Elon Is Back? (Edit: He Never Really Left.)

Elon Musk, who formally distanced himself from the White House last year, hasn’t stopped trying to influence American politics.

Musk took a step away from the Department of Government Efficiency—the agency he crafted and wielded against long-held federal spending practices. But, contrary to what some expected, that didn’t signal indefinite distance from Republican politics for the South African-born, Texas-voting centibillionaire. To the contrary, campaign finance records and his own social media profiles indicate that he’s ready to wield power whenever, wherever.

His public clash with President Donald Trump also doesn’t appear to be sticking. Musk has dined with the president and first lady Melania Trump and, weeks ago, attended the wedding of Dan Scavino, White House deputy chief of staff, at Mar-a-Lago alongside prominent administration officials.

He’s also been ceaselessly posting political commentary and recommendations on X, which he owns. Including frequent posts about the Epstein files, which he is in but has attempted to distance himself from.

One of his main targets of late has been the SAVE Act, Republican legislation that, if both houses of Congress pass it, could disenfranchise tens of millions of potential voters and uniquely target women through new voter ID requirements.

Republicans have been taking notice.

According to Politico:

The campaign has driven a huge volume of calls to member offices, according to two aides granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, forcing Republican after Republican to publicly state their support for the legislation.

After spending more than $290 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024 cycle, Musk claimed in May that he’d be cutting back. “In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg News at the time. “If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I do not currently see a reason.”

His announcement came after pouring money into the high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court election—to no avail.

Seems like he found a reason.

Musk gave $20 million to the two political groups by the end of 2025. With the midterms revving up, Republicans are considering what an influx of money from Musk, a divisive character due to his history of slashing government funding that affected Americans across the political spectrum, could do for their campaigns.

Talking to Politico, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) worried about how midterms tend to be rough for the president’s party.

“History is not on our side,” Gimenez said. “We’ll take any and all help possible to reverse that trend in history, because I think it’s important for the Republican Party.”

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The US Government Will Not Stop Sharing Nazi Propaganda

This past year, official social media accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies have adopted a distinct voice online. The posts look like memes, utilizing dramatic AI-generated art, general patriotic slogans, and cinematic language about “defending the homeland” and shaping America’s future.

But if you look closer, a pattern emerges.

Many of these phrases, images, and attached media aren’t just regular social media content. They repurpose language, symbolism, and cultural references with direct connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It’s content that experts say is instantly recognizable to those who are in the white supremacist know, but can be largely invisible to everyone else.

So, let’s look at a couple of the more egregious examples that reveal this pattern.

There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.

When reached by email for comment, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said “There are plenty of poems, books, and songs with the same title,” apparently referring to Which Way Western Man?. But a simple search across a variety of online music and literature libraries shows that isn’t necessarily true. One song by the same name did pop up with lyrics like “a war against Antifa, a war against the radical feminists, a war to take back our soul.”

“To cherry pick something of white nationalism with the same title to make a connection to DHS law enforcement. It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she continued.

Just two days after ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, DHS accounts shared a post with a song titled “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” by the Pine Tree Riots. According to a variety of reports, the track is regularly used in white nationalist circles for its evocation of a race war. And it is easy to see that some of these posts imitate slogans nearly identical to those used by Hitler and the Nazi Party. One of the more brazen examples is from the Department of Labor. It features a bust of George Washington super-imposed over a montage of images the administration regularly use to evoke white Western culture, with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” Reports have noted the resemblance to Hitler’s infamous slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,” or “One People, One Country, One Leader.” (The White House and Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment.)

Individually, each post could easily be dismissed, but taken together, they seem to form something more deliberate: a stream of repurposed Nazi propaganda for the everyday person’s feed.

Propaganda scholars say this is how it works. Suggestion, not through obvious symbols, but through repetition, emotional activation, and subtle normalization. Renee Hobbs, a communication professor who studies propaganda and founded the media literacy organization Media Education Lab, describes four pillars: stir emotion, simplify ideas, appeal to fears and hopes, and attack opponents.

It’s been reported that the purpose of these posts is to recruit specific people for specific reasons—a dogwhistle that only some can hear. But, as I point out in my latest video, whatever the actual intention or inspiration behind these posts, the result is a slow drip of extremist rhetoric that becomes familiar, official, and acceptable.

So, when officials like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem begin talking about things like checking papers, many Americans don’t recoil. They cheer.

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“I Love You, So Will You Fix This for Me?”

The first time I noticed it was last month, when he asked for a hug.

And not just any hug. “I could use a HUGE MAGA hug!” he wrote. “I love you. Do you STILL love me?” The love note was adorned with little hearts—and a request that I send him some money.

I didn’t respond.

Two hours later, another email. “Did you block me?” he asked in the subject line. “Are my messages getting through?”

The next day, he sent me half-a-dozen more notes—from two different email addresses.

8:25 am: “I’m attaching the letter I wrote to you”

9:48 am: “Don’t reject me!”

11:53 am: “Please confirm receipt of this email!”

1:25 pm: “Do not freeze me out”

7:27 pm: “I’m asking with an open heart”

10:40 pm: “Are my messages getting through?”

It was starting to sound kind of desperate. “Respectfully I’m asking, DO YOU STILL LOVE ME?” the president wrote. “I might be overthinking things. Here’s why: My love language is MAGA, and I need to confirm one last thing with you before I hit the hay.”

He asked me to fill out a survey and, of course, to send him money. But mostly he just wanted me to know: “I miss you.”

It all began to feel a bit creepy. I started thinking through his past letters; there had been a lot. Did I miss a few red flags?

Maybe it had started the morning of January 7, when he wrote that he’d “set aside some time just for” me, then followed up two hours later with: “Happy Anniversary?” It wasn’t really our anniversary. I guess he was talking about his work anniversary, which was still a couple of weeks away.

Things started getting pretty intense after that.

January 10, 4:09 pm: “Hello? Is anyone there?”

January 12, 3:52 pm: “Ouch, this is starting to hurt…”

January 12, 7:27 pm: “I’m alone and in the dark.”

It went on like this. I don’t know why he sometimes calls me “Bronte” when he tells me he needs me. His son even reached out.

I still haven’t written back. I’m not sure what I’d say. He doesn’t seem to be taking the hint.

February 1, 1:23 pm: “I’m asking with an open heart! – Will you show that you STILL love me?”

February 2, 12:05 pm: “Did you block me?”

February 2, 2:03 pm: “Pick up the phone PLEASE!”

February 2, 4:25 pm: “I love you, so will you fix this for me?”

Now it’s an “emergency,” and he’s quoting love songs.

I hope he’s doing OK. I hope there’s someone he can talk to. Valentine’s Day can get pretty depressing when you’re historically unpopular.

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Russell Vought Raided USAID Budgets He Helped Gut to Pay for His Own Security

Security detail for President Donald Trump’s budget chief and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought is being paid for by what’s left in funding for the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

There isn’t much left of USAID after Trump and Vought worked together to dismantle the agency last year. Just around 100 staff members are left to close out all operations by September.

Still, the White House Office of Management and Budget, which Vought oversees, is allocating $15 million from what remains of USAID operating expenses to pay the US. Marshals Service to protect the political appointee through the end of 2026.

Earlier this year, a man was arrested and is facing attempted murder charges after law enforcement said he showed up at Vought’s Northern Virginia home with rubber gloves and a surgical mask.

Related

The Bureaucrat Who Could Make Trump’s Authoritarian Dreams Real

According to officials within the Trump administration, Vought has received increased threats related to his work since being picked by the president and his control over Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has influenced much of Trump’s second term.

Mother Jones has not seen or confirmed any of these threats.

As ProPublica reported in October, “Vought is the architect of Trump’s broader plan to fire civil servants, freeze government programs and dismantle entire agencies.” He’s overseen tens of thousands of federal employees losing their jobs and was tasked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “oversee the closeout” of USAID, the agency now bankrolling his security detail.

The Trump administration’s decision to cease USAID operations around the world that assist in treating and preventing diseases, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande, will contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people globally, with two-thirds of them being children.

Related

Russ Vought Is Trump’s Shutdown Hero. His Neighbors Think His Work Is “Abhorrent.”

Vought, who said he hopes to put bureaucrats “in trauma,” has even faced protests from his own neighbors—though that pushback consisted of yard signs and messages written in sidewalk chalk and not violent threats, per reporting from Mother Jones’ Isabela Dias.

One such sidewalk read: “I was hungry and the USA fed me. Until Vought cut USAID.”

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Ohio Lawmakers Consider Bill That Would Essentially Ban Solar and Wind Projects

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

It’s not just federal headwinds that threaten to constrain renewable energy development. State and local restrictions on solar and wind are spreading across the United States, too.

Few states highlight this fact as well as Ohio does. The Buckeye State makes solar and wind farms go through extra hurdles that don’t apply to fossil-fueled or nuclear power plants, including counties’ ability to ban projects. Its siting authorities have also deferred to local opposition for renewable energy while granting opponents little say over where petroleum drilling rigs and fracking waste can go.

A bill now working its way through the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature threatens to raise even more barriers for wind power and solar farms. On Tuesday, the Ohio Senate’s Energy Committee held its third hearing on Senate Bill 294. It’s unclear whether the committee will hear additional testimony, so under state law the bill could pass out of committee as soon as its next meeting.

The bill’s primary backers are ​“among the most notorious climate-denial organizations out there.”

The bill would declare it to be state policy ​“in all cases” for new electricity-generation facilities to ​“employ affordable, reliable, and clean energy sources.” But the bill’s definitions not only veer from common usage in ways that would exclude renewables but also threaten to block wind and solar development altogether.

“If Senate Bill 294 were enacted, the Ohio Power Siting Board would be unable to support renewable energy projects under the bill’s restrictive definition. This would place Ohio at a disadvantage,” said Evangeline Hobbs, a deputy director at the American Clean Power Association, in joint testimony for that group and fellow industry organization MAREC Action. ​“At precisely the moment when Ohio needs every available energy source, this bill would tie the state’s hands.”

Based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, SB 294 is sponsored by Republicans George Lang of West Chester and Mark Romanchuk of Ontario.

Louisiana passed a similar bill last year that prioritized natural gas. A pending bill in New Hampshire says that energy sources ​“shall” be reliable, meaning not subject to routine daily weather variations.

Lang praised natural gas during his October 28 proponent testimony, noting the bill is designed to take advantage of the fossil fuel. In contrast, he claimed renewable energy ​“doesn’t meet those qualifications of being cheap. It misses the reliability…And it doesn’t really meet clean yet.” During the February 10 hearing, however, he claimed solar and wind were not really excluded and stressed that ​“there are definitions that have to be met.”

Those definitions, however, uniformly ding renewables.

SB 294’s definition of a reliable energy source would require it to be ​“readily available” with minimal interruptions during high-usage times and for it to have a 50 percent capacity factor. That’s the ratio of its actual power output to the potential maximum. This condition would exclude virtually all land-based wind and solar generation.

SB 294 ​“will destroy competition by declaring renewable energy unreliable, and it’s picking winners and losers.”

A high capacity factor ​“does not mean that an energy source will be available during extreme weather, or even generally available at peak times,” said Michelle Solomon, manager of electricity for Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank. In practice, grid operators ​“consider how combinations of resources on the grid can work together to meet needs.”

Instead of ensuring systemwide reliability, a single-minded focus on a high capacity factor will distort markets and raise costs for consumers, noted Brendan Pierpont, Energy Innovation’s director of electricity.

In fact, a high penetration of renewables can reduce the intensity of blackouts and vulnerability to extreme weather, according to a 2024 peer-reviewed study in Nature Energy. And, in general, a portfolio of energy-generation resources is more reliable than dependence on only a few sources.

“Reliability is really not a characteristic of a certain technology,” said Diane Cherry, MAREC Action’s deputy director. ​“And so taking things out of the ​‘all-of-the-above’ is a problem.”

SB 294’s perspective on what counts as clean energy is even more questionable than its definition of ​“reliability.”

Under the legislation, natural gas is called ​“clean energy,” and language in the bill could potentially even count some coal plants as clean. Meanwhile, solar and wind are only implied to be clean, by way of the bill’s reference to a federal law that deems them so. Nuclear power, which is carbon-free when generated but produces radioactive wastes before and after that point, is also dubbed ​“clean.”

The definition of ​“affordable energy source” likewise diverges from the common meaning of those words.

Data released by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie last October shows land-based solar and wind having lower average lifetime costs, called their ​“levelized cost,” compared with those of other types of power. Storage costs have also dropped substantially since 2020, and will likely fall even more.

Yet ​“the bill seems to want energy that is cheaper than renewable energy, which really does not exist,” Solomon said.

Ultimately, consumers would pay under the legislation, at a time when utility bills are already rising fast. Failure to add more clean energy sources to the PJM Interconnection region will cost the average Ohio customer roughly $6,500 more by 2035 than they would otherwise pay, American Clean Power reported in a Feb. 6 fact sheet.

Overall, SB 294 adds uncertainty for the industry and investors at a time when they want to build projects, Cherry said. Many companies are under the gun to start construction by July 4 or place projects in service by the end of 2027 in order to get federal tax credits.

The bill also does not mention energy storage, which can require permits from the power siting board. Pairing storage with renewables can raise their capacity factor.

“Energy storage will be increasingly critical to grid reliability and cost control,” said Nolan Rutschilling, managing director of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund, calling for the bill to be amended to include storage so that the board ​“has the full toolbox to evaluate projects that can deliver reliability without increasing fuel-price volatility or long-term customer costs.”

For their part, representatives of ALEC and the Heartland Institute gave proponent testimony on the bill last fall.

Both are ​“among the most notorious climate-denial organizations out there that have been funded by fossil fuel interests,” said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute. Yet they also ​“claim to be totally free-market and libertarian,” he added, an ironic point given the bill’s potential to distort the market in favor of fossil fuels.

To that end, SB 294 ​“will destroy competition by declaring renewable energy unreliable, and it’s picking winners and losers,” said Janine Migden-Ostrander, who formerly served as the Ohio consumers’ counsel and is a fellow at the Pace Energy and Climate Center. ​“The legislature should not be deciding this. Let the market decide. If projects are uneconomical, they will not be built.”

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How the NAACP Signed Up to Abolish ICE

In the summer of 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr. took the stage at the NAACP’s 47th annual convention in San Francisco. Speaking at the precipice of the Civil Rights Movement, King cautioned that “the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive.” Over the next decade, Black Americans’ struggle for racial justice would lead to major victories from the workplace to the ballot box. But today, as King warned, the “old order” clings on, and the civil rights gains fought for in the ’60s are under siege.

Since last January, the Trump administration has dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and shuttered civil rights offices across the federal government; rejected the legal framework used to protect marginalized groups’ access to jobs, housing, and education. Last month, Donald Trump even told the New York Times that he thought civil rights amounted to “reverse discrimination” against white people.

A year into Trump’s second term, and with months to go until the midterm elections, I spoke with NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson about Trump’s multifront attack on civil rights protections, federal agents’ violent invasion of Minneapolis, resistance to data centers in Black communities across the South, and the role of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization in this political moment.

Days before we spoke, an ICE officer shot and killed Renée Good in South Minneapolis, just blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020. Johnson, who has presided over the NAACP since 2017, called ICE’s intimidation and harassment of citizens and non-citizens alike, due process violations, and use of racial profiling (greenlighted by the Supreme Court) “something that we have not seen at this level in this country for many, many decades, if ever.”

In July, the NAACP threatened to sue xAI for its use of polluting methane turbines to power its data centers.

The NAACP of the 1950s and ’60s—after leading the charge against segregation in the 1954 landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education—paired its winning legal strategy with support for nonviolent direct action. The year after Brown overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal,” the NAACP provided legal aid to Black Alabamians boycotting segregated buses in Montgomery, and years later, to students protesting discrimination at lunch counters across the South. It even played a pivotal role in planning the 1963 March on Washington. But in the next decade, during the more militant Black Power movement, and into the Reagan years, the organization struggled with the departure of its longtime executive director Roy Wilkins, declining youth membership, and financial challenges.

At the start of the 21st century, the NAACP focused on less confrontational strategies until the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the 2010s—and Trump’s election—threw the organization into a new period of uncertainty. Promising a “systemwide refresh,” it dismissed its 18th president in May of 2017. Six months later, Johnson—the interim president and then-head of its Mississippi conference—was elected to the role.

In Trump’s first term, the NAACP took on high-profile court cases like its successful defense of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and since the start of his second, it’s taken a more offensive posture, disinviting the sitting president from last year’s annual conference for the first time in its history, and stepping up its support for more direct, localized action in Black communities resisting aggressive ICE raids and rapidly expanding data centers.

At the end of January, the NAACP launched a campaign calling on senators to block federal funding for ICE, impeach and prosecute Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and, ultimately, abolish the agency completely.

More and more Americans are calling on the government to do the same. More than six in ten respondents in a New York Times/Siena poll— after the fatal shooting of Good on January 7, but a week before federal agents killed Alex Pretti on January 24—believed that “the tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have gone too far.” (Other polls show weakening support, even among Trump’s base, for the president’s immigration agenda, which may make it increasingly difficult for the GOP to hold on to its narrow majority in Congress.)

The same poll found that voters’ primary concern is the economy, where Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted. Data centers cropping up across the country have sent electricity bills surging, contributing to voters’ anger about the cost of living. As the AI industry booms, voters across party lines are pushing back on data center construction in their communities.

Johnson told me that the NAACP has been “on the frontlines” of the data center resistance, starting with its work in Southwest Memphis, where Elon Musk’s xAI quickly built a data center in 2024, beginning construction last year on a second one on the Tennessee-Mississippi border, with talks of a third in the works. Last July, the organization threatened a lawsuit against xAI over the company’s use of polluting methane gas turbines to power those facilities, which it contends violate the Clean Air Act. Last September, the organization released resources for activists and organizers demanding increased transparency and accountability from the tech giants building this infrastructure.

After Trump’s second victory, Johnson said it was clear to the group he heads that the administration “would pursue a course of mass distraction” to achieve its goals. Trump first deployed these “distraction tactics”—“othering communities and seeking to erode protections” at home and creating conflict abroad—to push through his tax and spending megabill, Johnson said.

Now, as immigration agents swarm blue cities and tensions escalate with countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, “we believe all of these things in sum total are means by which the administration is trying to avoid the accountability around the Epstein files and releasing them, and to mask the current economic predicament”—including prices that, despite Trump’s promises, continue to rise.

In preparation for the midterms, the NAACP has been “actively engaged in the mid-cycle redistricting process, which is unprecedented,” he told me. In addition to filing lawsuits in states like Texas, the NAACP is “working with policymakers in certain targeted states” to protect Black voters’ access to the ballot box. Last fall, the NAACP also launched a mass mobilization in support of California’s redistricting ballot initiative, Prop 50, as I reported for Mother Jones in November.

Nearly 70 years after King’s speech, as the NAACP reaches its 117th anniversary—coinciding with a century of Black history commemorations and the nation’s semiquincenntinal—Johnson told me he believes “we are in a setback,” but also “at an inflection point.”

What’s at stake, he said, is “whether or not we will have a true representative democracy, or something less than that.”

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Early Voting Just Began in North Carolina’s Highly Anticipated Senate Primary

Early voting in the primaries for a hotly contested North Carolina US Senate race began today, with a field that includes a moderate former Democratic governor, a January 6 rioter, and a Trump-backed Republican. Winning the battleground state’s Senate race is vital for Republicans who want to keep the seat—and the Senate—and for Democrats, who hope to flip it.

Roy Cooper, the amiable ex-North Carolina governor with a middle-of-the-road approach to politics, is the anticipated pick for the Democratic Party. Cooper spent nearly 40 years in state politics, and his campaign has raised almost $18 million since launching last summer. If he were to win the race, Cooper would be the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat in North Carolina since 2008. As I wrote last month, Cooper was elected to his first gubernatorial term in 2016 at the same time President Donald Trump won North Carolina.

Former RNC chair Michael Whatley is widely considered the frontrunner in the Republican primary. Though he enters the race with low name recognition compared to Cooper, he also has Trump’s endorsement, with the president promising that Whatley would be an “unbelievable Senator.” This is Whatley’s first time on the ticket, but he previously served as chief of staff for Sen. Elizabeth Dole and as legal counsel for former President George W. Bush during the recount for the 2000 presidential election.

If he does win the whole thing, voters shouldn’t expect Whatley to challenge the president much. At a recent rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (in Cooper’s home county), Whatley told the crowd that they “need a conservative champion, and Donald Trump needs an ally in the Senate.” He told the Washington Post, “I think if I do disagree with [Trump], it’s going to be in private.”

Whatley’s primary challengers, Don Brown and Michele Morrow, haven’t raised nearly as much money, but they could still pose a threat. Brown is a retired Navy JAG Officer who previously ran for Congress in 2024, but lost in the primary. It’s not hard to see where Brown stands on the issues, thanks to the detailed list of policies on his website. Among these policies are 12-year term limits for members of Congress, an elimination of the federal income tax, and the end of the “failure” of the Department of Education “experiment.”

Morrow previously ran for North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction in 2024, where she lost by just a 2 percent margin. She is a registered nurse and former Christian missionary who was at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and has called public schools “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers.” In the past, Morrow promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on social media. She called for the televised execution of former President Barack Obama. She asserted that the “+” in LGBTQ+ stood for pedophilia. On her campaign’s homepage, she claims that she’s “the one candidate Roy Cooper FEARS!”

A January poll from Carolina Forward still shows Cooper leading Whatley, 47 percent to 42 percent, in a potential November matchup. The poll also shows that Whatley will be the likely Republican candidate. Brown, who is his closest opponent, trails 36 percent to 6 percent. There are five other Democratic candidates and three additional Republican candidates, though none of them are likely to be factors in the race.

The start of the primaries launches what’s expected to be a tight, expensive race. Spending is expected to reach anywhere from $650 million to $800 million, according to Politico.

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ICE Wanted This Kansas City Warehouse. The People Resisted and Won.

Federal officials from the Department of Homeland Security were eyeing a Kansas City warehouse for one of their next detention facilities for immigrants. The company that owns the Missouri warehouse, Platform Ventures, announced on Thursday that it is not moving forward with the sale.

The move comes after steep pressure from locals who have been consistently protesting the potential sale since immigration officials toured the facility on January 15.

Platform Ventures said it “is not actively engaged with the U.S. Government or any other prospective purchaser” in a statement to Kansas City Public Radio.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said that while his city welcomed the news, his office is prepared to keep fighting. “A mass encampment warehouse” is “offensive to the dignity and human rights of those who would be detained.”

According to a report from the American Immigration Council, by the end of November 2025, ICE was using 104 more facilities for detention than at the start of the year. That’s a 91 percent increase. The Council report found that the Trump administration’s arrest practices have led to a 2,450 percent increase in the number of people being held in ICE detention with no criminal record.

As DHS continues to expand its existing presence and open new offices around the country, Kansas City residents join other community leaders in Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, Ashland, Virginia, and elsewhere who are fighting back against potential ICE detention centers in their cities.

Terrence Wise, a leader with the activist groups Stand Up KC and Missouri Workers Center, said in a statement that the no-sale wouldn’t have happened without “several weeks of protest and collective action” from locals who “will continue fighting to keep masked, unaccountable federal agents out of our communities.”

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I’m a Minneapolis Postal Worker. This Is What I Saw.

Bianca Sonnenberg’s uniform has become her security blanket. Before ICE arrived in Minneapolis, she would change when she finished her route. Recently, she’s hoped her identity as a US Postal Service worker would protect her from getting targeted by ICE operations. She’s Native American, and over the last few months, she’s heard about ICE detaining Indigenous people in Minneapolis and around the country. It terrifies her.

White House border czar Tom Homan announced today that the Department of Homeland Security will end Operation Metro Surge after months of chaos resulting in DHS claims of more than 4,000 arrests, the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, and immense community resistance.

Sonnenberg spoke to Reveal about the big and small changes she and her colleagues witnessed along their routes in South Minneapolis during the disruptive operation. She spoke from her personal perspective and not as a representative of the USPS.

Her story has been edited and condensed for clarity.

As mail carriers, when we’re on our route for a long time, you start to know your community, so you memorize names. And a co-worker was like, “Alex Pretti’s on my route.”

And so I was like, “Oh my gosh.” He was like, “Yeah, they got a little memorial out there. I feel so bad. He has packages today.”

That almost made tears come to my eyes. It’s so sad how you’re here one second and you’re just gone the next. And you don’t think about that when you are ordering a package. You don’t think, “Oh, I’m not gonna be here to get my package.”

It’s really sad that he was taken and he did nothing wrong. I’ve seen the videos, and he didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t reach for any gun and all the stuff that they’re trying to make him seem like. First of all, they were calling him an assassin…but then it’s, “We gotta go through a full investigation.” How can you say that?

I feel grateful that I got this privilege of being a federal employee. In the daytime, I can go to the store; I can move about my community and not feel like they’re gonna bother me, per se. But I wear my uniform home because I’m too scared not to. I could be targeted.

My mindset is let me get what I need from the store or whatnot before I come home. Because God forbid somebody pulls the Uber driver over and I don’t have my uniform on. I run into the store before I get home, and there’s an operation on the block that I wasn’t paying attention to. I get caught up and they slam me around a little. I’m fragile. I’m 49 years old. I can get bruised. I bruise easily. I don’t want to go through that.

You don’t think about that when you are ordering a package. You don’t think, “Oh, I’m not gonna be here to get my package.”

It’s crazy, because I always say I only fear God, but they have definitely triggered something in me to be more protective of myself and of my surroundings and the people that I care about, including other people on my route.

I’ve been around them for over a decade. Most of them have all been on my route the whole time. So we’re a big village.

Our supervisor let us know (on January 24) that ICE had killed somebody close to the route. She said it happened in front of Glam Doll Donuts. I was like, “Oh my God, that’s my block.”

You could see the yellow tape and the community coming from every direction. I’m hearing the flash-bangs and I’m seeing the smoke.

As I’m delivering, I got a few people saying: “You shouldn’t be at work! You shouldn’t be here! You know that they’re shooting tear gas on the other side of the block.” And I’m like: “Yeah, I know, but I gotta keep doing my job. I may have medicine. I don’t know what I have in my packages.” But that’s my job.

So I go into an apartment building. There are a lot of customers in the hallway, and they’re watching through the windows. I’m like: “You guys gotta stay in here and be safe. That’s tear gas. You don’t wanna breathe that in.” So everybody stayed in the apartment building. I said, “I’m gonna keep going and get this next building done.”

As I went outside, going from one building to the next is about 50 feet, that tear gas got into me. And I’m breathing in and it kind of felt like glass shards in my nose and my throat. I didn’t want to cough right away to breathe it in more, so I just hurried up and got into the next building.

And then just kind of breathed a little bit and I was like, “Oh, man, is this what I’m gonna do?” I was just in shock that this was really happening. There’s some people who probably would say: “Oh, this is a dangerous environment. Let me get off the street. Let me just take care of myself.”

I didn’t feel like that. I felt like a medic in the war. I just gotta make sure all my people are okay. I had to make sure everybody on my route was okay.

In my head, I’m always thinking, this is somebody’s medicine or something that they need. If I don’t get it to ’em today, they’re gonna have to wait till Monday. And that’s just me doing my part that I could at that moment.

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DHS Claims to Be Winding Down in the Twin Cities. Local Leaders Are Still Pissed.

After more than two months of an aggressive—and deadly—occupation of the Twin Cities, top immigration official Tom Homan said during a press conference on Thursday that the Trump administration is scaling back “Operation Metro Surge.” Yet some local officials who have long been at odds with federal leaders aren’t buying it.

Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Immigration enforcement will still continue in the region, Homan also admitted, adding that removing agents depends partly on if “agitators” behave as the administration sees fit.

Homan cited “unprecedented levels of coordination” from state and local law enforcement, as well as elected officials, as one of the main reasons they are reportedly slowing down operations. But that coordination hasn’t been solely friendly. At one point, he said “I have not met with one county jail that says no to us.” But, according to the New York Times, the Hennepin County jail “has not agreed to change its policy of non-cooperation on civil immigration enforcement in any way.”

The announcement follows an aggressive takeover of the Twin Cities by immigration enforcement that included agents fatally shooting Renée Good and Alex Pretti, repeatedly using harmful chemical weapons, targeting operations at schools and on children, and overall creating an environment of fear that led many immigrants to fear leaving their homes. The Trump administration’s action in the area sparked nationwide protests and economic strikes. Homan was sent in to replace Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, who oversaw the majority of the violent operation in the Twin Cities.

Last week Homan announced that the Trump administration was removing 700 immigration agents from the area, yet around 2,000 federal law enforcement officials still remain in the Twin Cities. That’s nearly four times the number of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department.

Aisha Gomez, a Minnesota State Representative, released a statement calling the operation “authoritarianism” and vowed to continue fighting federal officials “until every abducted neighbor is returned to the arms of their family.”

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Trump Plans to Repeal the Finding That Lets the EPA Regulate Climate-Warming Emissions

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

In what is set to be its most audacious anti-environment move yet, the Trump administration on Thursday will roll back the mechanism allowing the government to regulate planet-heating pollution, the White House press secretary has told reporters.

“President Trump will be joined by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to formalize the recession of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding,” Karoline Leavitt said at a press conference on Tuesday. “This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history.”

The finding determined that CO2 and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, establishing a legal basis to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. Its overturning would be a “devastating blow to millions of Americans facing growing risks of unnatural disasters,” said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the environmental advocacy nonprofit National Resources Defense Council.

“Trump and Zeldin are telling our families: we’ll let you get sicker and watch your healthcare costs skyrocket as long as oil and gas CEOs can profit.”

“The Trump EPA is cynically pretending climate change isn’t a risk to Americans’ health and welfare,” said Hankins. “This is the biggest attack ever on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis.”

The rollback is sure to draw legal challenges.

“This isn’t going to stand without a fight,” Hankins added. “The EPA’s slapdash legal arguments should be laughed out of court. We will be seeing them in court—and we are going to win.”

The Environmental Defense Fund has also promised to sue the EPA over the rule, said Fred Krupp, its president**.** Abigail Dillen, president of the green legal organization Earthjustice, also said her group “will see the Trump administration in court..

In a statement, an EPA spokesperson called the endangerment finding “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” and said “hardworking families and small businesses have paid the price” for it.

“EPA is actively working to deliver a historic action for the American people,” the spokesperson said.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office directing EPA to assess whether the endangerment finding should be preserved.

After Zeldin announced the plan to repeal the finding in July 2025, the agency received half a million comments on the proposal. He then submitted the repeal of the legal determination for White House review last month.

Leavitt said on Tuesday the rollback would save Americans $1.3 trillion, but did not explain how officials arrived at that number. Though the new rule may save some corporations money, it could pose trillions in climate damages and healthcare costs, experts warn. The climate rules EPA is targeting could prevent tens of thousands of deaths and save the US $275 billion for each year they are in effect, an analysis by the Associated Press in July found.

Trump’s EPA has also sought a finding that emissions from power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.”

“Trump and Zeldin are telling our families: we’ll let you get sicker and watch your healthcare costs skyrocket as long as oil and gas CEOs can profit,” said Alex Witt, senior adviser at environmental advocacy group Climate Power.

The endangerment finding forms the legal underpinning of virtually all federal climate regulations, including those on vehicles, oil and gas operations, and power plants. But the final rule, Zeldin told the Wall Street Journal this week, will apply only to emissions standards on cars and trucks, not those governing stationary sources such as power plants.

The EPA did not directly confirm the scope of the planned change. The spokesperson said: “The Endangerment Finding is the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new vehicles and engines. Absent this finding, EPA would lack statutory authority…to prescribe standards for certain motor vehicle emissions.”

The agency has separately proposed to find that emissions from power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution” and therefore should not be regulated.

Gretchen Goldman, president of the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions was evident in 2009 and it’s even more undeniable today.”

“EPA has a legal obligation to regulate this pollution under the Clean Air Act,” said Goldman, who previously served in the Department of Transportation and the White House. “The American public deserves a government that will face the challenge of the climate crisis head on with proven policy solutions, not actively serve as agents of destruction by worsening it to boost fossil fuel profits.”

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Why VA Psychologists Are Quitting in Record Numbers

This article first appeared on The War Horse,an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

Each year, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ internal watchdog sends a survey to all 139 of the agency’s medical centers coast to coast with a straightforward question: Which jobs have severe staffing shortages?

In fiscal year 2025, the responses raised alarm: VA health care facilities reported more than 4,400 severe staffing shortages—a 50 percent hike from the previous year.

And once again, the job that topped the list for clinical positions among VA facilities? Psychologists. It’s the same occupation that took the lead spot in 2024 and has been in the top five since 2019.

Despite suicide prevention and veterans’ mental health being one of the VA’s top priorities, there are signs that psychologists and other mental health professionals on staff are reaching a breaking point.

“I loved my veterans and had the privilege of seeing real change in their lives over time,” said Laura Grant, a psychologist who left VA in September last year after nearly a decade on the job. But “burnout increasingly felt normalized rather than addressed.”

Grant was among six psychologists who left the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2025 and told The War Horse in interviews over the past several months that mental health providers are burning out.

Last year, the number of psychologists employed by the VA dropped for the first time in more than a decade. Every fiscal year since 2016, the department has added between 55 and 350 psychologists to its rosters, according to VA workforce records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request. In fiscal year 2025, however, the department lost more than 200.

In the most recent VA Office of Inspector General staffing report, 57 percent of VA health care facilities reported severe staffing shortages of psychologists. Shortages are defined by the government as occupations that are hard to fill, not necessarily positions that are vacant. Psychiatrists were the second most reported clinical occupation for severe staffing shortages at 55 percent of VA facilities.

The shortages aren’t unique to VA; more than 135 million Americans live in an area with a shortage of mental health professionals. And VA says it is currently posting hundreds of job openings for psychologists.

But the psychologists who left VA in the last year told The War Horse that the agency, once renowned for top-tier training—more than half of all US psychologists get training at VA—mentorship, and work-life balance is now one plagued by metrics and pressures to discharge patients more quickly to make room for new ones.

“There was so much I loved about the VA,” said Melissa London, a psychologist who left the San Francisco VA in January 2025 after her caseload doubled over the course of two years. “The [staffing] shortage was constant, but it was never nearly as bad as it was in the past year, or two years, at least.”

A VA spokesman dismissed the criticism, called concerns from former psychologists quoted in this story “unconfirmed hearsay,” and accused The War Horse of trying to make the Trump Administration look bad at all costs, regardless of the facts.

“The number of VA psychologists fluctuates from year to year based on labor market trends and demand for their services,” said Peter Kasperowicz, VA press secretary. “Today we employ more than 7,000 psychologists, which is more than VA had at many points during the Biden Administration.”

But as the number of psychologists declines, the demand for mental health care has continued to rise. VA saw 2.2 million patients for mental health care in fiscal year 2025, according to data obtained by The War Horse. That is a 40 percent increase from a decade ago. Meanwhile, the VA has increased the number of psychologists employed at the agency by only 24 percent since 2016. Psychologists aren’t the only ones who treat veterans’ mental health; some are seen by other providers, such as psychiatrists and social workers.

Despite the staffing shortages, psychologists still have the highest retention rates for surveyed VA employees in the first two years on the job. But a recent report from Democrats on the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs cited interviews with VA employees that indicate an ongoing “exodus” of mental health care providers at some facilities.

In a Senate committee hearing in December, Dr. Julie Kroviak, VA’s principal deputy assistant inspector general, acknowledged the trend. She said surveys found VA mental health providers “are losing clinical staff because of morale.”

Health care providers were protected from layoffs and ineligible for early retirement or deferred resignations when the VA shed more than 30,000 employees last year. VA insists it is prioritizing hiring mental health care providers, and is currently recruiting more than 400 psychologists across the country, said Kasperowicz. This week, there were 171 job postings under the code for clinical psychologist at the Veterans Health Administration in the USAJOBS portal.

However, multiple former VA psychologists told The War Horse they didn’t see evidence during their time on staff that hiring new psychologists was a priority.

A psychologist at the Bronx VA said they left their position focused on suicide prevention research and psychotherapy for veterans transitioning out of the military after their study’s federal grant funding ended. They said they weren’t able to find a new position in research or working with patients at their VA medical center, or to get the medical center director’s approval to get sponsored for a new grant. “There wasn’t any effort to provide me with bridge funding or to figure out how to keep me,” they said.

This psychologist, like some others who spoke to The War Horse, asked to remain anonymous either because they had friends or family who still worked at VA and feared backlash, or because they planned to apply for government-sponsored research grants and were worried that speaking with a journalist could lead to retaliation.

London recalled how difficult it was to hire new psychologists, including during the Biden administration. She cited hiring freezes and having to fight for new staff, even though “it was very clear to anyone in the field that additional staff was needed.”

Even before Trump returned to the White House, psychologists at VA were at a breaking point.

In September 2024, a psychology program manager at the Central Virginia VA Health Care System sent an email to several staff members. The subject: workload and burnout. The importance: high. In the email, the program manager stated that, since there would be virtually no new staff positions in fiscal year 2025, new strategies would be implemented to treat patients. “Effective immediately, we need to cut down on our caseloads, which have grown too large to be manageable,” they wrote.

An excerpt of an email sent by a VA psychology program manager. To read the full email, click here.

These new strategies included ending treatment with all veterans who have been in therapy longer than two to three years, pausing or ending treatment “with people who have not made progress recently and seem to have plateau’d,” telling patients they need to take a six- to 12-month break from therapy to practice skills, and starting all new patients on a short treatment model of six to 15 sessions.

“We just can’t keep seeing everyone in individual psychotherapy for long periods of time,” the program manager wrote. “It makes them dependent on psychotherapy, and it burns us out.”

A veteran, infuriated that his one-on-one therapy was cut off, later discovered the memo and tipped off The War Horse, which obtained a copy through a public records request.

The email may have been well-intentioned for both the therapists and the veterans. In 2024, a study found that when therapists are burnt out, veterans’ mental health care can suffer as well.

But one tactic to avoid burnout and care for more veterans mentioned in the email—the short treatment model of six to 15 sessions—has frustrated patients and providers, The War Horse has found.

And it isn’t unique to Central Virginia. Over the past several years, it has been rolled out at VA medical centers across the country, according to previous reporting by The War Horse.

VA has repeatedly told The War Horse that it does not have a national policy to cap mental health care.

Kasperowicz, the VA press secretary, called it “extraordinarily dishonest of you to take an email from the Biden Administration and try to misrepresent it as something that reflects the Trump Administration’s policies.”

Multiple psychologists in states across the country have told The War Horse they are still under pressure to limit one-on-one therapy.

One psychologist who left the Orlando VA Medical Center last year also said it was frustrating to frequently tell patients they couldn’t schedule future sessions for a month, or sometimes longer. “I felt like a factory worker.”

For several of the psychologists who spoke with The War Horse, the final tipping point came when Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began rolling out initiatives in the late winter and spring of 2025—including reductions in force—that seemed designed to drive employees out. “Recognition for meaningful clinical work felt scarce, while scrutiny and suspicion became more common,” said Grant.

Grant said that one of the several reasons she quit was the agency’s dismantling of DEI initiatives, which she said “were directly tied to our ability to show up authentically, ethically, and competently for a diverse veteran population.”

Kasperowicz said VA is “proud to have abandoned the out-of-touch and divisive DEI policies of the past so we can focus solely on VA’s core mission.”

The return-to-office mandate was also difficult on psychologists, who require privacy to hold sessions with their patients. The psychologist at the Bronx VA said they didn’t have their own office and had to use the offices of absent colleagues to work. They once couldn’t find an empty office and were forced to take a telehealth appointment from their car.

“There’s no respect for what these veterans need, which is privacy…even though I love working with veterans, and I have loved being at the VA for the most part, it was just really demoralizing.”

“There’s no respect for what these veterans need, which is privacy,” they said. “I couldn’t wait to get out, even though I love working with veterans, and I have loved being at the VA for the most part, it was just really demoralizing.”

VA has been taking steps to address staff burnout, including appointing chief well-being officers whose roles are to reduce administrative burdens and improve employee wellness. This month, the American Medical Association recognized seven VA health care facilities through its Joy in Medicine program, which highlights facilities that have met specific program requirements to address physician burnout.

VA’s press secretary did not respond to The War Horse’s request to interview one of VA’s well-being officers, and few of the psychologists who spoke to The War Horse had ever heard of the officers—none had encountered them.

London said that at the San Francisco VA, there were efforts to mitigate staff burnout, like pizza parties. But many of these efforts felt surface-level. “There’s constant jokes about burnout and the memes of the pizza party,” she said, “when what we really need is a new hire.”

The majority of psychologists who spoke with The War Horse now work in private practice, where they can set their own hours and their own rates. And while some still work with veterans, none have joined the VA’s community provider network, which would allow veterans to see them through the VA’s Community Care program.

London and Grant say that issues with payments from insurance contractors and low reimbursement rates are some of the main reasons that private practice psychologists don’t want to participate in the program.

Many of the psychologists said that they would be open to returning to VA one day. One called working with young veterans “the most rewarding clinical experience of my life.” That echoes data published by the department; 69 percent of psychologists who left the agency said they would be open to returning, according to the latest workforce data available.

“I think there would have to be a little bit more respect and empathy and compassion for clinicians and some strategies about burnout,” London said. “But it’s something that I would consider if there was a clear indication that they actually cared.”

This War Horse news story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

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This “Fish-Fluencer” Telling ICE to Fuck Off Is the Best Thing You’ll Watch Today

Nate Pischke has found a uniquely Minnesotan way to protest the ICE surge in Minneapolis, using his platform as a fishing influencer to call attention to what he describes as a federal siege of his hometown.

“I don’t feel comfortable putting out fishing content when, you know, our neighbors are getting kidnapped by goons on the street,” he said. “And so we pivoted quickly to start talking about this.”

Pischke and his collaborator, Erik Sudheimer, have built a small but dedicated following of a few thousand people who tune in to their YouTube show, Shore Lunch With Nate P., for fishing tips, outdoor cooking lessons, and a good amount of profanity-laced laughs.

But that changed when the ICE surge began.

They switched from talking about fishing for northern pike in Lake Bde Maka Ska to addressing what was happening on the streets around it.

“I wish I was giving you an update on fishing or an update on a new hot recipe I’m working on, but I’m not, because my city has been infiltrated,” Pischke said in one of recent video.

He has turned his indignation and outrage about the largest deployment of masked and armed ICE agents in US history into a call for hunters and fishermen to speak out.

“If you don’t think that what’s happening here is a problem, open your eyeballs up and come here, and I’ll buy you a beer. We can talk about it. I’ll show you around. Open invite, and I’ll buy the beers,” he said. “Beers within reason, okay?”

Editor’s note: No Nate Pischkes were harmed in the making of this video.

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Pam Bondi Refuses to Apologize to Epstein Survivors

The House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on oversight of the Justice Department devolved into insults and chaos on Wednesday. One telling example: whether Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Trump administration would apologize to survivors who were named, unredacted, in the department’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation files.

Among the documents released late last month, the Justice Department exposed the names of dozens of survivors, including some who have not disclosed their identities publicly or were minors when they were abused by Epstein. Many survivors remain identifiable as a result of incomplete or missing redactions.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) asked Bondi whether she would “turn to them now and apologize for what your Department of Justice has put them through,” asking the survivors attending the hearing in person to stand up.

“Why didn’t she ask Merrick Garland this twice when he sat in my chair?” Bondi said to Republican committee chair Rep. Jim Jordan as she and Jayapal talked over each other. “I’m not going to get in the gutter with her theatrics.”

Jayapal asks Epstein survivors in hearing room to stand and raise hands if they still haven't been able to meet with Bondi's DOJ. Every single one of them doe. Jayapal then gives Bondi an opportunity to apologize. She responds by trying to attack Jayapal and Merrick Garland but doesn't apologize.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-02-11T15:49:55.015Z

Jayapal wasn’t alone in bringing up how survivors have been hurt following years of abuse and inadequate investigation—and how they’ve been denied a voice in the department’s handling of the investigation and release of the files.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) grilled Bondi along the same lines. “How many lives have been derailed because your department was either sloppy and incompetent or willfully trying to intimidate and punish these ladies coming forward?” he asked.

“Your time is up,” Bondi replied.

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MAGA Absolutely Cannot Let Bad Bunny Go

It has now been several very long days since the Super Bowl and Bad Bunny’s raucous, joyous, extremely popular halftime show, stuffed with celebrities, heartfelt tributes to Puerto Rico and Latino culture, and a pointed listing of most countries in the Americas. Meanwhile, as one cannot help but be aware, at the same time on Sunday Turning Point USA sponsored a stream of Kid Rock in jorts and a fedora for an “alternative,” apparently pre-recorded half-time show. He performed from an echoing warehouse somewhere near Atlanta, alongside musicians who are best described as “names who might appear deep within your Spotify shuffle if you’ve ever listened to new country.” Post-show, Kid Rock has had to devote some time to insisting he did not lip sync, which is always a good sign.

The claim that Kid Rock achieved “cultural victory” over Bad Bunny is a salvo in a proxy war.

The battle, in other words, has been decided. And yet portions of the Trump administration and MAGA fight on, insisting that Bad Bunny has been humiliated, Kid Rock and his jorts have been vindicated, and the whole thing has in fact gone extremely well. In case that doesn’t work, Congressman Randy Fine (R-Florida) is also suggesting the FCC investigate Bad Bunny’s halftime show for vulgarity, as soon as someone in a position of power learns Spanish and can confirm what he said.

In many ways, the disingenuous—and seemingly endless—right-wing reaction to Bad Bunny’s half-time show is a study in the small-scale production of hamfisted disinformation. Take, for example, Trump-allied MAGA propagandist Benny Johnson, who once worked as Turning Point’s “chief creative officer” and who still seems to be allied with them professionally. By Wednesday morning, Johnson had produced a whopping 14 Instagram posts either about TPUSA’s half-time show or about Bad Bunny, along with sending an endless number of tweets and retweets on the subject. His thesis, if it could be called that, is best summarized by one of his tweets from Sunday night:

“The Bad Bunny halftime show was the worst entertainment performance in Super Bowl history,” he wrote. “Woke. Cringe. Unintelligible. Foreign. Boring. Derivative. Preachy. Creatively bankrupt. Worst of all: No songs you can even sing along to—because no songs were in *our* language.”

Johnson went on to declare, “This is an absolute humiliation for the NFL. In contrast, the TPUSA halftime show was just feel-good banger after banger from American artists who love this country and who football fans can relate with. It felt like America. Total cultural victory.” He also claimed that his slain former boss Charlie Kirk was “smiling from heaven” upon the whole affair, a sentiment echoed by Kirk’s wife, TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk. (Kirk didn’t appear to attend the show herself, and hasn’t shared any content from it on Instagram, where she’s usually fairly active.)

Johnson’s claims are, of course, racist and xenophobic, as well as very stupid: Bad Bunny is currently one of the most popular artists in the world, and one of his hit songs is about taking his large number of girlfriends to the VIP section of the club—meaning that “preachy” or “boring” are imprecise adjectives. It is also exceedingly possible to sing along to his songs even if you do not speak Spanish, as an unending procession of TikTok videos will attest. (Also: a lot of people in America do speak Spanish, including Latino Trump voters.)

Johnson’s claim that Kid Rock had achieved “cultural victory” over Bad Bunny is obviously a salvo in a proxy war, an insistence that the MAGA agenda is still popular with some kind of silent unseen majority, and one that invests conservatives with the pop culture relevance they’ve long chased. Alas, they still have a ways to go: Bad Bunny’s halftime show drew a record 135 million live viewers, while Kid Rock’s performance topped out at six million concurrent views; TPUSA’s YouTube channel now shows 21 million total views for the show.

Nonetheless, conservative commentator Glenn Beck called Kid Rock’s show a successful “proof of concept” and claimed it was possibly “the largest live audience” YouTube has ever had. Kid Rock himself shared a screenshot showing his new recording of the praise song “Til You Can’t” is currently in the No. 1 slot on iTunes, with Bad Bunny coming in second. (Meanwhile, on Wednesday, six of the top ten songs on Apple Music in the USA were Bad Bunny’s.)

“The halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American.”

This culture war anxiety was made further clear when Megyn Kelly made an appearance on Piers Morgan’s TV show and promptly had a meltdown when Morgan suggested Bad Bunny’s performance hadn’t been all that bad. “This attitude that you have right here is why you and Great Britain have lost your culture,” she told Morgan. “You ceded your culture to a bunch of radical Muslims who came in and took over, and now it’s gone. We’re not allowing that here. Whether it’s Hispanic, whether it’s Muslim, it’s not happening in the United States of America—that’s why President Trump was elected.”

“Football,” Kelly added, “that kind of football, is ours. They call it American football. And the halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American.”

The subtext is clear: it’s impossible to separate the right’s somewhat unhinged anxiety over Bad Bunny’s popularity with the country’s growing anger and distress over ICE brutality in Minnesota and elsewhere. Insisting that Kid Rock got the upper hand is an effort to claim that MAGA is, in some mostly invisible way, still winning, and that even the most distasteful parts of their anti-immigrant agenda are still popular. On Tuesday, the White House shared a video on TikTok of people in grass costumes from Bad Bunny’s performance, overlaid with racist text about “illegals” entering the United States. On Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security followed that up with a tweet brushing off criticism of its agents’ violations of civil liberties by claiming that law enforcement in Latin American countries—the same ones that Bad Bunny listed in his performance—also “demand proof of identity under reasonable suspicion or during investigations.”

And yet despite this full-court press by some sectors of the Trump Administration and MAGA-aligned media, it doesn’t exactly seem like it worked with their target audience. By Johnson’s dozenth Instagram post about Bad Bunny, his commenters were almost uniformly begging him to cut it out his criticism of the halftime show.

“He was phenomenal,” one person wrote, “And if anyone is putting America last it’s you with this divisive post.”

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DHS Shot Her and Called Her a “Terrorist.” New Videos Show Something Different.

Newly released body camera footage further undermines the Trump administration’s efforts to falsely portray Marimar Martinez—who was shot multiple times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum in October—as a “domestic terrorist.” Federal prosecutors shared three videos on Tuesday evening after a federal judge ruled last week that the footage and other evidence could be made public.

“I looked down and I noticed blood gushing out of my arms and legs.”

Martinez’s shooting caused nationwide outrage, particularly after it was revealed that Exum had bragged about shooting Martinez. “Read it,” he wrote in one message after being sent an article about the incident. “5 shots, 7 holes.” He continued: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”

The videos released on Tuesday shed further light on why prosecutors dropped charges against Martinez rather than try to bring a case against her to trial.

The newly released evidence is also part of a pattern. It is one of many examples of DHS immigration agents lying and providing false information to justify shootings and other uses of excessive force against US citizens and immigrants. These claims have collapsed again and again once DHS is forced to defend them in court.

Martinez’s case follows this pattern. DHS initially claimed their force was justified because Border Patrol agents “were ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles.” Once in court, evidence showed something much different. Like in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, DHS might have gotten away with its false claims about Martinez were it not for the video evidence that contradicted its account.

One of the videos released on Tuesday shows the perspective of a federal agent sitting behind Exum as he drives an SUV in Chicago. As drivers appear to honk at Border Patrol, one of the agents in the vehicle can be heard saying, “do something bitch.” About twenty seconds later, a Border Patrol agent says: “It’s time to get aggressive and get the fuck out because they’re trying to box us in.”

Soon after, an agent says “we’re going to make contact and we are boxed in.” Exum then jerks the steering wheel to the left, and the two vehicles collide. Previously released video footage shows that Martinez’s Nissan was to Exum’s left in the moments leading up to the collision. Martinez, a US citizen and teacher’s assistant at a Montessori school, also testified before Congress earlier this month that Exum intentionally sideswiped her vehicle.

Following the crash, Exum gets out of his SUV with a handgun drawn. Within seconds, he fires five shots at Martinez.

Martinez managed to drive away, despite sustaining multiple gunshot wounds. “I looked down and I noticed blood gushing out of my arms and legs,” she said in her congressional testimony. Martinez added that she saw her “life flash before me” before she lost consciousness and was taken to a hospital. While at the hospital, she said law enforcement agents rushed nurses to finish their work so that they could take her into custody.

Federal prosecutors went on to secure an indictment against Martinez for allegedly impeding federal agents. But the case fell apart after the text messages emerged in which Exum bragged about shooting Martinez came to light. In messages he wrote, “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out,’” and “My 15 mins of fame. Lmao.” In November, prosecutors dropped the case against Martinez.

Martinez is expected to announce a civil lawsuit on Wednesday. She will also be attending President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address as a guest of Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.)

The newly released evidence also included an email that Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander in charge in Chicago at the time, sent to Exum shortly after the shooting. “I’d like to extend an offer to you to extend your retirement beyond age 57,” Bovino wrote, according to reporting from the Chicago Tribune. “In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much left to do!!”

Bovino went on to lead the Minneapolis operation during which federal agents killed Good and Pretti before he was pushed out of his position.

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The GOP’s “Show Us Your Papers” Bill Is the Latest Effort to Help Trump Take Over Elections

The Republican-controlled US House is set to pass a new version of the SAVE Act, a sweeping voter restriction bill that would require people to show citizenship documents to register to vote and strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot, potentially disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans.

The House consideration of the new bill, now called the SAVE America Act, comes roughly a week after President Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places.” While the latest iteration of the SAVE Act does not usurp state and local election administration in precisely that way, it would still massively federalize new restrictions on voting that Trump and his allies have pushed for years.

“This would undoubtedly sow massive chaos in our elections. It would radically alter the way all Americans cast their ballots as elections are already underway. It would completely upend the 2026 election cycle.”

The centerpiece of the bill remains a requirement that voters show proof of US citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. Nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, according to a study by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups.

That likely understates the number of Americans who could be burdened by the bill, since most people do not carry around citizenship documents with them. Half of Americans, roughly 146 million people, do not have a passport. And 69 million women who took their partner’s last name and do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name could find it much harder to register to vote under the bill.

“If the SAVE Act were to pass, it would be the worst voter suppression law that Congress has ever enacted, certainly in recent memory,” says Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

The bill, which still faces steep odds in the Senate, would go into effect immediately after passage by Congress. That could completely disrupt the midterms and increase the likelihood of widespread voter disenfranchisement. “This would undoubtedly sow massive chaos in our elections,” says Gréta Bedekovics, director of democracy at the Center for American Progress (CAP). “It would radically alter the way all Americans cast their ballots as elections are already underway. It would completely upend the 2026 election cycle.”

The bill goes much further than simply requiring citizenship papers to vote, as I reported when it first passed the House in April 2025:

It would upend voter registration in the US because of a requirement that voters provide this documentation in person at an election office. According to voting rights experts, that requirement would end online registration, mail registration, and voter registration drives, methods that accounted for 1 in 3 registrations during the 2018–2022 election cycles. This requirement would apply not just for new registrants, but every time someone updates their registration. Roughly 80 million people register or re-register every election cycle, and less than 6 percent registered at an election office.

Although touted by Republicans, this provision of the bill could most harm some GOP-leaning constituencies. A CAP study of the 30 largest counties in the US by area, which represent eight Western states, found that voters “would be forced to drive, on average across the counties, four-and-a-half hours round trip and cover approximately 260 miles to reach their election office.” Some voters might have to drive as far as eight hours to register to vote.

On top of the proof of citizenship measure, Republicans added a photo ID requirement to vote. This was likely for messaging purposes, so that they can trot out the usual talking points about how you need ID to buy liquor, get on a plane, etc. But voting, unlike flying or drinking, is a constitutionally protected right, and 21 million Americans also do not have a current driver’s license and could be disenfranchised by this provision as well. Moreover, the United States, unlike other countries that require a photo ID to vote, does not issue a national ID card, and the provision would be stricter than any voter ID law at the state level except for in Ohio. Student IDs, for example, would not be accepted for voting purposes, nor would many tribal IDs. And the bill would require a photocopy of someone’s photo ID with a mail-in ballot, which would disrupt mail voting in most states.

“This bill is more than a voter ID bill,” says Sweren-Becker. “This bill is a show your papers policy. That is very different from any kind of voter ID policy that states have imposed across the country. There are states that require voter ID in a variety of forms. What the SAVE Act would do, which is to require something like a birth certificate or passport upon registration, is significantly more restrictive and would block millions of Americans from voting nationally.”

The other major change to the bill would require states to hand over their voter rolls, which includes sensitive personal information, to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS would then cross-check state rolls with its own citizenship verification tool, also known as the SAVE program, creating “a federalized surveillance system of voters under Kristi Noem,” Bedekovics says. “After what’s happened in Minnesota, Americans don’t want Noem in charge of anything, let alone their voter registration status.”

“This bill is more than a voter ID bill. This bill is a show your papers policy.”

The DHS database has a history of incorrectly flagging eligible voters, particularly naturalized citizens, as non-citizens based on faulty data, which could lead them to being wrongly purged from the rolls. The Department of Justice has sued 24 states to get access to state voter data and has already lost in court in California, Oregon, and Michigan.

The new SAVE Act, like the old one that passed the House last year, remains predicated on the lie that non-citizens are systematically voting in US elections, which every major study has disproven. As I previously reported:

In reality, such instances are minuscule in number. An audit in Georgia last year found only 20 suspected noncitizens on the rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. A similar review in North Carolina found only nine possible noncitizens registered to vote in the state out of more than 7.7 million total voters. In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed 42 jurisdictions, home to 23 million people, including 8 of the 10 areas with the highest populations of noncitizens, and found just 30 instances of a suspected noncitizen voting, equal to 0.0001 percent of total votes.

The latest data reinforces that point. Utah recently reviewed the eligibility of the 2.1 million voters on its rolls and didn’t find a single case of a non-citizen voting.

But we do have tangible examples of how such measures burden eligible voters:

When Kansas passed a proof-of-citizenship law in 2011, it blocked 1 in 7 new registrants, more than 31,000 people, from registering. Nearly half were under 30. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who saw the law as a model for the nation, claimed noncitizen voting was “pervasive” but identified only seven convictions for such acts in Kansas over a 13-year period. A federal court struck down the law in 2018; the alleged cases of voter fraud Kobach presented before the court, which he called “the tip of the iceberg,” was “only an icicle,” Judge Julie Robinson wrote.

“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” Kobach’s replacement, Republican Secretary of State Scott Schwab, told the Associated Press. “It didn’t work out so well.”

Along with the SAVE America Act, Republicans are pushing an even more extreme bill in the House, the Make Elections Great Again Act (MEGA), that would mandate frequent purging of the voter rolls, ban universal mail-in voting, and allow the attorney general to file criminal charges against election officials. The bill received a hearing in the House on Tuesday.

Trump and his allies, including Elon Musk, continue to exert a tremendous amount of pressure on Senate Republicans to do away with the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, even though Republicans strenuously defended the chamber’s 60-vote requirement and railed against federal encroachment on states’ rights when Democrats tried to pass federal voting rights legislation during the Biden administration. “There aren’t anywhere close to the votes, not even close, to nuking the filibuster,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-N.D.) admitted on Tuesday.

“When Democrats attempted to advance sweeping election reform legislation in 2021, Republicans were unanimous in opposition because it would have federalized elections, something we have long opposed,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said on Tuesday, announcing her opposition to the new bills. “Now, I’m seeing proposals such as the SAVE Act and MEGA that would effectively do just that. Once again, I do not support these efforts.”

It’s no coincidence that Republicans are aggressively promoting a new attempt to dramatically nationalize restrictions on voting at the same time that the Trump administration is undertaking unprecedented attempts to interfere in the midterms, from seizing 700 boxes of ballots and election records in Fulton County, Georgia, to demanding that Minnesota hand over its voter rolls as a condition of ICE leaving the state.

“The Trump administration has been engaged in a campaign to interfere with the midterm elections now for over a year, and more recently, the president has essentially said the quiet part out loud,” says Sweren-Becker. “But this has been a long running effort to undermine election administration, undermine trust in elections, interfere with the voter rolls, interfere with election officials doing their job. The SAVE Act is one part of this attempt to sow mistrust in elections, discourage Americans from participating, and outright stop millions of Americans from participating.”

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“The Tide Is Turning”: Democratic Military Vets Respond to Trump’s Failure to Indict Them

In a critical loss for the Justice Department, a federal grand jury on Tuesday refused to indict Democratic lawmakers who made a video reminding members of the military and intelligence community that they can refuse to carry out illegal orders.

The six Democrats featured in the 90-second clip are Sens. Elissa Slotkin (Mich.) and Mark Kelly (Ariz.), and Reps. Jason Crow (Colo.), Chris Deluzio (Pa.), Maggie Goodlander (N.H.), and Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.)—and they all served in the military or intelligence agencies. The indictment was sought by DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who is a longtime ally of President Donald Trump and a former Fox News host.

The video, which was posted back in November, was met with an avalanche of threats and attempted retaliation from President Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and—now—Pirro and the DOJ.

In a string of posts last year, Trump referred to the video as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL” and called the lawmakers “TRAITORS!!!” who “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” before saying their actions were “punishable by DEATH!”

We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community.

The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution.

Don’t give up the ship. pic.twitter.com/N8lW0EpQ7r

— Sen. Elissa Slotkin (@SenatorSlotkin) November 18, 2025

In early January, Hegseth censured Kelly, alleging that the retired Navy combat pilot and astronaut had engaged in “seditious” conduct. Kelly quickly sued Hegseth for violating his constitutional rights.

Here’s what the six Democrats had to say about the Justice Department’s failed effort to indict them over their political speech:

Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan

“Today, it was a grand jury of anonymous American citizens who upheld the rule of law and determined this case should not proceed. Hopefully, this ends this politicized investigation for good. But today wasn’t just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country. Because whether or not Pirro succeeded is not the point. It’s that President Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies.”

Full post here.

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona

“It wasn’t enough for Pete Hegseth to censure me and threaten to demote me, now it appears they tried to have me charged with a crime — all because of something I said that they didn’t like. That’s not the way things work in America. Donald Trump wants every American to be too scared to speak out against him. The most patriotic thing any of us can do is not back down.”

Full post here.

Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado

“They were trying to send a message that if you oppose them, if you step out of line, that they will crush their political enemies. But they failed. And they will always fail. I went to war three times for this country as a paratrooper and an Army ranger. I will never back down from my duty…We will continue to push back. The tide is turning, and accountability is coming.”

Donald Trump’s DOJ just tried—and failed—to indict me in front of a grand jury.

We will continue to fight back against their rising tyranny.

Don’t Give Up the Ship. pic.twitter.com/VFHaq0zYib

— Rep. Jason Crow (@RepJasonCrow) February 11, 2026

Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania

“American citizens on a grand jury refused to go along with this attempt to charge me with a crime for stating the law in a way Trump and his enablers didn’t like. They may want Americans to be afraid to speak out or to disagree—but patriotism demands courage in this moment. DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP!”

Full post here.

Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire

“President Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate me, arrest me, and hang me simply for doing my job…No matter the threats, I will keep doing my job and upholding my oath to our Constitution.”

Full post here.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania

“Yesterday, President Trump’s DOJ tried and failed to indict me for restating the law. Today, as we celebrate the win for free speech, I’m putting this distraction behind us and getting back to the real work at hand.”

Full post here.

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Trump’s Lust for Greenland’s Rare Earth Minerals Faces Harsh Arctic Realities

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

President Donald Trump has been voicing interest in exploiting Greenland’s mineral wealth since his first term in office, when he started talking about possibly seizing the autonomous territory. His threats of a hostile takeover have eased, but amid the focus on national security issues, access to critical minerals is now a key component in Trump’s “framework of a future deal.” Such a deal reportedly would open investment opportunities to US mining companies—while restricting non-NATO countries from obtaining mining rights—and give the US access to more valuable rare earth minerals, a global resource now nearly monopolized by China.

But experts warn that the reality of finding, extracting, and transporting precious and rare earth minerals to refineries and markets is far more complicated, and environmentally fraught, than the Trump administration may have anticipated.

“I’m skeptical, borderline cynical, that [the framework is] going to make any difference,” said Michael Jardine, managing director of Skylark Minerals. The Australia-based company recently ended a two-decade-old plan to develop a zinc mine in Greenland, a decision that Jardine attributed to high costs associated with energy, transportation, labor, and local political uncertainty. While more than 200 mining companies have exploration licenses in Greenland, only two mines are currently active.

“Greenland is a very unstable environment. Everything close to the shoreline will be vulnerable.”

Thanks to ancient volcanic activity that transformed metamorphic rock in southern Greenland into metal ores and sedimentary rock in the north into heavy metals like lead and zinc, the island’s rare earth reserves rank eighth in the world, at 1.5 million tons. As many as 25 of the 60 critical minerals the US has listed as necessary for economic prosperity and national security—materials that are crucial for developing wind and solar power, electric motors, superconducting magnets, guided missiles, and advanced radar systems—are found in Greenland. The island has two rare earth deposits—Kvanefjeld and Tanbreez—that are among the largest in the world.

But logistical and meteorological challenges, along with Greenlanders’ environmental concerns and strict regulations, have so far prevented any rare earth mining development.

According to many scientists who have conducted research on the island, those harsh realities are becoming more intense as the Arctic warms faster than any other place on Earth.

For example, an increasing number of rain-on-snow events, combined with warmer air, is triggering so-called slush avalanches. Due to their mass, the long distances they can flow, and their difficulty to forecast, these avalanches threaten people, equipment, and roads.

Rapid thawing of permafrost is undermining the stability of hillsides, leading to rockslides. In 2017, a massive landslide in Greenland’s Karrat Fjordset off a tsunami that wiped out 45 structures in a tiny fishing village and killed four people.And at least 21 wildfires have burned Greenland’s tundra since 2008, darkening glaciers with soot and accelerating a meltdown that is being further exacerbated by algal blooms on the ice shelf, which are in turn fed by mineral dust liberated by high winds. Historically, wildfires have been rare in Greenland; scientists attribute their apparent uptick to the Arctic’s rising temperatures, drier summers, and an increase in plant life as permafrost melts.

The 60 to 70 glacial lakes that are locked below Greenland’s ice appear to be stable for now, but scientists are concerned that this may change as melting overwhelms them with runoff. In 2014, the weight of 90 million cubic meters of glacial runoff—equivalent to nine hours of water pouring over Niagara Falls—created a crater 85 meters deep over a two-square-kilometer area in a remote area of northern Greenland.

“Greenland is a very unstable environment,” said geomorphologist Paul Bierman, author of When the Ice Is Gone, a book that describes the geological and geopolitical history of the island and how climate change will shape its future. “Everything close to the shoreline will be vulnerable to permafrost thaw, rockslides, avalanches, and the tsunamis they could trigger.”

The situation may look relatively stable in some places, he added. But that will soon change as the atmosphere warms. Already, permafrost thaw is destabilizing runways and radar installations at the US’s Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland.

Greenland is roughly three times the size of Texas, but it has fewer than 100 miles of roads, only 56 of which are paved. The territory has a tiny labor force, just 16 small ports, and its electricity generation is both inconsistent and limited. In northern Greenland, the sun does not rise for 100 days during the polar night.

Bitterly low temperatures—sometimes reaching minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit—make it difficult to operate heavy equipment as hydraulic fluid thickens. High winds ground helicopters, shut airports, and knock out communications. Pack ice hinders the movement of ships bearing fuel and equipment.

Considering all these challenges, it is perhaps not surprising that experts estimate that extracting minerals in Greenland costs five to 10 times what it would in more temperate climes. That’s why Wood Mackenzie, a global research and consultancy group, is cautioning investors about these formidable risks.

“Sure, there’s rocks there that have the rare minerals that the United States needs, but so do the rocks in the US.”

Greenlanders, who banned oil and gas drilling in 2021 because of its impact on the local environment and the climate, have been wary of mining. Past efforts have left behind long-lasting environmental liabilities. Three hard rock mines that operated in the 1970s dumped waste rock along the island’s pristine rivers, assuming their heavy metals would remain locked in that material. But they didn’t. According to a recent study, elevated levels of lead, zinc, and other heavy metals have been found in water, soil, lichens, vascular plants, and sediment in and around the mine site and in seaweed, three species of bivalves, and sculpins downstream.

It’s a similar story in Arctic Canada, where many large-scale mining companies operated in equally harsh conditions with little environmental oversight and left the Canadian government to spend several billion dollars cleaning up dozens of abandoned mines.

Some of these operations, including the Giant gold mine on the shores of Great Slave Lake in Northwest Territories, which went bankrupt in 1999, will need to be managed and monitored permanently because permafrost is thawing the underground chambers used to store 261,000 tons of arsenic trioxide dust—a byproduct of the process used to separate gold from rock—and releasing it into groundwater.

Separating rare earth minerals from rock in Greenland may prove to be even more challenging, experts say, because Greenland’s rare earths are found inside silicates, rather than in the phosphate and carbon minerals found in most of the world’s other large reserves. Extracting them may require new technology.

“The deposits in Greenland also tend to be heavily fragmented, difficult to access, and often mixed in with unwanted minerals like uranium,” said Melissa Sanderson, a former diplomat with the US Foreign Service who helped pave the way for the world’s biggest cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Separating them with chemicals would be difficult and very expensive.”

Sanderson currently sits on the boards of the Critical Minerals Institute, an industry group, and American Rare Earths, an Australia-based company that is developing a 2.9-billion-ton rare earth mine in Wyoming. “If this were simply a resource play in Greenland,” she said, “the United States would be better focused on well-defined, easily accessed rare earth deposits [in the US].” She suggests that the Trump administration’s focus on Greenland’s rare earths is more about keeping Russia and China out of the region. One of the proposals that Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte are discussing would reportedly restrict non-NATO countries from obtaining rights to mine Greenland’s rare earths.

In November 2023, the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding for a strategic minerals partnership with Greenland. And late last year, the British government announced fresh trade negotiations with Greenland that included talks over reducing tariffs on seafood exported to that nation; for its part, Greenland “will seek to strengthen cooperation on critical minerals” with the UK.

The government recently made it clear at an economic development forum in Nuuk in November that it is open to mining so long as Greenlanders benefit and so long as mining companies adhere to its strict environmental regulations. But the US could pressure the government to loosen those regulations to allow mining to move forward.

Colorado School of Mines economist Ian Lange, who was part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during Trump’s first term, said that pushing ahead with mines in Greenland, which would be very far from supply markets, doesn’t make economic sense. “Sure, there’s rocks there that have the rare minerals that the United States needs, but so do the rocks in the US, in Canada, in Australia, and Brazil. Why [open a new mine] when we already have many rare earth mines in play closer to home?”

The US government has already signed a number of agreements with allies such as Canada, Australia, and Thailand that specifically focus on critical minerals, notes Jane Nakano, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Mineral supply disruptions remain dynamic. This reality renders it unviable for the United States to solely focus on domestic production to meet its minerals requirement.”

The US has been moving quickly on this front. Last year, the Department of Defense took equity stakes in six mines in Canada, including an abandoned tungsten mine on the border of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. And this week the Trump administration announced it is spending $10 billion in financing for a nearly $12 billion critical minerals stockpile.

Patrick Schröder, a senior fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank, was at the economic forum in Nuuk where Greenlanders laid out their vision for the future. He said that the prospects for mining the island may not be attractive now, but that could change in several years as rapidly receding sea ice opens new shipping lanes, mining processes improve, demand grows, and the Greenland government builds new hydro dams to supply energy.

While the US, the UK, and the European Union may want to secure critical minerals for long-term supply chain needs, Schröder added, they should approach any mining ventures in Greenland within the wider context of both Arctic security and the climate crisis. He cautioned that extracting critical minerals without the right environmental safeguards “risks causing further harm in a territory whose ice sheet is already rapidly melting, with disastrous results for the global climate.”

The dilemma for Greenlanders, he said, is that climate change is not only opening new mining opportunities but also driving valuable cold-water fish, such as halibut, mackerel, and cod, into its waters. Greenland’s stunning fjords, giant icebergs, sprawling glaciers, and stark tundra are also beginning to draw tourists from all over the world.

“Greenlanders look at how their neighbors in Iceland have benefited from climate change and they would like to replicate that success,” Schröder said. “They are well aware that pollution that may be caused by mining could undermine those opportunities.”

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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping Our Country

During the 2024 presidential campaign, a conservative playbook emerged. Created by the Heritage Foundation, this 900-plus-page document was a roadmap written for a future conservative president. And while some Republicans tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, the authors and the concepts they wrote about have been embraced by President Donald Trump.

Journalist David A. Graham did a deep dive analyzing the pages for his book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. “I think at the heart of all of this is they want this Christian, conservative vision of society, and the way that they wanna achieve that is by dismantling many of the institutions of government as we know them,” he says.

On this week’s More To The Story, Graham sits down with host Al Letson to talk about how ideas and policies from Project 2025—like mass deportations, the replacement of federal workers with Trump loyalists, and the elimination of DEI initiatives—could be just the beginning. He says a lot of what has happened already is not reversible: “I think that a Democrat is going to have to rethink the way the government works…There’s no going back to January 19, 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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Trump’s Immigration Officials Don’t Want to Talk About the Cruelty

“I’m not going to speak about personnel actions,” acting ICE director Todd Lyons said in response to a question from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) about whether ICE agents have been fired for misconduct during his leadership.

“I welcome the opportunity to speak to the family in private, but I’m not going to comment on any active investigation,” Lyons said again, this time to a question about whether the immigration chief was willing to apologize to Renée Good’s family for the Trump administration calling her actions “domestic terrorism.”

Later in Rep. Swalwell’s questioning, Lyons refused to say whether he agreed with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s justification of Good’s killing on the same grounds.

This was the theme of more than three hours of testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday, as Lyons and two other top immigration officials, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott and Citizenship and Immigration Services director Joseph Edlow, largely deflected questions on accountability and killings by ICE officers.

But they were not quite as laconic on other issues. The officials responded effusively to praise for their work in what they and some Congress members—including committee chair Rep. Andrew Garbino (R-N.Y.)—characterized as prioritizing “the safety of law enforcement and the communities they serve and protect.”

Theofficials maintained that ICE agents were under attack in communities like Minnesota’s Twin Cities, claiming without evidence that “paid agitators” were actively trying to stop enforcement. Federal agents have been heavily armed during attacks, arrests, and removal of residents, while protesters have been overwhelmingly peaceful.

As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote in October, ICE agents are objectively not in danger: Reviewing ICE’s own data, he found that none of its agents have been killed by an immigrant in its more than two-decade history. The overwhelmingly leading cause of death was Covid-19, followed by cancers linked to the September 11 attacks.

And as Garrett Graff, an expert on the history of problems and corruption within ICE and CBP, wrote in a post republished by Mother Jones, “America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year—let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.” For Graff, this means Congress must halt funding.

The other topic Trump’s immigration officials appeared eager to talk about on Tuesday was body cameras. “One thing I’m committed to is full transparency, and I fully welcome body cameras all across the spectrum and all of our law enforcement activities,” Lyons said. “Body camera footage will be released.”

Lyons said previously during the Tuesday hearing that about 3,000 officers out of 13,000 wear cameras. Scott said roughly half of CBP’s 20,000 agents wear cameras.

But body cameras do not guarantee transparency. As my colleague Rachel de Leon wrote last week, additional body cameras do not mean public release, oversight, or accountability around the footage. (The Center for Investigative Reporting has filed a complaint in federal court calling for ICE and CBP to produce videos and other records from Chicago and Los Angeles raids filmed by videographers likely contracted by the DHS.)

In other words, the Trump administration’s promise of “transparency” is unlikely to mean accountability.

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The FBI’s Fulton County Raid Was Based on Debunked Claims By Election Deniers

On Tuesday afternoon, the FBI finally released a court-ordered affidavit showing the basis for its January raid seizing nearly 700 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. A judge signed off on the raid after the FBI alleged “evidence of a commission of a criminal offense” relating to the 2020 election.

But what the unsealed affidavit actually revealed was a laundry list of debunked and recycled claims about the 2020 election peddled for years by election deniers that have been rejected repeatedly in court and by election officials. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called the claims “baseless and repackaged.”

The affidavit immediately began with a red flag: the declaration submitted to the court by FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans said that the bureau’s “criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen,” a temporary White House employee tasked with investigating the 2020 election results. Olsen is a prominent election denier who played a leading role in the 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement, lobbying the Department of Justice to file a lawsuit with the Supreme Court attempting to overturn the election (Texas eventually filed a lawsuit that was unanimously rejected) and speaking to Trump multiple times on January 6, 2021. He was subsequently sanctioned by a federal court for making “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” while representing Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in her unsuccessful attempt to challenge the results of the 2022 election.

Evidence provided by Clay Parikh, another election denier who testified on behalf of Lake in 2022, is also prominently cited in the affidavit.

Beyond that, there wasn’t much new or surprising, other than the fact that a state judge signed off on the raid. In order to obtain a search warrant, a law enforcement agency has to establish probable cause: a reasonable belief, going beyond suspicion, that a crime was committed. But the run-of-the-mill procedural errors and claims that the affidavit focuses on have already been investigated and disproven. Moreover, it omits relevant information illustrating the election results were not fraudulent. These crucial omissions are at odds with numerous federal court rulings that establish the standards for probable cause.

“In drafting a search warrant affidavit, the Fourth Amendment requires the inclusion of facts that would negate probable cause, if they exist,” Orin Kerr, a professor at Stanford Law School, posted on X. “The government can’t pick facts that, if true, could support a finding a probable cause, but omit the facts that cancel that.”

The affidavit additionally provided no evidence, or even allegations, of foreign interference in elections, which raised further questions about why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present at the raid—when she has no authority over domestic law enforcement operations. US Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, and Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called on Gabbard to immediately brief senators “in light of recent unprecedented and deeply concerning election-related actions taken by ODNI under your leadership.”

Thus, what’s in—and not in—the document gives further credence to what election experts have long warned: the Trump administration is purposely recycling thoroughly debunked lies about the 2020 election in an effort to “take over” the handling of the midterm elections.

“Their intentions are clear,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the national voting rights organization Fair Fight Action, said on a press call Tuesday evening. “They want to dramatically remake our elections to curtail who is able to vote and whose votes are counted.”

Among the examples the FBI provides for probable cause, the agency points out that Fulton County admitted it “does not have scanned images of all the 528,777 ballots counted during the Original Count or the 527,925 ballots counted during the Recount.”

But Georgia law did not require counties to retain the scanned images of ballots at the time. The GOP-led state legislature added that requirement months later, in March 2021.

Another claim regurgitated by the FBI centers around the finding that some ballots were scanned multiple times in Georgia’s 2020 machine recount. After an independent investigation, Fulton County officials acknowledged that some ballots may have been scanned multiple times—though that does not mean the ballots were counted multiple times. (Ballots are sometimes rescanned if there’s an error in the tabulation process, in which case the initial scan of the ballot is deleted from the vote count.) Critically, the investigation that uncovered the repeat scans found no evidence of fraud. And regardless, the initial count, the subsequent hand-counted audit, and the computer-tabulated recount all showed that Joe Biden won the state by roughly the same margin: 11,779 votes.

“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law regardless of whether the failure to retain records or the deprivation of a fair tabulation of a vote was outcome determinative for any particular election or race,” the FBI affidavit says of its assertions. But that’s a pretty big “if,” especially because the affidavit offers no evidence to support it.

Fulton County argued in federal court that the seized ballots and voting records should be returned to their jurisdiction, writing that “there is significant evidence in the public record suggesting that these same debunked theories supported the federal warrant.” Following its release, Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts said the affidavit was based on “recycled rumors, lies, untruths and unproven conspiracy theories.”

The lack of evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Fulton County could ultimately persuade a federal judge to rule in its favor. But much of the damage has already been done.

Trump will continue to weaponize false claims about the 2020 election as a pretext for interfering in the upcoming midterms. And his allies on the state election board in Georgia could use the seizure of the ballots to push for taking over elections in Fulton County, which would allow them to dramatically limit access to the ballot and challenge election outcomes in the state’s largest county.

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Jeffrey Epstein Couldn’t Stop Emailing People About Eugenics

Why was Jeffrey Epstein obsessed with genes? In the latest tranche of Epstein records and emails made available by the Department of Justice, themes of genes, genetics, and IQ—alongside more explicit threads of white supremacy—keep cropping up, often adjacent to Epstein’s fascination with steering research in the biological sciences.

Those newly released emails include a February 2016 correspondence with Noam Chomsky in which Epstein insists on a genetic basis for Black and white differences in test scores—using it as a springboard to advocate for wider genetic editing. Practically impossible, Chomsky replies—and if it could be done, the best use would be “changing the genes for dedicated savagery and lack of concern for the welfare or even security of the population on the part of that [sector] of educated elite that reaches positions of power.”

“Agreed,” Epstein wrote. “Genetic altruism.”

Epstein’s language, perhaps influenced by that of biologist Richard Dawkins—whose own interest in eugenics, altruism, and selfishness shows some compatibility—echoes of Silicon Valley’s beloved “effective altruism,” another faux “altruism” built on dreams of harem bunkers for the super-rich. But then, Epstein had ideas in common with the billionaire circles in which he moved. I’ve covered his former friend Donald Trump’s fixation on race and genetics:

There’s a pattern to [Trump’s] comments about intelligence (or lack thereof), his intense hostility towards disabled people (including reputed public use of the r-word stretching back decades), and his preoccupation with “good” genes: it’s inseparable from his constant promotion of Afrikaner and Northern European immigration, sympathy to claims of “white genocide,” and promotion of close advisors like Stephen Miller and Elon Musk.

And those of Epstein correspondents Peter Thiel and Elon Musk:

Musk’s fantasies of superiority connect deeply to his twin obsessions with genetics and reproduction—especially his own. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Musk’s colleague Shivon Zilis, mother to four of his 14 publicly reported children, told the journalist Walter Isaacson.

Evil men like Epstein are, in the simplest form, obsessed with eugenics because they believe that their ill-gotten gains are the product of some innate superiority. His personal eugenicist beliefs have been previously reported on: A 2019 New York Times investigation, for instance, found that he “hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.” He was talking about those plans with scientists in the early 2000s, which, to public knowledge, fortunately did not happen.

But the new emails reveal a previously unappreciated range of public intellectuals and scientists implicitly tolerating those ideas—treating race science and eugenics as acceptable conversation even if, as Chomsky does in that discourse, contesting them. Epstein’s passion for injecting eugenics into conversation after conversation in his emails should shape the way we think about his role in funding scientific research and development—and steering richer men’s money in that world.

Epstein’s fascination with eugenics also puts his funding of health research in a disturbing light.

In a 2017 interview with Science, Epstein diminished the work of the Gates Foundation, which he said “doesn’t search for smart people”: unlike Gates, Epstein said, he was “interested in the rarefied peaks” and in “new theories of biology,” cultivating relationships with sympathetic scientists like virologist and former Stanford University professor Nathan Wolfe, a close Epstein ally and comrade in misogyny.

Some of Epstein’s conversations about genes, I found when parsing through the newest batch of emails, are just weird. In one email to a “Jabor Y,” Epstein wrote that he was “looking forward to your DNA test. to see how many genes we share.”

An unknown sender asked Epstein if he’d had his genome sequenced. Knowing what he’s done, it feels horrific to read Epstein jokingly respond that he has “two recessive genes that cause hyper fucking.”

In a 2013 email, Epstein remarked approvingly on “iq tests for children”—presumably not because the billionaire eugenics class particularly care about some disabled kids getting diagnoses they need for adequate accommodations in school.

Some of his correspondents took it even further. Racist AI researcher and Epstein grantee Joscha Bach said, as reported in MS NOW, that Black children’s brains “are slower at learning high-level concepts” and better suited to a “more hunting/running style of life.”

In a separate email with Bach—in which Bach also discusses the “Ashkenazi mutation”—Epstein reimagines Ancient Rome as a eugenicist paradise, a favorite theme of right-wing eugenicist tech billionaires like Musk: “it seems that Greece and Rome had a class society that allowed the upper classes to have more offspring than the lower classes, and larger social mobility based on IQ than our current arrangement,” Epstein writes approvingly.

And like Rome, it would be nice if the eugenicist billionaire empire fell.

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The Political World of Caregiving

It’s an old adage: when people get married, they promise to stick together “in sickness and in health.” But that’s easier said than done when you’re caregiving for a spouse or long-term partner, when systemic failures often lead to burnout.

In her new book, In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis, University of Connecticut professor Laura Mauldin explores the relationships between caregivers and their disabled and sick spouses, and the underlying lack of structural support in the US that makes unpaid care an inescapable feature of most such relationships.

The topic is personal for her: Maudlin’s partner leukemia came out of remission as they were getting closer in 2006. “Falling in love with J had called upon me to increasingly fill a role that required meeting nearly every one of her needs,” Mauldin writes in her introduction. “This was more than just providing emotional support when the person you love is suffering.” J passed away in 2010.

I spoke to Mauldin about crafting this book based on her lived experiences, how systems fail both disabled people and their caregivers, and what is at stake with Medicaid cuts exacerbating the damage to an already broken system.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What led you to write a book about spousal caregiving?

“What’s really important is for disabled people to understand that their situation is political, and for caregivers to understand that their situation is political.”

I had this experience of being a caregiver for my partner, and while I was doing that, I was also being trained as a sociologist. I was in graduate school, and I was focused on the social and political aspects of illness and disability from an academic perspective. I had this deeply emotional, traumatizing, transformative experience as a human, and then at the same time, I was being trained to think about and understand the world in particular ways, through theories of disability, through disability studies, with an emphasis on the politics of disability.

I processed the experience and tried to make sense of what happened to me, but also understanding that it was nothing unusual—that this is happening to millions of people all over the country all the time, and that I could both speak about this from personal experience and as someone who had been academically trained to think about the world in particular ways.

I started out this project as a kind of standard academic project. I began the research process and thought, Okay, I’m going to gather data. As soon as I started talking to people, I realized that I could not treat this as some kind of disconnected or depersonalized idea of data, and that I had to go ahead and bring the full force of my emotional experience into this matter, and write about that alongside other people’s stories. So it became a book of stories.

My main goal is to help people feel less alone. This is not a fringe experience. The second goal with the book was to write something that was emotionally accessible, so that people could gain a new understanding of the ways that their experience is shaped by social and political decisions.

How did you cope with being a caregiver of someone who lived with and eventually died from cancer?

I think I coped with it by writing this book. I have a long history with C-PTSD. For me, writing is the only way I can ground myself in the world. I had piles and piles of journals, so a lot of the material in the book actually wasn’t just from memory, particularly at the end of the book, where I have this love letter to everyone.

It’s really a love letter to them as well as myself—that if I can use this book as an act of care for other people, I am, by nature, sort of reciprocating that to myself: that we can tell each other that you’re okay, you aren’t worthless, you’ve done your best, you can forgive yourself—all these kinds of things, in a society that tells us that disabled people are worthless and caregivers are devalued. I don’t know that I actually coped well in the years that I was a caregiver. I think I coped by intellectualizing because I was in graduate school.

Disabled people are often taught to feel like burdens by society. How can we talk about caregiver burnout in a way that doesn’t add to that?

During those years, it was deeply difficult; it was traumatic. And that is every caregiver’s experience, because there is no system, and we have to stand in for an absent system. The result of that is profoundly negative mental health effects on caregivers. There is no alternative narrative available to caregivers, that if this person just didn’t have this disability, my life would be okay. Or it’s this person’s terrible illness.

“One of the key ideas in the book is that the state uses marriage to abandon disabled people…we have this myth-making around what love can do.”

Disabled people often feel, “Oh, well, I’m the person with the illness or the disability, therefore I’m the problem, right?” That narrative is very common. What I’m trying to do with this book is show how these social and political and cultural sort of systems and beliefs and practices essentially are a system of ableism, where we don’t invest in or value disabled people, so we don’t invest.

When we don’t invest in their care, we’re actually also not investing in caregivers’ lives either, because they’re the ones who have to pick up the slack. So many people I spoke to would be in a nursing home if their partner didn’t stay and take on this role. Once,when my partner was being discharged from the hospital, the nurse said, “Are you sure you want her to come home? Because this is nursing home–level care.” What am I supposed to say to that, you know? And of course, I say yes, she needs to come home, realizing that if I didn’t say yes, as for many people across the country, there’s nowhere else for them to go.

What’s really important is for disabled people to understand that their situation is political, and for caregivers to understand that their situation is political, and that the same system of ableism that’s entrenched in every care policy we have is entrapping both people. But people tend to see illness or disability as this tragic, rare thing that’s not supposed to happen. It’s just what it is to be alive, and we’re going to have care needs, so we need a system for that. We need infrastructure for that, but we don’t have it. So again, without understanding both of those positions as inherently political, people don’t have an alternate narrative other than “That person got this horrible, terrible disease, or has this disability, and that’s just so burdensome,” and then the person internalizes that.

One story that stood out to me was Tina’s. She and her now-spouse Ben got together when she was living with symptomatic multiple sclerosis, but they now seem to exist in a marriage where Ben seems incredibly burned out. What does that tell us?

I don’t think that [Ben] understood that this was lifelong and would kind of transform into a progressive, degenerative form of MS, rather than an episodic, relapsing remitting. One of his key quotes to me was, “People assume that there are programs and resources and there aren’t.” He didn’t understand what the sort of trajectory was going to be.

“There’s no shortage of people who love their partner and want to take care of them, but in the absence of supports…they literally can’t do it.”

Decades of literally not being able to leave his house because Tina was unable to be safely left alone—yet he had to work, because if he didn’t work, then they didn’t have money to pay rent, money [for] food, health insurance.

Because we attach health insurance to employment, he had no choice but to go to work and often leave her at home in a very perilous, dangerous, dehumanizing situation and over a number of decades of just being trapped in debt, having to eventually file for bankruptcy, not being able to find accessible housing, just one thing after another, after another. It tells you how many gaps there are, from housing, to wages, to the lack of programs to support the care needs of people living at home.

A lot of people think that there are long-term care [programs] like that. The only place you can get that is Medicaid, and Medicaid is a poverty program, but Ben had a job, so they were disqualified.

The reason why Ben’s income counted against Tina is that they were married: One of the key ideas in the book is that the state uses marriage as a tool to abandon disabled people. It is a tool where we have this myth-making around what love can do, and that marriage is about “in sickness and in health,” which absolves the state—this vow that makes you the responsible party.

What was it like finishing the book last year, as Republicans voted to gut Medicaid, which means that existing infrastructure, like home-and community-based services, could be even weaker?

It was mind-boggling, horrifying, demoralizing, rage-inducing, because so many people I talked to, even if they had Medicaid, had a hard time using Medicaid services because Medicaid had been cut so much. The wages are terrible, and people, including Ben and Tina, couldn’t find people to do the home health aide work that they needed.

We’re already at a crisis point, and now we’re just going to make it worse, so that more disabled people are going to be forced into institutions. There’s no shortage of people who love their partner and want to take care of them, but in the absence of supports and systems and infrastructure like the life-saving infrastructure of Medicaid, they literally can’t do it. They lose wages, which means they lose retirement, they lose Social Security, they lose all these things that you’re paying into when you are employed. But if we understand that we’re not alone, then new opportunities for conversations, for alliances, for support, for networks and community, all those things start to become possible.

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Immigration Court Blocks Trump from Deporting Pro-Palestine Tufts Student

An immigration judge dropped a deportation case against Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University doctoral student who was arrested by masked and plainclothes federal agents nearly a year ago, according to a letter from her lawyers on Monday.

In March 2024, Öztürk was one of four authors of an op-ed in Tufts’ student newspaper, Tufts Daily, that criticized the university’s administration for failing to act on three student-led resolutions that passed—including calling for the acknowledgement of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and divesting from Israel.

The Trump administration cited the op-ed as grounds for removing Öztürk from the US and revoked her student visa.

But the letter, addressed to a federal appeals court, said that the Department of Homeland Security failed to prove that Öztürk had to be deported from the US. The immigration court thus terminated the removal proceedings. Filings from the termination are not available publicly, according to the lawyers.

Related

Documents Prove The Trump Administration Arrested Students for Criticizing Israel

The lawyers said that the DHS’ legal case against Öztürk is a dangerous interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which in part states that the Secretary of State can consider someone removable from the US if their actions pose a threat to foreign policy.

According to the government’s perspective on immigration law and Öztürk’s case, “it could punitively detain any noncitizen in retaliation for her speech for many months,” the lawyers wrote in the Monday letter.

As Sophie Hurwitz wrote in Mother Jones, the Trump administration was actively pursuing the deportation of students like Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil to silence dissent—all without providing credible evidence for how they took part in antisemitic activity.

My colleague Najib Aminy examined unsealed court records last month on the case against Öztürk that revealed how the government used unverified accounts spread on social media and blacklists like Canary Mission, anonymously created to smear pro-Palestine activists as evidence. This allows groups like Canary Mission, which receives at least part of its money from major private American foundations, to contribute to targeting by the Trump administration.

“Visas provided to foreign students to live, study, and work, in the United States are a privilege, not a right—no matter what this or any other activist judicial ruling says,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement on Monday. “And when you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans, and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country.”

Öztürk—who researches how adolescents and young adults use social media in a positive, prosocial manner—summed up people’s pursuit of justice in a piece last month in the Cut, reflecting on the past year: “I know that speaking up is essential to prevent people from ending up in a state of screaming fear…Because my scream is not about me, it is bigger than me—it is about us.”

“Though the pain that I and thousands of other women wrongfully imprisoned by ICE have faced cannot be undone, it is heartening to know that some justice can prevail after all,” Rümeysa Öztürk said on Monday.

“I grieve for the many human beings who do not get to see the mistreatment they have faced brought into the light,” she continued, also recognizing immigrants and allies who have been targeted and detained in for-profit ICE prisons.

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The United States Sacrificed $35 Billion in Clean Energy Projects Last Year

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

For more than a decade, the clean energy economy has been on a steep growth trajectory. Companies have poured billions of dollars into battery manufacturing, solar and wind generation, and electric vehicle plants in the US, as solar costs fell sharply and EV sales surged. That momentum is set to continue surging in much of the world—but in the United States, it’s starting to stall.

According to a new report from the clean energy think tank E2, new investment in clean energy projects last year was dwarfed by a cascade of cancellations for projects already in progress. For every dollar announced in new clean energy projects, companies canceled, closed, or downsized roughly three dollars’ worth. In total, at least roughly $35 billion in projects were abandoned last year, compared to just $3.4 billion in cancellations in 2023 and 2024 combined.

Trump’s policies discourage private investment: “No one knows what six months from now will look like.”

“That’s pretty jarring considering how much progress we made in previous years,” said Michael Timberlake, a director of research and publications at E2. “The rest of the world is generally doubling down or transitioning further, and the US is now becoming increasingly combative and antagonistic towards clean energy industries.”

Timberlake said the Trump administration’s attacks on renewable energy are the main driver of the slowdown. Companies began pulling back their investments shortly after the November 2024 election, when a victorious Trump telegraphed that he would promote fossil fuels over solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies. For instance, TotalEnergies, the French oil-and-gas giant, paused development of two offshore wind projects in late November 2024, citing uncertainty after Trump’s election. The company has not restarted the projects since.

Trump followed through on those promises once in office: One of his first actions in office was to pause leasing and permitting for offshore wind. The freeze resulted in several wind developers indefinitely pausing or abandoning their projects while lawsuits trickled through the courts. (Federal judges have issued judgments in favor of the wind companies in recent months.)

Trump’s administration also pulled billions of dollars in funding for a range of clean energy projects and cancelled or retooled Biden-era policies favorable to the industry, such as energy-efficiency measures, IRS tax guidance, and loans for a transmission line expected to carry solar and wind power.

Congress, at the behest of Trump, also passed the “One Big Beautiful Act” over the summer. In addition to sunsetting lucrative tax credits for renewable energy production, the law hammered the electric vehicle industry from multiple sides: It ended investment credits supporting the buildout of battery manufacturers, and simultaneously nixed the $7,500 tax credit available to American consumers who purchase EVs.

Timberlake cautioned against pinning clean energy’s disappointing year on any one policy. While the One Big Beautiful Act was the “biggest signifier” of the shift, “the overall policy and regulatory attack” is to blame for the glut of project cancellations, he said. “It’s not an environment that encourages more investment because no one knows what six months from now will look like.”

Electric vehicle and battery manufacturing have been hit the hardest over the past year. Each sector lost roughly $21 billion in investment over the past year, according to E2’s analysis, which includes some overlapping projects that serve both purposes. The industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs.

These two industries likely lost the most investments because they had been growing the fastest in recent years, meaning they had more projects in the pipeline to cancel or downsize once President Trump was elected. The EV industry’s outlook, in particular, changed once Congress repealed consumer tax credits made available by former President Joe Biden. That, along with the general policy uncertainty, led to automakers revising their expectations for EV demand in the US and reallocating their investments accordingly.

Some states were hit harder than others. In 2025 alone, Michigan lost 13 clean energy projects worth $8.1 billion—more than twice as many as any other state, due to its role as the capital of the U.S. auto industry. Illinois, Georgia, and New York also lost billions of dollars in investments.

Many automakers that scaled back electric vehicle plans last year redirected those investments rather than abandoning them outright. Ford, for example, had originally planned to build all-electric commercial vehicles at its $1.5 billion Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake. But after revising its EV ambitions, the company pivoted the facility toward gas-powered and hybrid vans. Because Ford did not scrap the plant altogether, Timberlake said, facilities like Avon Lake could still be retrofitted for electric vehicle production if market conditions and policy outlooks improve.

“The silver lining view is they’re hopefully maintaining those facilities so that when there is certainty, those factories will still be available for making EVs down the road,” said Timberlake.

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Tens of Thousands of New Mothers Have Been Flagged to Police Over Unreliable Drug Tests

This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system.

Ayanna Harris-Rashid was sitting up in bed, her newborn son latched to her breast, one hand scrolling on her phone, when the police called. She was wanted on a felony charge of child neglect.

Harris-Rashid had just had her third child in March 2021. To ease pain and frequent nausea, she had used legal CBD gummies and a topical hemp-based ointment throughout her pregnancy. But at the hospital, she and the baby tested positive for marijuana, prompting providers to file a report with the South Carolina Department of Social Services, which forwarded the information to police, records show. Now an officer was demanding that Harris-Rashid turn herself in.

Harris-Rashid said goodbye to her children and husband. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to her newborn son. A friend drove her to the sheriff’s office, where she was handcuffed, strip-searched and placed for the night in a cold and crowded cell. By the time she left the jail the following morning, her milk supply had decreased and she found she could no longer breastfeed. The charge was eventually dropped.

“They shook me bare. They made me feel very indecent and inhumane,” she said, adding, “This is a person, a woman, a mother, an actual individual. What justifies this?”

What happened to Harris-Rashid is happening to women across the country with staggering frequency. In at least 70,000 cases in 21 states, parents were referred to law enforcement agencies over allegations of substance use during pregnancy, according to six years of state and federal data obtained and published for the first time by the Marshall Project. In many cases, the referrals began with false positive results from flawed drug tests—sometimes triggered by women’s prescribed medications.

Harris-Rashid with her third child, Rai. Harris-Rashid used legal CBD gummies and a topical hemp-based ointment to ease frequent nausea and pain while she was pregnant with Rai in 2021.Kathryn Gamble for the Marshall Project

The sheer number of people whom law enforcement is tracking is far higher than experts previously knew, including academics and reproductive rights organizations monitoring what they call pregnancy criminalization. Even so, the numbers the Marshall Project compiled represent a significant undercount.

“My initial genuine reaction is, frankly, shock and dismay,” said Dana Sussman, senior vice president of the legal advocacy organization Pregnancy Justice, which counted more than 1,800 pregnancy-related arrests and prosecutions from 2006 through 2024. She added, “This represents an incredibly regressive and counterproductive approach.”

The Marshall Project spent a year collecting and analyzing data on referrals to law enforcement. Reporters began with a request for federal data, then asked state child welfare agencies to verify the numbers and provide state policies. The totals reflect the number of newborn cases that those agencies shared with police or prosecutors.

Although most of those referrals did not lead to criminal investigations, many women were threatened with arrest or criminally charged. Others were confronted by police in their hospital rooms or homes and forced to turn over their children.

Read an in-depth methodology showing how the Marshall Project obtained the data and conducted its analysis.

In Oklahoma, armed sheriff’s deputies took two children from their parents after the mother tested positive for meth, a false result triggered by an acid reflux medication the hospital had given her during labor, according to court records and her lawyer. In South Carolina, police interrogated a mother after she tested positive for the fentanyl from her epidural, as well as marijuana, according to police records.

And after a Virginia couple insisted on having an attorney present for a child welfare interview, a police officer threatened them with arrest if they didn’t surrender their newborn. “When we step in, that’s when we start charging people,” the officer told the parents, according to an audio recording of the meeting. “You got about three seconds.” The mother had tested positive for methadone, the medication prescribed to treat her opioid addiction. The parents were forced to leave their newborn in the hospital and police escorted them out, records show.

The Marshall Project and other news organizations have previously reported on prosecutions of people accused of using drugs during pregnancy. But this new investigation shows a much broader swath of patients being surveilled by hospitals, child welfare authorities, and law enforcement than previously known—even while the underlying evidence for those allegations is unreliable, easy to misinterpret, and sometimes flat-out wrong.

After Harris-Rashid gave birth, hospital staff administered drug tests, and she and her child tested positive for marijuana. Kathryn Gamble for the Marshall Project

Many of the women who tested positive likely used illicit drugs. But data from three states that specifically track cases involving prescriptions show that thousands of new mothers were referred to law enforcement based solely on medications their doctors gave them.

In many states, referrals to police occurred even though some child welfare agencies ended up dismissing the allegations or never accepted the reports in the first place.

The Marshall Project received data from 15 states about the outcomes of child welfare investigations. More than half of the cases referred to law enforcement in those states—about 22,000—were found not to involve child abuse or neglect. Yet police sometimes launched criminal probes that continued well after child welfare authorities declined to take further action.

Some states are making few referrals to law enforcement. In Michigan, child welfare officials send cases to police only in specific circumstances—for example, if there are concerns for a caseworker’s safety or allegations of serious physical harm to a child. Fewer than 1 percent of reports in the state were shared with law enforcement, the Marshall Project’s analysis found.

But in 13 states, child welfare agencies automatically share all such reports, according to a Marshall Project review of policies in 50 states. They span blue states like Minnesota to red states like Oklahoma, where a case is referred to law enforcement in 1 out of 24 births, a higher ratio than in any other state in the analysis.

Federal law requires states to refer families to services and ensure that they have plans to care for newborns exposed to substances. States that automatically send every report to police are far exceeding federal requirements, experts said.

The law “does not call for any criminal justice response,” said Nancy Young, executive director of Children and Family Futures, a nonprofit that helps child welfare agencies implement federal requirements. “It doesn’t help in the long run. And it doesn’t help the baby.”

Decades of research suggest that using certain substances during pregnancy may harm the baby. Some illegal drugs are associated with early birth or stillbirth and can cause babies to experience withdrawal symptoms. Chronic use of cigarettes and alcohol can cause low birth weight and developmental delays. But studies show that punishments are ineffective at reducing substance use and can lead to poorer health outcomes for women, newborns, and families. Recognizing the potential for lasting harm, Illinois legislators in 2024 ended the requirement that child welfare authorities notify law enforcement.

Some states have set up alternative responses to offer services to families and steer them away from child abuse investigations. Yet several of these states also file automatic referrals with police, undermining what experts view as years of progress.

“I’m flabbergasted,” said Deborah Cohen, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University who studies the treatment of pregnant women with substance use disorders. Cohen said she had no idea state authorities forwarded reports of such patients to law enforcement. “I do not see how that’s helpful.”

The referrals are not always made for the purpose of filing criminal charges. In some states, they are a matter of administrative routine, required for any child abuse and neglect report. Child welfare authorities also call police to assist with emergency foster care removals, or to go with a worker on a home or hospital visit. In many states with automatic referral policies, police or prosecutors review the reports and file them away.

But criminal prosecutions of pregnant women have been rising for years, with a significant jump following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade. In anti-abortion states such as South Carolina and Oklahoma, women are particularly vulnerable to prosecution, and the decision to pursue a criminal case often comes down to the discretion of a single officer or prosecutor. At a time of increasing pregnancy surveillance, civil rights attorneys and advocates for women’s rights warn that the referrals significantly increase the risk that more people will face criminal investigation and charges.

“The states that are doing these automatic referrals, that makes the women in those states incredibly vulnerable,” Sussman said. “It opens the door—even when there’s no basis in law—to actually bring these prosecutions.”

For decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to alert child welfare services. In part to comply, many hospitals routinely drug test patients or babies to check if a mother might have used substances.

But the tests, which start typically with urine samples, are easy to misinterpret and often wrong. They do not show how often or for how long someone may have used drugs. Most tests cannot distinguish between a positive result caused, for instance, by marijuana—illegal in many states—or a legal substance, such as CBD products. Without confirmation testing and review, positive results often lead hospitals to accuse parents of drug use, even if the substance used was a prescribed medication.

Some law enforcement agencies may conduct additional investigations, but many do not. The Marshall Project reviewed records from two police agencies in South Carolina—one of the states most aggressively prosecuting women for pregnancy drug use—and found more than a dozen mothers were arrested solely on positive drug test results, without interviewing the accused or collecting more definitive evidence.

One of those cases was a first-time mom newly pregnant in 2024, who began to experience extreme morning sickness. She asked to be identified by her nickname, Maddie, because her court record has been expunged. Her symptoms were so severe that she could not keep down even water. The medication prescribed to many pregnant women, Zofran, did not work for her. “It was really bad,” she said, recalling her worries for her baby girl. “How is she going to be OK and grow and be fine?”

On a family member’s suggestion, Maddie tried marijuana gummies, which stopped the vomiting. But when she gave birth, she and the baby tested positive for THC.

A small amount of THC is legal under South Carolina and federal law, and many legal CBD products contain the compound. Maddie’s drug test results didn’t distinguish which product she had consumed or how much. But the hospital reported her to the Department of Social Services. She was barred from breastfeeding, she said, and from being alone with her newborn. The following month, she was arrested on a felony charge of harming her child or placing her at risk.

“I have never in my life been in trouble. I’ve never been arrested. Nothing,” she said. Now she was facing up to 10 years in prison under state law. “That would have been more detrimental to my daughter than me doing gummies pregnant.”

Eventually, Maddie hired an attorney and the prosecutor dismissed the charge.

Some law enforcement agencies are aware of the pitfalls of drug test evidence. At the Loris Police Department, north of Myrtle Beach, at least half of the newborn reports involve drug tests triggered by false positives, prescribed medications, or legal hemp products, said Lieutenant Larry Williams.

His department declined to file charges in six of 11 cases it received in 2024 due to faulty drug test results, including positives triggered by legal CBD, he said. The department has also received reports of positive tests caused by medications, such as those prescribed for ADHD, depression, and pain relief during labor.

But Williams said it can be difficult to prove a false positive result. When investigators are not sure, the department often decides to make the arrest.

“We always try to err on the side of the baby,” he said, adding that positive drug tests are sufficient enough to build a case. “My level of proof is, is it more likely than not? Is there probable cause enough to believe that you did this?” Many of the women arrested may not actually struggle with addiction. Only about 10 percent of charged cases involve “frequent flyers”—women with serious drug problems, Williams said.

The Marshall Project data shows that South Carolina is not the only state referring reports of positive tests caused by prescribed medications.

In Georgia, there were more than 3,000 of these reports from 2018 through 2024. State child welfare workers declined to open investigations into abuse or neglect in these instances, yet referred them to law enforcement anyway.

In Idaho alone, more than 1,000 mothers were accused of child abuse and referred to law enforcement for marijuana use during pregnancy, including the illegal drug as well as topical CBD oils and creams, according to records disclosed in a lawsuit against the state. The lawsuit is challenging a requirement that these parents be placed on a state registry, barring them from certain jobs. One woman on the list told investigators that she ate a brownie from a relative’s kitchen that she later learned contained cannabis. The relative lived in Oregon, where marijuana is legal. Another woman had taken prescribed medical marijuana while living in Washington state—where it is legal—because she preferred it over the side effects from a prescription medication to curb nausea.

In Oklahoma, where medical marijuana is legal, women have been arrested and prosecuted for taking prescribed marijuana during their pregnancies.

Erin Bailey, a defense attorney in South Carolina who represented Maddie and others, said women should not be punished for taking matters into their own hands.

“Women who are experiencing the side effects of pregnancy—which are very real and very much diminished by our society—should have the ability to make informed decisions about products that might be able to help them,” she said. Policing these actions is a slippery slope, she said, since many daily activities, such as driving too fast, can also cause potential harm to a fetus. “Am I going to be subject to arrest if I’m speeding while pregnant?”

Harris-Rashid with her four children in their home in Iowa City, IowaKathryn Gamble for the Marshall Project

Even without criminal charges, a police officer’s presence can be traumatic and frightening for someone who has just given birth.

In Idaho, which refers all reports of illegal drug use during pregnancy to law enforcement, child welfare workers coordinate with police to investigate. Officers can file criminal charges, such as misdemeanor injury to child, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, and can take a child into emergency custody without a judge’s order.

Surrounded by uniformed officers and a state worker who can take their newborn, many women feel they have no choice but to answer questions despite their right not to do so, attorneys and health care providers said. They added that some women were questioned while still under the influence of medications they received during childbirth. Attorney Brigette Borup, a public defender in Canyon County, said many of her clients have no recollection of those interactions with police.

“When they get told, ‘Well, we’re going to remove your baby,’ it’s just—nothing past that point gets absorbed,” Borup said. She added: “The common story I get is, ‘I barely remember anything that happened or anything that was said.’”

Even when women have used illicit drugs, attorneys said officers’ presence may be a violation of patients’ due process rights. During those initial encounters, officers don’t typically offer a Miranda warning to new parents that describes the right to remain silent or disclose the possibility that women may be arrested if they admit to drug use, according to three other attorneys who have represented women in criminal and child welfare cases in the state. Many women don’t realize that their answers could be used against them, said defense attorney Bob Eldredge, who practices in Pocatello.

“You’ve got your weapon, your uniform, you look like Batman, the mother is feeling guilty in bed anyway—you get a confession out of her,” Eldredge said. “They treat law enforcement officers like that’s their pastor, preacher, bishop coming in, and they come clean.”

Eldredge said it’s difficult to prepare a strong defense for clients who are despondent because of the removal of their children. “You have a hard time not breaking down and weeping in front of those women,” he said, choking up. “It’s so cruel what we’re doing.”

The data the Marshall Project obtained nationwide doesn’t track what law enforcement does with the referrals and whether charges were ever filed. Many women may not be aware at all that private details of their childbirths were shared with law enforcement.

Michelle Hansford, a peer support advocate at an addiction treatment program for pregnant women in Texas, said one of her patients was reported to child welfare authorities due to a positive test caused by the fentanyl in her epidural. That disturbed Hansford enough. But she had no idea that the report also went to law enforcement.

“That would worry me,” she said, adding that if her client had a later encounter with law enforcement, officers would be able to see the report on her record. “They’re automatically going to be biased against her.”

The referrals could also have broader repercussions for pregnant people across the country.

Anti-abortion activists have said they want to bring a case to the US Supreme Court to establish constitutional protections for the fetus. Criminal cases against women for drug use during pregnancy have already helped to establish case law for fetal personhood in multiple states. The referrals of positive drug tests to law enforcement agencies could help build the case for recognizing a fetus as a separate person entitled to equal protection, said University of California, Davis, law professor Mary Ziegler.

“The stockpiling of information like that is concerning, even if no one is acting on it in the near term,” Ziegler said in reference to the referrals to law enforcement. She said the policies do not actually help babies. “It’s literally about punishing people who are pregnant.”

The broader legality of such referrals is an open question. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that it was a violation of privacy for a public hospital in South Carolina to drug test pregnant patients without consent for the purposes of sharing the results with law enforcement. The ruling did not mention child welfare agencies, but some attorneys said the decision should apply to those agencies, too.

“Essentially, child welfare has become the pass-through,” Sussman said. “The child welfare agency is acting as an agent of the police. There’s no distinction between the two.”

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Who Paid for the Super Bowl ICE Ad?

On Sunday during the Super Bowl, you may have encountered a particularly saccharine bit of propaganda: a pro-ICE ad describing agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “friends” and “neighbors”—local heroes, deporting “violent criminals” from the homeland. (Only 14 percent of those arrested by ICE, according to CBS News, have been charged with violent crimes.)

The commercial wasn’t the work of the Trump administration—or even a political candidate or a well-known advocacy organization. The pro-ICE advertisement was placed by a group called American Sovereignty, which is brand new, seems to be a nonprofit or political entity, and has almost no public presence—save for half-a-dozen tweets over the last couple weeks.

ICE has one mission: to make America a safer place to live. And that’s what they’re doing.

THIS is law enforcement. THIS is ICE. pic.twitter.com/SyrWC1KHO1

— American Sovereignty (@AmSovereignty) January 31, 2026

American Sovereignty has a bare-bones website created in January, where you can sign up for a mailing list and read its privacy policy. But, otherwise, basically nothing is known.

I couldn’t find any publicly available corporate registration documents, and I got no response today when I reached out to the email address on the website to ask about the background of the group. It’s been the same for other news outlets: After American Sovereignty put up a pro-ICE billboard in San Francisco in the run-up to the Super Bowl, multiple journalists reached out to the group but didn’t get a response.

It’s an odd situation. Somehow, a group with virtually no public information seems to have been set up in recent weeks to buy millions of dollars worth of ads to promote the work of ICE—at precisely the moment when violence perpetrated by federal immigration agents has sparked a massive backlash and placed funding for the Department of Homeland Security in jeopardy. (DHS also did not respond to a request for comment.)

There are a few clues as to what’s happening.

According to documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission, the official name of the organization that placed the Super Bowl ad is “American Sovereignty PAC.” That paperwork lists Daniel Scarpinato as a contact for American Sovereignty. Scarpinato, who served as chief of staff to former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R), did not respond to a request for comment.

Scarpinato runs what appears to be a public relations group called Winged Victory: The Agency. The firm bills itself as helping clients with “crafting the right message, rolling out an idea, running a large-scale campaign, or prepping you for that tough interview.” Winged Victory didn’t respond to a request for comment.

So it remains a bit of a mystery. (If you have information, let us know.)

Someone created a group (a nonprofit, a political action committee, or something similar) with basically no public presence except for a bland website and a few tweets. It has launched millions in pro-ICE ads, and, at least so far, no one behind the venture has been willing to talk about it.

Ideally, in a democracy, we’d know who is spending millions trying to change public opinion on the secret police. But, in the American system, that’s just not how it works.

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Here’s the Thing About Bad Bunny’s Light Poles

While watching Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, you may have noticed the artist climbing electrical poles with other performers while singing “El Apagón.”

The song comes from the artist’s fifth studio album Un Verano Sin Ti, the most-streamed album globally on Spotify back in 2022. The album, which translates to A Summer Without You, is an exploration of a metaphorical absence in Bad Bunny’s life and the resulting feelings that stem from Puerto Rican experience. His song “El Apagón” does just this, literally translating to “the blackout” and referencing the devastating and ongoing power outages in Puerto Rico.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, Puerto Rico residents lost about 27 hours of power each year from 2021 to 2024—all without accounting for electricity failures from hurricanes or other major disasters. Over the past ten years, four hurricanes have dealt damage exceeding $1 billion in Puerto Rico. In comparison, residents in the mainland US experience about two hours of power loss each year.

The nearly yearlong blackout in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was the longest in American history. As a result of the damage, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the territory’s publicly-owned utility, declared bankruptcy. PREPA had a decades-long history of corruption. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, PREPA bought low-quality oil from suppliers for high-quality prices to fuel its power plants. The contracts allowed money to pass through executives and politicians, while residents continued to get service from a crumbling grid.

Puerto Rico then began to privatize power. In 2021, Luma Energy, a private Canadian-American company, took control of electric power transmission. But power outages grew worse as cuts increased on average by 30 to 35 percent since Luma came in, according to Luis Raúl Torres Cruz, a former member of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives. Last December, Puerto Rico’s government sued Luma Energy over allegedly making false promises to improve the electrical grid, all while raising costs.

In “El Apagón,” Bad Bunny delivers the verse “Maldita sea, otro apagón / Vamo’ pa’ lo’ bleacher a prender un blunt / Antes que a Pipo le dé un bofetón.” According to Gizmodo’s breakdown of the track, the verse roughly translates to “Damn it, another blackout. Let’s go to the bleachers and light up a blunt, before I give Pipo a slap.” Pipo refers to Puerto Rico’s former governor, Pedro Pierluisi, who helped sign the island’s electric grid to Luma, but never made good on his promises of fewer energy disruptions.

But it’s not just Puerto Rico. The Trump administration has taken back federal funding designated to modernize the territory’s electrical grid. In January, the Department of Energy canceled $450 million for grid resilience programs, according to Latitude Media.

Bad Bunny summed it up last April: “¿Cuando vamos a hacer algo?” or “When are we going to do something?”

Yet his song “El Apagón” also contains the lyrics “Puerto Rico está bien cabrón” or, according to Genius’ translation, “Puerto Rico is fucking great.” There is tangible pride and joy from being part of the island’s people, despite the continued power outages that contribute to increased economic hardship. That was obvious for all to see on Sunday.

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The Biggest Thing Missing from TPUSA’s Halftime Show: Joy

Turning Point USA’s “All-American Halftime Show,” an event created to compete with Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, was an all-around bummer. So down on its own purpose, in fact, that it appears not even President Donald Trump tuned in, opting instead to complain about Bad Bunny’s performance on social media.

But what exactly took place at MAGA’s halftime show? Outside of Kid Rock, the lineup was unlikely to be familiar to many Americans. It included third-place American Idol winner Gabby Barrett, a country singer named Lee Brice, and Brantley Gilbert, whose biggest claim to fame before Sunday’s event was a 2023 concert where he smashed a Bud Light can in solidarity with transphobes. The moments that did get shared widely were not positive and included footage of Kid Rock hopping around with his backing track out of sync. I also appreciated Kid Rock’s costume change from party jorts to serious pants during a memorial for Charlie Kirk.

But overall, it was what was missing—semblances of joy—that seemed to overshadow all of that. That it resonated like a gathering united by a disdain for others was unsurprising, given that it was born out of anger that Bad Bunny was performing the biggest show on the planet. This outrage was reflected in the YouTube livestream’s comment section, where endless praise for the show’s English-language songs flowed, and keyboard warriors furiously typed that Bad Bunny sucked in all caps. Others insisted that TPUSA’s show was attracting a larger audience than Bad Bunny’s show. (It didn’t.) Outside the comments section, a preachy vibe emanated throughout the show, including the reminder that outside of God, one “should be getting married, having children.”

Meanwhile, Bad Bunny’s performance erupted as one big party with everyone welcome. Each feature achieved a goal to enhance the show’s celebratory atmosphere: the piragua stand, Benito giving his Grammy to a younger version of himself, and the inclusion of Lady Gaga, who did a salsa-inspired version of “Die With a Smile.” As for the topic of marriage, Bad Bunny’s performance did include a real-life wedding. But there was no preaching. No judgment against those who aren’t married. No instructions. Just an invitation for all of America to join this happy couple in a heart-warming and memorable moment that they’ll surely remember.

As my cousin texted, Benito’s show reminded both of us of the parties my Panamanian grandparents used to throw while growing up, nudging the distant memories of when we both were, at some point, the child sleeping at the function, as Bad Bunny cleverly referenced during his set.

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