decided to open his own business after noticing that nobody nearby specialized in BMWs. Villegas remembered the family driving around to put business cards under the wipers of every Bimmer they could find to promote the shop, which Villegas now co-owns. Another family hustle was selling animals—and, at one point, fake Yu-Gi-Oh! cards—at the Bakersfield swap meet.

Judging by our conversations, as well his posts on Instagram, Villegas spent much of his youth devoted to three things: a high school sweetheart who is now his wife, playing the snare competitively on drumlines, and politics—ranging from a college selfie with Carl Bernstein to later praise for the historian Michael Kazin’s analysis of populism. While in college in Bakersfield during the 2016 campaign, he met Sanders when the senator came to town. “I was like, holy shit, this man is someone I believe in and someone I can get behind.”

In 2017, Villegas became the first person in his family to graduate from college, then left Bakersfield to get a PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He said he spent his first year overcoming imposter syndrome. He still laughs about wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt to an admitted students day as Ivy Leaguers arrived in business casual.

He now serves on a local school board while also teaching at the College of the Sequoias, a community college with three campuses in the Central Valley. He tries to meet his students where they are—including an extra credit assignment in which they use memes to illustrate a concept learned in class. One student recently went with a photo of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. Smith represented “Super Pacs and interest groups”; Rock was labeled “Having a fair election.”

In the Central Valley, the local economy is often dominated by agricultural giants and oil companies.Adam Perez

As a child, Jasmeet Bains lived just up Highway 99 from Bakersfield in Delano, a city known nationally for a historic grape strike launched by Filipino farmworkers in 1965. Her mom came to the United States from India on a journalism visa, while her father joined a brother already in the country. They lived in Ohio until her dad visited a friend in Delano when Bains was a toddler. He was shocked, Bains later recalled, to discover a place in America without snow, and they moved immediately.

Like Villegas’ father, Bains’ dad worked for a time as a car mechanic; he eventually acquired his own Chevrolet dealership. After college in Chicago, Bains sold cars for him for a time, then enrolled in medical school. She graduated in 2013, returned to the valley for her residency, and began working as a doctor of family medicine.

She was elected to the Assembly in 2022, when she was 37, to represent a district that overlaps with much of the one she is running for now. In Sacramento, she has established a reputation as one of the state’s most moderate and business-friendly Democrats. In some cases, she has broken with her party to defend the oil and agriculture companies that are central to the Central Valley’s economy. Whether her voting record has always benefited the workers at those companies is more debatable.

In 2024, Bains declined to vote on legislation that that requires California to reevaluate the use of paraquat, a pesticide that has been linked to increased risk of Parkinson’s disease and is prohibited in more than 70 countries.Not voting is a common practice in Sacramento when lawmakers want to avoid taking controversial positions, and Bains has employed that tactic repeatedly—including on bills limiting security deposits charged by landlords and so-called “junk fees” that companies add to the price of goods and services.

California Assembly Member Jasmeet Bains talks with colleagues during a session in 2023.Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee/ZUMA

Still, her legislative record has earned her plenty of supporters, and she’s endorsed by the California Federation of Labor Unions, a key player in state politics. Tania Salinas, president of the AFL-CIO’s labor council in and around Bakersfield, said Bains has excelled at getting funding for the district and protecting the jobs of the union members she represents—many of whom work in the fossil fuel industry. Salinas said she worries that Villegas’ refusal to take corporate money would hinder his ability to attract investment to the district. “How does that translate when you’re talking about industry?” Salinas added. “If you cannot talk to industry…how is that going to translate to jobs?”

The party leadership clearly sees Bains as the more electable of the two. Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has said the committee gets involved only in “primaries when we feel that one candidate stands out as the strongest possible nominee to ensure that we win in the general election.” DelBene argued that Bains will benefit from contrasting her work as a doctor with Valadao’s vote to cut Medicaid spending as part of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The GOP’s Congressional Leadership Fund, which has sent mailers designed to push Democratic primary voters toward Villegas, appears to agree that Bains would be harder to defeat.

“It is a point of privilege to have so much time in your life that you’re going to put things together to whine about endorsements. That is sick.”

Right or wrong, most of these political insiders seem to be motivated by pragmatic calculations rather than any personal objections to Villegas. Bains is a different story. Beyond blasting Villegas for “whining” about the campaign committee’s endorsement, she wanted to make sure I knew that he lives outside the district. She’s not wrong about that, but Villegas is hardly a carpetbagger. He grew up in Bakersfield, co-owns an auto shop there, and now lives 15 miles or so from the boundary line.

I was also eager to get Bains’ perspective on one of the stranger controversies of the campaign. During a Zoom event hosted in February by the Fresno County Young Democrats, both candidates were asked whether they believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Both gave the same one-word answer: “Yes.” But weeks later, after a video of their responses leaked, Bains walked back her claim. “I approach the word genocide with care, and I don’t believe it applies to Israel,” she said in a statement posted on her campaign website.

The legal debates around which atrocities amount to genocide are complex, but it’s an issue Bains has grappled with before. As her statement noted, she spearheaded California legislation officially designating the 1984 massacres of Sikhs in India as genocide. So I asked whether she could clarify why she hadinitially called Gaza a genocide and where she stood now.

Juan Hernandez Garcia, a field representative for Bains’ campaign, prepares a yard sign in Bakersfield. Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times/Getty

“The problem is litmus tests,” Bains began. “Litmus tests for complex issues are the problem.” But it was clear that Bains did not actually want to say anything specific about Israel or Gaza—neither of which she mentioned by name over the course of a more than three-minute answer. “For a physician like me, who holds her Hippocratic oath higher than her oath for office, any innocent life lost is a devastation,” she said. “There has been loss of life on both sides. There has been loss of life in many areas.”

For his part, Villegas issued no such retraction. “Increasingly, people are aware that we are sending billions and billions of dollars to this genocidal regime that has universal healthcare…while we do not,” he told me.

When I spoke with Bains, it had just been revealed that Democratic Majority for Israel would be launching a major ad campaign on her behalf. The group has now shelled out half-a-million dollars on spots that don’t seem to mention Israel at all. Instead, they are attacking Villegas over votes he cast as a member of the Visalia school board to approve settlement agreements with alleged victims of sexual assault. Legal experts have criticized the ads, which are based on opposition research produced by the Bains campaign, as misleading.

Another group, 314 Action, has spent more than $900,000 to help Bains. Combined, these two super-PACs have spent roughly as much as Villegas’ entire campaign. Overall, outside spending for Bains far exceeds the amount being deployed in support of Villegas.

Perhaps the most revealing divide came in response to an issue closer to home. I asked Bains what she hoped to do in Congress to promote healthcare access and affordability. She immediately looked back to a more optimistic era for Democrats. “The most amazing thing was when the ACA was passed,” she said, referring to President BarackObama’s Affordable Care Act. It was an obvious contrast to Villegas’ push for Medicare for All.

The two candidates are both millennials, just nine years apart in age. Yet they represent starkly different generations of Democratic politics. One is shaped by Obama’s success; the other by the long tail of Sanders’ defeats. Bains may consider it absurd to see the race as a fight for the soul of the party. But there is no avoiding it.

Continue Reading…