Inside Delaney Hall’s Black Box

Early Saturday morning, a woman whose husband is detained at ICE’s Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, drove nearly two hours to visit him. She was turned away at the gate.

GEO Group—the multibillion-dollar ICE contractor that runs Delaney Hall—had cancelled family visitation for the day. She sat on a curb, cried, and drove home. Throughout the morning, I saw half-a-dozen women and children arrive: all were told they would not be seeing their loved ones that day.

More than two weeks since detainees began a hunger and labor strike inside Delaney Hall—and their allies outside answered with near-daily protests—it’s still incredibly difficult to find out what’s going on inside the facility. Often, family members find their visits rescheduled or canceled, and journalists have not made it in, either.

Members of Congress are allowed by law to conduct unannounced oversight visits to ICE facilities like Delaney. But politicians have been turned away, too. New Jersey congresswoman LaMonica McIver is facing assault charges after she was arrested alongside Newark mayor Ras Baraka trying to conduct an oversight visit last year. New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill tried to visit the jail in late May, and was denied.

NEW: this morning, Sen. Andy Kim entered ICE’s Delaney Hall for an oversight visit. He saw people in visible medical distress—but GEO Group guards refused to let him speak to anyone detained there. pic.twitter.com/L2Tmqn8zIV

— Sophie Hurwitz (@sophiehurwitz) June 6, 2026

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed when he tried to enter Delaney Hall last month, and as my colleague Alex Nguyen reported, he was forced to directly call Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for admittance. Kim returned Saturday morning to try again—and this time, he made it inside.

But even Kim wasn’t able to find out much about the conditions there: “They refused to let me talk to any detainees,” he told me as he exited Delaney Hall.

“They told me that if I were to speak to any detainees, the oversight tour would immediately be cut off and stopped. This is impeding my ability to lawfully do the oversight that I’m legally allowed to do, and I told them I thought this was a deep breach of my responsibilities and what the American people are demanding.”

What he was able to see was disturbing.

As Kim walked past the women’s unit, he said, he saw a group of women frantically waving their arms and pointing at someone curled up on a bed in pain. “They’re just frantic and waving and pointing, and I saw the woman curled up on the bed. I asked, ‘What is happening here?’” The guards, Kim said, didn’t answer. (GEO Group and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.)

“They continue to have only one full-time doctor here for hundreds of detainees, many of whom have significant medical concerns,” Kim said. At this point, there are about 600 people jailed in Delaney Hall, a thousand-bed facility which has faced accusations of inadequate medical care, wormy food and abusive guards.

On his oversight visit, Kim asked the guards why detainees’ video calls are being restricted. “’We’ll get back to you,’” he said the guards replied. He asked after specific detained people, whose families had asked him for help. Again, he said, the guards responded, “’We’ll get back to you.’”

He asked about one detained woman who has been hospitalized for several weeks. “They aren’t telling her family where she is, which hospital she’s in. They’re saying it’s a security problem,” Kim said. Guards told the family to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out where she is, he said. “Can you imagine if your loved one was in a hospital and you don’t know what hospital they’re in, and then you’re told to just file some bureaucratic papers, and cross your fingers that they’re going to get back to you?”

“That’s the stuff that just pisses me off about this. I was here to get answers for these family members that I talked with earlier today, and I didn’t get them.”

For over a year, a group of volunteers has operated a “radical hospitality” tent outside Delaney Hall—the same tent where medics cared for Kim after he was pepper-sprayed.

On most weekends, when hundreds of family members might come to visit their loved ones, it’s bustling: volunteers distribute water and grocery gift cards, and children play on the rocking horse inside the tent to get some respite from the sun. Diapers, a volunteer told me, are often the most asked-for item.

This Saturday, though, the tent—painstakingly rebuilt after ICE agents reportedly ransacked it days earlier—was nearly empty after visits were cancelled for the day. A few individuals, turned away at Delaney Hall’s gate, stopped for bottled water and directions to the nearest bus stop.

“This is our money going to detain these people, and we’re not getting any answers,” Kim said. “I’m not getting answers on behalf of you, on behalf of other Americans, on behalf of the families of those that are detained. They deserve to have answers, they deserve to have their rights.”

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“Can We Make the Protesters Look More Violent?”

Scott Pelley spent 37 years at CBS News, only to be fired last week after coming into conflict with Free Press founder Bari Weiss, who took control of the network last October. In a New York Times sit-down interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro published Sunday, Pelley said Weiss personally interfered with the network’s coverage of the ICE officer who killed Renée Good in Minneapolis.

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro that, hours before an episode of 60 Minutes on the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was set to air, Weiss sent an email to his boss asking for changes to the episode. “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

On June 3, Pelley posted on Instagram that “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” Now, it’s clear that story was about the ICE agent who killed Renée Good: video of Good’s final moments posted by CBS Evening News does not in fact show her driving toward an officer.

A CBS spokesperson told the New York Times that Weiss’ comments “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration.”

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration,” Pelley said. “Constantly looking out for the views of the president.” But that, to him, wasn’t the worst part. “The bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence,” he told Garcia-Navarro. “The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air.”

CBS has previously pulled 60 Minutes segments, including one in December reporting on the Trump administration deporting people to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison—a key ally of President Donald Trump—installed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS shortly after buying her website, The Free Press, for a reported $150 million.

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Hegseth Warns Europe to Defend Itself Against a Second D-Day

In a perplexing speech Saturday commemorating the World War II D-Day landingsin Normandy, France, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called for European leaders to combat what he implied was a second, modern D-Day—in which European countries werebeing “stormed by different dangerous ideologies” accompanied by “boats and men.”

The original D-Day wasthe Allied invasion to liberate France from Nazi German domination: the defenders were Hitler’s National Socialists and their army, and the “dangerous ideology” was anti-fascism.

At Normandy in 1944,genocidal far-right extremists “defended” a conquered Europe against a multiracial force fighting for democratic ideas. In 2026, Hegseth’s speech suggested, it was happening again:“When will European capitals do something about that invasion?,” he asked.

Hegseth may have been confused—or, then again, we might be at the stage where our government explicitly aligns us with Nazism. After all, every single refugee we admitted to the US this year was supposedly fleeing anti-white persecution.

Commentators online noted Hegseth’s choice of words:

This is repulsive and confused, unless you're a Nazi… The beach-stormers are the good guys on D-Day. But Hegseth wants to make the liberators of Europe into a metaphor for economic migration. Probably because he hates both.

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T14:36:36.339Z

Hundreds of thousands of German Jewish refugees fled Nazi Germany and most were unwanted abroad, putting them back in the sights of the Nazis. Hegseth's analogy only points one way.

— Taulby Edmondson (@taulby.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T17:28:39.069Z

While the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” didn’t explicitly mention what those “dangerous ideologies” were, his past remarks and actions make it fairly clear. Last June, Hegseth orderedAmerican troops to provide security during federal immigration raids in Los Angeles. In January, he thanked ICE for its invasion and occupation of Minnesota—“You are SAVING the country”—and followed the post with a graphic on X, listing three ways to avoid ICE: “don’t be here illegally,” “don’t attack I.C.E. officers,” and “obey federal and state laws.”

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Hegseth has fired or forcibly retired at least 24 generals and senior commanders without providing any merit-based justification provided; roughly 60 percent have been either Black officers or women of any race.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill wrote in September, for Hegseth, “a military with Black leadership, with women in senior roles, and without obstacles to a diverse officer corps is one in which white men have to take orders from the wrong kind.”

Hegseth, Trump, and JD Vance’s obsession with a more racist Europe is having an impact, with explicitly racist parties in multiple European countries touting their ties to the Trump administration and a white nationalist conference in Portugal recently inviting disgraced former Customs and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino to deliver a prominent address; earlier this week, the European Union advanced a plan to increase deportations and build detention centers abroad—which it calls “return hubs”—in a move with unmistakable echoes of Trump administration policies.

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US Accepts Only White Refugees For Sixth Consecutive Month

Every single one of the 599 refugees the US admitted last month was a white South African, according to data the State Department’s Bureau of Population released Friday.

In fact, so was every other refugee admitted this year. Since October 1, 2025, the US has accepted 6,668 refugees. Of those, 6,665 were white South Africans. Three—admitted last November—were from Afghanistan. No other refugees were admitted.

That data is backed up by the US Refugee Admissions Program, a federal public-private interagency collaborationprogram that works on refugee resettlement.

BREAKING: in May 2026, *every single one* of the 599 refugees admitted in the U.S. were white South Africans.In FY 2026, the U.S. has admitted a total of 6,665 white South Africans, three Afghans (back in November 2025), and nobody else. For reference, the U.S. admitted 100,060 refugees in 2024.

— Alex Ip 葉清霖 (@alexip718.com) 2026-06-06T05:48:44.164Z

In October, the Trump administration announced that it would cut the number of refugees admitted per year to the US to 7,500—practically all of whom will be white.

A country that made its name as a haven for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, the United States has long accepted refugees in numbers an order of magnitude greater—and from all over the world. The Trump figures mark a precipitous drop fromfrom fiscal years 2022-2024; under Biden,in keeping with tradition,the annual limit was 125,000.

A presidential memo from September announced Trump’s intentions: that the refugees accepted “shall primarily be among Afrikaners from South Africa” and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”

The Trump administration sees Afrikaners, an South African ethnic group descended primarily from European settlers, as victims of white “genocide”—a racist conspiracy theory promoted by many on the far right, notably Elon Musk.

InMay, the US increased the number of white South Africans it planned to admit by 10,000, to 17,500, claiming that “unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation”—including South African immigration officials raiding a US refugee processing center in the country, arresting seven Kenyan nationals whom they alleged were working at the facility illegally.

A spokesperson for South Africa’s foreign ministry said to the New York Times that same month that “the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.” And as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote at the time, the White House “has cut off aid to South Africa based on its specious claim about discrimination against white South Africans.”

The State Department said the estimated cost of resettling those additional 10,000 Afrikaner refugees would be $100 million.

It’s yet another way the US under Trump continues to ostentatiously demonstrate who it deems worthy of aid, and who it doesnot.

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“This is a Tragedy”: Swimming Snakes Are Wiping Out These Beloved Balearic Lizards

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

Irrefutable proof of what Spanish researchers and wildlife experts had long suspected, and long feared, finally presented itself in the form of a grainy video that was shot on a minuscule island in the Balearics in April 2024.

Ribboning its way through the turquoise waters that separate the east coast of Ibiza from the islet of Santa Eulària 450 meters away, came a pale and solitary horseshoe whip snake in search of new territory and fresh sustenance.

The arrival of the snake on Santa Eulària, recorded by a local wildlife ranger, confirmed that the insatiable invader from the Spanish mainland—which has almost wiped out Ibiza’s endemic population of dazzlingly colored wall lizards—had opened up a new front.

“They control insect populations—including agricultural pests—so that all changes when they disappear.”

“There’d beenincreasing anecdotal evidence from fishermen and tourists who’d seen the snakes swimming, so we’d thought it was happening very often,” said Oriol Lapiedra, a biologist at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) in Catalonia. “But this was the first proper [evidence] we’d had of a snake swimming from Ibiza to the islet.”

The horseshoe whip snake, a nonvenomous reptile found across southern and eastern Spain, has become an existential threat to the lizards since it began appearing on the island two decades ago.

Its rapid colonization has been attributed to the fashion among wealthy property owners in Ibiza for importing ancient olive trees from mainland Spain to adorn the grounds of their homes. Unbeknown to them, however, the trees—replete with their nooks and hollows—have provided ideal travel berths for hibernating snakes and snake eggs.

Twenty years after it arrived, Hemorrhois hippocrepis is present across at least 90 percent of the island and has developed a taste for the unsuspecting lizards, whose familiar colors and outlines grace much of Ibiza’s tourist tat, from T-shirts and fridge magnets to towels and mugs.

These days, though, items of kitsch lizard merchandise may outnumber the real population. In October 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the Ibiza wall lizard (Podarcis pityusensis) up its extinction red list from “near threatened” to “endangered.”

Treasured and beloved as the lizards are for their aesthetic appeal and tame natures, they are also a keystone species that plays a vital role in maintaining the region’s ecosystems.

“They control insect populations—including agricultural pests—so that all changes when they disappear,” said Lapiedra. “But they also pollinate flowers and disperse seeds.”

What is more, the lizards are something of an evolutionary wonder: Each of the dozens of islands and islets that make up the Pityusic Islands has a different population whose distinct colorations include green, blue, black, brown, gray, and orange.

No one knows how many invasive snakes there are in Ibiza. According to the Balearic regional government, which is working with CREAF and other groups to protect the lizards, more than 3,500 horseshoe whip snakes were captured on the island last year alone, and more than 16,000 have been culled since 2016. Even so, forecasts suggest they will be found across 100 percent of the island by the end of 2027.

“Each, or most, of the islets have these unique lineages that are being completely lost to science.”

On the mainland, the snakes tend to be skinny creatures that seldom exceed lengths of 1.8 meters. But they are thriving to such an extent on Ibiza that specimens have been found that are more than 2 meters long and weigh 2.5 times as much as their peninsular peers. As Lapiedra put it: “We’ve found animals that are as thick as my wrist.”

The biologist and his colleagues, whose research was published recently in the journal Ecology, believe increased competition for food among the snakes on Ibiza may have driven them toward the islets.

While the hope is that dwindling food sources may eventually bring down the number of snakes, the damage has already been done. Researchers observed 72 lizards on Santa Eulària in 2016 and just three in 2023. Today, the unique lizard populations of 10 islets—including Santa Eulària—have become extinct, taking with them thousands of years of unique evolution. Meanwhile, horseshoe whip snakes have been found on Ibiza’s neighboring island of Formentera.

In an effort to safeguard the species, a “Noah’s ark” captive breeding program involving lizards from eight populations was set up at Barcelona zoo last year and is doing well. But the small size of the islets, combined with the voracity of the snakes, leaves little room for optimism and still less for complacency.

Lapiedra likens the situation to that of the Pacific island of Guam, where the arrival of the brown tree snake on US military ships 80 years ago led to the extirpation of 10 of the 12 native forest bird species. **“**The only difference is that the snakes in Guam aren’t reported to swim,” he added. “So there are islands [around] Guam that still have the species that Guam used to have.”

And yet, as Lapiedra pointed out, all is not lost on Ibiza. In an ironic twist for a species that has been thrust into extinction’s fangs by the human compulsion to order and reorder the landscape, the safest lizard populations in Ibiza are now those in urban areas.

“The lizards are still present in the largest cities in Ibiza and the populations are fine,” he said. “Basically what’s happening is that in the urban areas, the snakes get run over and people there also kill them because they don’t like snakes. So for now, some of these urban areas have good lizard populations.”

But for Lapiedra, his colleagues and people across Ibiza, the rapid disappearance of the lizards is both an ecological and a cultural disaster.

“Each, or most, of the islets have these unique lineages that are being completely lost to science and to humanity right now,” he said. “So this is a tragedy—it’s like a fire in an old church.”

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We Get It. You Don’t Trust Us.

Every week, a group of men in their late 60s meets at the Corner Cafe in Elizabethtown, North Carolina. One important reason for these meetups is to discuss what’s going on in their community.

Local news has virtually dried up in their rural county, as well as neighboring counties, and some residents say they’re being left in the dark and don’t feel equipped to make informed decisions.

“I’m not gonna vote if I can’t get the information,” says Penny Abernathy.

Like in much of the country, roughly two-thirds of North Carolina’s counties are considered news deserts. And the lack of local journalism isn’t just making it harder for people to stay informed; it’s exacerbating a crisis of trust in the news media.

This week on Reveal, we partner with the podcast Scene on Radioand itshosts John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika to understand how American journalism got here and what can be done to repair the cracked foundation of the Fourth Estate.

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ICE at the World Cup Is a Threat to Us All

We’re less than a week away from the first match of the FIFA Men’s World Cup, with tensions mounting over the United States’ role as one of the host countries, and it remains to be seen just how the Department of Homeland Security will respond to what it deems threats—or how active ICE will be at the tournament.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that “every single” agency would be on site. “We’re going to have facial recognition, right. If we have people coming in that’s on the terrorist watchlist, we’re going to collapse on them. That’s not going to [just] be ICE, that could be state police that collapse on them. We’re all working together.”

ICE’s facial recognition systems can misidentify people and generate false matches—andthe agency reportedly places smartphone-based facial recognition matches ahead of physical evidence including birth certificates.

Perhaps to counter potential criticisms, Mullin stated that ICE will be there “not for immigration, but for terrorist threats” and that “for years, ICE has been around and no one knew who they were.”

Several cities hosting World Cup matches have announced that they would not cooperate with ICE enforcement, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Seattle. On Monday, LA County Sheriff Robert Luna claimed that Mullin personally told him that federal agents would not conduct civil immigration enforcement “at any of the games.” But the federal government has increasingly deployed the criminal legal system against people they allege to have violated immigration law, with little regard for their alleged offenses and despite the fact that unauthorized presence in the US is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

Even giving Mullin the benefit of the doubt—which may not be the best move—his statement leaves ample room for loopholes: will it apply between games? To areas outside the stadiums? That uncertainty impacts fans, visitors, families of players, journalists—all of whom face a heightened risk of human rights violations, according toa joint travel advisory issued by more than 120 civil society groups in April. Among the risks listed in their press release:

• Arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation
• Expanded restrictions and limitation on travel and entry to the U.S.
• Invasive social media screening and searches of electronic devices
• Violent and unconstitutional immigration enforcement, including racial profiling
• Suppression of speech and protest and increased surveillance
• Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment – and even death – while in ICE detention or custody

Given that ominous warning—and the Trump administration’s tendency to label political opponents and immigrants of all stripes as “criminal aliens,” “domestic terrorists,” or otherwise dangerous—a secondhand verbal promisethat there will be no civil immigration enforcement is not reassuring.

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Is Madonna the Nancy Pelosi of Pop?

While watching Madonna’s recent Times Square takeover—sponsored by the gay “dating” app Grindr—it struck me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Something about Madonna’s performance made me immediately think of Nancy Pelosi. (Do with that what you will.) Both women are legendary trailblazers in their own right, foundational to their respective worlds, and yet always in a complicated negotiation with the legacy they’re leaving behind.

From the very start, both women were dismissed by the world around them, eventually defying expectations and a male-driven culture that wished to deem them unworthy. They both found longevity in their worlds due to reinvention, navigating the changing winds of pop culture or political landscapes by having to shape shift in ways their male counterparts never had to.

It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly sparked the comparison—maybe initially, it was the superficial fact of both being women who take up powerful spaces and refuse to let the world tell them they can’t do powerful things. Maybe it’s also that when these women dare to exist in public, we write about it, talk about it, send clips to our group chats about it.

Butthere was something else too. As Madonna precariously dangled her leg over the edge of a Times Square banister while she promotes Confessions II, the long-awaited follow-up to her 2005 chart-topping Confessions on a Dance Floor, I was hit with a type of exhaustion. It was a feeling I felt when Pelosi was exiting Congress. Madonna and Pelosi, in all their power, once created the winds of culture and politics. Now, it seems, they chase them.

But maybe that’s real legacy. It’s not about newness or the albums or gavels, but the audacity to still be here, unbothered and reveling in knowing you already did it. In a culture terrified of irrelevance, there’s something loudly radical about two women who’ve already proved everything—and know it.

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Only Candace Owens Could Prompt MAGA to Acknowledge Russian Disinformation

Far-right podcaster Candace Owens made a surprise trip to Russia this week, where she spoke on a panel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), a Davos-style event meant to build relationships between Russia and other world powers. Owens, who initially claimed that she was only taking a family vacation, used her trip to tweet at length about the country’s beauty, safety, and friendliness to Christians. “The Christian expression and heritage here is unmatched,” she tweeted, alongside photos of Russian Orthodox churches. “Unsurprisingly, they are lying to us about Russia.”

“I’m starting to understand why the talking heads panic and shout and lie about ‘Russian collusion’ when they learn an American with a platform is traveling here,” Owens added in another tweet. “It’s Plato’s allegory of the cave. It is genuinely shocking how clean, beautiful and ordered this city is. It is so far removed from media depictions.”

The baldly propagandistic nature of Owens’ trip generated condemnation from an unusual quarter: other MAGA figures, who suddenly found themselves unusually concerned about Kremlin-backed disinformation.

“I’m just wondering how long some of these people… have been activated as foreign agents.”

Glenn Beck, for instance, tweeted that Owens’ trip is “proof that Russia and Alexander Dugin’s massive propaganda operation is working.” (Dugin is a political philosopher and ultra-nationalist figure who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” due to his reported influence on the president.) A MAGA podcaster named Matt Tardio responded in agreement: “I’ve respected Glenn Beck for years on his honest reporting. Finally, people are waking up. Russian disinformation has been fooling influential people in the west with one goal, to destroy us from within.”

“Candace continues lying openly to her audience and they still clap like brainless seals,” declared Jessica Reed Kraus, the MAGA gossip blogger who writes the House Inhabit substack. “Russia is cool guys!” she added, mocking Owens’ fans.

In truth, most of the MAGA media world had very little to say about Owens’ trip. The few people on the right who condemned it notably have longstanding feuds with her, part of a massive, omnidirectional set of beefs and internecine fights that have been dividing the movement for most of Trump’s second presidency. Beck, for instance, has defended Erika Kirk, the widow of slain Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, against attacks from Owens. Other critics of Owens’ travel included her ex-boss Ben Shapiro, who referred to her trip as a “magical propaganda tour.” The two have been enemies for years after Shapiro fired Owens from the Daily Wire in 2024 for her rabidly antisemitic statements.

Laura Loomer, who’s been bitterly feuding with Owens for months, went further.

“I don’t think conservatives realize how much Russian propaganda we have been fed over the last few years as ‘independent journalism,’” she tweeted during Owens’ visit. “It’s starting to become very clear to me how many people who claimed to be defenders of the West were just saying that to suck in a pro-West audience so they could slowly brainwash them with foreign propaganda until they could convince their viewers to work against the West. Those ‘interviews’ we all defended were not actually interviews. They were psychological operations meant to weaponize political factions in America for the purpose of pushing foreign interests.”

The left, Loomer added in another tweet, “wasn’t entirely wrong when they called some people Russian puppets. Just like the right isn’t wrong when they call some people agents of the Chinese communists and Islamists. Now I’m just wondering how long some of these people I’ve known for years have been activated as foreign agents and who their handlers are.”

The MAGA movement as a whole has a mixed record on recognizing that disinformation or propaganda exist. Loomer, for instance, often dismissed reports that the Russian government attempted to interfere in U.S. elections as a “hoax.” And Beck had very little to say publicly about the Tenet Media scandal, in which numerous prominent right-wing influencers took money from a company that was secretly receiving financial backing from two people with ties to Russian state media. Lauren Chen, Tenet’s co-founder, had been a freelance contributor to Beck’s BlazeTV, although her contract was terminated after the indictment was released.

Russia uses the SPIEF as a display of economic might and soft power, mixing speeches from Vladimir Putin with ballet performances. Owens’ participation was first reported on X by national security analyst Ryan Mauro. Amid Russia’s continued attack on Ukraine, Western countries largely shun the event, but the Taliban did make an appearance this year. In a break with recent tradition, a U.S. official also attended: Rodney Mims Cook Jr, the Chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts, who’s overseeing the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom. Cook presented images of the ballroom during the panel, where he spoke alongside actor Steven Seagal, a Putin ally.

Owens, a dedicated rage-baiter, clearly understood her visit would generate controversy. “This has been the most triggering trip for the mainstream media,” she declared in an RT interview. “And it has been laughable to see the headlines they are coming up with.”

“Great news!” she tweeted on Friday morning, celebrating that she’s be attending a second day of the conference. “Thanks to the wall-to-wall western media meltdown about my trip to Russia, their entire nation became aware of my presence here. I have now been cordially invited to hear President Putin speak today at SPIEF. This is why we say there is no such thing as bad press.”

Owens also sought to leverage the presence of a U.S. official at SPIEF to defend herself from her erstwhile allies’ attacks: “Isn’t it kind of weird how Trump sent an entire delegation, (including the architect building his ‘ballroom’) and yet Zionists never accused any of them of being Russian spies? It’s almost as if the people who refuse to peddle their talking points, get smeared.”

(Owens often blames Jews or “Zionists” for unconnected world events—for instance blaming the Orthodox Jewish Chabad Lubavitch movement for U.S. involvement in Iran.)

Mitchell Jackson, a publicist for Owens and a slate of other controversial figures, told me that “Candace is not being paid to attend” SPIEF, adding, “Boeing, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley having previously hosted panels at this event, and everyone from Rex Tillerson to Jon Huntsman has spoken at this event.”

In 2018, Huntsman actually chose to cancel his address, and Tillerson’s appearance was before the United States enforced major economic sanctions against Russia. Today, the State Department advises Americans not to go to the country for any reason.

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Florida’s OpenAI Lawsuit Shows the GOP Splintering Over AI

OpenAI and its chatbot ChatGPT’s “success has not been earned; the rise of OpenAI is attributable to a web of deceit and the exploitation of users (including Floridians), leveraging their data and safety to boost OpenAI’s market value at unacceptable costs.”

Earlier this week, Florida, a state led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ right-wing, pro-business administration, sued OpenAI and itsCEO Sam Altman, alleging they promoted their products while knowing it could hurt users.

On its surface, this lawsuit may seem odd: It was filed by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, the 2024 presidential campaign manager and former chief of staff to Gov. DeSantis, who has repeatedly struck down government regulation and championed businesses—often at the expense of everyday people.

And the Trump administration appears to be committed to expanding artificial intelligence, stating in a January 2025 executive order that the US had to be dominant in the field “to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.The Defense Department evenmade a deal with OpenAI to use the company’s AI technology for classified security networks.

But the first page of Florida’s complaintfeatures a screenshot of OpenAI’s explanation of its parental controls for ChatGPT, in part reading: “We work with experts, test safeguards, and update our systems regularly to reduce risks. ChatGPT is trained to avoid showing harmful material and to respond in a respectful way for all users.”

Florida’s response: “Not so.”

The opening page of the Florida AG's lawsuit against OpenAI is quite the statement.

— Geoff Brumfiel (@gbrumfiel.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T15:42:12.739Z

The lawsuit claimsthat “mass shooters have been aided and abetted in deadly rampages”—including onewhere an accused gunman had extended conversations with ChatGPT before a mass shooting at Florida State Universitylast year—and has pushed vulnerable people to take their own lives, among other allegations.

As my colleague Mark Follman reported last month, within a roughly 20-minute conversation with ChatGPT, the chatbot had given him advice on weapons and tactics while he simulated planning a mass shooting:

ChatGPT delivered these responses with lots of encouragement—and it kept going even after I talked of emulating the Uvalde mass shooter’s choice of weapon, asked about livestreaming with a body camera and using hollow-point bullets, and focused on defending against return gunfire from police.

Mark’s investigation is cited in the Florida lawsuit.

(Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)

These are legitimate concerns and DeSantis’ administration is correct to pursue accountability against OpenAI and Altman. DeSantis also has a record—although largely only starting toward the end of 2025—of protecting Floridians from AI companies, including allowing local governments to reject data center development projects. Some of the governor’s efforts have even failed, with other Florida Republicans citing Trump’s messaging that states shouldn’t oppose AI development.

So are we looking at the “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” meme?

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point https://t.co/PgJ9dvyE10 pic.twitter.com/t1zV2E9iWC

— ClickHole (@ClickHole) February 5, 2018

Perhaps, but the large range of public statements on AI regulation among prominent figures in the GOP demonstrate that officials may see different upsides and downsides to following the Trump administration on this one issue.

For DeSantis, Floridians across the state, many of whom are part of—or could be—his voting base, are organizing against data centers. “No political party has a monopoly on the anger locals feel,” the Tampa Bay Timesnoted on Thursday. “It’s common at anti-data center events for the speakers to not even mention political parties.” And as my colleague Sophie Hurwitz wrote last month, most Americans say they would be against living near a data center. It’s popular to at least visibly consider regulating AI.

And this pressure may be seeping into the White House. President Trump flip-flopped on calling for federal vetting of some advanced AI systems for national security risks before their release to the public (although participation from AI companies is voluntary), eventually signing the executive order on Tuesday. It is still unclear to what extent the executive order changed after Trump had initially voiced objections last month, but AI regulation is now an issue that may be worth alienating others on the right over.

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Trump’s Gift to Drug Cartels, Money Launderers, and Terrorists

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

There has justifiably been much attention paid to Donald Trump’s personal corruption: cutting sleazy crypto deals, trading stocks in companies affected by his administration’s decisions, doling out pardons to fraudsters who make hefty donations to his political organizations, and so much more. But what’s even more significant is how Trump is perverting the federal government to allow wealthy individuals and corporations engaged in crooked conduct to escape scrutiny, prosecution, and punishment. Corporate scumbags and felonious plutocrats have never had it so good.

The Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission, enforcement actions have fallen precipitously, and the commission ended several high-profile cryptocurrency inquires that involved Binance, Coinbase, and other firms. The workforce for the SEC’s enforcement division was cut by a fifth last year, with many experienced attorneys and accountants given the boot. The IRS, too, has been hammered by layoffs, and the number of audits of people with $10 million or more in income dropped by two-thirds from 6,786 in 2025 to 2,264 in 2026. With new priorities established at the Justice Department—such as essentially shutting down the pursuit of cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—the number of white-collar prosecutions has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, according to the Financial Times.

But beyond this, the Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues. Who says so? The US Government Accountability Office. It recently released a report assessing Trump’s decision to loosen reporting requirements for shell companies. These are corporations that can have legitimate uses but are also set up so people or entitites can evade taxes, launder money, hide assets, and obscure the true beneficiaries of financial transactions. For instance, a sanctioned Russian oligarch might be able to use a shell company—or a string of them—to buy real estate in the United States and keep secret his ownership of the property.

The Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill passed in 2021, required most US firms to disclose to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) their “beneficial owners”—that is, the real people who control or own them. (In many instances, shell companies do not have to reveal their true owners and are registered in the name of others.) The aim of the legislation was to create a registry of owners and impede illegal financial activities, such as money laundering. An estimated 32 million businesses would have to register and note their real owners. (Several categories of business were exempted because disclosure requirements already applied to them—such as banks, credit unions, and securities dealers.)

But one month into Trump’s second term, his administration essentially eviscerated this reporting requirement, when FinCEN issued rules exempting domestic companies and Americans from this disclosure. As the GAO put it, this new exemption applied “to over 99 percent of entities that were previously targeted.”

The GAO report—in exceedingly dry language—notes this exemption is a boon for assorted malfeasants:

U.S.-based shell companies, often structured as LLCs or corporations, can pose significant risks of illicit finance activity. Treasury’s 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment identified several cases in which shell companies were used to facilitate financial crimes, including laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, cybercrime, and fraud, among others, indicating the continued risk posed by shell companies. The 2025 domestic reporting company exemption may perpetuate these risks.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, quickly jumped on the GAO report and cited it as evidence Trump is on the side of the bad guys:

The Trump Administration continues to put cartels and criminals ahead of law enforcement, opening the door for them to move millions of dollars through our financial system. Today’s GAO report confirms that Treasury gutted a bipartisan law designed to crack down on the abuse of shell companies, exempted 99 percent of the entities previously required to report, and has failed to address the “significant risks” this rollback created. Law enforcement groups have warned that it will be harder to go after drug traffickers, sanctions evaders, and major criminal enterprises.

Warren noted that one of the main forces behind passage of the Corporate Transparency Act was a former senator named Marco Rubio. In 2020, he tweeted, “My ‘Corporate Transparency Act’ [is] the most significant anti-corruption and money-laundering legislation in decades [and] forces anonymous shell companies to disclose their true owners.”

“There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”

Republican and Democratic senators have opposed the Trump administration’s wipeout of the Corporate Transparency Act, as have law enforcement organizations, business groups, and national security–minded think tanks of the right and left. The hawkish and neocon-ish Foundation for Defense of Democracies issued a statement last year that said, “Anonymous U.S. shell companies are not a theoretical vulnerability—they are a proven vehicle for illicit finance, sanctions evasion, corruption, terrorism, and transnational crime…FinCEN’s decision to exempt domestic entities would allow these practices to continue unchecked.”

Last year, Warren, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and other Democratic senators wrote the Treasury to complain about the weakening of this requirement, noting, “There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”

The Trump administration claims this disclosure obligation was too onerous for businesses, but it entailed minimal effort for the corporations compelled to register. So why kill this requirement? Warren and other legislators suspect Elon Musk had something to do with this. In a separate letter sent to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in April 2025, she and 18 other congressional Democrats asserted the Trump administration’s decision to neuter the Corporate Transparency Act was “seemingly triggered by a single Elon Musk social media comment.”

They pointed out that Musk, who at that time was a key adviser to Trump and engaged in a reckless dismantling of various government agencies, might have been “benefiting from foreign investments made through legal entities designed to hide the identities of the foreign investors.” They cited the Financial Times: “Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funneling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk” through “opaque structures” and “an arrangement that shields their identities from public view.”

During the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”

Responding to the recent GAO report, Warren asserted that this disclosure requirement would be beneficial for efforts to combat transnational crime, drug trafficking (including fentanyl smuggling), sex trafficking, the evasion of sanctions imposed on Iran, the theft of US technology by China and others, and fraud that targets US government programs. (The criminals that stole federal funds in Minnesota relied on shell companies.)

This may well be a personal issue for Trump. His Trump Organization is a collection of hundreds of shell companies. (Such entities are commonly used for real estate transactions.) And during the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”

Corporate reporting rules may seem like a wonkish topic. It certainly is not as visceral as Trump selling pardons or pocketing billions in crypto grift. But it may be more important, for Trump’s decision to protect the secrecy of shell companies—perhaps at the urging of Musk—has more far-ranging consequences than his own sticky-fingers corruption. It’s another way Trump is making America great for plutocrats, oligarchs, fraudsters, and scoundrels.

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Trump’s Justice Department Is Suing Cities and States to Dismantle Gun Laws

This story was originally published by The Trace_,_ a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

Last December, the Department of Justice opened a new office in its Civil Rights Division called the Second Amendment Section. The goal of the office, as previously reported by Mother Jones and The Trace, is to identify firearm restrictions enacted by cities and states that the administration believes to be unconstitutional—and sue to overturn them.

And sue they have.

In the section’s first six months of operation, the Justice Department has brought cases against police departments in Los Angeles County and the Virgin Islands, the city of Denver, the state of Colorado, and the nation’s capital, Washington, DC. Virginia may be next: Minutes after Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed an assault weapon ban last month, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on X, “See you in court!”

“It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us.”

The Civil Rights Division typically fights for the disempowered by enforcing federal anti-discrimination statutes. It was created in 1957 to ensure Black voting rights and school desegregation. Gun rights “have never been a focus,” said Megan Marks, a former attorney in the division who is now deputy director and managing editor of Red Line for Civil Rights, a nonprofit initiative that tracks the politicization of civil rights enforcement under President Donald Trump.

Not surprisingly, pro-gun organizations are thrilled with the Civil Rights Division’s new direction. “It’s great to have that giant 800-pound gorilla in the room with us,” said Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, which has more than 50 active lawsuits seeking to void gun laws across the country. “Because courts, like it or not, do take the DOJ more seriously. And frankly it’s nice to have the DOJ at least seeing the Second Amendment as equal to all the other rights.”

The DOJ’s suits come at a time when the Trump administration has departed from more traditional civil rights issues—discrimination against marginalized groups based on race, sex, disability, and religion—by pursuing conservative policies, reshaping DEI initiatives, investigating “reverse discrimination,” and suing universities over affirmative action practices.

“Under the leadership of President Trump, this is the most pro-Second Amendment Department of Justice in history,” a Justice Department spokesperson told me. “We are committed to maximizing law-abiding citizens’ ability to fully exercise their right to bear arms and evenhandedly enforcing federal laws that do not infringe on Second Amendment rights.”

The flurry of litigation began last September, when the Civil Rights Division filed suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over “unreasonable delays” in issuing concealed carry permits that allegedly stretched “as far as two years.” Six weeks later the division sued the police department in the Virgin Islands, a US territory, over “unreasonable delays” in its gun permitting process and requirements like bolted-in gun safes. Shortly after, the territory’s governor proposed laws establishing a 90-day deadline for approving or denying permits. The division then began targeting bans on semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, first in Washington, DC, in December, then in Colorado in May.

Some experts and veteran civil rights attorneys said they are troubled by the Justice Department’s new direction. “The history of racial discrimination in the US is this deep scar, while gun rights were never really under assault in a country that has more guns than people,” said John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University. He said the Second Amendment Section is unnecessary because an army of well-funded pro-gun groups “are constantly bringing litigation.” He also pointed to the financial burden for states and municipalities that will have to spend money defending their laws in court.

For decades, the National Rifle Association and allied groups have successfully waged legislative and legal campaigns to loosen firearm regulations across the country. They argue gun ownership is an innate human right—one that’s constantly under attack. These days most states allow gun owners to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit, and many even prevent municipalities from restricting the practice.

Marks, who spent nine years probing police misconduct in the Civil Rights Division before leaving in 2025, is concerned that the division is abdicating its responsibility to investigate serious law enforcement abuses in favor of instead “making AR-15s more accessible.” One of the key federal statutes that Marks and her colleagues enforced was passed after Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991. It authorized investigations to determine whether law enforcement agencies have engaged in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations, including excessive force or racial profiling.

The DOJ’s new Second Amendment Section is now utilizing that same language from the statute, but repurposing its meaning to “investigate law enforcement agencies that engage in a pattern or practice of infringing on law-abiding citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights.” That trade-off, experts said, comes with a cost.

“What we’ve seen play out is the department walking away from a number of completed investigations where they found systemic misconduct,” said Marks, referring to the traditional cases the Civil Rights Division has more typically pursued in the past. By focusing on gun rights, she said, “the department is walking away from its responsibilities to marginalized communities.”

Moros, of the Second Amendment Foundation, disagrees, pointing to a historical analogue for the Trump DOJ’s view that gun rights are a key component of civil rights. After the Civil War, he notes, the War Department established The Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary division created essentially to stabilize the South and to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people. Among other things, the bureau helped formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient—and argued for their right to own guns. “I do think it’s a very clear precedent, because they stood up for people who the state and local governments were trying to disarm,” Moros said. “This is definitely something the federal government has taken an interest in in the past.”

Donohue, the law professor, rejects that argument, adding that the gun rights movement has a long history of co-opting the language of civil rights. The NRA, for example, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization” without a hint of irony.

Former employees of the Civil Rights Division told Mother Jones and The Trace last fall that the revered unit had been co-opted by the Trump administration “to serve an agenda that is in some ways antithetical to civil rights.” In December, more than 100 former DOJ civil rights attorneys and staff published a letter warning of the destruction of the division, citing the retirement or removal of 5,000 career attorneys from the department overall. The new focus on guns is just another example of how the division has been repurposed to fulfill the administration’s ideological objectives, said Marks.

Marks said she hopes that if the next administration disbands the Second Amendment Section, the Civil Rights Division can return to its original focus of fighting for the disempowered. But she said it will take time. “I think it’s a question of, can they rebuild the resources? Can they ensure and reestablish norms like independent enforcement by career experts? So many of those guardrails are gone now. I don’t know that it can happen overnight.”

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The Delaney Hall Strikers Are Hitting GEO Group Where It Hurts

It has now been almost two weeks since the laborers keeping ICE’s Delaney Hall mega-jail open went on strike—demanding a chance to speak with New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, reviews of their cases, and ultimately, their freedom. Those workers are the detainees themselves, who serve as custodians, line cooks, hairdressers, laundry workers, and janitors at the Newark prison-turned-detention center where a thousand people are trapped in DHS custody, working for wages as low as a dollar per day.

What began as a simultaneous hunger and labor strike has become largely a labor struggle, organizers with the immigrant rights group Cosecha New Jersey told me. That strike, according to a letter signed by 46 detained people and published June 3, is near-unanimous and ongoing: “people detained have all voluntarily stopped working and assisting with facility operations,” they wrote in a May 31 letter titled “We Demand Freedom.”

The for-profit firm GEO Group, ICE’s largest private contractor and Delaney Hall’s operator, runs what it calls a “voluntary work program” that in effect keeps the center operating, described in a recent GEO Group detainee handbook reviewed by Mother Jones.

While work is supposedly voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is a “high offense” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or criminal proceedings.

“Any resident assigned to work in the kitchen will be paid $4.00 per day,” the handbook says. That’s the highest wage anyone gets: “Laundry Work Details and Barbershop Workers will be paid $3.00 per day. Special Work Details are paid $2.00 per day. All other job assignments are $1.00 per day. Ordinarily you will not be permitted to work more than eight hours per day or 40 hours per week.”

The document also lists the cost of a pair of shoes at GEO Group’s commissary: $24.28, equivalent to several weeks’ wages. A blanket costs eight dollars. ID cards, which detained people must pay to replace if damaged, cost $5 each, or a full week’s pay.

While the work program is labeled as voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is listed in the detainee handbook as a “high offense,” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or initiating criminal proceedings.

“Engaging in, or inciting a group demonstration” is also a “high offense” and “prohibited act.” And, the detained strikers wrote in their June 3 letter, they have been “subjected to reprisals, discrimination, mockery, mistreatment, and threats” since their strike began.

People detained in Delaney Hall began a hunger and labor strike on May 22.Derek French/Zuma

“They are trying to force us to work in all areas of the facility (cleaning, kitchen, maintenance, laundry, floor polishing)” they wrote, adding that GEO Group staffers threaten “to deport us, transfer us to punishment units, and move us from one detention center to another” if they refuse to work. “They tell us we have no rights here.”

“They don’t have cleaning staff, they don’t have kitchen staff,” said Cat Adorno, an organizer with Cosecha. “Those jobs, the detainees are the ones that do that.”

“We’re hearing that the place is becoming really dirty, that it started to smell like feces, that the guards have become incredibly aggressive, threatening them that if they don’t resume their work, they’re going to get transferred or get additional charges,” Adorno added.

The profit margins of facilities like Delaney Hall depend on coercing people into working for otherwise illegal rates, Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and journalist who researches conditions in ICE detention, said. “The way you keep the place clean is you use the people who are inside to clean it.”

Those dollar-a-day rates have held since 1950, when they were established by Congress. It was keyed to the “international standard for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, which was three Swiss francs.” Since then, several courts have ruled that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage, does not apply to people detained by ICE. But the legal battle isn’t over: there are now more than a dozen lawsuits making their way through the courts regarding involuntary work for unjust pay in ICE detention.

GEO Group staffers did not answer questions about the strike, or about whether Delaney Hall cleaning and kitchen staff can sustain the facility without the labor of detained people.

**“**In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel…to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements,” a GEO Group spokesperson wrote in a statement.

Facilities like Delaney Hall are profitable in part because they can compel detained people to work for otherwise illegal rates.

For more than a year, a group of union activists calling itself “Labor Eyes On ICE” has held monthly vigils at Delaney Hall—and on Sunday, members of at least 12 unions, including the Teamsters and the American Federation of Teachers, picketed on a dusty road just under half a mile from the building, prevented from getting within detainees’ earshot by barricades and lines of police.

Teachers and librarians showed up to chant and picket, as did Amazon warehouse workers and university clerical staff. In a nearby tent, masked medics wearing red-tape crosses on their arms handed out goggles to protect people from tear gas—and told me quietly that in their day-to-day lives, many of them are unionized medical professionals.

Mitch Israel, an organizer with the Teamsters at Amazon, had the ties between that company and ICE on his mind outside Delaney Hall this week: “Amazon actually loses money on its package delivering business most years,” he said, “and it funds that by using its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, to get huge contracts with ICE, with Palantir, and other groups that allow it to fund its abuse of workers. There is a direct connection between these things.”

The Delaney Hall detention facility has seen a surge of protests as detainees hold a hunger and labor strike over allegations of mistreatment and poor facility conditions. Riley Harty/Zuma

“This fight actually goes beyond Delaney Hall and back to our employers and our workplaces,” said Isaac Jimenez, a member of the administrative workers’ union at Rutgers University. At his employer, students, staff and faculty “have been calling for a sanctuary campus for over a year.”

“We’re supporting and uplifting the demands of the striking detainees and calling for this place to be shut down, calling on our governor, Mikie Sherrill, to meet with the strikers, and to help shut this place down as well,” Jimenez added. “I know it’s only really gotten to a head in the past 10 days, but this movement’s been growing for over a year, since Delaney Hall’s been reopened.” On Thursday, 13 days into the strike, Sherrill announced a $12 million increase in funding for legal services—enough to fund legal aid for “all low-income detainees in Delaney Hall.”

By withholding their labor, Free said, detained people “are in a real way hitting GEO where it hurts.” They are undermining the company’s revenue, “which is why the repression is so harsh.”

But it’s generally cheaper to let people go than to transfer strikers to different facilities, Free said. So when some detained people are released—like an 18-year-old who was freed from Delaney Hall earlier this week after missing her high school prom—“that is just as much a predictable consequence of these hunger and labor strikes as the repression and retaliation.”

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The White House Just Made Medicaid Work Requirements Even Worse

On Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its interim final rule on Medicaid work requirements, mandating that everyone who seeks Medicaid support has to prove they are unable to work to a greater extent, even if they have already been diagnosed with a debilitating condition like sickle cell disease—and even if they are already on Medicaid.

Federal Medicaid work requirements are being implemented as part of President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, a budget and spending bill which is also cutting nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid’s budget over the next decade.

In states with Medicaid expansion, an Affordable Care Act provision that allows more low-income people to access Medicaid, the legislation mandated that work requirements be implemented, but didn’t resolve certain details of how and who would be targeted—questions the Department of Health and Human Services has now answered in the most restrictive possible way. The Urban Institute estimates that between 4.9 and 10.1 million fewer people could be enrolled in Medicaid by 2028 as a result of work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks. The interim final rule is likely to yield a figure at the high end of that estimate. Medicaid work requirements have to be implemented in all states with Medicaid expansion by January 1, 2027, though some Republican-led states have opted to do so ahead of schedule.

“Congress compelled states to impose Medicaid work requirements on the expansion population,” said University of Pittsburgh health policy and management professor Miranda Yaver, “but it wasn’t entirely clear from the legislation to what extent states’ hands were going to be tied…there were a lot of open questions about how much discretion there would have.”

Under the interim final rule, people with certain conditions who are already on Medicaid will no longer be automatically considered “medically frail,” a classification that exempts them from work requirements; they must provide further proof, beyond their diagnosis, that they are “greatly impaired” from working. The new federal rule is notably stricter than what was implemented in Nebraska, a GOP-dominated state that voluntarily enacted work requirements eight months before the deadline—but which at least retained a list of conditions considered automatically exempt from work requirements for those on Medicaid.

State officials were blindsided by this medical frailty definition outlined in the new federal rule, which was never brought up in discussions between states and the federal government, Jennifer Wagner, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities‘ director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment, told me.

“We have heard that this was driven more by the White House,” Wagner said. “I don’t think it was CMS intentionally misleading states.”

While the federal interim rule is harsh, it is not final: there is a 60-day public comment period, after which states have until the end of the calendar year to implement (or, in Nebraska’s case, modify) their Medicaid work requirements.

“It’s going to be very costly in terms of time as well as money,” Wagner said, “and, realistically, states are not going to be able to do this accurately by January 1.”

There is no way to implement Medicaid work requirements without disabled and chronically ill people losing their access to the program, despite the claims of Republican politicians like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.).

“There are going to be so many disabled people and chronically ill people who lose access to their health care and other kinds of supports that Medicaid provides,” said Maria Town, the President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities.

Town is also extremely concerned that Medicaid-supported employment for disabled people is not considered to be meaningful “community engagement,” another stipulation for Medicaid coverage under the new rule. “It’s just a way of saying that disabled people’s labor shouldn’t be compensated,” Town told me.

The new administrative burdens will push people off of Medicaid, as when Medicaid work requirements were implemented in Arkansas during the first Trump administration, leading to 18,000 people losing Medicaid coverage in the state.

“People who had lost Medicaid benefits were worse off—they were more likely to have medical debt and have delayed important healthcare due to concerns about cost,” University of Colorado, Boulder economics professor Chloe East said in an interview.

Yaver, of the University of Pittsburgh, is also concerned that places that serve more Medicaid patients, like federally qualified health centers, will not be able to keep up with paperwork requirements to prove medical frailty.

“Writing attestations of medical frailty would almost assuredly fall under the umbrella of non-billable hours,” Yaver told me, “and this is going to be a large share of their patient population.”

Not only do Medicaid work requirements not increase employment, according to multiple studies, but a majority of adults on Medicaid already work.

“It’s hard not to think that the cruelty of the policy is the point,” East said. “Adding work requirements to Medicaid is part of a massive shift in our safety net in this country under this administration to make it as small and hard to access as possible.”

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You Can Hate Mackenzie Shirilla and Prisons Too

Maybe I’m leaning too much into The Discourse, but here’s this mind-boggling thing happening on the internet with the internet’s latest supervillian. Mackenzie Shirilla is the—star? protagonist?—of a new documentary on Netflix about a deadly 2022 car wreck that claimed the lives of her boyfriendDominic Russo and his friendDavion Flanagan. Shirilla, the driver, was eventually sentenced to two consecutive life terms in an Ohio women’s prison after a judge ruled that she deliberately drove her 2018 Toyota Camry directly into a brick wall at more than 90 miles per hour.

While the case had previously been covered on HBO’s Mean Girl Murders and and Hulu’s Killer Cases, its May 15 Netflix release catapulted it to stratospheric new levels of public awareness. It’s not hard to see why. The whole thing is true crime catnip: Shirilla comes off as an entitled wanna-be influencer with a massive internet footprint, overly permissive parents, and a contentious romantic relationship history with Russo, 20, who showers her with designer gifts paid for, apparently in cash, with money from “crypto investments.” The entire friend group is portrayed as Sam Levinson’s Euphoria come to life, where everybody involved is privileged, addicted to weed or mushrooms, and bored.

In one clip that’s since gone viral, Shirilla’s mother, Natalie, addresses the court at her daughter’s sentencing and all but shrugs away Davion Flanagan’s death by saying, “he was a new friend.”

@wreeccked

Mackenzie Shirillas mother takes the stand and judge gives her comments about what she has to say! #mackenzieshirilla #crimetoks #fyp #bodycam #foryoupage

♬ original sound – CrimeWatch

YouTube and TikTok Nation are activated. Countless prison phone calls between Mackenzie and her mother have been released online, each signaling some new element of the case: her prison romances, her lack of remorse, her glee at the film’s popularity, her hope that Kim Kardashian takes on her case. She’s alleged to have sugar daddies putting money on her books, prison godmothers watching out for her on the yard, a lucrative but undisclosed prison business, a waist trainer. Sleuths have tracked down her high school disciplinary records. Her father, Steve Shirilla, was suspended from his job as a digital media teacher at a local Catholic high school over his comments in the film about being happy his daughter smoked weed “instead of shooting up.” It’s been reported that he won’t return.

The only redeeming person in the whole thing seems to be Davion’s adopted father, Steve Flanagan, who is portrayed as the film’s moral center. But even he seems, perhaps understandably, lost in bloodthirsty vengeance. Eventually he reflects on people’s capacity to change, and his hope that Mackenzie’s parents learn to hold her accountable. As for an appropriate punishment? He wants his son’s life to have concrete value, he says about the prospect of the judge issuing a sentence of either of at least 15 years to life.

“If that were 30, I’d be happier with that,” he says.

As a culture, we’ve been to this place before. It was called the 1990s and it was not particularly fun for whole swaths of people who were young, poor, or of color. Prison populations soared, communities were wrecked, and most of the damage was underwritten by salacious coverage of crimes perpetrated by young people whom judges and the media wrote off as irredeemable.

For a small pocket of time, just before and during the pandemic, we seemed ready to reckon with damage wrought by those punitive impulses. The Supreme Court even ruled that sentencing juveniles to life without the possibility of parole constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Shirilla, at least, will be eligible for parole—in 2037. But at sentencing, in August of 2023, Judge Nancy Russo (no relation to Dominic) didn’t seem optimistic. “I understand that the pain in this room wants me to impose the harshest sentence,” Russo said. “But I don’t believe that would be the appropriate sentence because I do believe that Mackenzie will not be out in 15 years.”

So, in other words, it’s not worth sentencing Shirilla to the maximum because she’s…probably going to wind up serving most of it anyway?

Likability is not a pre-requisite for freedom. The frenzy over this film shows that we have learned nothing from the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed by an overzealous punishment system egged on by pop culture. We’re now hurtling dangerously toward a new nadir, one where the tough-on-crime tactics of the ’90s gets recast, its razor-sharp edges sanded down with the help of a new filter.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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“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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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