They Were Detained by ICE. Then They Vanished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaylynn Kim for The Marshall Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was like mind games and gaslighting her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Senator Who Won’t Shut Up about Climate Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do you think that’s a bad idea?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting.

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

Media Matters for America/Yale Environment 360

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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

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

But Kevin, isn’t that the problem?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional reporting by Joseph Gedeon in Washington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fortress Europe: The Fight for Refugees in Greece

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICE Agents at Delaney, hang in there.

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

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

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

Give… pic.twitter.com/nfm0qBgYC1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What Americans Really Think in These Troubled Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Washington Protesters Convicted of “Conspiracy to Impede” ICE Agents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It pays to earn an endorsement from Donald Trump.

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

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

On paper, Trump is winning.

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

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

Watch the full breakdown here:

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Watch: The Violent ICE Crackdown Comes to New Jersey

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

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

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

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Everyone’s Fleeing Trump’s Freedom 250 Concerts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, the whole country.

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

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

“Basically, it’s us against them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Andy Kim: Nothing’s Improved Since Minnesota—Except Private Prison Profits

“I certainly didn’t see anything at Delaney Hall that gives me a sense that things have changed since Minnesota,” Andy Kim told me.

The New Jersey senator, a first-term Democrat, drew headlines Monday after he and other protesters were pepper-sprayed by ICE agents during a rally outside Delaney Hall, a private prison in Newark, New Jersey that ICE has repurposed to detain immigrants—nearly 900 as of early April, according to agency data reviewed by NBC News.

ICE is holding “a man who has Stage 3 lung cancer,” Kim told me. He wants to “spend his final months… with his family. But they just won’t let him go.”

Kim joined advocates, organizers, community members, and the families of those detained at Delaney during ongoing protests condemning the horrific conditions inside—including the dismissal of essential medical attention, the lack of food, and the absence of air conditioning.

Early that afternoon,ICE agents swarmed people who had gathered at the entrance—a DHS spokesperson claimed there were approximately 125 protesters outside the building—some of whom had installed barricades, and many of whom later formed a human chain before ICE deployed chemical suppressants. ICE agents have mounted numerous further attacks on protesters throughout the week, charging and striking them with batons and driving vehicles into the crowd; some protesters reinforced their barricades with cement blocks in response.

BREAKING: ICE deploys PEPPER BALLS and Pepper Spray at Anti-ICE protesters, Agents rushed into their vehicles and exited – Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark NJ pic.twitter.com/H12vSj6bHE

— Oliya Scootercaster (@ScooterCasterNY) May 25, 2026

“There’s an 18-year-old high school senior in there who just wants to go to prom and graduation,” Kim told me in an interview. “There was a man who has Stage 3 lung cancer [who is] not getting medical treatment. He wants to leave, go back home, [and] spend his final months that the doctors say that he had left with his family. But they just won’t let him go.”

Delaney Hall is managed by the private prison firm GEO Group, which in Februaryreceived a $1 billion, 15-year contract from ICE to hold immigrants there. (The agency also spent nearly $130 million to buy a warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, that it plans to turn into a detention center; Kim and fellow New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker have introduced legislation to block thoseconversion projects).

GEO Group guards stopped Kim from entering the facility to inspect it, forcing him to personally call Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for admittance.Under Mullin, who assumed leadership of the agency in March, agents have been deployed to airports, continue to occupy cities, and still terrorize people with impunity—although Mullin’s nomination was meant in part to reform the department’s image after the ouster of former head Kristi Noem.

Kim also tried to de-escalate the standoff between protesters and agents outside Delaney when ICE agents told him that they were going to push their vehicles through the crowd.

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“I told them: ‘You can’t just plow your way through this crowd of civilians. You should be doing something to try to minimize the potential for violence,” Sen. Kim said. “They just said that they had to get through, and they were just going to do it, no matter what the cause.”

The most recent rallies come as hundreds of people being held at Delaney Hall began a hunger and labor strike on Friday to demand the immediate release of those with serious medical conditions and young and elderly people, as well as an investigation into the facility.

“We are not striking to demand better treatment and conditions,” those on strike said in a statement released on Friday. “We are doing this to demand freedom.”

“Many of them have been there eight, ten, twelve months, and there’s no progress when it comes to their case in court.”

Nearly 300 people signed a letter, which was smuggled out of the detention center the week before, detailing violations of their due process and worsening conditions.

“We feel vulnerable and, in a way, kidnapped—detained without justification—not to mention that we are being tortured physically and psychologically due to the poor food resources provided in these detention centers,” one letter reads in part. “Families are being destroyed and separated, where there are children, nieces, and minors who are suffering a very strong psychological impact because they do not understand the situation, and in some cases they have witnessed the arrests of their relatives, who have been struck by tragedy and the economic burden, since in most cases we are heads of household.”

The people Kim met with at Delaney“ran into the hallway to get a piece of paper off a bulletin board and showed it to me. It said that on Tuesday, after the [Memorial Day] holidays, this one judge has 74 cases before them in just one day,” he told me. “Many of them have been there eight, 10, 12 months, and there’s no progress when it comes to their case in court.”

Pax Christi New Jersey, a Catholic peace advocacy group, alleges that ICE has responded to the hunger and labor strikes by, among other things, canceling visitation and removing access to phones for large periods of time, leaving lights on throughout the night, and intermittently shutting off water. The group also stated that many people being detained are frustrated with media coverage that downplays, as those on strike stated Friday, the fact that detainees “are doing this to demand freedom.”

In response to a video clip posted Monday on X that showed Kim receiving treatment after getting pepper-sprayed, DHS claimed that “no individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles,” referring to the protesters as “rioters” andimplying that they had assaulted ICE agents.

“GEO Group and CoreCivic and others are making their fortunes” from immigrant detention, Kim said. “It’s coming at our expense.”

In a separate statement, Mullin called the actions of Kim and other New Jersey lawmakers who showed up at Delaney Hall “nothing more than a political stunt” and called the people detained there “murderers, pedophiles, rapists, and drug traffickers.”

Selenia Destefani, the managing attorney for Nova Law Group, which represents dozens of people detained at Delaney Hall, told NBC News on Tuesday that her clients have been given expired meals and food with worms in it. Lawmakers who went inside Delaney Hall backed up those claims.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that the amount of food given to detainees was “very sparse”: “They get up and have breakfast at 4 in the morning, lunch at maybe 12, dinner at 4, and very small portions, so it’s impossible,” Nadler said, “and very often, there are maggots in the food.”

“This isn’t a Holiday Inn. We’re not providing luxury housing. What we’re doing is providing a sanitary place for them to be detained,” Mullin said in a Thursday morning interview on Fox & Friends. “We’re providing them three meals a day. We’re meeting the calorie standard.”

Meanwhile, Kim told me, “GEO Group and CoreCivic and others are making their fortunes” from immigrant detention, “[and] it’s coming at our expense.”

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Trump Vows to Protect the Family Businesses: Crypto and Prediction Markets

In a Truth Social post Wednesday, President Trump typed out a lengthy paragraph on the necessity of protecting the prediction and crypto markets, taking the opportunity to label a slew of Democrats “scum,” call the US the crypto capital of the world, and claim prediction markets are a new form of financial market.

He didn’t say that he and his family are heavily invested in both sectors.

Trump does seem to have conflicted feelings about both crypto and prediction markets—as recently as 2021, he called crypto “a scam,” and his Truth Social post followed a story from the New York Times earlier this week about how Trump has personally complained about prediction markets.

But it’s undeniable he has personal interests.

For starters, he’s literally created multiple crypto businesses—the crypto business World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP meme coin, which have earned him hundreds of millions. And other businesses he owns, like Trump Media + Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, have invested heavily in Bitcoin—actually a major reason that company has lost more than $1 billion in its short life.

Truth Social is even attempting to launch its own in-app prediction market in partnership with Crypto.com, which would create an obvious conflict of interest for the president. Trump’s adult sons are heavily involved in crypto and prediction markets as well: all three are involved in World Liberty Financial, Eric Trump operates a Bitcoin mining company, and Donald Trump Jr. serves as an adviser to the two largest prediction market companies, Kalshi and Polymarket.

Backers of crypto and prediction markets want as little regulation as possible—and, more importantly, they want the regulation to be carried out at the federal level, under the control of Trump-appointed watchdogs like those at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Trump’s Truth Social post also praised the current CFTC chairman, Mike Selig, a former attorney who represented several crypto companies before taking a role as the chair of the SEC’s crypto taskforce, ultimately moving in December to the CFTC.

Critics in state office, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats, have said they will pursue prediction and crypto companies that break the law.

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Elizabeth Warren Has Some Questions for the Private Prison Executive Running ICE

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a few questions for the head of ICE. On Wednesday, the Massachusetts Democrat sent a letter to David Venturella, the new acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, asking him to disclose any financial entanglements with the private prison giant GEO Group, where Venturella previously worked.

GEO Group is a major ICE contractor that operates a network of immigration detention centers, including Delaney Hall in New Jersey, where reports of detainee mistreatment have led to days of protests. The company has told investors that it is “preparing for what we believe is an unprecedented opportunity to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities.”

In her letter, shared exclusively with Mother Jones, Warren asked that Venturella recuse himself from all matters that could benefit GEO Group, such as contract negotiations; that he make his ethics disclosures and related documents public; and that he answer a series of questions to clarify his potential ethics conflicts.

“Americans should not have to wonder whether ICE enforcement priorities are being driven by the financial interests of politically connected detention contractors,” Warren wrote to Venturella. “Your career can be characterized as a continuous, decades-long trip in and out of the revolving door between ICE and the private prison industry.”

Venturella is one among many past and present ICE officials with deep ties to the private prison industry, but his connections are among the most egregious. He spent more than a decade as an executive at GEO Group, eventually managing the company’s federal contracts. Now, as Venturella takes the helm at ICE—he was appointed May 12 and is slated to start the job May 31—GEO Group is having a great year.

“Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history, and we expect 2026 to be a very active year as well,” said GEO Group CEO George Zoley on a May 6 earnings, call touting the “new growth opportunities” that the firm “captured in 2025 and are normalizing in 2026.”

ICE contracts drove a year in which GEO made “up to approximately $520 million in new incremental annual revenues…the largest amount of new business” the company has ever drawn in a single year, Zoley said on that call. With Venturella leading ICE, he could now be in a position to negotiate contracts with his own former employer.

“Given your track record and previous employment at GEO Group, I request that you recuse yourself from all matters that could directly or indirectly benefit GEO Group, including through the award, writing, and execution of federal contracts,” Warren wrote. “Additionally, I request that you make your ethics disclosures, waiver agreements, recusals, and all related ethics guidance public.”

Venturella, legally, will eventually have to release some of this information—as a senior government official, he’ll theoretically be compelled to file a public financial disclosure document within 30 days of his May 31 appointment. There, he’ll list other positions held and money earned. (Venturella’s predecessor, Todd Lyons, filed a very sparse disclosure, featuring only funds related to his spouse’s employment by the Pentucket School District.)

“Communities across the country are increasingly alarmed that the Trump Administration is building a deportation machine designed not only to terrorize immigrant families, but also to enrich a small network of politically connected contractors and former officials,” Warren charged. “Your longstanding ties to GEO Group and the resulting ethics concerns surrounding your appointment only deepen those fears.”

While employed by GEO Group, Venturella made at least $6 million and negotiated major contracts to reopen shuttered facilities. Venturella and ICE did not answer requests for comment prior to publication.

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“Mind-Bogglingly Crazy”: Climate Experts Alarmed by Europe’s Deadly Spring Heatwaves

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

Malcolm Mistry knew it was going to get “very warm, very quickly” on Monday morning but a slow start out of bed delayed his plans for an early game of cricket with his son. It was already 10 a.m. by the time the pair arrived at the sun-soaked nets of their local club in south-west London, and to the embarrassment of the 48-year-old scientist, who played cricket in his youth, his body was struggling after just half an hour of bowling.

Had he continued for another hour, Mistry reckons he would have probably suffered from heatstroke. Had he and his son stayed until noon, they would have found themselves straining their bodies in direct sunlight while a nearby weather station logged the UK’s hottest May temperature since records began.

“I could feel I was panting a bit more heavily,” said Mistry, a leading climate and health researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “That’s when I said to myself: ‘I need to stop here right now, immediately, before something happens.’”

“For vulnerable groups without access to cooling…these temperatures are quite simply dangerous and potentially fatal.”

The dark side of a gloriously hot European summer, excess mortality data compiled by experts such as Mistry shows, is an almost unfathomably large death toll—one that society rarely treats as a crisis. In 2024, summer heat in the EU claimed roughly three times more lives than car crashes, 16 times more than murderers, and more than 10,000 times more than terrorists.

This year, summer highs are striking before spring is even over. It may herald worse heat to come as parts of Europe brace for yet another torrid season of punishing extremes.

Temperatures over the weekend reached dizzying highs in the UK, which shattered its historical temperature record for the month by a full 2 C. The Monday peak of 34.8 C at London’s Kew Gardens was followed by a “tropical night” at Kenley airfield, with lows that did not drop below 21.3 C, and was beaten on Tuesday with a high of 35.1 C in west London. The Met Office said the temperatures would be “exceptional in the UK even in mid-summer, let alone in May.”

In France, where Monday highs surpassed 37.1 C in the south-west, the national warning system was activated for the first time in May since it was introduced in 2004, and seven deaths were linked to the heat. Météo-France said abnormally hot periods had occurred in the month in previous years, “but nothing comparable to this one.” Spain may endure temperatures as high as 40 C this week.

“Early-season heatwaves are especially hazardous because our bodies have not had time to acclimatize,” said Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, an environmental epidemiologist at Imperial College London, who estimates an extra 250 heat-related deaths will have occurred in England and Wales between Saturday and Monday.

“This exceptional spring heatwave is far more than an uncomfortable disruption to our sleep, work or study,” he said. “For vulnerable groups without access to cooling—particularly elderly people, the very young and those with underlying health conditions—these temperatures are quite simply dangerous and potentially fatal.”

The specific trigger for the record temperatures is an area of high pressure trapping heat. It comes on top of a global rise in average temperatures, which has increased the likelihood of extremes and made unprecedented highs an increasingly common reality.

Peter Thorne, a climate scientist at Maynooth University in Ireland, said: “We know beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the climate crisis had made heatwaves such as the latest one stronger and more likely. “But nevertheless, many of the records being set, particularly in the UK and France, are mind-bogglingly crazy.”

“This latest heatwave in Europe is a brutal reminder of the spiraling impacts of the climate crisis, both human and economic,” Simon Stiell, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary. “The main culprit is the world’s addiction to burning coal, oil and gas, and destroying forests. Many other parts of the world are also getting hit hard, such as India and other parts of Asia. The science is clear that human-induced climate change is making these heatwaves more frequent and extreme.”

“This latest heatwave in Europe is a brutal reminder of the spiraling impacts of the climate crisis.”

Farmers across the continent have begun to sound the alarm over weather projections in recent weeks, with a regional lobby group in the Netherlands recently warning of stress from prolonged heat and drought. Last month, the young farmers association in Aragón, in Spain, warned of a possible “catastrophe” for cereal crops because of extreme heat and lack of rain.

Scientists have warned that El Niño, a warming weather pattern projected to return in a particularly potent form this year, could lead to even hotter temperatures in 2026. Current projections foresee it reaching moderate strength in the summer and peaking toward the end of the year, though official scientific bodies have warned that projections made before the end of spring are subject to great variability.

“What matters much more than hype around an upcoming El Niño is that we have permanently shifted the climate,” said Thorne. He compared it to walking into a casino and rolling a seven on a six-sided dice.

“I expect numerous notable extremes in Europe this summer because that is our new reality—but exactly what, where, when and with what impacts is not predictable,” he added. “But if you don’t lose this time, there is always next year. And coming back to the casino analogy, in the end the house always wins.”

Simon Stiell, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, said: “This latest heatwave in Europe is a brutal reminder of the spiraling impacts of the climate crisis, both human and economic. The main culprit is the world’s addiction to burning coal, oil and gas, and destroying forests. Many other parts of the world are also getting hit hard, such as India and other parts of Asia. The science is clear that human-induced climate change is making these heatwaves more frequent and extreme.”

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They’re All Ken Paxton Now

When President Donald Trump endorsed Texas attorney general Ken Paxton earlier this month in his race to unseat four-term GOP Sen. John Cornyn, it fell to Lindsey Graham—as it so often does—to say the loud part loudest.

Sure, Cornyn is Graham’s colleague. And Paxton is a scandal-plagued hack lawyer who has been impeached by members of his own party; forced to take remedial ethics classes; admitted to breaking securities law; reported to the FBI by his employees; investigated by own his state bar association; and whose wife has filed for divorce on “Biblical grounds.” But what Graham actually feared about the prospect of Paxton winning their primary was telling. “I think we’ll win Texas no matter what,” the South Carolina senator told reporters. “The truth of the matter is, Paxton will cost more money.”

For now, it’s Cornyn and his national Republican allies who have just lit giant bags of cash on fire, spending at least $92 million to produce the single worst primary performance for an incumbent Senator in almost fifty years. Next up for Republican funders afterPaxton’s victory on Tuesday is an expensive general-election against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico that could help decide control of the chamber.

Paxton’s win was not surprising, with Trump’s late endorsement perhaps more a reflection of the underlying realities than a determinative factor itself. But the margin was nonetheless stunning. Paxton won Republican voters by nearly two-to-one. Of the state’s 254 counties, all but one went for the AG. The exception was tiny Kennedy County—Cornyn carried it 6 votes to 2.

The GOP’s Texas nominee is remarkable for his willingness to do what is asked regardless of what might be proper.

Incumbents almost never lose like this. But it’s not even the only time it’s happened this month. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who angered Trump by voting for conviction at the second impeachment trial, recently became the first incumbent senator to finish outside the top two in a primary since the 1940s, according to the Downballot. Last week, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie lost by nine points after bucking Trump on the Epstein files and the Iran war. Before that, the president helped take out six Republican legislators in Indiana who had blocked his push to redraw the state’s voting maps. Trump is more unpopular than he’s ever been in the general electorate. But among Republican primary voters, the bond has never been tighter.

Trump has always hovered over the Texas race in instructive ways. Cornyn and his supporters spent most of last year running a series of extremely blunt and ultimately kind of amusing attack ads with the goal of tanking Paxton’s numbers and scaring the president away. After the first round of the primary, when Cornyn unexpectedly came out on top in a three-person field, Trump said he was going to endorse one candidate soon and ask the other candidate to drop out, so the party could unite against Talarico. Paxton was quick to say that he would consider dropping out if the Senate would pass the SAVE Act, an omnibus voter suppression and election-malfeasance bill that’s somehow also anti-trans. The SAVE Act didn’t pass and Paxton’s bluff was safe—and in the end, Trump took another month to endorse.

Cornyn’s trajectory is instructive, although there are vanishingly few pre-MAGA Republicans left to take note of it. He was a less partisan attorney general than Paxton, in his previous life in Austin. In his current one in Washington, Cornyn passed a modest, bipartisan gun control law after the massacre in Uvalde, and called Trump “reckless” after January 6th. A lot of people in the chamber seemed to respect him. There is not even a billow of smoke about a messy personal life. But there has also probably never been a point in the last two years of Trump’s rule where anyone has thought, Well, John Cornyn will put a stop to this. He, too, told a story about what MAGA does to Republican officeholders, about how people who might know better simply find a different version of themselves. When Democrats in the state escaped to Illinois last summer to deny quorum, it was Cornyn who suggested the FBI be used to track them down. This was the fallacy of his campaign—that in order to stop Paxton, he must essentially become him. But there was no substitute for the real thing.

As I explained in a profile of Paxton several years ago, the newly minted Republican nominee embodies something essential about the GOP in the age of Trump. He is remarkable not for his smarts or charisma, but for his willingness to do what is asked regardless of what might be proper. Shame can only hold you back. Under Paxton, the AG’s office has been a fully weaponized agency, that has launched frivolous but harassing investigations of voting rights groups and immigrant aid organizations; targeted Trump critics and Democrats; and built the legal foundation for overturning a presidential election. He has been elected over and over again by running against the enemies of Donald Trump and Christian nationalists—a Jewish Republican speaker; business-minded Republicans in the state legislature; a Bush scion; and now a white-haired elder statesmen who looked like someone who might broker a grand bargain even if he never really did.

It’s fitting that when Paxton was impeached in 2023, it was for allegedly using his office to benefit the interests of a single donor. While he was acquitted by the state senate and has denied wrongdoing, that kind of concierge service is the secret to his staying power. Increasingly, it’s just how you get ahead in Republican politics—not by blocking and tackling, or constituent services, or quietly building a reputation, but doing what is asked by the big guy.

Trump is who they want to be—saying and doing what he wants, making deals, getting rich. But Ken Paxton is all that most of them are: A bad lawyer looking to get ahead, background music in someone else’s story. After all, the Senate Republican caucus already includes two other former state attorneys general who signed the Texas AG’s shoddy brief seeking to throw out the results of the 2020 election. Graham and the rest will welcome him, even if it costs $100 million to get him there, because whoever was left of the old guard has retired or been forced out. There’s no more delusion about what a Republican senator is or needs to be in Trump’s second term: They’re all Ken Paxton now.

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What the Hell Is That Thing

At first, when I saw these photos of curling scaffolding outside the White House, I thought construction was beginning on the Trump Arch. That assumption, however, shows my limited fluency in Donald Trump’s vanity projects.

This is actually something else entirely: a tarantula-like stage being built for the president’s birthday cage fight extravaganza, called UFC Freedom 250. The fights, which will be part of Trump’s America 250 celebration, will reportedly cost $60 million. Trump announced the event last year during a visit to the Iowa State Fair. This summer, it’s happening for real, featuring boxers Ilia Tupuria and Justin Gaethje.

Construction continues for the upcoming UFC match alongside the ballroom addition on the South Lawn of the White House on May 26, 2026 in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump is hosting a UFC match on the White House grounds in honor of the 250th anniversary of the United States.Kevin Dietsch/Getty

Oh, you didn’t realize a cage fight was happening at the White House soon? Neither did many of us. Here is a list of things that people at the Center for Investigative Reporting’s New York office think the arena, at least in its current iteration, resembles instead:

1. Alien egg
2. Elon Musk’s first installation on Mars
3. Mall bungee jumping setup, near the food court, right around the corner from Claire’s, probably smelling faintly of cheese.
4. Rollercoaster, but little
5. Church carnival in a parking lot
6. The millionth Transformers film
7. The launch celebration for a new and improved NuvaRing. This one is sort of high-concept, and I don’t really understand it, but I believe my colleagues and here’s a link where you can judge for yourself.
8. St. Louis Arch (a.k.a The Gateway Arch, but a Lego Technic version.)
9. McDonald’s Arches.
10. Installation purpose-built for a mid-sized city’s bid to host the Olympics

The arena scaffolding looms over the White House. Kent Nishimura/Getty

I’m no architecture critic, so there’s not much else for me to add here. If tickets to the fight didn’t (reportedly) cost $1.5 million, I’d check it out. I think the Transformers movies are pretty neat, and I think that there are many worse things the president could be wasting his time on than a UFC fight.

I want to bungee jump off the Freedom 250 scaffolding. Kevin Dietsch/Getty

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Fuel and Sewage Leaks Have Made the Potomac One of America’s Most Endangered Rivers

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

The warning signs were years in the making. And yet, regulators failed to heed the writing on the wall, according to Dean Naujoks.

An investigator with the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, Naujoks spent three years documenting what he calls a systemic failure that culminated in dual environmental catastrophes now threatening the health of the entire Potomac River system, which is already stressed.

In January, a 60-year-old sewer pipe known as the Potomac Interceptor, running along the Maryland shoreline of the Potomac, collapsed near the Clara Barton Parkway corridor in Montgomery County, releasing an estimated 243 million gallons of raw sewage into the river over approximately three weeks.

But even before that spill, another crisis had already begun to unfold elsewhere in the watershed. At Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County, a fuel system failure on Dec. 11 led to thousands of gallons of jet fuel entering the headwaters of Piscataway Creek, a tributary that feeds directly into the Potomac. The leak continued for months before state regulators were notified.

Stretching more than 400 miles, the Potomac River is a source of drinking water for more than 5 million people in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. In April, American Rivers, a conservation nonprofit, named it the most endangered river in the country, citing both the sewage spill and the rapid expansion of data centers.

Piscataway Creek, an 18.6-mile tributary of the Potomac, begins at the edge of Joint Base Andrews and slips back into the Potomac at Fort Washington Park. Its name derives from the indigenous Piscataway people, who’ve stewarded these waters for thousands of years and maintain a living relationship with the creek and the river to this day.

Naujoks believes neither crisis happened in a vacuum.

He first began tracking contamination in Piscataway Creek around 2022, after reports emerged of tainted fish. A researcher named Pat Elder, Naujoks said, who worked for an organization called Military Poisons, which investigates PFAS contamination at military bases across the country, initially raised the alarm.

A US Geological Survey employee collects water samples on February 18 after a sewage leak released 243 million gallons of wastewater into the Potomac River.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty via Inside Climate News

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are chemicals used in products ranging from kitchen items to military firefighting foam and are linked to cancers, immune disruption and reproductive harm.

When representatives from the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) tested the creek, they found the highest PFAS levels in any fish in any stream in the state. Among species tested was a sunfish from the creek that registered PFAS levels 1.4 million times higher than the EPA’s own standard for safe drinking water. The source of the contamination was the military’s practice of dousing jet fuel fires with firefighting foam laced with so-called “forever chemicals.”

Established in August 1941 and spanning roughly 6.8 square miles, Joint Base Andrews is a federal Superfund site that has been subject to cleanup efforts for decades. The US Air Force first released a report on PFAS at the site in 2018.

It took until 2023 to obtain the first fish consumption advisory from the state, Naujoks said. Even then the warning, posted online and in press releases, had limited reach among the shoreline communities that depend on the creek for subsistence fishing, he said.

“There’s a fish consumption advisory, but none of them know about it…it’s not like there are signs up,” he said. “A lot of these people are subsistence fishing…poor Black, Latino, Korean, Asian families…and they’re just filling the buckets up every spring.”

Once word of the contamination got out, public pressure increased. In April 2025, after years of advocacy, state officials finally organized a public forum to address concerns about Piscataway Creek and Joint Base Andrews. But Naujoks described the event as structured to avoid accountability rather than encourage it.

Instead of a traditional question-and-answer session, the forum included multiple information stations in a crowded room, making it difficult for residents to ask direct questions.

Federal funding for cleanup efforts has been inconsistent. A $2.7 million allocation for remediation at the base was eliminated at the beginning of the second Trump administration, according to Naujoks.

He has since contacted a criminal investigator about the military’s handling of the site’s contamination, arguing that the case may warrant a broader environmental investigation. Naujoks said the state and federal regulators should take action against the base for its failure to report the leak in a timely manner. “That’s what should be happening under the law,” he said.

A fuel system at the base failed a precision tightness test on December 11, 2025, according to MDE, more than three months before state regulators were notified of a potential spill.

“On March 23, 2026, the state received its first notification of the incident,” MDE said in an emailed response to Inside Climate News. “[Joint Base Andrews] reported to the National Response Center that an oil sheen and petroleum odors were observed in Piscataway Creek.”

Chaired by the EPA and staffed by the US Coast Guard, the National Response Center operates around the clock and is the designated point of contact for reporting oil, chemical, radiological and biological discharges into the environment across the United States.

Of the estimated 32,000 gallons of jet fuel that leaked, only 10,000 gallons have been recovered. The remaining 22,000 gallons entered the environment.

Although the base is a federal property, MDE has enforcement authority. “We have authority under state environmental regulations and law to take enforcement action, including potential penalties,” the department said in its comments. “The base is responsible for reporting discharges immediately and is also responsible for containment and remediation.”

In an emailed comment, a Joint Base Andrews spokesperson confirmed that approximately 22,000 gallons of jet fuel entered the environment, an estimate derived from the monthly fuel inventory report received on April 8. “At this time we do not know what amount may have entered Piscataway Creek,” it added.

“Water is not merely a luxury or a convenience to all people but rather the most important nutrient for life itself.”

The base said it is conducting joint water sampling with MDE, with results from April 13 and April 20 showing petroleum constituents trending downward. A more precise estimation of the spill’s scope is still under investigation, the base said.

Members of Maryland’s congressional delegation sent two separate letters demanding accountability: one to the Secretary of the Air Force regarding the fuel leak and another to DC Water concerning the Interceptor collapse.

“At a time when we need to be doing all we can to protect and clean up our waterways, these spills are taking us in the wrong direction,” US Sen. Chris Van Hollen said in a statement to Inside Climate News. “They are putting even more strain on our already overburdened waterways—hurting our environment and the lives and livelihoods that depend on them.”

Van Hollen’s office said the Air Force had yet to respond to the delegation’s letter, and had still not identified the source of the fuel leak.

US Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, in an emailed response, said the focus must remain on stopping future leaks, while acknowledging the disproportionate burden carried by communities with the least political recourse. The families suffering most—subsistence fishing households and lower-income residents in Prince George’s and Charles counties—had the least say in decisions about military base oversight or utility infrastructure, she said.

In an emailed statement, the EPA said it had accomplished its remediation goals related to the Potomac Interceptor collapse and that water quality recreational advisories had been lifted across DC, Virginia, and three Maryland counties. Regarding the jet fuel leak, the agency said it deployed personnel to assess Piscataway Creek and found the containment measures were working as intended. MDE was overseeing the cleanup conducted by the Air Force, but had not requested additional help from EPA, according to the agency.

The contamination has had consequences for the communities downstream of Joint Base Andrews.

The Piscataway Indian Nation, whose ancestral connection to the creek’s waters stretches back more than 15,000 years, issued a formal statement following the Interceptor collapse, signed by 29th Hereditary Chief Mark Tayac.

The Nation described the sewage spill as a “preventable, and yet seemingly inevitable” disaster that had since curtailed its members’ ability to fish, hunt, gather traditional foods, prepare healing medicines and make cultural items. “Water is not merely a luxury or a convenience to all people but rather the most important nutrient for life itself,” the statement said.

The Nation noted that fecal bacteria levels remained 2,700 times the safe limit as of early February, and that scientists had found unsafe levels of MRSA, a powerful, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, in the river. The statement warned that the sewage spill could affect shellfish harvesting more than 50 miles downriver from the spill site.

The sewage and fuel spills are further stressing the already vulnerable river.

Asked about the absence of advisory signage at known subsistence fishing locations on Piscataway Creek despite years of documented contamination, MDE said it was in the process of updating signs and noted there were “only two locations in Piscataway Creek that can accommodate signage.”

Repair work continues on the broken section of the Potomac Interceptor on February 16 in Cabin John, Maryland.Chip Somodevilla/Getty via Inside Climate News

Don Boesch, a marine scientist who has monitored the Potomac estuary for decades, said the sewage spill’s long-term impact on the river’s oxygen levels and the prospect of fish kills would depend largely on summer water discharge volumes and that “it will be hard to distinguish any effect of the sewer line break this year, much less into the future.”

But he directly addressed the institutional failure behind the sewer pipe collapse. DC Water had known for years that the Interceptor was at risk of failure, Boesch said, and yet deferred repairs. Investments in advanced wastewater treatment had been steadily shrinking the Potomac’s seasonal dead zone, he noted, making the spill’s disruption of that progress all the more consequential. “We must maintain fail-safe infrastructure to ensure the effectiveness of these sizable investments,” he said. “That’s the lesson from this year’s entirely preventable disruption.”

Van Hollen’s office said the Trump administration had proposed a 90 percent cut to the State Revolving Fund—the primary federal mechanism for water infrastructure investment—in its FY2027 budget, a proposal Congress had rejected in the FY2026 spending bill but that remained a live threat.

Naujoks is demanding a full investigation of the PFAS contamination and sampling of every creek and tributary draining from Joint Base Andrews, not just Piscataway Creek, which is the only waterway publicly known to be affected.

He has already contacted a state criminal investigator about the failure to disclose the leaking jet fuel, arguing that months of silence between the fuel system failure and the report to regulators merit a criminal investigation. “Did somebody commit a crime for not reporting this?” he said. “That needs to be investigated.”

He said he is watching whether state lawmakers have the appetite to compel MDE to conduct that sampling before the remedial PFAS investigation, which is not expected to conclude until 2029, runs its course.

“It just doesn’t surprise me,” he said of the base’s conduct, “because it’s Prince George’s County, where they’ve gotten away with this shit for a long, long time.”

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Oh Goody, a Trump Official Once Called Ebola a “Scam”

The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda is one of the largest in recent history. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been nearly 1,000 suspected cases and more than 200 suspected deaths. The disease is spreading quickly, and public health workers say they have struggled to contain it because funds for the US Agency for International Development and other aid efforts have been cut by the Trump administration.

The US State Department insists that President Donald Trump’s cuts did not contribute to the delayed response to the outbreak. Tommy Pigott, a spokesman, told the New York Times last week, “It is false to claim that the USAID reform has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ebola.”

But in March 2025, Nicholas Enrich, then an acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, testified before Congress that funding had been frozen, protective equipment could not be accessed, and an agency leader had characterized an Ebola outbreak in Uganda at the time as a “scam.”

Enrich told the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs that in February, his requests for funds to address Uganda’s ongoing Ebola outbreak had fallen on deaf ears. Tim Meisburger, who was then the head of USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, Enrich testified, “specifically noted that Ebola was a ‘scam’ because there had only been ‘one death.’” Enrich attempted to “explain that Ebola was still in an incubation period, and that we should see the response through,” but to no avail. Instead, he continued, his superiors decided to “deprioritize activities related to neglected tropical diseases, MPox, Polio, Ebola, and any monitoring and surveillance activities.”

Meisburger had previously made headlines in 2021, when he was serving as a deputy assistant administrator at USAID’s Bureau for Development, Democracy and Innovation. According to the Washington Post, he had told fellow staffers during a video call that the January 6 Capitol insurrection was caused by “a few violent people” and that “several million” others had been protesting peacefully. He was dismissed from his position after those comments came to light, but he was brought back into public office during Trump’s second term.

According to Enrich, the other high-ranking official present at his meeting with Meisburger was an assistant to the administrator for global health, Mark Lloyd, who also has a history of making controversial statements. When Lloyd was named USAID’s religious freedom adviser at the end of Trump’s first term in 2020, the Washington Post reported on Islamophobic comments he had previously made on social media, including calling Islam a “barbaric cult.”

As of June 2025, Meisburger had reportedly taken a new role with the Peace Corps, while Lloyd is still with USAID’s Bureau of Global Health. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Around the same time that Enrich was meeting with Meisburger and Lloyd, SpaceX head Elon Musk, who was then leading Trump’s US Department of Government Efficiency, took to X to brag about gutting USAID. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he tweeted in February. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

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Why Conservatives Are Trying to Kill the Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act is widely considered one of the most effective laws in prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. One of its key provisions has long allowed states to take race into account when drawing voting maps to ensure that nonwhite voters have electoral power. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court narrowed that provision. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the court’s decision as the “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

Jamelle Bouie, a political columnist for the New York Times, often analyzes today’s political stories through the lens of a historian. He’s written about why the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision to exclude African Americans from becoming citizens still matters today and how the Trump administration’s war on the federal government is similar to the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” campaign. And he’s also examined the conservative movement’s now-successful effort to dismantle the Voting Rights Act.

“The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country,” Bouie says.

On this week’s More To The Story, Bouie and host Al Letson talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been defanged by the Supreme Court, why the Democratic Party is made up of “a bunch of weenies,” and why he believes the country is experiencing a constitutional emergency.

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

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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White House Seeks Gag Order For All Federal Workers

In an attempt to stop federal workers from sharing information with journalists, the Trump administration may soon ask them—all two million of them—to sign non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs.

A draft document shared Tuesday by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) outlined a set of civil and criminal penalties the federal government could pursue against any employee who breaks their NDAs and shares “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” about their job.

It’s not unheard of for federal employees to sign legally binding NDAs—covert operatives, for example, have signed them for decades. But for practical, ethical, and legal reasons, NDAs are a relative rarity in the public sector; they’re better known for their starring role in the broad universe of private-sector litigation. There, they are weapons celebrities and public figures wield against each other—essentially reputation management tools. Donald Trump himself has historically been fond of NDAs, paying adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to sign one in 2016, and asking all White House staff to sign them in 2018. White House Counsel Don McGahn initially “refused to draft or distribute” those agreements “because he did not think they were enforceable.”

A blanket NDA across the federal government would be even more difficult to enforce, legal experts say. “The Supreme Court upheld, for example, non-disclosure agreements for a CIA agent,” said David Loy, legal director at the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit free-speech group. “But to the best of my recollection that has never been extended to garden-variety government workers.”

An Office of Personnel Management media relations officer wrote in an email that the agency aims to stem the tide of government leaks, which are “disrupting agency operations and eroding trust across government.”

Those leaks included “the release of personal information belonging to approximately 4,500 ICE employees,” the release of planned ICE operation information, and “unauthorized disclosures from Federal employees divulging the secret U.S. raid on Venezuela prior to it occurring.”

To some press freedom advocates, these exact examples show that a government-wide hush order would be counterproductive.

“Aggressive efforts to stifle interactions between government employees and journalists ultimately threaten the public’s access to newsworthy information,” Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. “The reporting identified in the draft notice itself illustrates the importance of journalists being able to talk with federal officials about issues across government.”

In its press release, OPM claimed its NDA would be “fully consistent with existing whistleblower protections under federal law,” and that signing it would supposedly be optional. But the category of “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” contained in the draft documents is remarkably broad—and open to some interpretation.

“Even if the NDA does not impose new restrictions on its face, it could still chill protected speech if employees are led to believe they cannot discuss anything related to their work,” Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Senior Attorney Greg Greubel said. On its face, the NDA’s only enforceable parts are already covered by confidentiality obligations that have always come with working for the government. “So the issue is less the NDA’s text than how agencies implement and communicate it,” Greubel said.

“To leak out the notes of a meeting is not the same as leaking the nuclear codes, right?” said Loy, of the First Amendment Coalition.

Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said that the legality of the NDAs depends on exactly how broad they are. “If the NDA basically just duplicates duties of confidentiality that public employees might already have, then there really isn’t an issue here,” Levinson said. “On the other end of the spectrum, there is an issue if the administration wants this NDA to act as a catch-all gag order.”

Some federal employees’ advocates fear that might be the case. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees—the union representing over 800,000 federal employees and DC government workers—wrote in a statement that “federal employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they accept federal employment, and the public has a right to know about this administration’s abuses.”

“Federal agencies already have extensive policies and procedures in place for preventing the unauthorized release of classified or privileged information,” Kelley added. “This proposed rule sweeps in an extraordinarily broad category of information, extending restrictions to the very material the public relies on to learn when an administration is causing harm.”

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Why Billionaires Pay Much Less Tax Than the Average American

This story was originally published on Gabriel Zucman’s substack, to which you can subscribe here (for English) or here (for French).

Last week, Jeff Bezos made an unexpected contribution to the debate about taxation in the United States, claiming that billionaires like himself pay a lot of tax and that it would be pointless to ask them to pay more.

Coming from someone who, famously, paid zero income tax in 2011 and even received a tax credit for his children, this predictably did not go very well.

But it’s not just billionaires like Bezos, with a clear interest in maintaining the status quo, who express this sentiment. There is a common view that the US tax system is progressive, that the super-rich must pay a lot of tax and the working class does not contribute to funding the government.

So it’s worth looking at what the research says on this issue. My colleagues and I have spent several years trying to assemble the most comprehensive estimates of who pays the taxes in the United States.

One myth worth dispelling is the notion that the superrich pay a significant amount of tax.

To begin with, it’s worth dispelling a common myth. Contrary to what we often hear, the working class pays a lot of tax in America. Bezos, echoing conservative commenters, claimed last week that the top 1 percent pays 40 percent of taxes and the bottom 50 percent only 3 percent.

But this claim is misleading. It captures just one tax —the federal income tax—and ignores all the rest: payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise duties, etc., many of which are regressive.

If one takes a comprehensive view of taxation in the United States, here’s the picture that emerges: All social groups pay broadly the same effective tax rate today—around 25 percent to 30 percent of income, including all taxes—with billionaires having the lowest tax rate: 24 percent on average in 2018–20.

The figure depicts the US average tax rate by income groups from 1950 to 2018. All federal, state, and local taxes are included. Taxes are expressed as a fraction of pretax income. P0-10 denotes the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution, P10-20 the next 10 percent, etc. Saez and Zucman (2020)

Working class people significantly contribute to funding American society today. Payroll taxes and consumption taxes absorb a high fraction of their income. For the middle class, the income tax starts kicking in on top of these. And for the rich, the corporate tax becomes significant.

Of course, low-income Americans also receive government transfers. If one views these transfers as a “negative tax” (which is problematic for the reasons explained in this article), then the tax rate of the working class falls.

But the tax rate of the middle-class barely changes. No matter how one looks at it, billionaires pay much less tax than the average American.

The second myth worth dispelling is the notion that the superrich pay a significant amount of tax. The case of Bezos himself is a good illustration of why that is not the case.

Based on public data, it is possible to estimate Bezos’s total effective tax rate: the total amount of tax he pays personally plus indirectly through Amazon, relative to his income (not including unrealized capital gains).

Bezos’s total effective tax rate was just 15 percent in 2018. Meanwhile, the average person in the US pays around 30 percent of their income in taxes.

Data from publicly available sources.Saez and Zucman (2023)

More broadly, if one looks at the 400 wealthiest Americans, recent research shows that billionaires tend to have low individual income tax rates.

Simply put, the ultrawealthy can easily structure their wealth so that this wealth will generate little—sometimes even no—taxable income. Hence no income tax owed. And things are getting worse: The effective tax rate of billionaires has fallen sharply after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018.

In a context where billionaire wealth is booming, this deprives governments of very significant revenue. And even more importantly, it fuels the rise of inequality—or rather, the rise of plutocracy, which now far exceeds its Gilded Age peak.

In 1910, the top 0.00001 percent wealthiest Americans—who became known as the Robber Barons, extracting immense wealth from their monopolies, free of tax—owned wealth equivalent to 4 percent of US national income.

Today that same fraction of the population —which now includes 19 households – own the equivalent of 14 percent of US national income in wealth.

It is high time we fix this anomaly.

This chart shows the evolution of the wealth held by the richest 0.00001 percent of Americans (that is, the 19 largest fortunes in 2025 and the 4 largest in 1913), expressed as a percentage of US national income. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

Gabriel Zucman is an economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and at France’s École Normale Supérieur whose research focuses on the accumulation, distribution, and taxation of wealth from a historical and global perspective.

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Republican-Appointed Judges Just Gave the Roberts Court a Stunning Rebuke

On Monday, a three-judge federal court panel with two Trump appointees restored an Alabama congressional map with two majority-Black districts for the 2026 midterm elections, finding that another map recently green lit by the Supreme Court intentionally discriminated against Black voters.

The same panel had already concluded last year following a full trial that Alabama had discriminated against Black voters by refusing to create a new majority-Black congressional district after the Supreme Court ordered it to do so in its 2023 Allen v. Milligan decision. The high court’s conservative majority, however, abruptly reversed that order in the wake its April Louisiana v. Callais decision that gutted the Voting Right Act, and allowed Alabama to use a map with only one majority-Black district for November’s midterms, even though the state’s primary was only a week away and the three-judge panel had invalidated that map based on an exhaustive review of the evidence leading to the conclusion that the legislature had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. It asked the lower court to reevaluate its ruling in light of Callais.

But in a stunning rebuke of the Supreme Court, the panel, made up of three judges nominated by Republican presidents, reached the same conclusion it had before. “Ultimately, we cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the judges wrote in a unanimous opinion. “We do not lightly intrude in state affairs, but our previous review of the undisputed evidence left us in no doubt that Alabama’s legislatively enacted plan (the ‘2023 Plan’) intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution. Our re-examination in light of Callais yields the same conclusion.”

The panel reaffirmed intentional racial discrimination, writing “we do not find the issue particularly complex or close.”

In Callais, the Roberts Court majority feigned moderation. It called its revision of past precedent an “update” and promised that Section 2 of the VRA, which required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, is still good law—but now in a narrower set of circumstances. But the new standards the opinion set, combined with the six-three Republican majority’s subsequent actions, bely that promise. Callais, on its face, still bans intentional racial discrimination in redistricting. But by vacating the injunction the three-judge panel had issued after justsuch a finding_,_ the high court’s GOP appointees signaled that they intend to use Callais much more broadly than Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion initially admitted.

Tuesday’s decision from the three-judge panel, however, takes Callais at its word. Step by step, it lays out why the Alabama map fails under Supreme Court precedent, the VRA, and the Constitution. It repeatedly reminds readers that the Supreme Court agreed with their finding in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama had violated the VRA_,_ and that Callais claimed not to have upset that opinion. If the Supreme Court meant to use Callais to end all claims of anti-Black racial discrimination in gerrymandering, the panel effectively sends the case back to the high court and tells them, do your dirty work yourself.

In an extensive opinion issued Tuesday with analysis running nearly 80 pages, the panel reevaluates its decision to block the legislature’s 2023 map and keep in place one drawn by a special master under both longstanding Supreme Court precedent and the Callais updates. The first is the Purcell Principle, a Supreme Court doctrine which instructs courts not to interfere with election rules too close to voting because of the chaos it could cause. It’s likely that the high court’s conservative majority may be tempted to allow Alabama to implement its 2023 map with one Black majority district on this premise—that a change from what the court ordered after _Callais_at this juncture would cause too much chaos. If they do so, it would be impossible to square such a decision with how the Court had justallowed Alabama to enact a new congressional map one week before the May 19 primary.

But the panel rejects the idea that using the legislature’s discriminatory 2023 map in place for just weeks is anything but an ill-timed and dangerous upset of the status quo. After all, Alabama voters have now used the court-ordered special master’s plan in 2024 and were starting to again this year. “The Special Master Plan will forestall an expensive, aggressive, and perhaps logistically impossible voter reassignment effort,” the opinion states. “Enjoining the unconstitutional 2023 Plan will improve the administrative situation in Alabama, not worsen it.” If the Supreme Court chooses to block this injunction again on Purcell grounds, the panel warns, the high court justices will be the ones putting a new map in place at the last minute.

The opinion then moves on to the meat of its analysis. In Callais, the 6-3 majority made vote dilution claims under the VRA nearly impossible to prove, requiring a showing of intentional discrimination that cannot be explained away by traditional redistricting criteria or partisan preference. It seemed written as if to make the standard so difficult as to be impossible to surmount. But the panel oversaw an extensive trial, leading to an opinion with hundreds of pages of factual findings that amounted to intentional discrimination. They found race, not partisanship, guided the legislature. And so, asked to reconsider their findings, they unanimously found that their opinion still wins the day.

Under Callais, partisanship functions as a get-out-of-jail-free card. If a legislature claims that its goal is partisan advantage, Callais seems to greenlight maps that effectively mute the political voice of minority voters. Moreover, the GOP justices ruled in a case two years ago that courts must accord legislatures a “presumption of legislative good faith” in their redistricting efforts—yet another obstacle to concluding unconstitutional or illegal racial gerrymandering.

But the Alabama panel found that in this case, neither partisanship nor the good faith presumption could rescue the state’s map from convincing evidence of illegal racial discrimination. “The record now includes extensive lawyer argument about purportedly partisan motives for the 2023 Plan, but there is zero evidence the Legislature enacted the 2023 Plan for partisan purposes,” the panel wrote. In other words, they reject the idea that merely saying this is partisan in court is enough if the legislators never said it at the time. “Alabama cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court found,” the panel wrote. “If such retroactive validation strategies were available, States would be encouraged to govern themselves according to what they think federal law ought to be, not what it is.”

Likewise, the three judges found the presumption of good faith doesn’t get Alabama over the finish line this time. “The unique reality of this evidentiary record overwhelms the strong presumption of legislative good faith,” the panel writes. “If this record does not rebut the presumption, we seriously doubt that it is rebuttable absent a clear and direct expression of invidious discrimination in the text of a bill or official arguments in support of its passage.”

Here, the panel is, at least implicitly, challenging the Supreme Court. Is it merely enough for lawyers to claim partisans goals after the fact? Is the presumption of good faith so strong that it requires ignoring the factual record of a case? Since this case will surely be appealed right back to the Supreme Court, the Republican appointees will have to own this radical rewriting of the law if they want to, once again, block the panel’s decision and let the discriminatory map go into effect.

Finally, the panel likewise looked at its record and reaffirmed its finding of intentional racial discrimination, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. “We are painfully aware of the gravity of our ruling, but in this unusual posture and on this extensive record, we do not find the issue particularly complex or close,” they wrote.

Lawmakers in Southern states have moved to eliminate Black representation with alarming speed following the Callais decision, seeking to erase at least five majority-Black districts in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi. Both the substance and timing of the Callais decision was a form of electoral warfare by the Roberts Court, intervening in the midterms in unprecedented fashion to allow Republican-controlled states just enough time to redraw their maps to take away Democratic seats—but not enough time for Democratic-controlled states to fight back.

That gave a huge boost to Trump’s mid-decade gerrymandering push after Democrats had fought Republicans to a surprising draw. But the Callais decision, combined with an equally shocking ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court invalidating a voter-approved congressional redistricting plan, could shift up to ten congressional seats toward the GOP this November, potentially allowing them to hold the House despite Trump’s deep unpopularity.

But now, at least one conservative Southern court panel is telling the Roberts Court: not so fast.

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