How Your Data Is Powering Trump’s Surveillance State

In the past 24 hours, I’ve checked Google Maps for directions, logged a sunset run on Strava, booked a yoga class with ClassPass, swiped into the New York City subway using a card linked to a digital profile, and sent and received hundreds of emails, texts, Slack messages, and phone calls. Meanwhile, my iPhone passively logged each of my 13,444 steps, while my face and gait were recorded by countless discreet cameras—both those installed by the city and by my neighbors. Then, of course, there are the Google searches, the Instagram likes, the re-posts on X and Bluesky.

If somebody—a police officer, a prosecutor, an FBI agent—were to get ahold of all this data, they’d be able to sketch out a pretty complete picture of my daily life. In most cases, I probably wouldn’t even know that my data had been obtained.

“We should have a conversation, both individually and collectively, about what the stakes are when we build these networks of digital surveillance all around us without thinking about the consequences.”

For decades, civil libertarians and privacy experts have warned about the surveillance threat posed by digital technologies. But if those risks ever felt abstract, they’ve become all too real during Donald Trump’s second term: To aid its mass deportation agenda—and, at times, intimidate those who protest against it—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has gone on a $300 million spending spree, buying up surveillance technology powered by a mix of federal, state, and commercial data systems.

In his new book Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, George Washington University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson details how the rise of digital technology and smart devices has led to massive amounts of data being created, aggregated, and shared with law enforcement—and how our own consumer choices have ensnarled us in this web of digital surveillance. Ferguson surveys various court cases to show how our legal system offers few protections if a police officer—or a tyrannical government—wants to weaponize your data against you. I spoke with him the current legal landscape, how the second Trump administration has turbocharged state surveillance, and what lawmakers and citizens can do to protect their digital privacy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to write this book?

I wrote a book called The Rise of Big Data Policing, which was about how police departments were buying technology directed at their citizens and what that meant. And this book was more of an internal sense of, “What are we doing? What’s our complicity in building these networks of self-surveillance?” Because I think we all think that we are buying this for our own consumer benefit—_I’m protecting my home by buying this Ring doorbell camera—_and not necessarily thinking, oh, wait a minute, that means there’s now footage of every time any family member has left the house and what they’re doing. And that data is available, at least with a warrant, if police want to get access to it. We should have a conversation, both individually and collectively, about what the stakes are when we build these networks of digital surveillance all around us without thinking about the consequences.

When talking about surveillance, there’s often this mindset of, “If I’m not doing anything wrong, why should I worry?” But your book shows how consumer data can be used to power racially biased predictive policing algorithms or criminalize things like obtaining an abortion, seeking gender-affirming care, or engaging in First Amendment-protected activity. What do you say to someone who isn’t concerned about buying into self-surveillance?

First, we’ve seen in the last few months that the federal government seems willing to weaponize the criminal justice system for politicized prosecutions. That changes who is at risk for criminality and who can say, “But I’m not doing anything wrong.” Eight million Americans went out and protested in No Kings. It’s pretty easy to call some of them supporting some level of sedition or treason or “part of antifa,” and we’ve already seen that kind of dissent criminalized in certain ways. If your Ring doorbell camera caught you walking out with a No Kings sign, or your cellphone revealed that you were at a protest, or you sent some tweets, or you Googled, “Where is the nearest No Kings protest?”: Your data is now available to a government that doesn’t like that speech and doesn’t like that level of dissent. That opens you up to vulnerability.

Same thing if you’re a woman who’s trying to get abortion services in a state that’s trying to criminalize them. What is a crime can change—it has changed, because we’ve seen social norms and mores turn into criminal laws with new targets. The last couple of months have changed, I think, everyone’s recognition of how vulnerable we all are to a government that can identify people that it does not agree with and turn that into criminal prosecutions.

What constitutional protections are in place? The Fourth Amendment is supposed to safeguard our right to privacy, prohibiting unreasonable government searches and seizures. But how does it govern how law enforcement obtains Americans’ digital data?

The general reality is that neither constitutional law nor statutory law has actually caught up with the reality of our smart technologies. For Fourth Amendment purposes, we are told by the Supreme Court that a warrant is required when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in our persons, our homes, our papers, and our things. For example, the Supreme Court has said police need a warrant to get into your smartphone, but it’s an open question about whether law enforcement can go buy that exact same data from the data broker that has collected it. The Supreme Court has said that data you have given to a third party does not require a warrant because you knowingly provided it to a third party. That theory, called the third-party doctrine, is a huge, huge loophole, because everything we do in the digital age involves a third party. You don’t run your own server, your own email system, your own search engine. So if the third-party doctrine applies in the digital age, it means that almost everything we touch is exposed to police without a warrant. Kash Patel recently said in front of Congress that the FBI was buying some kind of data from these data brokers outside of the warrant requirement.

“We have created a lot more vectors of information about ourselves that are now available to law enforcement, both with a warrant and sometimes without it.”

Your Google searches reveal a whole lot of private information about what’s going on your head and the questions you have, and the fact that the government might be able to just access your Google searches on a whim, without a warrant, without requirements, should be troubling to you. The thing that struck me the most in writing the book, from all the research I did, was that there is nothing too secret or too private that cannot be obtained with a warrant. That really privileges prosecution over privacy. And I think it’s kind of a wake-up call, because we have created a lot more vectors of information about ourselves that are now available to law enforcement, both with a warrant and sometimes without it.

Your book mainly focuses on how local law enforcement has weaponized data, but it struck me how ICE under the second Trump administration has made the warnings of your book manifest at a remarkable speed and scale. How did digital surveillance tools at the local level set the stage for what’s now happening in the federal government?

What we’ve seen in the last few months is a federal government that essentially is moving full steam ahead in embracing the surveillance technologies that exist without any of the cautions or restrictions that were put in place by a Justice Department that was worried about the technology and how it would be perceived. We’ve now seen the federal government embrace a fusion of new surveillance technologies and power, primarily focused on immigration via DHS and ICE, while also giving new life to some of the Fusion Centers that have been sitting around in search of a mission after 9/11. I think those are now finding a new mission: the federalization of surveillance.

At the same time, local law enforcement is actually perhaps moving a bit slower, although technology companies are investing a lot in building real-time crime centers, automated license plates reader systems, and trying to centralize the video streams and sensor streams that exist in cities. So perhaps there’ll be the same story told in different ways—where we are accelerating in both local and federal policing surveillance technologies, but I think they have taken different paths to get there.

You mentioned Fusion Centers, which were founded after 9/11 as counterterrorism hubs for sharing information between federal, state, local, and private partners. How did the post-9/11 national security state plant the seeds for everything we’re seeing now?

Maybe I’m naive about this, but I sort of see that in the local policing surveillance context, there is still a recognition that some normal rules apply—like Fourth Amendment warrants and other things are at least considered, because we’re dealing with traditional policing powers. But when we move to the national security context, things change. The rules about surveillance have changed, and that’s in part because of how Fusion Centers have avoided any scrutiny because they played in this world of: This is for national security. It’s not for ordinary policing, so you don’t have to worry about the niceties of the Fourth Amendment or warrants.

“AI will supercharge police power.”

Under the Trump administration, by evoking national security and this idea that there’s some non-traditional policing power at stake, they’ve been able to avoid some of the traditional Fourth Amendment scrutiny. They’re kind of acting outside the normal bounds that have limited police power. When you view immigration as a national security issue, the Fourth Amendment rules seem to fall away. And we’re watching ICE agents and Border Patrol agents seem like they are not following traditional Fourth Amendment rules, going into homes that require judicial warrants.

Your book makes several references to artificial intelligence, but it struck me how a lot of the data-driven policing you talk about doesn’t necessarily rely on AI. How does the rapid rise of AI change the picture of what you described in your book?

AI will supercharge police power. The easiest way to see that is video analytics in police systems. It’s pretty common to see cameras on the streets. But the ability to fuse all those camera streams and video streams and then run video analytics on them is a great concrete use case of AI. We can now take the video feeds of a city street—including city cameras, commercial cameras, Ring doorbell cameras, and other things—and run object recognition software to identify every object that you could see. Foreground and background, car, person, bike, van, building, door, window, briefcase, colors, objects. The ability to do pattern matching to identify objects and track the same objects over time is a great concrete use case for artificial intelligence.

It also gives police a superpower, where all those otherwise disparate streams of video can now be used to track people, surveil people, do anomaly alerts if something unusual is happening, do virtual patrols to watch the streets in real time. And so what you can see in that example is a transformation from the analog world of cameras to the digital world of cameras, and then on top of that, AI gives you the ability to use this data that was probably otherwise not very productive or helpful. You were able to watch the city streets, but there was almost too much information to process. But when you can actually analyze everything that’s happening within those video feeds, it suddenly becomes useful. It allows you to isolate actions or patterns that you’re interested in—even without facial recognition, which is another form of AI. The idea is being able to use and make useful overwhelming amounts of data in a new way that enhances police power.

What are some of the things you’d like to see legislators do to update our laws for the digital age?

I use the “tyrant test” as a metaphor, but also a practical plan of action that says we should begin with the assumption that our data will be misused—that the tyrant will be reading your most embarrassing Google search—and then go from there. What would you do to protect yourself?

In the book, I propose two legislative solutions. One is simply to enhance the warrant requirement for smart device surveillance to something akin to the Wiretap Act. Since the late ’60s, the police have been able to put a microphone in your living room and listen to everything you say. The Wiretap Act basically requires police to tell a judge, Look, there’s no other way we can get this information unless you use this wiretap. The standard is basically higher than probable cause—it requires a minimization of other information, like other people’s voices that are being captured in the house, and you have to report back to the judge about what you did and why you did it. And even though this is an incredibly invasive technology, as a society we’ve been okay with it because we have relatively transparent and relatively high procedural protections around the use of it.

I think we should transport that sort of idea into these smart devices in our world. You should have to abide this higher standard that I call in the book the WALL Act. It still allows police to get access to data when they really, really need it, but it doesn’t allow them to simply get it because the data is available, and it doesn’t allow them to fish or use it for politicized prosecutions.

“You need to realize that every smart device is a surveillance device. You’re paying for the privilege of being surveilled because you think it has a convenience.”

There’s another idea in the book where I talk about digital privileges. If you admit to a murder to your lawyer, your lawyer can’t say that. They can’t be called to testify against you, because we think there’s a value in having the attorney–client privilege. There’s also a spousal privilege. And we should think about that with our digital information. We probably trust our digital devices with our most intimate information. We ask questions like, Am I pregnant? What is this ailment? You go to the digital device probably before your best friend. And that idea of intimate information could be privileged by legislative rule. The current privileges that exist in law are state made. And they basically say, _There’s another value here we think is more important than prosecutio_n. So the book makes a somewhat radical proposal that we should think about this idea of digital privileges and say, There are ways that our digital lives are connected to very intimate, very personal things, and it might be more important to privilege those things than to prosecute a crime. There’s a lot of pushback to that, but I think it’s worth a debate.

I enjoyed the part of the book where you talked about ways to resist surveillance by sabotaging your data—you don’t need to give every single app your real birthday or the same email address, for example. What are the first steps you’d recommend to someone who is concerned about digital privacy and wants to fight back against surveillance?

I think the key is to be intentional. The first step is to educate yourself about the risks of digital surveillance and make your own balance about whether you really need the cat cam to watch your kitten while you’re away at work. Cats have done fine without you watching them for years. Are you making an intentional decision about the choice of self-surveillance? You need to realize that every smart device is a surveillance device. You’re paying for the privilege of being surveilled because you think it has a convenience. No one is judging you for making that choice, but you need to make the informed choice about whether that is something that is worth the cost and benefits of what it reveals about you and your family and your community.

The second thing to do is to recognize that you are a target of surveillance—that there are companies that are trying to monetize you. Every time you get something that seems to be free in the digital age, it just means you’re the target. You’re the product, and they’re selling your data. You can make informed choices about what kind of devices you purchase.

And third is to recognize that this isn’t an individual decision. You and I can’t negotiate with Amazon or the FBI about the terms of service or how we’re being surveilled. This has to be a community pushback where we collectively say that we don’t want to have this kind of surveillance in our communities. And we’re seeing that. We’re seeing communities push back on automated license plate readers. We’re seeing communities recognize that these surveillance systems are also potentially being used for immigration enforcement. We’re seeing a growing concern about the collection and centralization of data by the federal government, and I think that those are collective concerns that come from individual education about the issues but then lead to collective action.

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The (Few) Republicans Breaking With Trump Over Iran

Even Republicans are joining congressional Democrats in calling for President Donald Trump to be removed from office following his threats of genocide against the people of Iran on Tuesday.

In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Congress is currently in a spring recess, with formal legislative business scheduled to return next week, but Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said in a Tuesday press release that the president’s threats “cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric.”

According to NBC News, over 70 Democratic congressional lawmakers—mostly from the House—have publicly said that impeachment and conviction or an invoking of the 25th Amendment should happen. Section four of the 25th Amendment allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

In this case, the vice president would become acting president. Republican lawmakers have largely remained silent on the issue, but a few have expressed concerns, such as Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Several prominent conservatives once loyal to Trump have voiced opposition, including former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, right-wing commentator Candace Owens, and right-wing media personality Alex Jones.

“Now it’s time to say no, absolutely not, and say it directly to the president, no,” Carlson said on his podcast on Tuesday, noting US officials should reject Trump if he orders devastating strikes—including nuclear weapons—against the people of Iran.

Carlson also condemned Trump’s Easter message, claiming it mocked Christians for its profanity, threatening to kill civilians, and saying “Praise to be Allah.” The president had threatened to bomb power plants and bridges—widely considered war crimes—unless Iran leadership “Open[ed] the Fuckin’ Strait” or “you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!”

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A Landslide in Wisconsin Will Make It Much Harder for MAGA to Steal Elections

Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election received far less attention than a similar contest a year ago, when Elon Musk spent $25 million trying to flip the balance of power on the court. Back then, the world’s richest man—who, at the time, was also a key White House adviser—personally hand-delivered $1 million checks to voters while wearing a cheesehead hat.

This time, majority control of the state’s highest court wasn’t at stake. But the outcome was still hugely significant for politics in Wisconsin and nationally.

The massive 20-point victory by Chris Taylor, a former Democratic state legislator and appellate judge in Madison, expands the progressive majority on the court from 4-to-3 to 5-to-2. That extends a remarkable winning streak for Democratic-backed judicial candidates, who’ve now won five of the last six Supreme Court races in the swing state. It’s a stunning turnaround from a decade ago, when a conservative majority dominated the court and upheld much of then-Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) right-wing agenda, such as his efforts to crush unions, make it harder to vote, and gerrymander in the GOP’s favor.

In 2020, when conservatives on the Wisconsin court held a 4-3 majority, Donald Trump and his allies attempted to convince the justices to overturn the state’s presidential election results. They nearly succeeded. Just one of the conservatives, Justice Brian Hagedorn, sided with the liberals in narrowly upholding Joe Biden’s win.

Taylor’s victory on Tuesday means progressives are set to control the court’s majority through at least 2030. That will make it nearly impossible for Republicans to use the state courts to hijack elections. Taylor said during a debate last week with her opponent, Maria Lazar—a fellow appellate judge who previously served in Walker’s administration—that she was “very concerned that we might have efforts to suppress the vote” and that “this is why we need a strong Supreme Court that’s going to hold the federal government accountable.”

Taylor’s win also makes it likely that progressives will retain their majority through the post-2030 redistricting cycle. That will make it tougher for Republicans in the state legislature to engage in gerrymandering like they did after 2010, when they locked in lopsided majorities for a decade-and-a-half.

In 2023, the court’s new progressive majority invalidated the state’s GOP-drawn legislative maps, leading to competitive elections in both chambers of the legislature. And the court could soon decide whether to strike down the state’s congressional map, which gives Republicans a 6-to-2 advantage in its US House delegation.

Other recent decisions by the court have been similarly consequential. In July 2025, the court struck down Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban, which went back into effect after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It also restored mail ballot drop boxes and said the legislature could not fire the state’s top election administrator. The court might also soon revisit the legality of Walker’s law revoking collective bargaining rights for public sector unions, which has decimated labor’s influence in the state.

Wisconsin Supreme Court elections often serve as a barometer for national politics. When Musk’s attempt to buy the court backfired last year and progressive judge Susan Crawford won by 10 points, it sent a signal that democracy could defeat oligarchy.

Taylor won by twice that margin. If Crawford’s victory was a landslide by Wisconsin standards, Taylor’s was a tsunami. Taylor won at least 24 counties that Trump carried in 2024. Democrats also prevailed in the mayor’s race in Waukesha, the county seat of a longtime GOP stronghold in suburban Milwaukee. The results are another indicator that a blue wave is forming in November.

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The Trump Administration’s Latest Target: This Woolly American Icon

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

The American buffalo—those ornery, hairy prairie beasts that reign as the official mammal of the United States—have joined wind turbines, electric cars, and climate researchers in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

Acceding to anti-bison grumbling from cattle ranchers and Republican politicians in Montana, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in January proposed canceling leases for buffalo grazing on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

The BLM is part of the Department of the Interior, which, for more than a century, has celebrated its role in heading off the extinction of buffalo, which were killed by the tens of millions during white settlement in the West. The Interior Department still sports a buffalo on its official seal.

But the BLM, long nicknamed the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining,” has traditionally prioritized leasing the rangelands it oversees for cattle grazing.

Now, in the MAGA era, with Interior reversing the Biden administration’s determination that conservation is a use of BLM land on par with grazing and resource extraction, Burgum has ruled that since bison here in north-central Montana are not being raised for “production-oriented purposes,” they have no legal right to roam, wallow, or munch grass on land leased from the bureau.

If the ruling becomes final, which may occur this spring, more than 950 buffalo will be evicted from tens of thousands of acres of federal land, some of which they have been grazing on, behind stout electric fences and without major incident, for 20 years.

Cows will then mosey on in, and their owners will benefit from the hugely discounted grazing leases available from the BLM. It charges a per-animal fee that is about 90 percent cheaper than fees charged for grazing livestock on privately owned land in this state.

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, a friend of Secretary Burgum and a fellow Trump-supporting tech multimillionaire, gave voice to the joy that the prospect of buffalo banishment has generated among cattle ranchers who drive Montana’s agricultural economy and Republicans who dominate politics in the state.

“For years, we have raised serious concerns about the federal government’s failure to listen to the folks who live and work the land,” Gianforte said in a statement. “By proposing to cancel these [bison lease] permits, BLM is finally acknowledging that federal overreach cannot come at the expense of our local communities and the production agriculture that feeds our nation.”

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

Gov. Greg Gianforte speaks at a Trump rally at Montana State University in Bozeman on August 9, 2024.Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images via Inside Climate News

Interior aimed its proposed decision at seven federal lease allotments held by American Prairie, a well-heeled nonprofit foundation that has long been a bête noire of local cattle ranchers and Montana Republicans. American Prairie—often with large donations from wealthy coastal environmentalists—has been buying ranches here in the depopulated outback of eastern Montana for nearly a quarter century. The foundation wants to revive the grassland ecosystem to create an “American Serengeti,” chock full of sage grouse, prairie dogs, and charismatic megafauna like bison, pronghorn, elk, wolves, and grizzly bears.

The anti-buffalo wording of Bergum’s proposed decision, however, is resounding far beyond this lonesome precinct of Montana. It is raising alarm and outrage from the Great Plains to California, where there are about half a million bison, many of which are raised for conservation and human consumption. Buffalo are grazing behind fences on scores of Indian reservations and on BLM allotments in Colorado, New Mexico, the Dakotas and elsewhere in Montana—and have been doing so without legal objection from Interior for more than four decades, until this year’s order overturning BLM’s 2022 decision to allow American Prairie to graze bison on seven allotments in Phillips County.

Particularly alarmed is the Coalition of Large Tribes (COLT), which manages 25,000 buffalo and represents more than 50 tribes, accounting for about 95 percent of Indian Country and half the Native American population in the US.

“Interior’s proposed ruling would put a chokehold on us being able to increase our buffalo herds,” said OJ Semans Sr., executive director of the tribal coalition and a member of the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. “We should not have the federal government saying only cattle get affordable BLM leases. It is just so stupid the way they are doing this. It is DEI for cows.”

Coalition tribes run bison on reservation land but plan to shift some of their growing herds to BLM grazing lands, which total about 155 million acres. Much of this land is threaded through and around large reservations. Tribes raise buffalo for spiritual, ecological, and nutritional purposes—and sell buffalo meat (about 25 percent leaner than beef) for profit. Two tribes in California, the Pit River Tribe and the Fort Bidwell Indian Community, are actively seeking BLM grazing leases for their bison.

In a blistering notice of protest to Interior, the coalition’s lawyers said that “as the proposed decision is currently written, it is unlikely that any tribal government or tribal citizen buffalo herd would ever be eligible for BLM grazing leases.”

Non-tribal buffalo ranchers with federal land leases are also up in arms. Colton Jones, an owner of the Wild Idea Buffalo Company in Hermosa, South Dakota, said he fears that his lease for bison grazing on 26,000 acres of US Forest Service land, which is part of the Department of Agriculture rather than Interior, will be the next target of “politics and pressure from the current administration.”

“This action is not only unnecessary and politically motivated, but it also sets a deeply troubling precedent that threatens the livelihoods of family-owned bison operations like ours and the many ranchers with whom we maintain longstanding business relationships,” Jones said in a letter to the BLM state office in Montana.

Protest letters from American Prairie, the Coalition of Large Tribes, and private buffalo operations accuse Burgum’s Interior Department of concocting anti-bison language that distorts the meaning and purpose of the Taylor Grazing Act, a Dust Bowl-era law that governs livestock grazing on BLM land.

That 1934 law, written by members of Congress at a desperate time when wind-born topsoil from the Great Plains was raining down on Washington, DC, was intended to halt catastrophic damage to public lands from overgrazing, restore the health of the prairie ecosystem, and stabilize the livestock industry.

Interior’s primary rationale for booting buffalo off BLM land, according to its proposed decision, is that leases under the Taylor Grazing Act are “limited to cases where the animals to be grazed are domestic and will be used for production-oriented purposes.”

There are about 950 buffalo on American Prairie land in Phillips County, Montana.Blaine Harden/Inside Climate News

Pro-bison lawyers point out that the words “production-oriented purposes” do not appear in the grazing act and that Congress has never defined the words “domestic” or “livestock” to exclude buffalo. State law in Montana explicitly defines bison as livestock.

A novel argument made by Interior in its proposed buffalo ban hinges on “intent.” Burgum’s decision argues that American Prairie’s buffalo “are intended to be released into the wild or integrated into a wild herd in the future”—and therefore should not be “properly considered ‘domestic livestock.’”

Lawyers for buffalo interests mock this interpretation, arguing that nowhere in federal grazing law, agency regulations or case law is there an “intent standard” as regards the raising of buffalo. They also said that buffalo run wild nowhere in the US outside of Yellowstone National Park and a handful of other national parks and reserves.

Like cows, bison live and die behind fences, and many are slaughtered for human consumption. As the Coalition of Large Tribes explains, buffalo are “actively managed, marketed, sold, and traded like other livestock, and offered for commercial hunting.”

Nineteen years ago, when I first wrote in the Washington Post about American Prairie and its frosty relations with some of its ranching neighbors, the foundation’s leaders rhapsodized about vast open spaces where buffalo would run free—and where fences and cows would go away. American Prairie told the Department of the Interior that its mission was to develop the largest, most genetically diverse conservation bison herd in North America.

“This thing is huge,” Sean Gerrity, then-president of American Prairie, told me in 2006, “it will affect a tremendous number of people, and it will last a long time.”

Since then, American Prairie has indeed expanded. Its bison herd is up from 19 to 952; its land holdings have grown from about 60,000 acres to more than 600,000 acres, including property purchased outright and land leased from the state of Montana and the BLM. The foundation says it wants to buy more land and envisions eventually having about 1.7 million acres that, combined with the Charles M. Russel National Wildlife Refuge and the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, would provide the amount of land researchers believe is required for a fully functioning prairie ecosystem. It would continue to expand its buffalo herd as a keystone of that habitat.

But the sobering realities of life in Montana have also set in, especially as the state’s politics have shifted in recent years from purple to hard-right red. Dozens of local ranchers have placed “negative bison easements” on future sales of their property that would prevent buffalo from grazing on them. The foundation has sued the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, claiming it has slow-walked the processing of American Prairie’s applications for leases that allow buffalo grazing on state land.

American Prairie has had to adapt.

It now has more than eight times as many cattle as buffalo on its land. And the buffalo herd is managed much like bison operations across the West, with $350,000 worth of BLM-approved fences, disease inoculations, ear tags and regular harvests for human consumption. Of the 2,000 bison that have grazed on American Prairie land in the past two decades, about half have been slaughtered for meat or shipped away to tribal buffalo herds, breeding programs or zoos. There is a building on the property for slaughtering buffalo.

“We are largely an operation like a ranch,” said Scott Heidebrink, director of landscape stewardship for American Prairie, as he drove me among bison herds on the foundation’s land and offered me snacks of buffalo jerky.

“Cows are not going away,” said Heidebrink, a South Dakota native who has worked on this land for a decade and has a degree in wildlife and fisheries science from South Dakota State University. “We have fences and roads and buildings, and of our 606,000 deeded and leased acres, only 46,000 acres do not have cattle on them.”

Scott Heidebrink, director of landscape stewardship for American Prairie, drives his truck around the foundation’s land. Blaine Harden/Inside Climate News

Phillips County, home to American Prairie and the focus of BLM’s proposed buffalo ban, is one of the more inhospitable places in the continental United States for making a living from agriculture. Rain is scarce, winters long, summers scorching and the soil is poor. Prairie grasses and sagebrush do well; row crops often do not.

Numerical proof of how hard it is to scratch out a living in Phillips County—a Connecticut-sized expanse of prairie lying between the Canadian border and the Missouri River—is the relentless decline in its number of human inhabitants. The high point was 1920, when the Census counted 9,311 residents lured in during the first two decades of the twentieth century by a series of increasingly generous homestead acts and by railroad advertisements promising that rain would follow the plow.

Census records show that since 1920, the population of Phillips County has declined every 10 years for an entire century. The 2020 census counted 4,217 residents; three people have died or otherwise departed the county since then.

“Their claim that bison are some kind of magical animal that grazes different is just ridiculous.”

What can and do thrive in Phillips County are cows—and bison. Before they were killed off, researchers believe that millions of buffalo roamed what became Phillips County.

Now, cattle ranching is the county’s dominant economic engine, usually producing about two-thirds of its total agricultural income. Cows outnumber humans by about 11 to one in what is one of Montana’s top cattle-producing counties.

But to raise cattle profitably, ranchers here—as across the Great Plains—have had to get bigger. They do so by buying out their neighbors. Purchase of more land usually comes with below-market grazing privileges on thousands of acres of adjacent BLM land. About half of the land in the county is federal- or state-owned.

As a result, fewer ranchers are raising more cattle per ranch—part of a nationwide trend. For the most part, management of these cattle has been sustainable, avoiding the destructive grazing practices that created the Dust Bowl.

Still, there is a growing body of scientific evidence showing that bison would be far better for the prairie ecosystem of Phillips County than cattle.

A Kansas State University study found that sustainably managed buffalo are twice as effective as cattle at increasing the diversity of native plants. Bison, which tend to move farther and faster while grazing, do less concentrated trampling of the land and spread seeds more widely, thus increasing the resiliency of grasslands to droughts, which have increased in severity with climate change.

Bison are less stressed by hot weather than cattle and spend less time lingering at ponds and wetlands, decreasing soil erosion and giving other animals access to water. In winter, buffalo slow their metabolism to conserve energy and eat less; while cattle increase their metabolism and eat more. And bison can survive on lower-quality forage than cattle.

Buffalo herds also increase the diversity of birds, amphibians, elk, deer, coyotes, wolves, and bears on the prairie.

Deanna Robbins, a third-generation cattle rancher and activist critic of American Prairie, is not persuaded by research that shows the benefits of buffalo over cattle. “They romanticize the bison,” she said. “Their claim that bison are some kind of magical animal that grazes different is just ridiculous.”

Anti-buffalo billboards and banners produced by Save The Cowboy are found all over Phillips County, Montana.Blaine Harden/Inside Climate News

She said research funded by stockgrowers shows that properly managed cattle are just as eco-friendly as bison. Robbins, though, said that buffalo themselves are not at the top of her list of worries.

“My biggest concern is American Prairie’s planned takeover of federal grazing with their bison, and then the growth of the American Serengeti, which would bring in more apex predators,” she said. “If they surround me with those things [wolves and grizzly bears], it doesn’t matter what land I own. I am not going to have an economically successful ranch.”

To stop American Prairie, Robbins and other local ranch women created Save The Cowboy, which has placed anti-buffalo billboards and banners across Phillips County and neighboring Fergus County, where Robbins has her ranch. The organization, created nine years ago, objects to America Prairie’s nonprofit status and to its moneyed coastal donors who “have no idea of what life is like here in Montana.”

“I have accepted the fact that they are here, and I know they are not going anywhere.”

While Save The Cowboy has drawn support from Montana’s governor and congressional delegation, its concerns were largely dismissed by the Biden administration, which, in 2022, granted American Prairie’s request to graze buffalo on land leased from the BLM. Bison would be good for the land, water quality and wildlife, the administration stated.

All that’s changed during President Donald Trump’s second term. To the delight of Robbins and other supporters of Save The Cowboy, Interior’s proposed decision would void Biden’s bison leases and put cattle first.

“What the Trump administration did was understand what the rules really are for managing this land,” said Robbins. “We definitely feel like we are being heard. These are different times.”

Dusty Emond is a fourth-generation cattle rancher whose family has owned land in Phillips County for 107 years. For the past 15 of those, his herds have grazed across a fence—within easy snorting distance—of growing herds of bison managed by American Prairie.

Emond, 53, was opposed to American Prairie when its land agents first began sniffing around the county, searching for ranches to buy. He supports the Trump administration’s proposed cancellation of grazing leases for American Prairie bison on BLM land.

“The biggest problem I have with them is their money,” Emond said. “We can’t compete with it. When a ranch comes up for sale, they have unlimited money. They buy at the top of the market. The more land they buy, the less there is for farm families around here.”

Dusty Emond is a fourth-generation cattle rancher whose cattle are just across a fence from American Prairie’s buffalo.Courtesy of JayAnn Demarais via Inside Climate News

Emond worried, when buffalo first moved in as close neighbors, that they would infect his cattle with brucellosis, an infectious bacterial disease that induces abortion in pregnant cattle, elk, and bison—and can infect humans. Billions of dollars have been spent in the United States to eradicate the disease, yet it persists in some buffalo and elk in Yellowstone National Park. Montana ranchers and politicians often issue ominous warnings about the heightened risk of brucellosis to the state’s cattle whenever they complain about buffalo on BLM land. American Prairie says that’s just a scare tactic.

Emond said that when it comes to the buffalo next door, he worried too much, and brucellosis has turned out to be a non-issue.

American Prairie has “done a better job than I thought they would” in tending to the health of buffalo, Emond said. There have been no cases of buffalo transmitting the disease to his cattle, nor from any managed buffalo herd to cattle anywhere in the country, according to the National Park Service.

American Prairie, for all his initial trepidation, has turned out to be a good neighbor, he said. So much so that he’s gone into business with the foundation, leasing about 20,000 acres of its deeded and allotted BLM land for his cattle.

“It hasn’t been a problem for me,” he said, referring to the day-to-day proximity of his cows and their buffalo. “I can think of about four times in the past 15 years that their bison have gone across the fence into my herds. It has been very minor—no worse than any other neighbors. And when I call them, they are right there to come get the buffalo.”

Emond said he’s learned that cattle and buffalo separated by strong fences can get along just fine. He would prefer that the buffalo herds not grow larger, but he believes they will over time and that his ranch will survive.

“I’m a realist,” he said. “I have accepted the fact that they are here, and I know they are not going anywhere. I’m willing to work with them.”

A bison herd on land managed by American Prairie.Blaine Harden/Inside Climate News

Scott Heidebrink, the American Prairie land manager, acknowledged that the Trump administration may soon force a major cutback in herd size.

If Interior’s proposed ban on leasing BLM land becomes final, he said, several hundred buffalo could be culled or shipped elsewhere. In the process, he said, cattle and the remaining bison will be shuffled around on American Prairie’s holdings.

“If we lose, we have deeded land where buffalo can go,” he said, while cattle now grazing on that private land would move to land leased from the BLM. The bison and their keepers will bide their time—and wait for a new president to reopen federal land.

“It is very evident that this administration is anti-bison,” Heidebrink said. “But we are here and we are not going away.”

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Trump’s Iran War Is Tearing Apart His Catholic–Evangelical Coalition

Last week, in a prime-time speech that was confused and discursive even by his own standards, President Donald Trump attempted to justify the current war in Iran. US attacks, he assured the American public, were “an investment in your children and your grandchildren’s future,” adding for emphasis, “There’s no country like us anywhere in the world, and we’re in great shape for the future!”

Just hours after Trump spoke, Pope Leo XIV expressed skepticism about Trump’s triumphant speech. God, he said, “rejects the prayers of those with hands full of blood.” An escalation, he warned, would be a “tragedy of enormous proportions.”

Over the weekend, the conversation continued, with Trump posting on Saturday on Truth Social, “Time is running out—48 hours before all hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!” Then, on Easter Sunday, the president became even more agitated and launched a profanity-laced post on Truth Social. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

In his Easter address, the Pope, unsurprisingly, preached a very different message: “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue!”

Pope Leo’s comments reflect the growing uneasiness that many Catholics feel with American aggression in the Middle East. Just days before, Leo XIV had warned, “We cannot remain silent before the suffering of so many people, helpless victims of these conflicts.” Prominent Catholic leaders—including Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy—have echoed those sentiments, arguing that the war in Iran doesn’t meet the conditions for the doctrine of “just war,” meaning one that, according to Catholic teachings, is morally defensible, such as, say, World War II.

“Conservative Catholics who spent years building an alliance with evangelical Protestants, are waking up to find that their allies consider their faith a species of paganism and their sacraments a blasphemy.”

Over the last few months, some right-wing Catholics who disagree with Pope Leo XIV on almost everything else have come to his side on the Middle East conflict. “There was an effort among church leaders in Rome and here in the United States to highlight the suffering in Palestine,” Michael O’Loughlin, executive editor of the progressive Catholic news outlet National Catholic Reporter, told me. “I’m wondering if that broke through traditional political barriers, if some Catholics on the right, who might generally be more sympathetic to Israel, if they heard those messages and started to look at the whole situation more critically.”

But what may have started as an intra-Catholic reckoning on Palestine has spread far beyond the confines of the Catholic faith. The conflict has emerged as the latest—and possibly largest—crack in a powerful religious alliance between pro-Trump evangelical Christians and Catholics that has defined the conservative movement for decades, one that McLoughlin noted may have always been uneasy, yet also “hugely important.”

In a Substack post last month about the complex interfaith dynamics surrounding the Catholic response to the war in Iran, religious and political commentator Christopher Hale put it in stronger terms. “Conservative Catholics who spent years building an alliance with evangelical Protestants,” he wrote, “are waking up to find that their allies consider their faith a species of paganism and their sacraments a blasphemy.”

Pope Leo XIV presides over the Easter Mass in St. Peter’s Square on April 05, 2026 in Vatican City.Antonio Masiello/Getty

Given the centuries-long divisions between Catholics and Protestants, the alliance between American Catholics and evangelicals has been a relatively recent phenomenon, one that was forged in the late 1970s largely over the groups’ shared opposition to abortion. Over the following decades, their bond as allies deepened in the fight against gay marriage; more recently, it further solidified in the anti-trans movement.

Yet evangelicals and Catholics have always been strange bedfellows; not only do fundamental theological differences divide the two groups, but in the political sphere, they often disagree on matters including immigration and the death penalty. “It was always a fragile and improbable alliance,” Robert Orsi, a scholar of American history and Catholic studies at Northwestern University, told me, because the bond was “born of [the] political, and not the religious.”

After the Hamas attacks of October 7, the fissures between the two camps began to deepen—and one major reason has to do with their differing visions of the end of the world, or eschatology. Many evangelicals—especially those who are part of the rapidly growing charismatic movement—are Christian Zionists, meaning that a victorious state of Israel plays a central role in their dramatic and troubling end-times scenario, which is, put simply, that Jews return to Israel, usher in the second coming of Jesus, and then convert to Christianity or perish.

Evangelicals and Catholics both believe that a special covenant existed between God and the Jews; one need only read the Old Testament to see that unfold. But for Catholics, the restoration of Israel predicted in the Bible is more symbolic than literal—they generally don’t believe that the state of Israel must prevail politically to usher in the second coming of Jesus.

Catholic teaching strongly rejects antisemitism and the insidious and pervasive old trope that Jews were responsible for killing Jesus. Yet embedded in the criticism by Catholics of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and, more recently, the war in Iran, some evangelicals see a threat to the very existence of Israel, the Jewish people, and their own deeply held beliefs about the end-times.

Last month, weeks after the US attacked Iran, an anonymous account on X called Insurrection Barbie posted a screed against traditionalist Catholics, or those who favor a return to Catholicism as it was before the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The post falsely claimed that Catholics see “Jews, Israel, and Protestants not as covenant partners but as adversaries of Christian civilization.” The post has been viewed 4.1 million times. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, an evangelical Christian and strong supporter of Israel, reposted it, urging his 7.1 million followers to “READ every word of this. It’s the best & most comprehensive explanation of what we’re fighting.”

Then there was the widely publicized incident involving Carrie Prejean Boller, a conservative Catholic activist and former Miss California who has vociferously opposed the war in Iran. Boller, who converted to Catholicism in 2025, served in Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission until February, when she was removed because of her comments during a hearing on antisemitism. “I’m a Catholic, and Catholics do not embrace Zionism,” she said, “so are all Catholics antisemites?” Other members of the panel pushed back, but she was resolute.

At the same hearing, she also stood up for the far-right influencer Candace Owens, a recent convert to Catholicism who has defended Hitler and referred to Israel as a “synagogue of Satan” against allegations of antisemitism. “I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an antisemite,” she said. “She’s not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism, and that really has to stop.”

In response to Boller’s removal, Owens fired off a post on X. “You hosted a performative Zionist hearing meant to neuter the Christian faith,” she wrote. “Carrie spoke truth, as a Catholic, and Christians, the Truth cannot be defeated. Zionists are naturally hostile to Catholics because we refuse to bend the knee to revisionist history and support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers.” Last month, the right-wing group Catholics for Catholics held a gala to honor Boller “in recognition of her courageous defense of the Faith.”

Another recent flashpoint in the tension between evangelicals and Catholics came when Israeli police stopped Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, head of the Catholic church in Israel, from entering Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he was planning to celebrate mass on Palm Sunday. “That was shocking,” said Orsi, the Northwestern scholar. “I mean that that could really break something between Catholics and Jews.” And an affront to Israeli Jews could also strain relations between Catholics and the many evangelical Christian Zionists who support them.

“It was always a fragile and improbable alliance, born of [the] political, and not the religious.”

Israeli leaders said that safety concerns prompted their actions, but some Catholics saw the snubbing of Pizzaballa as retaliation for his strong condemnation of the war in Iran. Last month, Pizzaballa cited US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comparison of the war in Iran to the Christian Crusades as an example of abusing God’s name to justify war, which is, Pizzaballa said, “the gravest sin we can commit in this time.” Last summer, he called Israel’s actions in Gaza “morally unjustifiable.”

“Cardinal Pizzaballa was turned back because the Jews are at war with the Catholic Church,” tweeted E. Michael Jones, editor of the conservative Catholic magazine Culture Wars, to his 132,000 followers. “This violation of his rights as cardinal archbishop has nothing to do with ‘security concerns.’ If the Israelis were really concerned about their security, they would stop attacking Iran.”

Shortly after, radical right pundit Steve Bannon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, both conservative Catholics, discussed the incident on Bannon’s show. Palm Sunday, Posobiec said, “clearly holds biblical significance for so many of the believers. That’s why the outrage was so swift and so strong, by so many Christians all around the world.” Bannon called for a Christian uprising against the Israeli government. “We need the Christians to take control of the Christian sites, full stop—we don’t need to be supplicants to the Israel government to do this,” he said. He then took the argument a step further, lambasting US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Sen. Ted Cruz, both evangelical Christians who strongly support Israel. “And any Christian [like] Huckabee and Cruz and this crowd that doesn’t agree, that shows you what heretics they are.” (Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, later expressed regret over the incident, and Huckabee called it an “unfortunate overreach already having major repercussions around the world.”)

Against the backdrop of these tensions, far-right Catholic influencers have become emboldened in their criticism of one of the most politically prominent evangelicals in the Trump universe. In a clip that went viral last week, during a White House Easter luncheon, the president’s spiritual adviser, evangelical minister Paula White-Cain likened Trump to Jesus. White-Cain, a charismatic evangelical who has called Israel her “spiritual home,” noted that Trump has been “betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that Our Lord and Savior showed us.”

The blowback was immediate and unsparing. Hard-right Catholic commentator Taylor Marshall, who has 235,000 followers on X, posted White-Cain’s remarks with the comment, “Paula White speaks blasphemy.” Boller posted to her 160,000 followers on X, “We were promised the golden age…now they are glorifying a genocide and justifying it as if it’s God’s will. Heretical teachers like Paula White are advising Trump for more war and destruction to fulfill their false end times fantasy.”

Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right Catholic former editor of Breitbart News, had choice words about White-Cain after the incident, which he shared with his 828,000 followers. He described her as a “heretic con artist who preys on the poorest, dumbest**,** and most desperate people in America.” He added, “God isn’t the only one using Donald Trump, is he, you vapid old hag.”

“What does matter is that this Pope has said that this war is bad, this war is sinful, this war is immoral. This papacy was not the dream papacy of the Catholic right.”

Candace Owens reacted to the fact that Bishop Robert Barron, a Catholic leader in the Minnesota Diocese of Winona-Rochester and a prominent theological conservative, was also present at the luncheon but offered no objection to White-Cain’s remarks. “I am a new Catholic, but I am deeply concerned about Bishop Barron,” she wrote. “Paula White is an unabashed heretic.”

The Catholic commentators I talked to for this article cautioned me against using fringe voices on the Catholic right—such as Steven Bannon and Candace Owens—as representatives of broad Catholic sentiment. As Michael Sean Winters, a journalist who covers politics for the progressive Catholic news outlet National Catholic Reporter, put it, “I just don’t think it’s your average Catholic in the pew.”

He’s right. The 1.4 billion members of the global Catholic Church are astonishingly ideologically diverse; along with all the doctrinaire traditionalists, there are also thriving strains of progressivism and social justice teaching. “Catholics are not a monolithic social or political group any longer,” Fr. James Martin, editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America, noted to me via email.

Indeed, the fringe controversies obscure the more important fissure. “What does matter is that this Pope has said that this war is bad, this war is sinful, this war is immoral,” Orsi told me. “This papacy was not the dream papacy of the Catholic right.”

Out of the shambles of the evangelical-Catholic coalition, a new alliance is beginning to take shape. Today, some conservative Catholic intellectuals find they have more in common with a hard right group of Christian nationalist reformed protestants than with mainstream megachurch evangelicals. Christopher Hale, the progressive Catholic commentator, noted in his Substack post that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a disciple of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, a hard-line Calvinist protestant. Wilson is the de facto patriarch of the TheoBros, an extremely online group of mostly millennial, mostly Calvinist men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists.

Last week, I spoke to R.R. Reno, editor of the conservative Catholic publication First Things. Unlike the Pope, Reno is cautiously supportive of the war in Iran because he believes that it can be defended under the just-war doctrine. “Diminishing or neutralizing the war-making capacity of one’s enemy is the baseline cause pursued by nations that make war,” he wrote in a recent First Things opinion piece. Doug Wilson shares this cautious support, even though his Calvinist denomination does not believe that Israel plays a special role in the End Times. But beyond their agreement on Iran, Reno says that he and Wilson, who has written for First Things, get along because of their shared erudition. “You go down to your local Pentecostal church, and they typically want to engage on things just at the level of the Bible,” he told me. He noted that mass advertising was invented in America more than 100 years ago, and part of its genius “is to be able to bring things into focus in a kind of pithy way. And American evangelicalism is just so American.” In contrast, much like Catholicism, the kind of protestant faith that Wilson practices “has a very rich intellectual tradition,” says Reno. He refers to it as “single-malt Calvinism.”

The newfound bond between Catholics and TheoBros is not without tension—the main pressure point being that Wilson takes a dim view of Catholicism as a whole, calling the faith “priestcraft” and the authorities in Rome “not qualified to teach the saints of God.” Still, Reno told me, “I have a lot in common with the Doug Wilson crowd.” While the simplicity of evangelical messages may appeal to the masses, Reno says, his brand of Catholicism and Wilson’s single-malt Calvinism are “more likely to exercise influence at an elite level, and,” he added, “you’re not going to get Paula White exercising influence at an elite level.”

There is perhaps no better example of the elite influence of the TheoBros and Catholics than Vice President JD Vance, whose views have been shaped by both movements. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has written about how Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the philosopher René Girard have influenced his worldview. Yet he also has intellectual and social connections to the TheoBros, especially those associated with their unofficial publication, American Reformer. His assertion that children should be allotted votes managed by their parents, for example, echoes arguments against women voting made by Wilson’s church.

For Vance, a presumed 2028 presidential hopeful, harmony with Doug Wilson, who just planted a new church in Washington, DC, and recently spoke at the Pentagon at Hegseth’s behest, is an asset. One that may be more important than his harmony with the Pope, who, on the Iran War and several other key issues, happens to be opposed to the actions of Vance’s boss and the MAGA base. (Before he became pope, he also famously criticized Vance on social media for his remarks about the Christian concept of rightly-ordered love, saying he was simply “wrong.”)

On the war in Iran, Vance seems to have come around from initial misgivings to a position that reflects Trump’s rather than that of Catholic leaders. I asked Winters, the National Catholic Reporter journalist, if he thought Vance struggled internally to integrate the teachings of the Pope with the directives of President Trump. “I would be surprised if he sees it as a predicament,” Winters told me. “I just think the ambition is so raw there, that’s an easy call. Trump is going to win that every day and twice on Sunday.”

When a journalist asked him last month about his change of heart on Iran, Vance replied, “We have a smart president, whereas in the past, we’ve had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated.”

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Minnesota’s Attorney General Isn’t Backing Down

Earlier this year, parts of Minneapolis resembled a war zone. The Minnesota city had become the violent epicenter of President Donald Trump’s immigration raids as thousands of masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol roamed the streets in what was known as Operation Metro Surge.

“It felt like a siege,” says Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who sued the Department of Homeland Security to end the operation. “It felt like nobody was safe.”

Thousands of immigrants, many of whom had no criminal record, were detained. Children were arrested. High schoolers were pepper-sprayed. And two US citizens—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—were shot and killed by immigration agents.

Following weeks of protests, the White House reversed course and ramped down immigration enforcement. But hundreds of agents are still there as state officials like Ellison are left to clean up the mess the federal government largely left behind.

On this week’s More To The Story, Ellison talks with host Al Letson about the economic damage from the Trump administration’s ICE raids and persistent fears within immigrant communities, his congressional confrontation with Sen. Josh Hawley over a Covid-19 fraud scheme, and why he refuses to back down from the what he describes as the “Trump onslaught.”

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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We Asked the White House If Trump Was Considering Nuking Iran. Its Response Was Chilling.

On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump began a post on his social media platform Truth Social by writing, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Trump continued in the post, “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

The president’s post and other recent threats come in the lead up to an 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline that he has imposed on Iran to reach a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz. The threats have led to concerns from figures including former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson and Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House communications director turned Trump critic, 0f a potential nuclear strike against Iran if the president is unable to open the strait through conventional weaponry and diplomacy.

I asked the White House Tuesday morning if the president is mulling the use of nuclear weapons and if his apocalyptic Truth Social post is intended to convey such a threat. Six minutes later, at 11:19 a.m. eastern time, the White House press office declined to rule out the use of nuclear weapons. Instead, an unnamed official wrote, “We refer you to the President’s TRUTH on this inquiry.”

In a follow-up email, I wrote that the Truth Social post in question is ambiguous and that I would write in this article that “the White House press office declined to comment on whether the president is considering a nuclear attack on Iran,” and that it instead directed me to a post that threatens the imminent death of an entire civilization.

I also asked if the White House would like to provide additional comments or a statement. Two minutes later, at 11:45 a.m., the White House shared a statement attributable to press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The Iranian regime has until 8PM Eastern Time to meet the moment and make a deal with the United States,” Leavitt said. “Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do.”

The responses from the White House press office were different from an earlier tweet from its rapid response team that criticized a Democratic account for saying that Vice President JD Vance had implied on Tuesday that Trump was considering using nuclear weapons. “Literally nothing [Vance] said here ‘implies’ this, you absolute buffoons,” the rapid response team wrote.

The threat by Trump on Tuesday is yet another escalation from the president in the lead up to his imminent deadline for opening the Strait of Hormuz. On Easter Sunday, Trump wrote that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one” before adding “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” The language of the post suggested that Trump is considering using conventional weapons to target civilian infrastructure, which is itself a war crime. Trump said on Monday about Iran, “The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.”

Some of Trump’s biggest backers, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, are now warning that the president is no longer fit to serve and should be removed from office by his cabinet. “25TH AMENDMENT!!!,” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote in response to Trump’s most recent threat. “We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”

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Trump: “A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight”

Trump threatened genocide against the people of Iran Tuesday morning, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

The Truth Social post in full: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

This warning comes as Trump’s latest deadline for Iran’s leadership to open the Strait of Hormuz expires on Tuesday night at 8pm Eastern Time and is a horrifying escalation of his threat over the weekend to commit war crimes by bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure, including power plants and desalination plants.

But the president clearly doesn’t care. In a Monday afternoon press conference, he told reporters that he was “not at all” concerned about his threats violating the Geneva convention’s bans on attacking resources essential for a population’s survival. The prohibitions bind all United Nations member states.

“I’m not worried about it,” Trump said in his dismissive Monday remarks. “You know the war crime? The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

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America Can’t Let Go of George Washington’s Slave-Holding History

During the summer of 2020, as protestors rallied against racial injustice, at least two dozen monuments of Confederate soldiers and slave owners were “torched, occupied, or removed.” In Portland, protestors toppled a George Washington statue on the lawn outside the German American Society, erected to commemorate the sesquicentennial. Six years later, and the Trump administration is fighting in court to remove plaques in Philadelphia that commemorate Washington’s history of enslaving people.

These two sides of the argument over how we remember Washington are the inspiration for John Garrison Marks’s new book, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory.

Thy Will Be Done, released this week, explores how Americans have struggled to grapple with the complex role slavery plays in Washington’s legacy for 250 years. While revered for helping found the nation, Washington was a prolific enslaver, who owned 123 people, signed the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and evaded Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act by moving his slaves in and out of the state every six months so they wouldn’t have to be legally freed. Yet, Marks, a historian and American Association for State and Local History senior staff member, notes that Washington’s feelings about slavery weren’t necessarily always positive. In private letters, Washington wrote about his “growing objection” to buying and selling enslaved people because it often broke up families. However, he still served as an active participant in the institution, and his slaves were only emancipated in his will after he and his wife died.

To better understand how we’ve reckoned with this complicated legacy over our history, Marks searched through archives, newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, and books to track how debates surrounding Washington’s involvement with slavery have changed over time. What he discovered is that we’ve been having some version of the same argument over Washington and slavery since Washington was alive.

At the center of Thy Will Be Done is a question of how understanding Washington’s relationship with slavery helps us better understand our nation. “What is it, exactly, that Washington left to us?” Marks asks in the introduction. “Our current struggle to make sense of George Washington and slavery reflects a broader struggle to understand our relationship to the American past and what it should mean for us in the present.”

In our conversation, Marks discussed the arguments that surround Washington’s involvement in slavery, how these conversations can’t happen in a vacuum, and why unpacking this history should be a community effort. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In the book you talk about reviewing the past decade of commentary about Washington and slavery, and it being clear to you that little progress has been made over the past two centuries.

I think it’s really remarkable to look at the historical record and to see that the criticisms that people are levying against Washington for his involvement with slavery today are no more intense—are no more vitriolic than what people were saying about him in the 19th century.

Then likewise, the people who want to continue to celebrate Washington and who say that his involvement with slavery shouldn’t be a factor in our admiration for this person who did so much for the founding of the nation, that idea echoes what you see in these eulogies for Washington right after he died.

So, the fact that you see both sides of this conversation so early on in our conversations about Washington is really remarkable and they remain consistent for more than two centuries. I think in part, that’s because the people engaging in those conversations, the people using Washington’s history with slavery, or ignoring Washington’s history with slavery, are rarely doing it with a desire for better historical understanding. They’re doing it to be able to score points in the present. They are wielding Washington’s history with slavery as a cudgel against the opponents in the political and cultural fight that they’re engaged in.

What I’m trying to do in the book is to say, let’s understand the ways that our conversation about history right now is informed by this two centuries of history that preceded it, in order to kind of break ourselves out of that cycle, to embrace the ambiguity and complexity of Washington’s legacy with slavery, to stop trying to find one single answer that is going to settle this once and for all, to recognize that that’s impossible, and instead to decide what should this mean for us now in the present.

That makes me think about chapter six, “Washington and Slavery in the American Classroom,” and how these conversations have been reflected there.

That was a chapter that was difficult to write, but it was one that I knew had to be in the book, because so much of our conversation over the last couple of years about the history of slavery and its intersection with the founding, how people should encounter this history or not, how they should be shielded from this history, has revolved around how young people are taught this history in the classroom.

It became one that I knew was going to be really important to understanding today’s debates about Washington and slavery. It was fascinating to see its history going back to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and see all the ways that just suggesting that there was a connection between Washington and slavery, or even just writing about the history of slavery and also writing about George Washington on pages near one another, was sparking this reaction from people who were furious about their heroes being debunked, when, in reality, that often wasn’t even part of the text. It was just the mere mention of Washington and slavery near one another that seemed upsetting for people.

It begs the question of if you’re trying to erase something from history, that in itself feels like an admission that it’s bad, so why can’t we just say it was bad?

I think that’s a big part of the reason why you’ve seen what the state of Florida has done. It seems they kind of recognize, “okay, we can’t just ignore and erase George Washington’s history with slavery, so instead, we’re going to acknowledge it, but all as part of his lead up to his decision in his will to free the people that he enslaved.” This lets them celebrate Washington as this great emancipator, as this liberator, as this person who delivered liberty, both to America and to the people that he enslaved. And it helps them kind of reconcile that contradiction and tell the story that they want to tell, while still sort of acknowledging that Washington was involved with slavery.

It sets aside that he enslaved other people for the entirety of his adult life, and only in his will does he say, after both he and his wife died, can this subset of the people that he enslaved at Mount Vernon achieve their freedom. [Florida] uses [Washington’s emancipation of the people he enslaved] as this, like this end point to the story.

You see this at various times throughout American history. You see it in some ways, in the way that Mount Vernon has told this story, where it always seems to lead to this moment of emancipation. You also saw it among some anti-slavery activists in the 19th century. Where they’re using the story of Washington emancipating the people that he enslaved as part of their effort to say, “what could be more American than ending slavery? If Washington freed the people he enslaved, clearly, this must be a fundamentally American value, and we should all try to emancipate all the people that are enslaved in this country.”

So, they were able to use that story in one way in the 19th century, and now you have conservative education reformers trying to use it in a very different way in the 21st Century. The way that those two examples kind of speak to each other and don’t was really fascinating to me, and speaks to the way that Washington’s history with slavery has been used and abused throughout our history in ways that are really complex.

There was a quote that stood out to me about social media. You write “it’s as if these conversations are happening in a vacuum—never more than inside the echo chambers of modern social media—sealed off from all the earlier iterations of these same ideas.” What role does social media play in disrupting any forward motion in these conversations?

I think there is a tendency to use history, not to improve understanding, but to score points in the present, and that kind of point scoring is never more clearly on display than in the ways that people post on social media.

Many of the people using the past in one way or another are more concerned with trying to support something that they already believe and that’s a problem.

I don’t think I have to point out that often the people who are engaged in these debates or are commenting on Washington’s involvement with slavery and how we should or shouldn’t talk about it, probably think that they are presenting an idea that is novel. They probably think that now is finally the time to fully acknowledge Washington’s involvement with slavery, not realizing that there have been other Americans making that very same point for more than 200 years.

Anti-slavery activists in the 19th century. Black activists during the Jim Crow era. Civil rights activists in the 1960s. Descendants of slavery at Mount Vernon in the 1990s and early 2000s. All the way up through Black Lives Matter, there have always been groups of Americans who are demanding that we confront this part of our history. It’s really striking that the legacy of these conversations, the broader historical context of these conversations, almost never figures in at any moment that it actually arises as part of the discourse.

Which then leads into what you were saying about the semiquincentennial being a space where we can have all these conversations, so we can start that first step of moving forward.

I think it’s a real opportunity to bring people together and have some difficult and complex conversations about our history. I’ve been working on Semiquinentennial initiatives since 2017, and my hope has always been that this anniversary can help us arrive at a more complete and more inclusive and more widely shared understanding of American history.

I hope that this anniversary is going to spark for people this idea that they want to know more about the nation’s past. Maybe people who haven’t thought about history since they were in high school or since the Bicentennial are suddenly reengaged in thinking and talking about history. And maybe that can help them encounter some history about Washington or other founders that they didn’t necessarily go looking for, but they find really interesting and rewarding, and can have that kind of conversation.

In the book, you also emphasize the community effort of unpacking this history, that’s not just one person’s job to do it.

Yeah, that’s important to me. That is certainly important to the museum and public history field is increasingly how we talk about it and talk about our work. If we accept that there’s no single answer here, if we accept that there’s always going to be this degree of ambiguity and complexity that we have to contend with, then I think the only way to really do that and the only way to truly benefit from a deeper engagement with this history is to do it together, to do it with other people, to decide, with members of your local community, or people in your state, or even thinking about it much more broadly, as a national community, is to do that process together and try to arrive at an understanding of why people think about this question in different ways, why different people might come to different conclusions and come to kind of a greater acceptance of what it means to reconcile Washington’s history with slavery. To accept that ambiguity as part of his legacy.

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New Utah Law Shields Fossil Fuel Firms From Liability for Climate Chaos

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

Utah has made it nearly impossible for residents to hold fossil fuel companies legally accountable for climate damages in a move one advocacy group described as putting “profits for the biggest polluters over communities,” with other states expected to follow suit.

The new state legislation comes as part of a push from Big Oil and its political allies—including groups tied to rightwing impresario Leonard Leo—for legal immunity in red statehouses and Congress, with a goal of winning state and federal legal immunity similar to the liability waiver granted to the firearms industry in 2005.

Such policies would shield major fossil fuel companies from a wave of litigation they are facing from states, subnational governments, and individuals who claim the firms knew their products would cause climate damages, but sold them to the public anyway. Four other red states are considering laws similar to Utah’s—with two close to passage—and federal legislation is seemingly in the works.

Signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, late last month, Utah’s new legislation shields any person or entity from civil or criminal liabilities related to planet-warming emissions, unless a court finds that the defendant violated the specific “enforceable limitation” on a greenhouse gas or the “express terms of a valid permit.”

The new law “prioritizes profits for the biggest polluters over communities already suffering from climate impacts.”

Challengers would also have to provide “clear and convincing evidence that unavoidable and identifiable damage or injury has resulted or will result as a direct cause of the” violation. The language will make it virtually impossible to successfully sue polluters for climate damages, critics say.

“This is a surrender to wealthy special interests and an affront to the public good,” said Delta Merner, lead scientist at the science hub for climate litigation at the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists. “Utah’s new law prioritizes profits for the biggest polluters over communities already suffering from climate impacts and constituents should be outraged.”

Set to be enacted next month, Utah’s HB 222 was sponsored by the Republican representative Carl Albrecht, who has receivedsome funding from oil and gas interests. He was also formerly the CEO of a rural electric cooperative.

“That cooperative is substantially powered by fossil fuels,” said the Democratic Utah state senator Nate Blouin, who opposed the bill, which he said passed quickly and without much discussion. “He’s got a history in the industry, and continues to draw from that experience to push bills like this forward.”

Albrecht did not respond to a request for comment, but told Bloomberg Law that the policy aims to halt “frivolous” legal challenges from environmental groups and to protect the state’s coal-fired power plants. He also said industry trade groups gave him the idea for the proposal.

“To understand this bill you need to follow the coordination,” said Merner, noting that the Utah legislation closely mirrors a model policy called the Energy Freedom Act, circulated by the conservative group Consumers Defense.

Consumers Defense has financial ties to a group linked to Leo, the architect of the far-right takeover of the Supreme Court who helped select Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. In recent years, groups tied to Leo have launched an unprecedented campaign to thwart climate accountability litigation.

Asked about Leo’s involvement in the model legislation, Will Hild, president of Consumers Defense, said it was not attributable to “any individual figure.”

In recent years, 70 cities, states, and individuals have sued energy majors for allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis.

“The Energy Freedom Act is intended to clarify that carbon emissions should not automatically carry legal damages and to push back on efforts…to shape national climate policy through litigation rather than through elected lawmakers,” he said. “This ensures decisions remain with accountable representatives, prevents a small number of states from imposing their policies nationwide through judicial fiat, and protects consumers from economically disruptive policies.”

In an emailed statement, Leo said: “Preserving individual dignity and worth includes good stewardship of the environment as well as maintaining conditions for the financial wellbeing of hardworking consumers.”

“Getting this balance right can be very tricky, which is why we support enterprises that seek to ensure that decisions are made based on sound science and through an accountable and constitutional political process, rather than lawfare supported by unaccountable judges, trial lawyers, and dark money special interest groups on the left,” he said. He did not answer a question about his role in the liability waiver proposals.

Lawmakers in Louisiana and Oklahoma are considering similar legislation, and the state legislatures of Iowa and Tennessee have voted to pass climate liability-limiting legislation, though neither has yet been signed into law.

“In Tennessee they literally called the bill the Tennessee Energy Freedom Act,” said Iyla Shornstein, political director at the Center for Climate Integrity, which tracks and supports climate accountability litigation. “It’s a direct borrowing from the Consumers Defense language.”

The Utah bill’s passage comes as climate lawsuits against big oil companies inch closer to trial, and as states adopt climate accountability legislation.

In recent years, 70 cities, states and individuals have sued energy majors for allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis. New York and Vermont have also passed climate “superfund” laws requiring major polluters to pay for damages caused by their past planet-heating pollution, with other states considering similar policies. “The oil companies clearly see these as an existential threat to their business model,” said Shornstein. “Their lobbying makes that clear.”

Earlier this year, the top US oil lobby group the American Petroleum Institute (API) said one of its top priorities for 2026 would be blocking “abusive” climate lawsuits targeting Big Oil. Months earlier, 16 Republican state attorneys general also called on the justice department to provide a “liability shield” for oil companies.

Lawmakers have also pursued narrower efforts, including a failed attempt to block Washington DC from the deployment of some legal theories against oil companies, and a 2025 Maryland bill that would have barred state and local climate lawsuits but never reached a vote. And last year, both API and energy giant ConocoPhillips also pressed Congress on draft legislation to limit climate liability.

If Big Oil “can secure blanket immunity now, they can avoid the fate of tobacco, but if they fail, they face tobacco-level accountability.”

Such a federal policy appears to be in the works: during a House committee hearing last month, the Wyoming representative Harriet Hageman, a Republican, said “Congress has a role to play” in defeating climate accountability lawsuits.

“To that end, I’m working with my colleagues in both the House and Senate to craft legislation tackling both these state laws and the lawsuits that could destroy energy affordability for consumers,” she said.

Hageman did not provide specific details about the legislation. She did not respond to a request for comment. The API declined to comment on the state of a federal liability waiver proposal.

Other industries have lobbied for liability waivers before. Since the firearms sector successfully pushed for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005, “not a single negligence case against a gun manufacturer has gone to trial,” noted Merner.

The pesticide sector is also currently pursuing state-level immunity bills, while its allies have unsuccessfully pursued a federal waiver. The tobacco industry, facing widespread litigation, also pushed for such immunity in the 1990s but failed, ending up paying $260 billion in settlements.

“It seems that the fossil fuel industry has learned from these precedents. If they can secure blanket immunity now, they can avoid the fate of tobacco, but if they fail, they face tobacco-level accountability,” said Merner.

Lawmakers, advocates and journalists have amassed mountains of evidence in recent years that oil companies intentionally covered up the climate harms of their products. Climate science, meanwhile, continues to warn that fossil fuels are the primary cause of dangerous global warming.

“I don’t see why industry would be pushing for immunity if they thought they could win on the merits of their case,” said Merner. “The evidence shows they knew about climate risks for decades and lied about it, so they’re trying to change the rules of the game entirely.”

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In Indian Country, Data Centers Come With a Familiar Threat of Colonialism. These Organizers Are Fighting Back.

Last August, citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation began hearing whispers of an AI data center coming to their reservation. Kenzie Roberts and Jordan Harmon, both Muscogee citizens, were immediately worried. It “didn’t seem like something that should align with our values as Indigenous people,” Roberts said. The center would be located on Looped Square Ranch, a 5,570-acre plot of land where the tribe runs its food sovereignty initiative, a program that allows the Muscogee Nation to directly serve its citizens’ food needs. At the ranch, the tribe hosts youth agricultural activities like 4H; citizens can visit for hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering; and the nation runs a fully functioning cattle ranch and meat processing center. The proposed legislation would rezone that land for industrial purposes—potentially taking that all away. “We give so much from the heartland, and then they still try to extract more from us,” Roberts said.

As developers scope out land across rural America for the hyperscale data centers needed to power generative AI, Native lands have become the latest target for Big Tech—from the Arizona desert to the Great Plains in Montana to the hills of central Virginia. Often, when tech companies come into Indigenous communities, they promise jobs and economic benefits for the community, but community activists say those benefits rarely materialize. Instead, data centers bring a threat of land loss and displacement that feels all too familiar for Indigenous people. “It’s just layer upon layer of exploitation, of violence, of continued colonialism. All in the name of imperialism,” said Krystal Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne organizer who is the executive director of Honor the Earth, a national organization promoting Indigenous sovereignty that has been leading the fight against data centers. According to Honor the Earth, there are currently at least 106 proposed data center projects near or on Native lands. In western New York, a proposed $19.46 billion data center project would sit adjacent to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s territory, threatening an old forest that tribal citizens use for hunting, fishing, and gathering traditional medicine. In Reno, Nevada, an industrial park with a number of data centers planned threatens the water supply of Pyramid Lake, which is home to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and completely surrounded by the tribe’s reservation.

Companies attempting to construct data centers on Indigenous lands likely see it as an opportunity not just to access large plots of land, but also to use tribal sovereignty to bypass cumbersome state regulations that tribes don’t have to follow. Many tribal nations don’t have the legal codes or regulatory bodies in place yet to regulate utilities, Two Bulls said, so developers are moving quickly to begin data center projects while that’s still the case. Two Bulls also said that many developers see Indigenous communities as easy targets, especially poorer tribes that don’t have the legal or financial infrastructure to pursue litigation. “They don’t think they’re going to get a lot of pushback,” said Ashley LaMont, an enrolled tribal member of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the campaign director at Honor the Earth, who’s been organizing with Roberts and Harmon in Oklahoma.

The data center boom feels like yet another example of developers treating Native lands as an unlimited commodity for exploitation.

Two Bulls said that tribes with large land bases are open to the purported economic development that a data center could bring—because they need it. But tribal nations also need to consider whether they will be able to hold companies responsible for harm or depleted resources on their lands and whether they’ll have oversight of data centers. Community organizers and experts cite concerns about air pollution, electrical rate hikes, and the depletion of finite resources like water. “For Indigenous communities as a whole, water is going to be a continued worry,” said Lance Tubinaghtewa, a program coordinator at the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of Arizona. Tubinaghtewa, who’s Hopi, has been closely monitoring data centers that could threaten Indigenous communities in Arizona.

The organizers I spoke with say that the concern about data centers mirrors other issues—oil and natural gas pipelines, uranium and lithium mining, rollbacks on environmental protections for sacred lands, and man-made dams—that some Native communities have been fighting for years. They see parallels to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016, when activists flocked to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, where the pipeline was threatening sacred lands and water in the area. At the time, these protesters often referred to themselves as “water protectors” and repeated the Lakota phrase “Mní Wičóni” or “Water is life.” Today, as corporations attempt to place hyperscale data centers—which can guzzle up to 5 million gallons of water per day—on Indigenous lands, organizers are again taking up the water protector mantle. For them, the data center boom feels like yet another example of developers treating Native lands as an unlimited commodity for exploitation.

For months, Harmon and Roberts traveled all around the Muscogee Reservation—which covers 11 counties in Oklahoma—holding town halls to organize against the data center. Some Muscogee citizens they met were concerned about water or electric bill increases—a recent Bloomberg analysis shows that electricity costs were up by 267 percent in areas near data centers. Others wondered if a data center would bring jobs for local laborers. In one town hall, Harmon argued that while job prospects are an “alluring promise,” research shows that data centers aren’t providing the job opportunities that tech companies claim. Ultimately, those conversations paid off. “Our National Council reps were saying they were getting more calls about the data center than anything they ever had before,” Harmon said.

One of those calls came from James Floyd, the Muscogee Nation’s former Principal Chief, who said every aspect of the data center proposal seemed in opposition to traditional Muscogee values. “Our citizens own this land,” he said. “We as a nation own this. It’s been our tradition—before removal—that land was held in common and we all had a say in how the land was going to be used. Fast forward 200 years later and we get into a situation like this. It speaks to how we disregard our own culture in trying to pursue something that will make somebody some money.” The specific legislation for this project was proposed by the tribe’s administration—its executive branch—but the decision about whether the ranch should be rezoned and used for a potential data center was ultimately left up to the National Council, the tribe’s legislative branch. But Dode Barnett, a member of the Muscogee Creek National Council, said council members looking for information about the project kept hitting a brick wall.

Big tech companies and their developers often come with non-disclosure agreements in hand, and if they sign, officials are limited in what they can disclose about the projects. The NDAs can limit important information—like the amount of water and energy a data center would use and sometimes even the name of the company building it—in the name of protecting corporate secrets, leaving the public in the dark. In the case of the Mvskoke Tech Park legislation, the tribe’s administration had signed NDAs, meaning they couldn’t discuss any details about the project with members of the National Council who would ultimately make the decision. For Barnett and other members of the National Council, this made understanding the proposed project difficult—and ultimately led Barnett to vote against it. “There was just a broader sense of alarm for me, personally, around the NDAs,” she said. As a result, Barnett has drafted legislation that would make it illegal for certain Muscogee officials to sign NDAs in the future. She sees it as a chance to return the nation’s government to its values, echoing Floyd. “The Muscogee Creek Nation government was based on the citizens themselves having a lot of power,” she said.

With all the secrecy surrounding data centers, actually knowing the locations of projects is no easy task. Honor the Earth recently launched a map compiled from crowdsourced information to help keep track of data centers on or within 30 miles of Indigenous lands. Once it has identified a data center project on Native land, Honor the Earth drafts a letter to the tribal communities that could be impacted to give them information about how the project will affect their community, and provides them support if they want to resist.

Despite the downsides, the US Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs has encouraged tribes to get involved with the data center boom, calling the centers a “big economic opportunity” and downplaying their drawbacks. The department is offering technical, financial, and legal assistance for tribes who might want a data center on their land, including site evaluations, introductions to industry partners and subject matter experts, and consulting on regulations and deals.

Some Native people also see data centers as an opportunity for tribes. Last fall, a group of researchers at the Colorado School of Mines, two of whom are Indigenous, wrote a piece called “The Future of AI Runs Through Indian Country” arguing that data centers could be an opportunity to place “high-tech infrastructure on Native American lands.” The authors argue that, thanks to their unique assets—which include large land bases, water rights, and tribal sovereignty—tribal nations stand to benefit greatly if they get in on the data center game. Tribes can avoid the risks of extraction and exploitation by implementing the proper safeguards, they say, without spelling out what those safeguards are.

When the Muscogee National Council voted on the data center bill last November, Roberts and Harmon were nervous. Sitting in the audience with other organizers, it felt like the decision could go either way. But the bill failed by a 4-11 vote. They were relieved—but the fight isn’t over yet. In addition to the four council members who voted in favor of Mvskoke Tech Park, Harmon thinks other council members might reconsider the proposal in the future if the NDAs aren’t in place and they can see more information about the proposed project. She also worries that the project might be approved if it’s moved to a less controversial location. Already, more bills are popping up in nearby city councils for data centers that would extend onto Muscogee land. To eliminate that worry, Harmon wants to see the National Council pass a full moratorium on data centers on Muscogee land.

“We should always oppose colonization. We shouldn’t back down.”

And Harmon’s concerns aren’t just limited to data centers in Oklahoma. Nearly 1,000 miles away in Twiggs County, Georgia, another developer has proposed a data center on Muscogee ancestral lands. Before the US government forcibly removed them in the 1830s, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation had inhabited this part of Georgia for thousands of years, and the proposed data center could threaten the preservation of ancestral Muscogee mounds and villages that remain in that area. Some Muscogee citizens—including former principal chief Floyd—traveled down to Coweta County, Georgia, last fall to speak against a proposed data center there called Project Sail. Harmon and Roberts hope that moving forward, they can motivate more Muscogee citizens to pressure the tribal government to turn their attention towards their homelands before it’s too late. “It carries an extra emotional burden because it’s hard to be this far away from our homelands and to hear from white people, ‘We want to protect your sacred sites,’ and then to hear from our own tribal leaders that they’re not interested in that,” Harmon said.

Seeing this fight play out on so many fronts could be discouraging for some. But for Harmon, it’s a motivator. “We should always oppose colonization,” she said. “We shouldn’t back down.”

Harmon and Roberts have helped form the Stop Data Colonialism coalition, a national group founded by Honor the Earth, bringing together Native organizers working to halt data center projects in Indian Country. The Stop Data Colonialism coalition has also been organizing in other parts of Oklahoma. In the past week, the Tulsa City Council passed a nine-month moratorium on new data center construction, a data center project in Tulsa pulled its rezoning request, and another developer in Coweta pulled its data center proposal all together. The group also held a town hall with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which then unanimously passed a moratorium on hyperscale data centers on its land. “We’re hoping that tribes will…actually say, ‘We don’t want this here.’ There’s more work to be done,” Harmon said.

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Trad Wife Horror Story

Trad wives have been baking, churning, scrubbing, and harvesting their ways through our social media feeds for several years now, praising homemaking and subservience to their husbands on countless dedicated TikTok channels. With her pristine makeup and prairie dresses and endless cheerful obedience, this internet persona—thetrad as in “traditional” wife—seemed predestined to end up as a character in fiction or film.

But that in no way makes Caro Claire Burke’s new novel Yesteryear, starring a trad wife influencer, any less bracing. On the surface, Burke’s protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, has everything she dreamed of: an internet following and sponsorships to match it, hard won by turning her life into an 1800s pioneer fantasy with her strapping farmer husband Caleb and their gaggle of children on a farm in the foothills of Idaho. She hasn’t even really had to give up modern luxuries; her children are tended to by (off-camera) nannies; there’s a refrigerator hiding in a pantry off the kitchen (a possible nod to the most famous real-life trad wife influencer, Hannah Neeleman, who goes by the handle Ballerina Farm). Sure, there are hordes of angry online commenters out to get her, and yeah, Caleb may be sleeping around, but life is mostly perfect.

One morning she woke up with the idea for the title of her book, Yesteryear, which felt “all-encompassing.”

Then one day Natalie wakes up to everything a little off-kilter, and pieces together that she has time-traveled to the actual 1800s, an era of little medical intervention, no electricity, and low patience for female opinions. Darkness sets in early, and the food sucks. But small observations soon have her questioning whether she has really time-traveled—or whether she’s caught up in some kind of dark West World-like reality show. The narrative unspools from there, with detours into Natalie’s origin story, and there are more than a few satisfying twists that kept me reading late into the night.

Burke came up with the premise after watching too many trad wife videos on TikTok in the winter of 2024, she told me on a phone call—the phenomenon was something she “became very obsessed with very quickly,” she said. She was working for Katie Couric Media at the time but had a fiction MFA and had been hoping to also write a novel. One morning she woke up with the idea for the title of her book, Yesteryear, which felt “all-encompassing.” She’d never written a thriller; all her fiction until that point had been, in her words, “small, quiet, family interiority drama.” Perhaps because of that, she “was really able to go for it,” unencumbered by her own expectations.

The resulting book is juicy, vindictive, and loads of fun—and has already been optioned by Amazon MGM Studios, with Anne Hathaway planning to co-produce and star in the film adaptation. While Burke’s tale serves as somewhat of an indictment of conservative gender roles, it’s not without its nuances. “It was very important to me to be just as honest and hard-eyed at liberal culture,” she says.

Burke also co-hosts, with Katie Gatti Tassin, the podcast Diabolical Lies, which lends a feminist lens to all manner of culture and politics topics, including young conservatives and the manosphere. I spoke with Caro about her own political awakening and her thoughts on trad wives’ agency.

I read that you grew up conservative. Anything resembling tradwife conservative?

I grew up in a Republican household, and I was Catholic, I got confirmed. But I also went to liberal schools, and so I was never cloistered away. I kind of grew up in the Bush-Romney era of conservatism. It wasn’t as hard of a pivot as the ones that you might see in the book.

You told an interviewer that your life changed after watching the movie Captain Fantastic, and then wondering who Noam Chomsky was. Is it true you and your husband then ditched your jobs to live in an Airstream?

It was a little less romantic than that. It was the pandemic era. We bought this, like shit kicker 1967 Airstream, and he renovated it, and then we lived on the road for two years, off and on. The Captain Fantastic of it all was pretty inspiring for us. The van life craze hadn’t super kicked off, but we were definitely a part of that as it was happening. So, yeah, I bet we probably were Chomskied a little bit.

So much was happening in America at the time—I don’t know if I would have radicalized honestly if our country hadn’t been radicalizing too.

It struck me that the off the grid life depicted in Captain Fantastic, and the supposedly off-the-grid life of your trad wife protagonist, Natalie, might actually have some overlaps, like back-to-the-land hippie or back-to-the-land Christian conservative? It’s kind of this place where the far left and far right start to converge.

We talk about this a lot on our podcast, there is a lot of overlap there. I mean, anytime you have anyone who is trying to behave in any sort of heterodox way. Something appealed to us so much about being quiet and reading and trying to hold on to those kinds of traits in a time period where it feels like the world is hellbent on wrestling that out of you. Arguably, you have that quiet in Yesteryear, but there are no books, so I think that’s kind of the inverse: You do have this quiet, you have opportunities for revelation, but I don’t know if you have people who are equipped to receive the revelation.

Yesteryear is kind of a thriller-slash-horror book. Obviously there’s trad wife content on TikTok, but did you draw on anything else as inspiration for the novel?

You mean, for like, the horror element of it? It’s funny that I had never written horror because I’m obsessed with it. I loved The Witch, and I rewatched it in the final days of editing Yesteryear. And I remember being like, Oh my god, darkness. I added a few lines about how dark it can be in a house when there’s no electricity. And then obviously, Hereditary is a classic. There’s a movie that came out this year called Bring Her Back that I thought was one of the more terrifying things I’ve ever seen. If you like horror, highly recommend.

I grew up loving Little House on the Prairie, and I have almost like a primal yearning for a simpler life that many trad wives seem to advertise. Did you feel drawn to that life at all when watching their content and imagining the life of an 1800s pioneer woman?

“The trad wife stuff and this vision of this aesthetic—I was obsessed with it.”

I think all of it is kind of intoxicating. There is something natural about seeing stars, as corny as that sounds, or being alone and not hearing anything else. That’s incredibly soothing. But yeah, I mean, with the trad wife stuff and this vision of this aesthetic—I was obsessed with it. I’m so aware of how attractive it is, because I find it attractive, and I think that’s also why it was easy for me to write about it for two years. It does seem so beautiful. And I think the way that America fetishizes the Wild West and cowboys and Indians and this whole fantasy, it’s so intoxicating, and we’re so educated to fantasize about it, that I think it’s kind of unavoidable in a certain way.

How did you do research for the book, aside from, I’m assuming, watching trad wife TikTok videos?

The thing that I researched much more were patterns of behavior with women in these fundamentalist communities. You can interview people, but also there are Reddit chats of people who have left the Mormon faith, or left the Jehovah’s Witness faith, or left an evangelical community. There are whole podcasts dedicated to women who have left those communities. I kind of went through a period of just like waterboarding myself with that, and then you start to see, it’s all the same consistent behaviors.

There’s a point in the novel when your protagonist, Natalie, has just woken up in 1805, or she’s not sure. And her husband smacks her for talking out of line. There’s this moment of shock that she no longer has the power she had in the modern era. To me, that actually highlights how much power she did have in the modern era—she was kind of running the show, calling the shots. To what extent do you think that is true for many trad wife influencers?

I think it’s a question that could be asked more often. I see a lot of people assume that if women are wealthy, then they have the ability to leave. And I think that anyone who looks into this is like, that’s not even remotely true. Something that was important to me was having certain elements of financial abuse, where it’s like, Natalie does have a lot of power, but also she doesn’t have control of their finances. I don’t really have an answer for how much power Natalie has. As I was writing her, it felt like, like a pendulum swing with each chapter, where it’s like, you have a moment where she is totally in charge, and has figured her way out of some bind, or come to a solution or gotten what she wanted, and then the next chapter is like, Well, be careful what you wish for, because now you’re stuck in a new way.

“I see a lot of people assume that if women are wealthy, then they have the ability to leave. And I think that anyone who looks into this is like, that’s not even remotely true.”

I think that a lot of women can think or hope that they’re reaching a level of power if they play along within these communities, but you never actually have it, because women are not allowed to have power. It’s all really an illusion at the end of the day.

With the women who seek to fulfill these traditional roles, what advantage do they gain by pretending to be powerless?

I mean, I think they are powerless. I’m sure there’s an exception to every example. But, I would say 99.9—virtually all—of the women that I spoke with or I listened to on podcasts or that I was reading from, they were all born into these communities. When you’re born into this community, you are taught from childhood that there is one way to go to heaven, and that way is to perform as a wife and a mother. When every woman behaves the same way, then you have to start to wonder if any of them are making choices to begin with, or if it’s all been kind of cultured into them.

“You are taught from childhood that there is one way to go to heaven, and that way is to perform as a wife and a mother.”

I know New York mag just did this big cover story: We never stop talking about Mormon women. But there’s a reason why they’re all over social media. It’s because they’re taught to be beautiful, to prioritize their looks and to evangelize and they’re also taught to work themselves to a bone and never complain about it. When it’s taught to you from birth, and when there are real punishments on the line of not doing it, like divorcing your husband is not an option in the same way that it is for me as like a totally secular person—these women usually don’t have access to their own finances. They often don’t even graduate from college. They usually have kids. If you have a child, I think it makes the idea of leaving pretty unattractive, let alone if you have, like, six kids.

I have a hard time with the idea of choice in these women, because I feel like when they’re all making the same decision and they all end up powerless—it’s hard for me to argue that they did really choose it.

There’s this internet idea that women are quitting the modern workforce to become trad wives, but it kind of sounds like what you’re saying is almost all trad wives were born into these communities.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that women who were not in these positions are now converting into these positions. There’s evidence that women are dropping out of the workforce, but that’s not because they’re about to bake bread. It’s because they can’t afford childcare. There’s this stat that this year, something like 400,000 women dropped out of the workforce, and it’s the biggest decline in modern history. It’s funnily timed, right? With the whole trad wife thing. But everything I can find from women who have reported leaving and who are willing to talk about it is caregiving responsibilities. It’s not them being like, I have chosen to reject feminism. I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that women are choosing this en masse. I think there are women who are already born into it, and then I think there are women who make a lot of money by pretending that they’re doing it online.

Are there that many women doing that second option who are basically completely pretending, or are they still from these communities, they’re just kind of amping up the back-to-the-land lifestyle?

That’s kind of the question. I have my suspicions. I don’t know. Obviously the most famous one is Hannah Neeleman, Ballerina Farm. I have no fucking clue what that woman is thinking. There are people who could argue that she genuinely believes the whole lifestyle she’s selling. And then I think there are people who go, this woman went to Juilliard, she lived in New York City, she knows what she’s doing. I think we always learn more after the fact, and I think we usually learn more about what is taking place with these people from their children.

So we just need to wait like, 15 to 20 years, and then all will be revealed.

Yeah, exactly. It’s like the Duggars—we have to sustain maximum damage, and then we will get, like, a sliver of truth at the end of it.

The Trump administration is trying to redefine, even from a legal perspective, the sexes in a way that reinforces this Christian conservative idea of traditional gender roles and hierarchy and how women should submit to their husbands. I heard you suggest on your podcast Diabolical Lies that this could be considered a form of voter suppression. Can you say more about that?

I think it is voter suppression. There have been efforts all over the country to suppress the abilities of women to go about their daily lives in a number of ways. There are a bunch of Republicans in the Midwest who are actively trying to return us to our teenage birth rates that we worked so hard to decrease. They’re like, no, actually, we want a lot of teenagers giving birth again. You have a lot of people trying to reverse no-fault divorce laws. I think that there are a lot of Republicans who think like, well, make sure that the last name for the woman matches the last name of her marital license. And if that all matches up, then maybe they can vote. And if not, you’ve got a problem.

“When you are trying to encourage women to be at home…you are creating a scenario in which women will not have access any number of things outside the house, and one of those is basically behaving like democratic citizens.”

Also, economically disenfranchising—there’s also something they’ve done to the Black community forever, like when election day isn’t a federal holiday, you are intentionally ensuring that poorer people will have less of a chance to vote than wealthy people. The same is true for women. When you are trying to encourage women to be at home and to be a primary caretaker, and to not rely on anyone else, and to not use daycare, you are creating a scenario in which women will not have access any number of things outside the house, and one of those is basically behaving like democratic citizens.

Who is your imagined audience for the book?

It’s kind of hard for me to visualize. I think practically, it’ll be women, and I hope it’s women of a wide range of ages. If men read it, that’s awesome. The idea of a married couple, or any sort of couple reading it together really excites me. And having conversations with each other about gender and how it plays a role in their marriage or partnership, that’d be cool.

With your podcast Diabolical Lies, I’m curious—there are so many podcasts out there. When you and Katie Gatti Tassin were planning to start it, what hole were you trying to fill in the podcast universe?

We had a few instincts about things that we craved and we weren’t seeing, and so some of them were, longform. Joe Rogan does a three hour podcast every day. So Katie and I had both been told separately, ‘Oh, well, you can’t really have a podcast that’s more than an hour. People won’t listen.’ And we were like, there’s no way that’s true. We don’t need 10 million listeners, but there’s no way that you can’t have a viable product that’s also longform. We just kind of felt, it sounds really corny, but there just weren’t many podcasts where women were talking about issues in the kind of way that we wanted to, which is kind of irreverent, but taking itself pretty seriously, and caring about a range of issues that aren’t just pop culture. The fun thing about a podcast is that it’s very inexpensive to try.

What does the name refer to?

It refers to a [Kansas City Chiefs kicker] Harrison Butker commencement speech, and he was telling all the women that the greatest lie they had been told was that they should seek purpose outside of the home. He said, ‘You guys have been sold the most diabolical lies,’ essentially being the tenets of feminism: that you can have fulfillment beyond being a mother or a wife.

Something that kind of nagged at me a little bit while I was reading Yesteryear was the modern career woman is also pretty miserable seeming.

It was definitely intentional. I think first and foremost, it was important for me to really imagine the alternative through Natalie’s eyes. I had spent so much time in these trad wife worlds that it was very easy for me to regurgitate their perspective of what it meant to be modern. And I also think I started to realize like, well, there are elements of that that are true. Women aren’t supported in the workforce. Women don’t get the type of leave that they deserve. It is very hard, probably impossible, to “have it all.” And I think in a book that skewers so much of conservative culture, it was very important to me to be just as like honest and hard-eyed at liberal culture. The argument against feminism, is that feminism and all that it came from has led to miserable lives. And so I think in order to embody Natalie fully, it was important to go there and to kind of be like, yeah, no, it’s not just conservatism that is a little bit of a joke. It’s also the half-assed liberal feminism that we’ve gotten that really hasn’t given us what we need.

If modern liberal feminism is not giving us what we need, what do we need—what do we deserve?

What do we deserve? Oh, my God, that’s like the million dollar question. I mean, the first step, the bare minimum, is an adequate social safety net. If there were one thing that I would have Yesteryear do, it would be give women maternity leave, for fuck’s sake. There are certain things that America is so behind on that it’s laughable. Every woman should have access to a minimum of six months maternity leave, let alone support for breastfeeding, let alone access to child care. Having a serious conversation about where our taxes are not going and how pathetic that is, given that every other developed nation has figured it out to a better extent than us, would be my starting point. And then from there, we could have more waxing poetic conversations about, like, how many hours should a person work. But we’re at triage right now.

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Trump: Iranians Who Are Being Bombed Are Saying “Please Keep Bombing”

According to Donald Trump, Iranians want the US military to continue to bomb their homes.

“We’ve had numerous intercepts,” Trump told reporters in a press conference on Monday afternoon. “’Please keep bombing. Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding.”

When questioned on who sent these communications, the president responded, “I don’t know what they do. All I can tell you is that they want freedom.” Trump did not say when the intercepts were received—let alone any give evidence that they exist.

The bizarre remarks came as a reporter asked Trump why he claims Iranians would be mad if he halted future military strikes, including those on civilian infrastructure: “Wouldn’t that be punishing Iranians for the actions of the regime?”

Q: Why would Iranians want you to blow up their infrastructure, to cut off their power? TRUMP: They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedoms. We've had numerous intercepts — 'Please keep bombing. Do it.' These are people that are living where the bombs are exploding

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-06T18:01:31.779Z

For Trump, the war is the only way for the people of Iran to win freedom. Apparently, people’s lives are in “much greater danger” without it.

“It’s amazing when I see some of the stupid people like AOC plus three, all that group. They talk about ‘oh freedom for Iran.’” Trump said. “They don’t tell you the real facts.”

“Women, men, gays…They kill the gays. They throw them off buildings,” Trump continued, referring to the Iranian leadership’s violence toward the people residing in the country.

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She Helped the Authorities Deport Her Abuser. Then They Deported Her Back to Him.

Her abusive husband had hurt her too many times.

So Carmen F., an immigrant from South America, called the police. He was soon deported.

Then she applied for a U visa, a special visa that gives crime victims a pathway to permanent residency in the United States if they cooperated with law enforcement to get their perpetrators off the streets.

Unfortunately, the wait time to receive one of these visas is often more than 15 years. There’s a massive backlog, and in the meantime the Trump administration has been deporting the applicants, contrary to longstanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has defended the deportations, arguing that crime victims can return later if their visas are eventually approved.

Last year, ICE detained Carmen (not her real name) and deported her and her young son back to their homeland—where her abusive ex was awaiting them at the airport.

Now she’s part of a class-action lawsuit by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. The suit seeks to return Carmen and other deported survivors to the United States. It also seeks an injunction to stop ICE from deporting others in similar circumstances. The case was filed in federal court in California in October on behalf of eight named plaintiffs and four immigrant rights groups. A judge is expected to issue a decision any day.

U visas were born out of a problem: Undocumented immigrants are exceedingly vulnerable to violent crimes, and they are less likely than citizens to come forward and help police catch the perpetrator, because doing so puts them at risk for deportation.

In 2000, as part of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, Congress created the U visa pathway to permanent residency for them. Immigrants who survived domestic violence, sexual assault, and certain other crimes could apply for the visa if they helped law enforcement investigate or prosecute the offense. Survivors of trafficking could apply for something similar, T visas.

“Seeing my child so afraid, I knew I had to protect him and had no choice but to call the police.”

But Congress capped the number of U visas that could be granted each year at 10,000, not nearly enough to cover all those who apply. Today, more than a quarter-million immigrants are in the backlog. In the past, they were allowed to stay in the United States until US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) could process their applications, so long as an initial review deemed them eligible. In the meantime, they could get work authorization and a status called deferred action, which protected them from deportation.

Carmen’s lawsuit, ICWC v. Noem, accuses the Trump administration of ignoring deferred action status and removing survivors from the country anyway; the administration is also deporting people like Carmen who don’t yet have the status but may be eligible once USCIS reviews her application. The case was filed against ICE and USCIS and seeks to represent a wide class of survivors who applied for U visas, T visas, and other protections under the Violence Against Women Act.

“These individuals were given a promise that they would be protected as long as they were vulnerable and shared their story with the cops. Now all of a sudden the government casts that aside,” says attorney Erika Cervantes, who filed the lawsuit with co-counsel Sarah Kahn at the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. “They’re just deporting people left and right nationwide.”

These deportations are “really significant departures from previous policies,” adds Cristina Velez at the nonprofit Asista, which also advocates for immigrant survivors. If applying for U visas or T visas comes with a chance of removal, she worries fewer people will do it. “That undermines the goals: encouraging cooperation with law enforcement and enhancing public safety.”

Carmen arrived in the United States in 2022 with her husband and young son. (Her real name, country of origin, and other identifying information were excluded from the lawsuit because she is still in danger.) They applied for asylum and rented a room from her cousin’s friends. Her son started kindergarten and joined a soccer team, which he loved. They went to church on Sundays.

But Carmen’s home life was becoming increasingly difficult. “My children’s father was drinking very much,” she said in a court statement. “He would yell and sometimes even hit me.” After an immigration judge denied their asylum claim in 2024, things escalated. That summer, her husband came home drunk, so she closed her door. He pounded on it, threatening to kill her, and her son became hysterical. “That week, I had endured several days of threats, intimidation, and sexual abuse,” she told the court, “but seeing my child so afraid, I knew I had to protect him and had no choice but to call the police.”

She received a restraining order, and her husband stayed away for a while. But one day that winter, she returned home and he was there. He beat her, according to the suit, and she called the police again. In March 2025, he was deported.

She applied for a U visa that month, but at her June check-in with ICE, the officers detained her. They sent her and her son to the family detention center in Dilley, Texas, where lawyers and detainees have reported horrible conditions. “ICE detained us just a few days after my son graduated from second grade,” Carmen said. “He had been looking forward to his summer vacation and he spent it in prison.” Carmen’s lawyer informed ICE that Carmen had a pending U visa petition, but they deported her anyway the following month.

Back home, Carmen’s husband has confiscated her passport and won’t let her leave the house without his permission.

Another plaintiff, Camila B., is from Mexico and has lived in Los Angeles for 23 years. She applied for a U visa in 2023, after she was punched in the face by an assailant at a bus stop; in May 2025, USCIS informed her that she qualified for deferred action status. But during the government’s massive deportation operation in L.A. last year, armed men surrounded her tamale stand and shoved her into a vehicle; she did not immediately know they were ICE. A judge ordered her released on bond, but months later she still needs to check in with officers weekly.

In Texas, meanwhile, an immigration judge refused to release plaintiff Paulo C., even though he has deferred action status after helping police prosecute the man who raped his then 13-year-old daughter. He “has shown up time after time,” his daughter wrote to the court. “The last couple of months without him have felt like an eternity.” Because the immigration judge wouldn’t let him out, he had to file a habeas corpus petition in a federal civil court to convince another judge to release him. He remains free but at risk for deportation.

DHS did not respond to questions for this story, but the agency has previously defended its practice of deporting survivors with pending U visa applications. Former spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that every deported individual has “had due process and has a final order of removal—meaning they have no legal right to be in the country.”

In February, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews decisions by immigration judges, argued in a related case that it was inappropriate for a judge to pause removal proceedings for someone who applied for a U visa. The board wrote that judges should not act in a way that “effectively grants amnesty to thousands of removable aliens because they may be eligible for a visa sometime in the future.”

That’s “quite escalated language,” Kursten Phelps, an attorney at the nonprofit Tahirih Justice Center who worked at USCIS until last year, said of the implication that people are exploiting the process to stay in the country longer. “I don’t know that I have ever worked with a survivor who was happy about the backlog, because it presents tremendous instability, long waits, lots of uncertainty, and lots of stress for individuals who are working toward building safe, independent lives.”

The solution, she says, is for Congress to increase or eliminate the annual cap on visas.

In court, DHS has suggested that deported survivors can return if and when their visas are eventually granted. Jessica Farb, deputy director of the Immigration Center for Women and Children, another plaintiff in the suit, isn’t swayed by that argument. It “greatly misses the point,” she says, “of all the harm caused by being removed.”

When Carmen disembarked from her deportation flight in July, her 8-year-old son in tow, her heart sank: Her ex was standing there waiting for her. He “told me it was such a coincidence that he was there when we arrived. I knew he was lying,” she told the court, though she still isn’t sure how he found out she’d be coming.

He took her home with him, where the abuse continued, according to the lawsuit. “What could I do? I had no choice, I had nowhere else to go and there was no one speaking up for me,” she said. Her husband confiscated her passport and won’t let her leave the house without his permission.

“Under prior policy,” her attorneys wrote in the suit, “she would not have been put into this impossible and dangerous situation.”

Carmen says she and her son are terrified. “I believed that the U visa meant that we would finally be safe,” she said. “[I]nstead, they put me and my child on a plane and sent us into the arms of the person we had sought protection from.”

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One Acre, One Vote: The Bizarre Election That Could Decide Arizona’s Energy Fate

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

In a country characterized by antiquated systems for regulating how electricity is produced and transported to homes and businesses, one utility in Arizona may be the most outdated. In 1903, almost a decade before Arizona became a state, a group of landowners around Phoenix secured a federal loan for a dam on the Salt River. The dam collected water to irrigate farms and produce hydroelectric power to run irrigation pumps. The landowners created the Salt River Project Association to govern the operation of the dam, and gave each landowner a vote for every acre of land they owned.

The Salt River Project (SRP) now serves one of the nation’s largest metro areas, not just a swath of farmland. With several hydropower dams and a fleet of power plants, it generates power for more than 2 million customers in the Phoenix area, making it the largest public power utility in the country and one of the few in which customers elect the people who run the utility itself.

Even though Phoenix has transformed from a patch of farmland into a sprawling city, the utility still uses an acreage-based voting system. A person who holds 20 acres gets 20 votes, a person who owns a half-acre lot gets half a vote, and many condo owners get only .01 votes. Renters can’t vote at all. Only individual homeowners and trusts can vote, so a company like Target doesn’t get to vote with the acres of its shopping center. Thousands of ratepayers, then, are excluded from voting. Even taking into consideration the restricted pool of voters, turnout for these elections is usually very low, which further constrains the mandates that board members carry when making decisions about how Salt River generates electricity.

“It’s effectively feudal,” said John Qua, a campaign director at Lead Locally. Qua has been working on clean energy advocacy in the SRP over the past six years, through three election cycles. That undemocratic governance structure has kept the Salt River association stuck in its opposition to clean energy — despite the association’s location in sunny Arizona, a region that also has the benefit of flat desert expanses with steady winds. The utility relied on fossil fuels for almost two-thirds of its generation in 2024, and its carbon reduction target could allow the utility to burn more fossil fuels in 2035 than it does now.

Next week, though, the balance of power might finally shift. On Tuesday, Salt River ratepayers will elect candidates for half of the utility’s 14 board seats.

Turning Point has cast the race as a referendum on “radical change” and says it is opposed to wind and “bad solar.”

In recent years, a new slate of board members who want to boost clean energy have been elected, and with Tuesday’s election, their coalition stands to win a majority if it sweeps its races. Their opponents are part of a coalition of large landowners and business leaders backed by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

The clean energy advocates say that their presence on the board has already shifted SRP toward solar and distributed energy. The district identified around 2.8 gigawatts of new solar for addition to the grid in 2024, which could power hundreds of thousands of homes. Even under its current plans, solar and renewables will make up 45 percent of its generation within a decade. It has also piloted a number of programs that can make home air-conditioning more efficient and ratchet down demand during peak periods.

The election comes at a pivotal moment: The utility is now facing a huge spike in demand, and the two sides differ on how to meet it. In its latest long-term plan, the utility estimated that peak demand could grow by around 4 percent per year between 2023 and 2035, and that power consumption from large customers like data centers could almost triple over the same period. The adoption of electric vehicles and the sprawl of the Phoenix metro will further stress the grid.

Other big utilities around the country are struggling to meet similar demand growth, and in most cases the utilities are responding by building more natural gas to provide around-the-clock backup power, and extending the lifespans of coal plants. That’s the strategy of the pro-business slate, which argues that shunning fossil energy will lead to high prices or even shortages of energy.

The clean energy advocates, meanwhile, believe that SRP can meet peak demand with renewables. They want to build more batteries that can store solar energy for nighttime use and invest in other carbon-free baseload power such as nuclear reactors. They also want to reduce demand stress by installing rooftop solar panels and making homes more energy-efficient.

Both sides have claimed that the data center boom is proof that their preferred source of energy should dominate. “A lot of the votes on resources are split, us all on one side and them all on the other,” said Casey Clowes, one of the clean energy advocates on the Salt River Project board, who is now running for vice president. “What’s holding up us being faster and adopting more and just getting more solar online is really that the board controls those decisions.”

Clowes and her allies believe that the utility’s nine existing gas plants are enough to provide round-the-clock power while the utility builds out more solar, wind, and battery storage. The conservative slate, by contrast, supports SRP’s current plan to convert retiring coal units into gas-fired power plants and to build new gas turbines across the service territory.

“They’re chasing rainbows and unicorns,” said Barry Paceley, a construction business owner and utility council member who is running against Clowes for vice president. “If we’re sitting here static, and said nobody else can move to Arizona, no more businesses come in, no more chips, no more data centers, then maybe. But for the real world, where are you getting the power from?”

A solar farm just east of the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Arizona. The Salt River Project, one of the state’s biggest utilities, has faced criticism for being slow to add solar energy. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty/Grist

The clean energy advocates have an even harder task ahead of them this year thanks to the involvement of Turning Point USA, the conservative political group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, who was a resident of Scottsdale. The group has deployed hundreds of volunteers to turn voters out for the pro-business slate, which has also drawn $500,000 in spending from a pro-business political finance group. Turning Point’s lawn signs are widespread, says Qua of Lead Locally. The clean energy advocates are trying to run a similar ground game, but they expect the pro-business slate to outspend them by a 10-to-1 margin.

Turning Point has cast the race as a referendum on “radical change” and says it is opposed to wind and “bad solar,” but its website notes with apparent approval that the Salt River Project “supports clean energy initiatives” and “supports solar and storage.” (Turning Point didn’t respond to interview requests.)

The clean energy slate controls six of the board’s 14 seats, and the establishment controls eight seats, including the presidency and the vice presidency. Clowes and a former state utility regulator named Sandra Kennedy are running for the presidency and the vice presidency; the clean energy coalition is also running candidates in three of the seven district-level elections for the board. They will need to win all three, or flip two and the presidency, in order to take control of the utility.

The areas in question are extremely small, and represent the purplest of Maricopa County’s famously purple suburban landscape. The two seats that are most up in the air are for Districts 4 and 6, which encompass the western side of Phoenix and its immediate suburb Glendale. There are only around 7,000 acres of votable land in District 4, split across around 57,000 landowners. The largest landowners in Salt River’s service area used to own big patches of farmland, but many of them have sold their farms to developers, commercial parks, and even data centers. Because only individuals and trusts can vote, the land sales have shifted voting power toward a larger group of ordinary landowners who own much smaller lots. Even so, the big landowners still have significant sway over election outcomes.

Most of these landowners won’t cast a vote: In a comparable election in District 8 in 2022, the clean energy candidate won by a margin of 248.33 acres to 209.01, meaning that well under 10 percent of eligible voters even showed up to the polls.

Rebecca Egan McCarthy contributed reporting to this story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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HHS Directly Gives Crisis Pregnancy Centers Millions of Dollars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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See Photos from the First Lunar Travelers Since 1972

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A MAGA Crack-up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump’s Iran Speech Offered Zero Answers and Backfired

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump’s Forest Service Upheaval Sows Confusion and Concern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump’s Executive Order on Mail Voting Is Plainly Unconstitutional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, of course, includes Trump himself.

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