Is the Once-Extinct Dire Wolf Really Back, or Did Some of the Reporting Go Too Far?

This story was originally published b_y Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Amid a supremely chaotic news environment—dominated by Trump’s deportations, Trump’s funding cuts and layoffs, Trump’s tariffs, and, of course, the tumultuous stock market the tariffs produced—one carefully calibrated science story managed to break through the noise and make global headlines this week: A biotechnology company called Colossal Biosciences claims to have resurrected the dire wolf, a species that went extinct over 10,000 years ago.

In case you haven’t already read a dozen stories about this, here are some of the most salient details: Scientists at Colossal retrieved DNA from an approximately 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth and from the inner ear bones of a 70,000-year-old dire wolf skull. From the extracted DNA, they were able to sequence the dire wolf’s genome—up to 91 percent of it, at least—and study it to determine what makes a wolf “dire.”

Colossal’s scientists then took cells from a gray wolf—with whom the dire wolf shares 99.5 percent of its DNA—and used CRISPR to edit the genes to be more like a dire wolf. In total, they made just 20 changes to 14 genes; no actual dire wolf DNA was spliced into the gray wolf DNA. Then they took the modified gray wolf DNA, inserted it into dog ova that had the dog’s genetic material removed and placed 45 of those engineered embryos into eight surrogate dogs. (That’s 45 embryos per dog, to be clear.) Those approximately 360 embryos netted three apparently healthy wolf pups: two males and a female.

The question is whether making 20 changes to gray wolf DNA is enough to call the resulting animals “dire wolves.”

“[If] it looks like a dire wolf and acts like a dire wolf, I’m going to call it a dire wolf,” Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, told Wired. “And my colleagues who are taxonomists will disagree with me,” she conceded. But also, the genetic changes they made all targeted how a dire wolf might look; the New Yorker reported that “no effort had been made to try to identify genes for behavior.”

Other scientists also disagree with Shapiro: “The work that’s being done at Colossal has not brought a species back from extinction,” Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine, told the Bulletin. “[It’s] a genetically modified wolf.”

Colossal gave non-exclusive access to the three wolf pups and to the embargoed story about their achievement to some of the nation’s most prominent publications, including Time, the New Yorker, and Wired. This virtually guaranteed a media blitz when the stories finally dropped, all on the same day. The resulting media frenzy provides a fascinating case study of science journalism.

Let’s start with the headlines. Some of the most credulous include:

“The Return of the Dire Wolf” in Time.

“The Dire Wolf Is Back” in the New Yorker.

“Life After Death” in the print edition of the New Yorker.

“The dire wolf, which went extinct 12,500 years ago, revived by biotech company” in CBS News.

“Dire wolves brought back: See photos of Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi” in USA Today. (Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are the names of the wolves in question.)

This list might be a bit repetitive, but it’s illustrative of the overwhelming volume and tone of the coverage.

Other outlets hedged their bets a bit: “Scientists Claim to Have Brought Back the Dire Wolf” in Wired; “Scientists Revive the Dire Wolf, or Something Close” in the New York Times; “Did Scientists Actually De-Extinct the Dire Wolf?” in Scientific American; “A biotech company says it has bred three pups with traits of the extinct dire wolf” in NPR. Still others eventually pushed back on Colossal’s claims: “Scientists say they brought back dire wolves from extinction. Not exactly” in the Washington Post; “No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction” in New Scientist; “Experts dispute claim dire wolf brought back from extinction” in the BBC. You get the idea.

In general, the stories that unequivocally affirmed Colossal’s de-extinction achievement in the headline came out first—or were chasing search-engine attention with regurgitated versions of those initial articles. The stories with a more skeptical perspective were published in a subsequent wave after scientists and science writers began disputing the company’s claims.

It’s important to consider how sausage like this is made, and I mean the stories—not the actual wolves. None of the reporters I contacted or Colossal would confirm the exact details on the record, but it is clear that Colossal reached out to a relatively few handpicked journalists or publications who agreed to an embargo specifying when the publication of articles could occur. (Update: A Colossal publicist confirmed in an email that “yes, we had journalists sign [nondisclosure agreements] before sharing the news around the announcement.”)

Though a matter of some controversy in media circles, such embargoes are fairly common in the world of science journalism, where they are often rationalized with claims that journalists need significant amounts of time when dealing with complex subjects.

Colossal would have begun by meting out interviews to its chosen journalists—by phone, video call, or in person—with scientists, executives, and animal caretakers. The company had to arrange times for the journalists to come see the two males in their enclosure (at an undisclosed location in the northern United States). Those were likely separate visits because none of the journalists mention seeing their peers on the premises. But it’s theoretically possible there was one big, coordinated press trip, and the writers don’t mention it because it could be distracting or draw attention to the sausage-making process.

It’s interesting from a craft perspective to consider how different journalists handled the same general material—which details crop up where, and how. For example, Wired and the New York Times reported that a fourth pup was born at the same time as Khaleesi but died after 10 days from an infected or ruptured intestine, but neither the New Yorker nor Time included that information.

Jeffrey Kluger reported for Time that the two male pups (who were born first, before the female) were initially kept together with the surrogate that displayed the most maternal instincts, but after a few days were removed because “the surrogate was actually becoming too attentive.” Max, on the other hand, wrote in the New Yorker that the wolves were initially nursed by one of the surrogates, but switched to bottles because the dog couldn’t “keep up with their metabolic needs.”

Crucially, the stories written in advance by journalists with early access uniformly lack substantive criticism or questioning of Colossal’s work on dire wolves from scientists unaffiliated with the company, presumably because they were barred from sharing specific details about the dire wolf project outside the company until the embargo lifted.

Mullin and Reynolds included a vague quote in their article from David Jachowski, a professor of conservation at Clemson University, about the tricky nature of defining species, but carefully stated that Jachowski “did not know specific details about the dire wolf project.”

“I really feel that bringing back one or even five woolly mammoths is not a good idea,” Yale University bioethicist Stephen Latham told Kluger. “A single woolly mammoth is not a woolly mammoth leading a woolly mammoth life with a woolly mammoth herd.” Presumably, Kluger asked about the woolly mammoth because Colossal’s desire to bring a woolly mammoth back from extinction is well-known public information and therefore fair game, unlike the dire wolf project.

“The very credulous way in which the media was essentially acting as an effective PR arm for Colossal—[that] was really shocking to me.”

Max spoke with one scientist who expressed skepticism about Colossal’s messaging—Elinor Karlsson, an expert in wolf and dog genetics. “I ask Beth [Shapiro], ‘Why are you calling this a dire wolf when it’s a gray wolf with seventeen or eighteen changes in its DNA?’” Karlsson told Max. But Karlsson is on the company’s advisory board.

Under normal circumstances, journalists who agree to an embargo hold their stories until a pre-arranged date. Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, told Andrea Thompson, an editor at Scientific American, that the mainstream media stories were supposed to coincide with the publication of a scientific article backing up some of their work, but the New Yorker broke the embargo, unleashing the floodgates of media coverage before the scientific article could be published. (Max, the New Yorker staff writer assigned to the story, declined to comment.)

The deluge of articles on Colossal’s work took the scientific community by surprise. Many scientists argued that the gray wolf is not the dire wolf’s closest living relative, citing a 2021 paper that found dire wolves diverged from living canids 5.7 million years ago, and from African jackals 5.1 million years ago, making them genetically closer to the jackal. But Colossal says their more complete genetic analysis shows that dire and gray wolves shared common ancestors as recently as 2.5 to 3.5 million years ago, according to Wired.

But scientists have to take Colossal at their word, because their work has not been published or peer reviewed.

“This is not how we normally do science,” said Gill, a paleoecologist. “We don’t do science by press release in the absence of a paper. We don’t do science by New Yorker and Time magazine announcements.”

The result of Colossal’s extensive and carefully constructed promotion was a series of detail-rich feature stories that prominently repeated Colossal’s claims with virtually no pushback from outside experts. Other outlets quickly followed with their own stories based on those first few features and on Colossal’s press release. Some of those journalists sought outside expert input; some didn’t.

Gill had a visceral response when she first saw the headlines, like a gut punch. “It was an emotional roller coaster,” Gill said. “In terms of the very credulous way in which the media was essentially acting as an effective PR arm for Colossal—[that] was really shocking to me.”

Gill is worried that the frenzied media coverage will be detrimental to the public’s understanding of conservation and extinction, but also that the subsequent backlash will undermine the public’s trust in science. “This kind of messaging is really hard to walk back from,” she said.

The response she has observed has been polarized. Some people have responded that scientists shouldn’t be playing God, which could reduce support for essential biomedical research in general. Others have expressed a kind of manic enthusiasm, relieved that we no longer need to worry about the biodiversity crisis because humans can just bring species back from extinction.

This latter view was espoused by none other than Interior Secretary Doug Bergum, who put out a statement that said, in part:

“The Department of the Interior is excited about the potential of ‘de-extinction’ technology and how it may serve broader purposes beyond the recovery of lost species, including strengthening biodiversity protection efforts and helping endangered or at-risk species. The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: once a species enters, they never leave. In fact, 97 percent of species that are added to the endangered list remain there. This is because the status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation… Since the dawn of our nation, it has been innovation – not regulation – that has spawned American greatness. The revival of the Dire Wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder, showcasing how the concept of ‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”

Shapiro and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm told Wired that they hope media coverage of their “dire” wolves will raise awareness about the plight of the gray wolf. That’s not what I see happening—in the public sphere, or in the places it matters most, like the Interior Department.

Remus, Romulus, and Khaleesi will live out their lives in pampered confinement. Colossal’s leaders have said that the animals they create are not just “curios” but are meant to be reintroduced to the landscape so they can fulfill the same ecosystem functions as they did in the past. And yet, the three wolf clones will not be rewilded. Presumably the others that follow won’t either. Lamm has said they plan to make seven or eight.

Basically, the so-called dire wolves can’t be rewilded. Gill said that whether woolly mammoths died because they were hunted to death by humans, or because of climate change, or some combination of the two, is up for debate. But scientists know what happened to the dire wolves: They starved to death. “Regardless of what caused the extinction of most of these large grazers, the animals that ate them died because they had nothing to eat,” Gill said. “That has not changed. In fact, it has gotten more so over time as we’ve lost more and more of our wild spaces and more and more of the places where big animals would roam.” It makes no sense to start a (hypothetical) rewilding project with a large, charismatic predator before introducing its potential prey. If dire wolves couldn’t compete with gray wolves and coyotes back then, when large prey animals were more abundant, there’s no way they could compete now, Gill concluded.

“We’re not making a wild population, but we’re also not making a curio in a park,” Gill said, summarizing Colossal’s conflicting positions. “What are you doing? What is the point?”

And what about the journalists who spread Colossal’s message, largely without checks on the company’s narrative?

It’s hard to blame the journalists for agreeing to whatever terms Colossal imposed on their initial access—I would likely have accepted an embargo, too, if offered the opportunity. And the stories do raise some important ethical and practical questions about de-extinction.

But when the company you’re writing about is given the first and last word, and most of the words in between, are readers really getting the whole story?

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Bernie Sanders Spoke at Coachella and the Crowd Went Wild

On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) made a surprise pit stop while on the road for his “fighting oligarchy” tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) across the West. He appeared at the Coachella annual music festival.

Sanders took the stage to introduce the singer Clairo, whom he praised for standing up for reproductive rights and speaking out against the war in Gaza. He then urged the crowd to get energized and fight back against President Donald Trump’s lawless, authoritarian agenda.

“The future of what happens to America is dependent upon your generation,” Sanders told the crowd. “Now you can turn away, and you can ignore what goes on, but if you do that, you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up, to fight… for economic justice, social justice, and racial justice.”

Coming on the heels of Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) recent marathon speech to Congress, Sanders’ music festival appearance is the latest high-profile attempt by a sitting member of Congress to rally opposition against Trump. The president had made significant gains among young voters in the November election compared to his 2020 race, and Coachella’s audience, which tends to be mostly Gen Z and millennials according to one survey, is a crucial demographic for the Democrats. Sanders was not the only lawmaker at Coachella: he was introduced by Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), the youngest member of Congress.

Sanders got a warm welcome; Trump, not so much. Each time Sanders mentioned him, the crowd roared with boos. “I agree!” he replied at one point. The 83-year-old Sanders warned, in a roughly three-minute speech, of the threats Trump and the GOP pose to tackling climate change and improving abortion rights, worker’s rights, and access to equitable healthcare.

“We have an economy today that is working very well for the billionaire class, but not for working families. We need you to help us to create an economy that works well for everybody, not just the one percent,” Sanders told the crowd. “We have a health care system that is broken. We are the only major country not to guarantee health care to all people. We need you to stand up to the insurance companies and the drug companies and understand that health care is a human right.”

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As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote, Sanders has become something of a leader of the Trump resistance these past couple of months, seeking to gain the support of otherwise apolitical voters as other high-profile Democrats largely have remained silent. “I mean, Kamala [Harris] is not talking, Barack [Obama]’s not talking, [Joe] Biden’s not talking,” one longtime Democratsaid. “Right now, he’s the only one talking, and he’s the only one making sense.”

Sanders appears to be doing exactly what Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Democrats should be doing during an appearance on CNN Sunday morning. “I think our secret, super-duper strategy is, just tell the truth about what’s going on,” she noted. “The American people will see pretty clearly who’s fighting for the billionaires and who’s fighting for them.”

Meanwhile, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been hitting the road. He delivered the Coachella speech after making a stop earlier in the day in Los Angeles with the New York lawmaker. In a post on X, Sanders said the LA turnout was about 36,000 people, making it “our biggest rally ever.”

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RFK Jr. Cut 10,000 HHS Workers. Milwaukee Kids Paid the Price.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently denied a request from health officials in Milwaukee to investigate a lead poisoning crisis in that city’s aging schools. Instead, the city’s 67,500 public school students seem to be caught in the crosshairs of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mission to massively overhaul the Department of Health and Human Services.

“I sincerely regret to inform you that due to the complete loss of our Lead Program, we will be unable to support you with this,” Aaron Bernstein, director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, told city officials in an email obtained by CBS News.

Kennedy is a longtime vaccine skeptic whose unorthodox approach to health and medicine has made him a perfect acolyte for Donald Trump and his best known sidekick, Elon Musk. Despite recently flip-flopping on the measles vaccine after a recent outbreak in Texas, he’s also forced a top vaccine official out of office and killed the National Institutes of Health’s climate change programs.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy promised to cut 10,000 of the agency’s 82,000 jobs in an effort to streamline the federal government’s efficiency. “We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy told reporters in March, according to the Guardian. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.”

Those cuts are part of Trump’s broader effort to dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. Led my Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cuts have been characterized by the people at the center of them as chaotic, wasteful, and ineffective, according to reporting by my colleague Julianne McShane.

Kennedy himself nearly admitted as much, saying less than a month after he announced them that up to 20 percent of jobs slashed at his agency were cut in error and would need to be reversed. “Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday, according to the Guardian. “We’re reinstating them.

Back in Milwaukee, local officials will try to manage a crisis that could impact most of the city’s public school buildings. Those schools were largely built before 1978, when lead-based paint was outlawed in the United States. Longterm exposure to lead, which has for decades been found to disproportionately impact low-income Black communities (see: Flint, Michigan), can have behavioral and physical impacts well into adulthood. My late colleague, columnist Kevin Drum, wrote about them often for Mother Jones.

The CDC’s lead poisoning team was one of several that were cut on April 1.

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Trump Mistakenly Deported a Man to El Salvador. There’s Still No Plan to Bring Him Back.

On Friday, Federal District Court Judge Paula Xinis ruled that the Trump administration had failed to comply with a court order requiring it to provide information about what it is doing to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the US government mistakenly sent to one of the world’s worst prisons in El Salvador.

When Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign appeared in federal court in Maryland earlier on Friday, he had no information to provide about what his client, the Trump administration, had done to comply with her order.

“Have they done anything?” Xinis asked, according to the Hill.

“Your honor, I don’t have personal knowledge,” Ensign replied.

“OK, so they’ve done nothing,” Xinis concluded.

As a result, Xinis held in her written ruling that the administration has “made no meaningful effort to comply” with her order, even though it is now backed up by a unanimous Supreme Court decision. The judge is now requiring the government to provide a daily status update that details where Abrego Garcia is and what the Trump administration is doing to bring him back to the United States.

How the Trump administration responds has the potential to deepen a constitutional crisis. Some of the president’s top aides, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, have made clear that they do want Abrego Garcia to return to the United States. It remains to be seen how the courts will respond if the administration continues to stonewall.

On Friday, Trump appeared more willing to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back I would do that. I respect the Supreme Court,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I have great respect for the Supreme Court

The case began last month after Abrego Garcia, who is married to a US citizen and is the father of their three children, including a 5-year-old with autism, was sent to a Salvadoran megaprison in what the administration concedes was an “administrative error.” Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador because an immigration judge had previously ruled that he could not be sent to the country because he was more likely than not to face persecution there.

In response to a lawsuit brought on Abrego Garcia’s behalf, Xinis ordered earlier this month that he be brought back to the United States—rejecting the Trump administration’s claim that it didn’t have to do anything to fix its mistake because Abrego Garcia was no longer in US custody. The Trump administration quickly brought an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to try to overturn Xinis’ ruling.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that largely upheld the lower court by holding that the Trump administration should “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia. It added that the government should “be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

Xinis quickly followed up by ordering the government to provide information by Friday morning about the current location of Abrego Garcia, what steps it may have already taken to facilitate his return, and what additional steps it is planning to take to bring him back. But the government did not do so. As Xinis wrote in her Friday decision:

During the hearing, the Court posed straightforward questions, including: Where is Abrego Garcia right now? What steps had Defendants taken to facilitate his return while the Court’s initial order on injunctive relief was in effect…? Defendants’ counsel responded that he could not answer these questions, and at times suggested that Defendants had withheld such information from him. As a result, counsel could not confirm, and thus did not advance any evidence, that Defendants had done anything to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. This remained Defendants’ position even after this Court reminded them that the Supreme Court of the United States expressly affirmed this Court’s authority to require the Government “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

The Trump administration’s first daily update is due on Saturday at 5 p.m. Eastern. It will be back in court on Tuesday.

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Trump’s Deportation Black Hole

On March 15, federal agents rounded up more than 230 Venezuelan nationals who were then deported to El Salvador and locked up in the country’s notorious megaprison. The Trump administration said the men belonged to a violent Venezuelan gang, but presented no evidence, and there were no court hearings in which the men could contest the allegations.

Nearly a month later, families of the Venezuelan men say they have heard nothing about their fate. It’s as if they disappeared.

“We’re living in a world where you can just be rounded up with no hearing, not even an administrative hearing, nothing,” says immigration attorney Joseph Giardina. “Why couldn’t you have let their cases be adjudicated? There’s no logical answer other than a publicity stunt.”

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporters Isabela Dias and Noah Lanard speak to the families and lawyers of 10 men now imprisoned at the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. They vehemently deny allegations that the men are members of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization, and several provided evidence to support that denial.

To learn more about the Trump administration’s arrangement with the government of El Salvador, host Al Letson speaks with Carlos Dada, co-founder and director of El Faro, the Salvadoran investigative news outlet. Dada says that in addition to foreign nationals, the agreement also allows for American citizens convicted of crimes to be imprisoned in El Salvador.

As the Trump administration also targets international students who have spoken out about Israel’s war in Gaza, Reveal’s Najib Aminy reports on pro-Israel groups that are claiming to have shared lists of student protestors with the White House, and then taking credit when some of those young people are targeted for deportation.

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Bad News for Man’s Best Friend: Dogs Are Environmental Villains

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

Dogs have “extensive and multifarious” environmental impacts, disturbing wildlife, polluting waterways and contributing to carbon emissions, new research has found.

An Australian review of existing studies has argued that “the environmental impact of owned dogs is far greater, more insidious, and more concerning than is generally recognised”.

While the environmental impact of cats is well known, the comparative effect of pet dogs has been poorly acknowledged, the researchers said.

The review, published in the journal Pacific Conservation Biology, highlighted the impacts of the world’s “commonest large carnivore” in killing and disturbing native wildlife, particularly shore birds.

In Australia, attacks by unrestrained dogs on little penguins in Tasmania may contribute to colony collapse, modelling suggests, while a study of animals taken to the Australia Zoo wildlife hospital found that mortality was highest after dog attacks, which was the second most common reason for admission after car strikes.

In the US, studies have found that deer, foxes and bobcats were less active in or avoid wilderness areas where dogs were allowed, while other research shows that insecticides from flea and tick medications kill aquatic invertebrates when they wash off into waterways. Dog feces can also leave scent traces and affect soil chemistry and plant growth.

The carbon footprint of pets is also significant. A 2020 study found the dry pet food industry had an environmental footprint of around twice the land area of the UK, with greenhouse gas emissions—56 to 151 Mt CO2— equivalent to the 60th highest-emitting country.

The review’s lead author, Prof Bill Bateman of Curtin University, said the research did not intend to be “censorious” but aimed to raise awareness of the environmental impacts of man’s best friend, with whom humans’ domestic relationship dates back several millennia.

“To a certain extent we give a free pass to dogs because they are so important to us…not just as working dogs but also as companions.”

“To a certain extent we give a free pass to dogs because they are so important to us… not just as working dogs but also as companions,” he said, pointing to the “huge benefits” dogs had on their owners’ mental and physical health. He also noted that dogs played vital roles in conservation work, such as in wildlife detection.

“Although we’ve pointed out these issues with dogs in natural environments…there is that other balancing side, which is that people will probably go out and really enjoy the environment around them—and perhaps feel more protective about it—because they’re out there walking their dog in it.”

Angelika von Sanden, a trauma therapist and the author of Sit Stay Grow: How Dogs Can Help You Worry Less and Walk into a Better Future, said she had observed that for many clients the companionship of a dog was often “literally the only reason to survive, to get up, to still keep going”.

“It gives them a reason to get up, a reason to get out, a reason to move around and be in contact a little bit with the world outside,” she said. “Dog owners can get a bad name if they are not aware of the surroundings they are in and of other people around them.”

In the review, the researchers attributed the extent of the environmental impacts to the sheer number of dogs globally, as well as “the lax or uninformed behavior of dog owners”.

A simple way to mitigate against the worst impacts was to keep dogs leashed in areas where restrictions apply and to maintain a buffer distance from nesting or roosting shorebirds, the paper suggested.

“A lot of what we’re talking about can be ameliorated by owners’ behavior,” Bateman said, pointing out that low compliance with leash laws was a problem.

“Maybe, in some parts of the world, we actually need to consider some slightly more robust laws.”

He suggested that dog exclusion zones might be more suitable in some areas.

Bateman also raised sustainable dog food as an option to reduce a pet’s environmental paw print, noting however that “more sustainable dog food tends to cost more than the cheap dog food that we buy which has a higher carbon footprint.”

“If nothing else, pick up your own dog shit,” he said.

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Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Deported, Immigration Judge Rules

A Louisiana immigration judge ruled Friday that recent Columbia graduate and Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil can be deported—even though Khalil has a green card, is a lawful permanent resident, and has not been charged with any crimes.

The judge gave Khalil’s attorneys until April 23 to ask for a stay of the deportation. There is a separate case in federal court in New Jersey still ongoing over whether Khalil’s arrest on March 8th violated his First Amendment rights.

The rationale for deporting Khalil is obscure. Secretary of State Marco Rubio submitted a two-page letter arguing, essentially, that Khalil is deportable on the basis of ideas: his “past, current, or expected beliefs.” Rubio relied on a 1950s law that says the Secretary of State can determine whether a noncitizen’s presence in the US harms national security goals.

The US, following the Trump administration’s executive order on antisemitism, has said Khalil—and other pro-Palestine activists—are harming the US goal of combatting antisemitism. Immigration judge Jamee Coman said she has no authority to question the Secretary of State.

In Rubio’s letter to the court, released by the Associated Press onThursday, he asserts that Khalil’s alleged beliefs mean his continued in the country “would compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest.”

Rubio’s letter also directly accuses Khalil, who was a negotiator for the student activist of Columbia University’s pro-Palestine encampment in spring 2024, of participation in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.” (Khalil’s friends and supporters, many of whom are Jewish Columbia students, argue that this account is entirely false.)

Khalil has been detained in Jena, Louisiana for over a month. His wife, who is eight months pregnant in New York City, said Khalil will likely miss the birth of his first child.

Khalil’s legal fight is likely to be long: despite this ruling, his federal habeas case, which is being heard in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey, will continue.

At his hearing in Jena, Mahmoud Khalil asked to address the court, according to an ACLU press release.

“I would like to quote what you said last time that there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness,” Khalil said. “Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me is afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”

Since Khalil’s March 8th arrest, over 800 other noncitizen students, recent graduates, and university affiliates have had their visas revoked.

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Democrats Home In on Trading Activity Before Trump Flip on Tariffs

Democratic lawmakers are calling for federal agencies and state attorneys general to investigate whether President Donald Trump, members of his administration, or any of his associates manipulated markets or helped enrich allies in connection with Trump’s sudden reversal on tariff polices Wednesday.

Six top Democrats wrote to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins Friday, asking the agency to investigate “whether the tariff announcements, which caused the market crash and subsequent partial recovery, enriched administration insiders and friends at the expense of the American public and whether any insiders, including the President’s family, had prior knowledge of the tariff pause that they abused to make stock trades ahead of the president’s announcement.”

In varied missives over the last few days, Democrats—who for months have publicly struggled with how aggressively to combat Trump—have taken direct aim at the economic damage inflicted by the president’s erratic tariff policy. And they have zeroed in on seemingly suspicious trading activity that took place ahead of Trump’s about-face.

“It is unconscionable that as American families are concerned about their financial security during this economic crisis entirely manufactured by the President, insiders may have actively profited from the market volatility and potentially perpetrated financial fraud on the American public,” Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote.

The White House dismissed Democratic calls in a statement Friday. “It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security in the face of nonstop media fearmongering,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said. “Democrats railed against China’s cheating for decades, and now they’re playing partisan games instead of celebrating President Trump’s decisive action yesterday to finally corner China.”

The senators and other lawmakers have noted Trump’s post at 9:37 am Wednesday—just hours before he announced the tariff walk-back—on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”

Some Democrats pointed also to data showing an apparent spike in purchases of call options—a contract allowing the buyer to lock in a set price for a security and reap a potentially large benefit if the price rises—about 10 minutes before Trump announced he would be backing off on his tariffs.

“Given the uncertainty of when the President privately decided to pause the tariffs, and the fact he convened several meetings during that timeframe (including with Members of Congress), there is an open question as to who had access to this material, nonpublic, and market-moving information,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said in a letter signed by 18 other Democratic members of the House Financial Services committee on Thursday, seeking investigations by the SEC and other entities.

It’s not clear from the publicly available data who purchased the call options—it is could plausibly be no more than a well-timed gamble that the previous two days of collapsing prices would pause or be reversed. But the House Democrats also pointed to Trump’s gleeful celebration of huge gains by those around him in the hours after the stock market rebounded.

Waters noted a video of Trump talking in the Oval Office on Wednesday, the day the stock market briefly surged following Trump’s announcement that he was partially pausing his tariffs. In the video, Trump can be seen speaking to several men and laughing about how much money they had supposedly made that day. “He made $2.5 billion today, and he made $900 million—that’s not bad,” Trump laughs as the other men chuckle.

“From an initial standpoint, these activities and statements appear to be a blatant violation of insider trading and market manipulation laws aimed at preventing government officials and corporate insiders from profiting off material non-public information in the stock market,” Waters wrote.

Democrats, despite their requests for investigations, said that they do not believe the SEC or other federal agencies under Trump will act. Waters asked for probes by the GAO, a congressional agency, as well as by the SEC’s inspector general, in an apparent effort to overcome likely federal reluctance to anger Trump.

Warren, Schumer, Wyden, and Schiff on Friday also wrote to the National Association of Attorneys General, seeking state-level investigations.

“Every Attorney General must immediately investigate whether” Trump’s Wednesday morning post “or anything else surrounding this tariff policy…was illegal market manipulation or insider trading,” the senators wrote. “It is imperative that they investigate whether President Trump, his family, members of his administration, or members of Congress profited from recent changes to tariff policy.”.

In an appearance Thursday night on MSNBC, Schiff said that with the Justice Department run by former Trump lawyers, “we can’t hope they’re going to do any scrutiny. If they’re not going to hold people accountable, then somehow it has to get done.”

“They’ve got a get-out-of-jail-free card from the Justice Department,” Schiff said, citing the Supreme Court’s “absolute immunity” ruling last year. “So, it falls on the rest of us in Congress to do something. And we’re going to have to do the oversight that in a normal world would be very bipartisan, where there would be people in the executive doing it.”

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Inside Trump’s Federal “Probie” Purge

On Wednesday, S.W.,an award-winning probationary worker at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), spent the day crying in bed.

S.W., who is being identified by her initials due to fear of retaliation for speaking out, is one of more than 24,000 federal probationary employees, those who have been in their jobs for a year or two or less, who were fired en masse on Valentine’s Day as part of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s purge of federal workers. A month later, in mid-March, she and thousands of other probationary workers were reinstated following a court order. For S.W., who said she is five months pregnant and her family’s breadwinner, getting that news felt like a win. “I felt so happy, I was on top of the world,”

Her hope was dashed Wednesday, when an appeals court allowed the Trump administration to resume terminations of probationary workers. It was one of two court rulings this week that allowed the firings of federal probationary workers to proceed, along with a Tuesday decision from the Supreme Court in which a majority of the justices ruled that the nonprofit organizations fighting the firings lacked standing to sue over them.

After getting the news, S.W. felt herself slipping back into the depression that she fell into after initially being fired in February. “This week, I feel like I’m failing my child,” she said, referring to her pregnancy. “Her mom is not emotionally in a good place.”

The recent court rulings have thrown the future employment of this portion of the federal workforce into question. Six probationary employees who work at fourdifferent federal agencies told Mother Jones the recent chaos has left them stressed and anxious.

One probationary HUD worker likened the government’s changing directives to a breakup with someone who keeps coming back: “It’s emotionally very turbulent,” he said. It’s also “the ultimate irony” for a government allegedly obsessed with reducing its bottom line, he added. “I think they have saddled themselves—and particularly agencies—with the burden of paying people who aren’t actually contributing to their mission and with years of litigation and administrative burdens.”

S.W. agrees. “I have been getting paid to do nothing,” she told me. “I don’t know how efficient it is to have thousands of people getting paid to sit around.” Spokespeople for the White House and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which administered the first round of “fork in the road” buyouts, did not respond to questions for this story.

The firings of previously reinstated probationary workers have reportedly already begun after the courts gave the green light this week.

On Thursday, Reuters reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), housed within the Department of Commerce, had promptly begun firing previously reinstated probationary workers. One of them, Mike Garza, an IT specialist at NOAA, told Mother Jones on Friday morning that he worries about finding another job and fears will not be paid for the current pay period, since some of NOAA’s probationary workers did not get full back pay for the month-long period between February and March when they lost their jobs. Garza said he is still waiting on approximately $1,600 from that time period.

“I get angry, I get sad, I get depressed about the country being taken apart,” Garza said. “I’m trying to keep it together, but it’s really hard, to be honest.”

A spokesperson for NOAA did not immediately respond to questions.

“Probies,” as they’re known on Reddit, at other agencies are bracing for the same fate. “It’s essentially a whiplash situation,” a probationary worker at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told me.

While they wait, many “probies” are weighing whether or not to take the second round of “fork in the road” buyouts that more than a half dozen agencies reportedly offered last week. Two of the three HUD workers I spoke to said they plan to take it. But doing so will bring its own set of sacrifices. Those who accept it will likely forfeit their ability to take legal action against their agencies, according to one of the law firms representing probationary employees in a class action lawsuit contesting their terminations. Legal action is one of the only avenues left for probationary workers to contest their firings, given that they have more limited rights to appeal them than other federal workers do.

Other “probies” do not trust the government will follow through on the offer they are promising. “I am not relying on the federal government at all to come through with what they say,” said Claire Bergstresser, a probationary worker in HUD’s Office of Fair Housing, who added that she does not plan to take the buyout. Indeed, experts have questioned whether the offer is legally sound.

HUD workers have good reason to doubt the government’s word: HUD “probies” also did not receive back pay for the period between mid-February, when they were terminated, and mid-March, when they were reinstated and placed on administrative leave following a court order. The three HUD employees I spoke to recounted losing thousands in pay during that month, ranging from $4,000 to more than $12,000. When HUD officials reinstated the approximately 300 fired “probies” in mid-March, they urged them to cancel any unemployment insurance claims they filed with their states—without clarifying that the agency would not be paying them for the prior month of missed work. They did not explain that detail until more than a week later, according to internal emails sent to HUD employees and reviewed by Mother Jones. Spokespeople for HUD did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.

Some “probies” never got a second buyout offer. S.W. and three other HHS employees said the agency has yet to send out a second round of offers. That may be because HHS fired 10,000 people last week, and eliminated 10,000 more through the first round of buyouts and voluntary retirement offers. Spokespeople for HHS did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.

The probationary workers say that ultimately, it’s Americans who will pay the price of their job losses. One worked on a grant program that develops affordable housing, which will likely be in even shorter supply in light of the Trump administration’s reported plans to terminate half the housing agency’s workforce overall. “Grantees—people on the ground who are building the housing and implementing the programs—are basically going to be left without guidance, support, and advocates at the federal level to help make sure they’re getting the money on time and that they have proper guidance on how to spend the money in the most effective ways,” the HUD worker said.

The “probie” purge will also be a loss for the future of the federal workforce, experts say. Caitlin Lewis, executive director of Civic Match, a platform that matches federal workers with jobs in state and local government, said that while the company does not ask about candidates’ probationary status, more than 9 percent of federal workers who use its services have between one to three years of relevant work experience, indicating they are likely probationary employees. “Young workers go into public service because it’s their dream career, so these layoffs can feel particularly soul-crushing,” Lewis said. “It’s incumbent on us to keep them in public service because their enthusiasm and passion can translate into fulfilling careers where they’ve made a real difference in their communities long-term.”

The GSA worker agrees: “They fired their next generation of federal employees and they’re going to find out the hard way that we were valuable. Nobody works harder than a probationary employee.”

S.W. is trying to stay calm in the midst of uncertainty—at the very least, for the sake of her pregnancy. She knows that chronic stress can lead to a low birthweight and potential developmental delays for her future child.

But trying to stay calm is easier said than done. “I could get an email at any moment that says, ‘you’re terminated.’” If that happened, she would also lose the insurance her family relies on and that she uses to access therapy, which helps her manage her depression, she said.

For now, she is holding out hope she will eventually get to go back to work. “I felt like it was meaningful work and that was very important to me,” S.W. said. “You want to wake up and love what you do, and that’s what I had.”

Update, April 11: This story was updated with details about the back pay Garza says he received.

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How GOP Lawmakers’ Districts Benefited from Biden’s Energy Spending

President Trump’s overarching embrace of fossil fuels includes repealing a landmark Biden legislative achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, which has helped support major investments in clean energy infrastructure.

While this will be the 55th time Republicans will have tried to roll back part or all ofthe $370 billion IRA, a Mother Jones analysis shows that most of the spending under the bill—and its associated jobs—went to areas represented by Republicans in Congress.

As the Biden White House explained, the 2022 law aimed to make sure the U.S. remained “the global leader in clean energy technology, manufacturing, and innovation.” That logic—and the jobs and tax credits spun off by the spending**—**conviced 18 Republican House members to sign a letter last summer asking their GOP colleagues not to go through with a “full repeal” of the bill, a move that was largely seen as an effort to appeal to voters ahead of the 2024 elections.

In the end, three of the Republicans who signed the letterwere unseated in November. Last month, 21 Republicans, many who signed on to the summer letter, released an updated plea to preserve parts of the Inflation Reduction Act.

At least two thirds of the announced jobs were for projects in districts now represented by a Republican.

Still, given Trump’s priorities, the world’s largest investment in climate and clean energy remains on the chopping block. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he hopes to approach the IRA with something “between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.”

But data published on January 15, 2025 on Energy.gov documenting $300 billion in investments unleashed under Biden helps explain why some Republicans are pushing Johnson against a complete elimination of the IRA. By plotting announced projects catalogued in the Biden administration database to Congress’s current district boundaries, our analysis shows how the bill benefited conservative voters.

Of the total investment, at least 57% went to districts currently represented by GOP House members, or about $171 billion. Republican districts saw nearly three quarters of private investment underwritten by the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

By region, the Midwest saw more funding for energy projects than any other, and over three times as much as the East Coast.

The Biden administration compiled dataset tracks 209,268 jobs created at private energy projects subsidized or covered by $163 billion in IRA and BIL funding. At least two thirds of the announced jobs were for projects in districts now represented by a Republican. The median number of jobs announced in Republican districts was 600—exactly double the 300 jobs in the median Democratic district.

The top three districts to receive the most money in energy investments under Biden are currently represented by Republican representatives Richard Hudson of North Carolina, Victoria Spartz of Indiana, and Mark Amodei of Nevada, who, like all lawmakers mentioned in this story, did not respond to requests for comment.

While Hudson’s North Carolina district has benefited the most from IRA spending—with over $17 billion dollars in investment, mostly going toward a major Toyota battery plant—he has never been a fan of the law. In a 2022 statement committing to vote against it, he said the “bill would raise taxes [and] throw money at woke climate and social programs that won’t work.”

Spartz’s district got some $13 billion in IRA spending, largely thanks to a battery plant in Kokomo, Indiana. She also voted against the bill, and argued it would trigger “energy inflation, and recession.”

But Amodei, whose district was the third largest recipient of these funds, has signed both letters urging GOP powerbrokers to keep parts of the Inflation Reduction Act alive. The districts represented by the Republican lawmakers who signed the March letter received over $22 billion, or about seven percent of the total invested. Amodei’s district, which got $9.7 billion, made up roughly 40 percent of the funding received by the letter’s signatories.

Rep. Andy Ogles, the Tennessee Republican leading the repeal charge, saw his own district receive nearly $400 million in funding. Other co-sponsors of the bill pushing repeal saw over $9 billion in energy funding, mostly in private investments supported by the bill’s tax credits. One, Rep. Andy Biggs, was elected from an Arizona district which was the twelfth highest recipient of funding.

In 2022, Biggs attacked the IRA in a video to constituents, warning that they were “going to start feeling the pains of this legislation soon.” But the month before Biggs shared that video, the faltering economy had forced a delay in the construction of a battery manufacturing factory planned for his district. The following year it received $5.5 billion through Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and is set to open later in 2025. Biggs has hailed the plant’s construction and job creating potential as “fantastic news” for his constituents.

The data used for this analysis is available here.

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Trump’s Bureau of Land Management Pick Bails Out Over January 6 Condemnation

This story was originally published on the Substack Public Domain, to which you can subscribe here.

Kathleen Sgamma, a longtime oil and gas activist, withdrew her nomination to lead the federal Bureau of Land Management hours before her confirmation hearing Thursday.

The move comes two days after a watchdog group surfaced private comments in which Sgamma condemned President Donald Trump’s actions during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) announced her withdrawal at the opening of Thursday’s meeting of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where Sgamma was scheduled to testify and field questions.

“I was informed by the White House earlier today that one of the nominees scheduled for consideration at today’s hearing, Kathleen Sgamma, nominated to serve as the director of the Bureau of Land Management, has withdrawn from consideration,” Lee said.

Lee did not elaborate on her decision.

Earlier this week, Nick Surgey, the executive director of watchdog group Documented, circulated a private memo in which Sgamma blasted Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 riot.

“I am disgusted by the violence witnessed yesterday and President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it,” Sgamma wrote a day after the attack. “I’m disgusted he discredited all the good work he did reorienting the judiciary back toward respect for the rule of law and constitution by dishonoring the vote of the People and rulings of those very same judges on his numerous challenges.”

Those comments may have been her undoing. Shortly after Sgamma’s withdrawal, David Bernhardt, the Interior Secretary during Trump’s first term and a close ally of the President, posted on X: “2 years ago, in my book, I explained that individuals who know their views don’t align with the president, and yet seek political appointments hoping such divergence will not be noticed cause needless harm and conflict, hindering the president’s agenda. Sad. Self-inflicted.”

Sgamma is president of the Western Energy Alliance, a litigious oil and gas trade association. As Public Domain previously reported, Sgamma has argued that the federal government owns too much land and co-authored an energy section of Project 2025, the controversial policy blueprint that MAGA operatives compiled to guide Trump in a second term.

Public Domain attempted to reach Sgamma twice this week for comments about news developments, most recently on Thursday morning. In both cases, her email pinged back with an auto-response saying she had traveled to Washington for her confirmation hearing and was not available to respond.

In an email statement to Public Domain, White House spokesperson Liz Huston said, “We accept her withdrawal and look forward to putting forth another nominee.”

Thursday’s news comes as a big win for the environmental groups that opposed Sgamma, though it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will nominate someone they find more palatable. More than 125 public land, climate and environmental advocacy groups sent a letter earlier this week urging senators to vote down Sgamma’s nomination, citing “inherent conflicts of interest.”

“Kathleen Sgamma’s entire career has been focused on handing over our public lands to oil and gas companies,” Athan Manuel, the Sierra Club’s lands protection program director, wrote in a statement Thursday. “Placing her at the top of BLM would have been a disaster, but withdrawing her nomination doesn’t change this administration’s top goal—selling off those public lands to fund tax cuts for billionaires … The American people have spoken loud and clear that our public lands are not for sale.”

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How to Travel Abroad as the World’s Most Toxic Brand: American

President Donald Trump’s convulsive tariff policy, which all but reversed course Wednesday with the caveat that the same pain would return in 90 days, continues to scramble the world’s economic order. But against the upheaval of broken alliances and global supply chains, a small anxiety is emerging among Americans with wanderlust: how to travel with the world’s most toxic passport.

Because who wants to host visitors who,if electorally judged, voted for this tumult? Even the Brits seem over us. In some ways, the question is an extension of the long-held stereotype that American travelers can be obnoxious. That they are loud and generally indifferent to local cultures. But under Trump, the stereotype feels rife for explosion.

So ahead of summer travel, I wondered: Will an American accent get your ass kicked? Should I pack a bunch of Resistance era clothing? What should I know about unlawful detentions? I called Amy Tara Koch, a travel reporter and lecturer at Northwestern University, for some quick answers on how to think about global travel during these strange times.

So first, let me get your impression, as someone who enjoys travel on a personal level, of Trump’s tariffs.

I’m not in favor of them. I’m not in favor of him. I’m not in favor of his policies. I’m not in favor of any of this.

I was in Europe last week, and many people asked me: “How did this happen? How? How could it have happened? We didn’t see it coming.” And my only response then, and it’s still my response now, is that I didn’t see it happening, either. I did not vote for Trump, and based on the shock I see, that echoes with the way people in Europe feel. People kind of commiserate with you.

So while being in Austria on assignment, I did not feel any animosity at all. But I feel confusion and distress. This opens the way to frank conversations, especially amid the tariff chaos.

I spoke to a few travel agents this morning, and what they were hearing is that American clients who have dual passports are opting to use the [other] one, particularly Canadians.

Yeah, my husband also has an Irish passport and is planning to use that when we travel this year. Any behavioral change you might recommend?

I have heard that Democrats traveling abroad are opting to wear shirts that say, “I voted for her,” or, “I voted for Kamala.” But in terms of potential hostility, you have to remember that after Covid, it was so hard for these hotels, restaurants, and airlines to rebound. People may be upset about what’s going on with Trump, but I suspect they would welcome Americans with open arms because they rely on tourism. You’ve got to think about these hoteliers who need to make numbers and need to still get back what they lost over the last five years. So you’re not going to feel hostility from the people in the business: restaurants, hotels, etc.

But fast forward to 90 days, when the same tariffs are supposedly returning. Any backlash is likely to target something like a Starbucks in Europe, not exactly the individual American to make them feel unwelcome or unsafe.

What about the stereotype that already exists that Americans are loud and annoying?

It’s funny, because I was at dinner in Zurich, and there were some Americans nearby who I noticed were being quite obnoxious. Then I overheard the name “Trump” and it appears like they forced the topic of politics with the server. That felt very inappropriate to me and indicative of that stereotype of a swaggering American abroad.

My approach when traveling abroad is to always be kind and gracious. Don’t be bossy or appear like you’re pushing everyone to the side with a sharp-elbowed attitude. Personally, I am embarrassed by [US politics and Trump]. When people bring it up, I feel inclined to try and blunt the topic by saying, “Listen, I don’t agree with [Trump.] We all find it terrifying and upsetting.” We all have to be empathetic, compassionate, kind, and, crucially, not aggressive. Aggressive behavior is very Trumpian. When traveling, it’s important to send the message that that behavior is not reflective of our country.

Thinking about all this, I can’t help but identify American influencers as a particularly vulnerable group when it comes to potential hostility abroad. That’s true in good times, but probably even more so now. What should they know ahead of this summer? Should they be rethinking locations?

Influencers, by nature, are a little bit aggressive, with their halo lights and constant flashes. But I don’t think that they’d be unsafe; people will just roll their eyes like usual. Take what happened with Emily in Paris, when influencers crowded all the set locations, including restaurants. French people can’t stand these influencers—and that’s on a good day. They cause such a jam to the infrastructure that people can’t get into their homes. So that annoyance for influencers already exists because it’s perceived as aggressive behavior.

Be more empathetic to people and their surroundings. Be a little bit more soft-spoken. If you’re going to try to capture something on your phone, then do it subtly, not with this swagger coming from the United States.

What should Americans do to prepare upon returning to the US amid the government’s immigration crackdown, which, according to recent comments, may soon include US citizens?

I don’t have a deep knowledge of visas and such. But I would recommend, if you can, getting Global Entry. Have every single thing that makes it as easy as possible for you to get back into the United States.

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Some States Are Banning Forever Chemicals. Now Industry Is Fighting Back.

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

In 2021, James Kenney and his husband were at a big box store buying a piece of furniture when the sales associate asked if they’d like to add fabric protectant. Kenney, the cabinet secretary of New Mexico’s Environment Department, asked to see the product data sheet. Both he and his husband were shocked to see forever chemicals listed as ingredients in the protectant.

“I think about your normal, everyday New Mexican who is trying to get by, make their furniture last a little longer, and they think, ‘Oh, it’s safe, great!’ It’s not safe,” he says. “It just so happens that they tried to sell it to the environment secretary.”

Last week, the New Mexico legislature passed a pair of bills that Kenney hopes will help protect consumers in his state. If signed by the governor, the legislation would eventually ban consumer products that have added PFAS—per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, known colloquially as “forever chemicals” because of their persistence in the environment—from being sold in New Mexico.

As health and environmental concerns about forever chemicals mount nationally, New Mexico joins a small but growing number of states that are moving to limit—and, in some cases, ban—PFAS in consumer products. New Mexico is now the third state to pass a PFAS ban through the legislature. Ten other states have bans or limits on added PFAS in certain consumer products, including cookware, carpet, apparel, and cosmetics. This year, at least 29 states—a record number—have PFAS-related bills before state legislatures, according to an analysis of bills by Safer States, a network of state-based advocacy organizations working on issues around potentially unsafe chemicals.

The chemical and consumer products industries have taken notice of this new wave of regulations and are mounting a counterattack, lobbying state legislatures to advocate for the safety of their products—and, in one case, suing to prevent the laws from taking effect. Some of the key exemptions made in New Mexico highlight some of the big fights that industries are hoping they’ll win in statehouses across the country: fights they are already taking to a newly industry-friendly US Environmental Protection Agency.

PFAS is not just one chemical but a class of thousands. The first PFAS were developed in the 1930s; thanks to their nonstick properties and unique durability, their popularity grew in industrial and consumer uses in the postwar era. The chemicals were soon omnipresent in American lives, coating cookware, preventing furniture and carpets from staining, and acting as a surfactant in firefighting foam.

“Fluoropolymers are PFAS. PFAS plastics are PFAS. They are dangerous at every stage of their life.”

In 1999, a man in West Virginia filed a lawsuit against US chemical giant DuPont alleging that pollution from its factory was killing his cattle. The lawsuit revealed that DuPont had concealed evidence of PFAS’s negative health effects on workers from the government for decades. In the years since, the chemical industry has paid out billions in settlement fees around PFAS lawsuits: In 2024, the American multinational 3M agreed to pay between $10 billion and $12.5 billion to US public water systems that had detected PFAS in their water supplies to pay for remediation and future testing, though the company did not admit liability. (DuPont and its separate chemical company Chemours continue to deny any wrongdoing in lawsuits involving them, including the original West Virginia suit.)

As the moniker “forever chemicals” suggests, mounting research has shown that PFAS accumulate in the environment and in our bodies and can be responsible for a number of health problems, from high cholesterol to reproductive issues and cancer. EPA figures released earlier this year show that almost half of the US population is currently exposed to PFAS in their drinking water. Nearly all Americans, meanwhile, have at least one type of PFAS in their blood.

For a class of chemicals with such terrifying properties, there’s been surprisingly little regulation of PFAS at the federal level. One of the most-studied PFAS chemicals, PFOA, began to be phased out in the US in the early 2000s, with major companies eliminating the chemical and related compounds under EPA guidance by 2015. The chemical industry and manufacturers say that the replacements they have found for the most dangerous chemicals are safe. But the federal government, as a whole, has lagged behind the science when it comes to regulations: The EPA only set official drinking water limits for six types of PFAS in 2024.

In lieu of federal guidance, states have started taking action. In 2021, Maine, which identified an epidemic of PFAS pollution on its farms in 2016, passed the first-ever law banning the sale of consumer products with PFAS. Minnesota followed suit in 2023.

“The cookware industry has historically not really engaged in advocacy, whether it’s advocacy or regulatory,” says Steve Burns, a lobbyist who represents the industry. But laws against PFAS in consumer products—particularly a bill in California, which required cookware manufacturers to disclose to consumers if they use any PFAS chemicals in their products—were a “wakeup call” for the industry.

Burns is president of the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, a 501(c)(6) formed in 2024 by two major companies in the cookware industry. He and his colleagues have had a busy year, testifying in 10 statehouses across the country against PFAS restrictions or bans (and, in some cases, in favor of new laws that would exempt their products from existing bans). In February, the CSA was one of more than 40 industry groups and manufacturers to sign a letter to New Mexico lawmakers opposing its PFAS ban when it was first introduced. The CSA also filed a suit against the state of Minnesota in January, alleging that its PFAS ban is unconstitutional.

Its work has paid off. Unlike the Maine or Minnesota laws, the New Mexico bill specifically exempts fluoropolymers, a key ingredient in nonstick cookware and a type of PFAS chemical, from the coming bans. The industry has also seen success overseas: France excluded kitchenware from its recent PFAS ban following a lobbying push by Cookware Sustainability Alliance member Groupe SEB. (The CSA operates only in the US and was not involved in that effort.)

A redefinition of PFAS by the federal government could “have a chilling effect on state legislation.”

“As an industry, we do believe that if we’re able to make our case, we’re able to have a conversation, present the science and all the independent studies we have, most times people will say well, you make a good point,” Burns says. “This is a different chemistry.”

It’s not just the cookware industry making this argument. Erich Shea, the director of product communications at the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED in an email that the group supports New Mexico’s fluoropolymer exclusion and that it will “allow New Mexico to avoid the headaches experienced by decisionmakers in other states.”

The FDA has authorized nonstick cookware for human use since the 1960s. Some research—including one peer-reviewed study conducted by the American Chemistry Council’s Performance Fluoropolymer Partnership, whose members include 3M and Chemours, has found that fluoropolymers are safe to consume and less harmful than other types of PFAS. Separate research has called their safety into question.

However, the production of fluoropolymers for use in nonstick cookware and other products has historically released harmful PFAS into the environment. And while major US manufacturers have phased out PFOA in their production chain, other factories overseas still use the chemical in making fluoropolymers.

The debate over fluoropolymers’ inclusion in state bans is part of a larger argument made by industry and business groups: that states are defining PFAS chemicals too broadly, opening the door to overregulation of safe products. A position paper from the Cookware Sustainability Alliance provided to WIRED lambasts the “indiscriminate definition of PFAS” in many states with recent bans or restrictions.

“Our argument is that fluoropolymers are very different from PFAS chemicals of concern,” Burns says.

Some advocates disagree. The exemption of fluoropolymers from New Mexico’s ban, along with a host of other industry-specific exemptions in the bill, means that the legislation “is not going to meet the stated intentions of what the bill’s sponsors want it to do,” says Gretchen Salter, the policy director at Safer States.

Advocates like Salter have concerns around the use of forever chemicals in the production of fluoropolymers as well as their durability throughout their life cycles. “Fluoropolymers are PFAS. PFAS plastics are PFAS. They are dangerous at every stage of their life, from production to use to disposal,” she claims.

Kenney acknowledges that the fluoropolymer exemption has garnered a “little bit of criticism.” But he says that this bill is meant to be a starting point.

“We’re not trying to demonize PFAS—it’s in a lot of things that we rightfully still use—but we are trying to gauge the risk,” he says. “We don’t expect this to be a one and done. We expect science to grow and the exemptions to change.”

With a newly industry-friendly set of regulators in DC, industry groups are looking for wins at the federal level too. In February, an organization of chemical manufacturers and business groups, including the American Chemistry Council and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, sent a letter to the EPA outlining suggested “principles and policy recommendations” around PFAS. The group emphasized the need to “recognize that PFAS are a broad class of chemistries with very diverse and necessary properties” and recommended the agency adopt a government-wide definition of PFAS based on West Virginia and Delaware’s definitions. Both of those states have a much more conservative definition of what defines PFAS than dozens of other states, including Maine, New Mexico, and Minnesota.

A federal definition like this could “have a chilling effect on state legislation going forward,” said Melanie Benesh, the vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental activist organization. “There would be this federal position that the chemical industry could point to, which might be convincing to some state legislators to say, well, this is what the federal government has said is a definition of PFAS. As you start excluding PFAS from the class, you really limit what PFAS are covered by consumer product bans.”

Shea, of the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED that the group believes “that the federal regulatory approach is preferable to a patchwork of different and potentially conflicting state approaches.”

States with bans face a monumental task in truly getting PFAS out of consumers’ lives. Vendors in Minnesota have been left with expensive inventory that they can no longer sell; Maine’s law, one of the most aggressive, makes exemptions for “currently unavoidable use” of PFAS, including in semiconductors, lab equipment, and medical devices. PFAS are used in so many of the products in our lives that it’s almost unfathomable to think of phasing them out altogether, as soon as possible.

For advocates like Salter, it’s a change worth making.

“There might be essential uses for PFAS right now,” she says. “But we want to spur the search for safer alternatives, because we don’t want to give a pass to chemicals that are harming human health. By exempting them altogether, you are completely removing that incentive.”

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Veterans Affairs Backtracked on His Cancer Treatment. He Blames DOGE.

In February, after Donald Trump returned to office, Army veteran Mark Puhl’s medical requests to the Department of Veterans Affairs—for surgery and a chemotherapy port, both related to cancer for which he had already received care through the VA—were denied. Puhl, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, holds the cost-cutting efforts of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” responsible.

“They approved me to see the surgeon who would do the surgery,” Puhl, 37, said. “They approved an MRI on top of that, to make sure that there were no vessels wrapped around the lumps they wanted to cut out to test for cancer. But then they denied the surgery itself.”

Puhl, who served Army tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq, was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma, a rare type of cancer, in 2022. Puhl was exposed to burn pits—open-air incineration of trash, often toxic, by militaries in the field—and said that a VA doctor had previously connected his case of lymphoma to his service. Due to the complexity of treatment for his cancer, Puhl was referred to the VA’s Community Care program, through which the agency would pay for his care at an outside hospital. Every day, Puhl takes oral chemotherapy pills; once a month, he takes steroid medication, both of which the VA provides. But even before the Trump presidency, his coverage was not exactly perfect.

“Even under the Biden administration, there were issues with me just getting assistive devices,” Puhl said. “The [VA] didn’t want to get anything done in a timely manner. It took them over a month for that one.”

It was already challenging to get into Community Care. Another veteran I spoke with, Ed Anderson, an organizer with Common Defense, told me that he was rejected by the program last year when he reached out for help with gastrointestinal disorders. Anderson previously received mental health support through Community Care, which he described as “life-saving.”

In February, it was announced that Veterans Affairs would be subjected to billions of dollars worth of contract cuts. It emerged later that month, following backlash, that the contracts themselves would not be slashed—but the recent crop of unexpected denials like Puhl’s reflect veterans’ concern that workers in the VA, whose budgets and jobs face the sweeping threats of DOGE, may feel pressured to take steps to save money, even in areas they haven’t yet been explicitly directed to. In a statement to Mother Jones, VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said that “VA DOGE liaisons are not involved in Veterans’ health care decisions, and VA has made no efforts to scale back community care.”

Puhl said that VA staff who rejected his Community Care coverage told him they were just following agency policy—and that the care they had previously approved for him already “cost the taxpayers money.” To Puhl, that doesn’t add up: the surgeon he had been approved to see at an outside hospital was also already going to cost money through the Community Care program.

The rates, Puhl replied, were the problem—not the vets. “If you’re complaining about keeping your job and having money saved, [it’s] $50,000 for 30 minutes to talk to an oncologist,” Puhl said. He then asked why he hadn’t been approved for a new chemotherapy port, which he needed in order to receive inpatient chemotherapy treatment twice a year. The person he corresponded with said they weren’t in charge of that denial.

A notice Puhl later received, reviewed by Mother Jones, said that a VA surgeon could perform his cancer-related surgery—but the agency had previously referred him to Community Care because it believed that wasn’t the case. It made no sense to him.

“If you want to sit there and worry about your job and affect other people’s lives,” Puhl said, “that’s not going to work.”

Those delays in care have made Puhl sicker in recent months. It’s not easy to keep up with work—which includes running his own animal rescue service, having a dog training business, and a job at a friend’s mechanic shop—while being in a lot of pain. Dealing with delays to cancer treatment is an extra job that he does not need.

Given the longstanding veterans’ mental health crisis, Puhl is also extremely concerned about the psychological impact of further roadblocks for veterans trying to get the care they need.

“What do you think is going to happen next?” Puhl asked, rhetorically.

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Democrats Grill Officials on Insider Profits From Trump’s Tariff Reversal

Leading Democrats are raising questions about whether insiders profited from the market swing that followed President Donald Trump’s sudden reversal on sweeping tariffs he recently announced on imports from foreign countries.

“Who in the administration knew about Trump’s latest tariff flip flop ahead of time?” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked in a Bluesky post Wednesday. “Did anyone buy or sell stocks, and profit at the public’s expense? I’m writing to the White House—the public has a right to know.”

On Wednesday, just a week after imposing massive tariffs, or taxes paid by purchasers of foreign goods, in what he called “Liberation Day,” Trump—who for days had claimed he would not budge—abruptly changed course in the face of stock market plunges, warnings of a global recession and a sell-off of US Treasury bonds.

“I was watching the bond market,” Trump told reporters. “The bond market is very tricky.” Investors, he added, “were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”

In a confusingly written Truth Social post, Trump on Wednesday afternoon announced a 125 percent tariff on Chinese imports, along with a “90 day PAUSE” on other reciprocal tariffs he announced last week—along with a lowered, though still substantial, reciprocal rate of 10 percent. Though Trump might yet reimpose the tariffs, the announcement, widely seen as the president backing down on an economically disastrous policy, sent markets soaring.

Suspicion about the reversal stemmed in part from earlier posts by Trump. “BE COOL!” he wrote Wednesday morning on Truth Social. “Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” Minutes later, he added: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”

DJT is the stock symbol for Trump Media & Technology Group—the parent company of Truth Social—which saw its stock price jump in the moments after Trump’s post. Its price continued to rise throughout the day, spiking around the time word came that Trump had folded on at least some of his tariff threats. The company’s share price had been punished over the last week—following a long-term trend for the stock—shaving as much as $500 million off Trump’s net worth, much of which came back today.

If investors took Trump’s post as a signal to buy—either his own stock or the stock market more broadly—they would have done extremely well, achieving returns of more than [20 percent][10].

Schiff and other Democrats noted Wednesday that the market swings created opportunities for corruption.

“These constant gyrations in policy provide dangerous opportunities for insider trading,” Schiff wrote.

The reversal left Republicans who had spent days defending Trump’s tariffs scrambling to offer new justifications for his actions.

On Capitol Hill, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was forced to [defend][11] a new policy—one he appeared to have had no role in crafting—before irate members of the House Ways and Means committee.

“So the trade representative hasn’t spoken to the President of the United States about a global reordering of trade, but yet he announced it on a tweet?” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) [asked][12] Greer. “WTF! Who’s in charge and what do you know about those details? It looks like your boss just pulled the rug out from under you and paused the tariffs, the taxes on the American people. There is no strategy.”

“If it’s not market manipulation, what is it?” Horsford asked. “Who’s benefiting? What billionaire just got richer?”

[10]: http://trump net worth [11]: https://waysandmeans.house.gov/event/full-committee-hearing-on-the-trump-administrations-2025-trade-policy-agenda-with-united-states-trade-representative-jamieson-greer/ [12]: https://x.com/atrupar/status/1910031725138260167

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How a Small African Nation Scrambled to Appease Trump on Tariffs

President Donald Trump has not been particularly kind to the small African nation of Lesotho. His administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development hit the nation of about 2.3 million people hard, by cutting millions of dollars of funding for public health and other programs. In March, he ridiculed the country during his address to Congress, alleging that the United States had spent $8 million “to promote LGBTQI+” in a country “nobody has ever heard of.” And then last week, he dropped the hammer: A 50-percent tariff on all imports from the country—which was tied for the highest in the world, before Trump paused the implementation on Wednesday afternoon.

In announcing the 90-day reprieve—which will keep 10-percent tariffs on much of the world and a 125-percent surcharge on Chinese imports—Trump boasted that “more than 75 countries” had expressed their willingness to negotiate with the White House. Lesotho, at least, was one of them. According to a State Department memo obtained by Mother Jones, high-ranking Lesotho officials scrambled to cut a deal in the days following Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcement. The memo, sent out Monday from the US Embassy in Maseru, detailed the government’s efforts to stay on the good side of an American president who has inexplicably put the country in its crosshairs.

But in addition to a pledge to buy more goods from the United States, these officials sought to demonstrate their friendliness with the United States in other ways: They offered assurances that the country would soon grant Elon Musk’s Starlink an operating license—and they signaled the government’s openness to helping with Trump’s mass-deportation efforts.

The memo, titled “Lesotho Urgently Seeks Deal to Reduce Tariffs,” stemmed from a series of meetings between the American chargé d’affaires in Maseru, and top Lesotho government ministers, in the aftermath of Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement. The effects of the tariff could be “significant,” in the memo’s assessment—driving up unemployment in a country where 39 percent of young people are jobless and devastating the country’s garment industry. (That sector, the memo noted, was a “success story” of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a free-trade agreement between the United States and a number of African nations that is up for reauthorization this year.) It underscored the challenges of tiny Lesotho, which exports about $237.3 million worth of goods to the US each year but has a per-capita GDP of about $1,000, attempting to ever achieve import-export parity with the United States:

“The Ministers emphasized that as a least developed country, Lesotho’s ability to increase imports from the United States were limited, but they pledged to ‘do their best’ to address the trade deficit.”

If Lesotho does not have a lot of buying power, it does have other things the Trump administration might want. According to the memo, the government officials discussed the possibility of importing wheat from the US instead of South Africa (which surrounds Lesotho on all sides), and of purchasing medical equipment and military supplies. And they sought to “demonstrate their commitment to the bilateral relationship,” in the State Department diplomat’s words, in other ways.

On a list of American companies the country was eager to do business with, one name stood out. Musk’s satellite telecommunications company, Starlink, has been trying to break into the market in Lesotho for a while—Musk even met with prime minister Sam Matekane in New York last year. While Musk has been stymied by regulators in some other African countries—most notably South Africa—the Lesotho government had good news on that front.

“To demonstrate opportunities for U.S. businesses, the [government] is finalizing a licensing agreement for Starlink, with the goal of having a signed agreement by April 15,” the memo stated. “Deputy Prime Minister Nthomeng Majara and others stated the deal is essentially complete.” (SpaceX, Starlink’s parent company, did not respond to a request for comment.)

The memo also played up Lesotho’s willingness to help out on military matters. In addition to previous partnerships in the region, “an advisor close to PM Matekane” told the chargé that his government would consider sending troops to the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo “to support peacekeeping operations there, particularly as the United States seeks access to minerals,” according to the memo.

“In a further demonstration of their commitment to the United States,” it continued, “the Foreign Minister said Lesotho would explore accepting third country national…deportees from the United States”—that is, foreign nationals deported by the United States who aren’t accepted by their home countries. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that at least six other countries were in talks with the Trump administration about accepting deportees, including nearby Eswatini.

A State Department spokesperson said the department would “not comment on private diplomatic conversations.” Neither the White House nor Matekane’s office responded to a request for a comment.

Lesotho is just one country, albeit one that has borne the brunt of Trump’s policies to an unusual degree. But the diplomatic missive offers a glimpse of the ways Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade have fused with foreign- and economic policy, and underscored the difficulty of disentangling Musk’s vast business empire from the interests of the government he now serves. It also laid bare the stakes, not just for Lesotho, but for the American sphere of influence that these teetering trade deals and canceled development funding were meant to strengthen.

If this is how the United States is going to treat its friends, they might some day prefer the company of other ones. The last section of the memo was titled simply: “Chinese Embassy Seeks to Take Advantage.”

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Trump Refuses to Bring Back Those Wrongly Detained in El Salvador. You Could Be Next.

At any moment, the Supreme Court will issue a decision in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whom the Trump administration admits itdeported to a notorious Salvadoran mega prison due to “administrative error.” The ruling could pose a make or break moment, not just for the life of Abrego Garcia, but for what kind of country we are going to be.

Less than three months into Trump’s second term, the stakes of litigation over its agenda are extremely high. If the Supreme Court requires the US government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s rapid return to US soil, it will have held the line by requiring that the rule of law governs Trump’s deportation powers. But if the court halts Abrego Garcia’s return, the United States is on track toenter a dark new chapter in which anyone—noncitizens and citizens alike—can be shipped off to foreign prisons with no hope of return. These are the tools of control exercised by authoritarian regimes on other continents. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen here.

“The government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend…there is nothing that can be done.”

Abrego Garcia is an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador. In 2019, the government attempted to deport him and claimed, on very weak grounds, that he was a member of the MS-13 gang. On appeal, an immigration judge found that he faced “a clear probability of future persecution” if returned to El Salvador. The judge ordered that Abrego Garcia not be removed to El Salvador. The government never appealed. Abrego Garcia is married, raising three children, gainfully employed, and has never had a run-in with the law.

When the Department of Homeland Security picked him up in March and put him on a plane to El Salvador, it did so against the immigration judge’s clear order. The government itself concedes his removal was an “administrative error.” Yet, the government does not want to retrieve him and is fighting a judge’s order to bring him back. Instead, it argues that even if removed in error, the courts have no authority to facilitate a prisoner’s return from abroad. What’s done is done, Trump administration lawyers argue: once you arrive at El Salvador’s brutal labor camp, it’s as if the US government has thrown away the key.

If the Supreme Court accepts the government’s argument, it would destroy Abrego Garcia’s life. But under its logic, untold numbers of other noncitizens and citizens are in jeopardy of permanent and unlawful disappearance. It wouldn’t matter who you are. If the government scoops you off the street and ships you off to another country without providing a chance to make your case in court, there is nothing you, your family, or a judge could do. The president’s power over national security and foreign affairs, the government argues, cannot be impinged, even if it violated an individual’s constitutional rights to deport them. But this logic leads to a license for Trump to disappear anyone, possibly forever.

Constitutional law luminaries Erwin Chemerinsky, Martha Minow, and Laurence Tribe stress the gravity of this case in an amicus brief they submitted to the Supreme Court. If the administration’s argument prevails, they warn, “the Executive Branch would possess a shuddering degree of power—power that the President could wield in extreme and extraordinary ways, including against American citizens that the President simply disfavors.”

A three judge panel from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rebuked the government’s arguments in a ruling that seized on the dystopian powers the government is seeking. “The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” Judge James Wilkinson warned in a concurrence. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”

It’s no surprise that Wilkinson’s concurrence found its way into Abrego Garcia’s brief to the Supreme Court; In 2003, Wilkinson authored an opinion granting the federal government the power to indefinitely detain a US citizen without the opportunity to challenge their confinement in court if it designated him an “enemy combatant”—a decision overturned by the Supreme Court. If Wilkinson, a Reagan-appointee who has accorded the government extreme deference in the arena of national security and detention, can see that the Abrego Garcia case is a bridge to “perfect lawlessness,” then perhaps the Supreme Court will as well.

Abrego Garcia’s case was first filed in federal district court in Maryland, where a judge ordered the government to “facilitate and effectuate the return of Plaintiff Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7, 2025.” The government appealed to the Fourth Circuit. Then, on April 7, before the circuit court had issued a decision, the government appealed to the Supreme Court, asking the highest court to immediately halt the lower court’s order so that the government wouldn’t have to retrieve Abrego Garcia that day. It also asked the high court to fully vacate the district court’s order. After this appeal was filed, the Fourth Circuit released its opinion siding with Abrego Garcia. As Stephanie Thacker, a judge on the appellate court, explained in that opinion, “The irreparable harm in this case is the harm being done to Abrego Garcia every minute he is in El Salvador.”

“It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness.”

But shortly after that opinion was issued, Chief Justice John Roberts halted the lower court’s order temporarily while the highest court decides whether to grant the administration’s request for a fuller rebuke of the lower court. It is this decision that will indicate whether or not there is a meaningful right to challenge detention before removal to a foreign country or whether that right can be overridden by an alleged “administrative error.”

In a separate ruling Tuesday over challenges to removals to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that every person transferred has the right to meaningfully challenge that removal in court. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers quickly filed a notice with the Supreme Court to remind them that Abrego Garcia had the same right to challenge his removal but was denied it—a constitutional violation that must be remedied. Thus, the Abrego Garcia case is an immediate test of the Supreme Court’s own ruling: Will the right to challenge removal in court be one that can be denied by administrative error—either a genuine error or an alleged one?

It’s important to realize administrative errors are not that uncommon in immigration enforcement. For example, a Government Accountability Office report found that between 2015 and 2020, ICE likely deported 70 US citizens. The government can and does retrieve people from foreign countries after unlawful removal. Moreover, there no reason to believe the Trump administration wouldn’t make the same argument about people it has deliberately removed.

One reason to worry is the government’s response when a federal judge ordered it to turn around the planes taking hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, on the basis that the detainees were not afforded the opportunity to challenge their removal. The government made the decision not to turn the planes around, but instead to continue on to El Salvador, unload the planes, and place the detainees in the care of a foreign country. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, a leader who himself employs authoritarian tactics and illegal confinement to maintain control, mocked the efforts to stop the planes. He posted an article on X about the order to turn the planes around and commented “Oopsie… Too Late” followed by the tears of joy emoji often used to gloat over the suffering of others. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, retweeted him. Dodging a court order wasn’t an error, it was a joke.

“We are not stopping,” border czar Tom Homan said on Fox News two days later. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

To those who think this would never happen to a US citizen, consider that Trump is already publicly contemplating how to send his own citizens to El Salvador. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the administration is exploring its legal options for sending US citizens to CECOT, which is known for rampant human rights abuses and inmate deaths. “The president has said if it’s legal, if there’s a legal pathway to do that, he’s not sure, we are not sure if there is, it’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed,” Leavitt confirmed Tuesday. To be clear, there is no legal way to deport US citizens. But the Abrego Garcia case could pave the way. It should be assumed, by Leavitt’s own assertion, that if the claim of administrative error becomes an unreviewable blank check to deport people ineligible for removal, the administration will use it.

To lessen the shock of her words, Leavitt caveated that deportations of US citizens would only happen to “heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly. These are violent, repeat offenders in American streets.” But that’s cold comfort.

The cold endpoint of this logic is to disappear people into foreign prisons—possibly forever.

You don’t have to be a violent criminal for the government to claim that you are one. Again, the Abrego Garcia case demonstrates the danger. According to the brief from the government, Abrego Garcia is a “verified” and “prominent” member of the MS-13 gang, which they argue nullifies the 2019 order against his removal to El Salvador. Contrast this to the brief submitted by Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, which clarifies that the evidence of Abrego Garcia’s membership in MS-13 was always shoddy: In 2019, “the Government offered two pieces of ‘evidence’: first, Abrego Garcia was wearing ‘his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,’ and second, ‘a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.’” Moreover, as the Fourth Circuit pointed out, the government had ample opportunity to prove his gang affiliation in the district court but did not.

In other words, in Abrego Garcia’s case, we already see the government pluck a law-abiding father off the streets and claim without evidence that he is a “prominent” gang member. Without a right to remedythe government’s actions, the same thing could happen to anyone else. If the government feels no compunction to even provide proof of the claim that Abrego Garcia is a gang member, what is protecting anyone else from the erroneous designation of criminal in order to facilitate their removal? The government is showing in this case that it is willing to operate not only beyond the rules and jurisdiction of the courts but also with its own set of facts.

Finally, the government contends that in sending prisoners to El Salvador, it is relinquishing jurisdiction over them. Despite the Trump administration’s disturbing arrangement to use El Salvador’s CECOT for a fee, it contends that everyone it sends to El Salvador is now solely at the mercy of that country. Because courts have no authority to direct the president’s power to conduct foreign affairs, the government argues, they have no authority to instruct the government to correct its errors by negotiating with a foreign government.

That is a terrifying contention—it means anyone sent there could be lost forever. It means that the US has created a loophole under which it can simply throw up its hands every time it is asked to retrieve someone it doesn’t want to and say, ‘Sorry, it’s not our jurisdiction anymore—and it’s not a judge’s business either.’ There may be assertions of criminality or some other excuse, but the cold endpoint of this logic is to disappear people into foreign prisons—possibly forever.

The Supreme Court could mandate Abrego Garcia’s return and strike a blow to this authoritarian menace the Trump administration is trying to create. Or, it could let this Maryland father rot in a foreign labor camp, signaling that it will look the other way when the government makes its next “administrative error.”

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Montana Republicans Say No to Prosecuting Parents for Trans Care

Five days after President Donald Trump declared “gender ideology” to be “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse,” Montana’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives killed a bill that would have enshrined much the same idea into state law by criminalizing parents and medical providers.

Montana Senate Bill 164 would have made it a felony for any adult to help transgender children under 16 to gain access to gender-affirming medical care—including hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries—classifying such help as child endangerment. On Tuesday, House lawmakers voted 58-40 to reject the proposed law, with 17 Republicans joining Democrats to block the bill from advancing to its final reading.

“I think it’s overly broad,” the lone Republican to speak against the bill, Rep. Brad Barker, said Tuesday. Barker said that while he generally opposes gender-affirming care for trans youth, SB164 was “the wrong approach.”

“I don’t like the thought of criminalizing parents,” Barker said, entreating fellow Republicans to “vote with your conscience.”

The bill carried penalties of up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines for any adults, including parents and doctors, who provided children with surgery, puberty blockers, or hormone replacement therapy for the purpose of “altering the appearance” of the child or affirming the child’s gender. If “serious bodily injury” occurred, the maximum punishment was 10 years imprisonment and $25,000 in fines.

“Turning parents and doctors into felons is absolutely not the approach that best serves this state,” Democratic Rep. SJ Howell, the first non-binary person to be elected to the Montana legislature, said on the House floor.

The bill cleared the Senate in February, 30-20, with two Republicans voting against it. In that floor debate, the legislation’s sponsor, Republican Sen. John Fuller, called it a “simple bill” to protect Montana’s children. “The state does have a compelling interest, a very compelling interest, to avoid the sterilization and sexual mutilation of children,” he said. In 2023, Fuller sponsored a law that threatened medical providers’ licensing if they offered gender-affirming care to minors, a law that courts have blocked while litigation proceeds.

Tuesday’s vote was the second time this year a large swath of Republicans crossed party lines to block an anti-trans bill.

“This bill is not about politics, it’s about safeguarding the health and innocence of Montana youth,” one of SB164’s House supporters, Republican Rep. Braxton Mitchell, said Tuesday. But more than a quarter of members of his own party disagreed, suggesting a potential turning point for the Montana legislature, at least on trans issues.

Tuesday’s vote was the second time this year a large swath of Republicans crossed party lines to block an anti-trans bill. Last year, Montana’s first openly transgender lawmaker, Rep. Zooey Zephyr, said her Republican colleagues often privately bemoan the transphobic culture wars and apologize to her for their votes on anti-LGBTQ legislation.

Even so, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed two anti-trans bills into law last month—a bathroom ban and a law prohibiting trans girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams from kindergarten through college. The bathroom ban has been temporarily blocked. A state law that prohibited trans women from participating in female collegiate sports was ruled unconstitutional in 2022.

The right to privacy is enshrined in the Montana constitution, and state courts have strongly affirmed its application to healthcare laws. Last December, the Montana Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s preliminary injunction on a law that would have made gender-affirming medical care providers vulnerable to licensing board disciplinary proceedings. And last summer, it ruled that a parental consent law for minors seeking abortion was unconstitutional. (In January, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen asked the U.S. Supreme Court to declare that ruling an unconstitutional infringement on parental rights. The Supreme Court has not decided whether to hear the case.)

If it had passed, SB164 would have become the first law in the country defining gender-affirming care as a form of felony child endangerment. (Child endangerment and abuse fall under different statutes, but both evoke the same myth that gender-affirming care is dangerous for youth.)

Montana, however, wouldn’t have been the first state to direct child welfare workers to investigate families of trans children. In 2022, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to open child abuse investigations into parents who seek gender-affirming care for their children. That directive remains partially blocked after families of trans children and the LGBTQ advocacy group PFLAG sued.

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Don’t Believe RFK Jr.’s Flip-Flop on the Measles Vaccine

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is trying to have it both ways when it comes to the measles vaccine.

In his first sit-down interview in his role as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—which was taped Tuesday and aired on CBS News Wednesday morning—Kennedy claimed to endorse the vaccine after a record both long and very recent of pushing baseless treatments.

“The federal government’s position, my position, is people should get the measles vaccine, but the government should not be mandating those,” he said. That comment appeared to surprise the interviewer, Dr. Jon LaPook, chief medical correspondent for CBS News, who replied: “That’s new, as far as I’m concerned, that you’re saying that.” (Predictably, anti-vaxxers are pissed.)

Kennedy actually appeared to first endorse the vaccine the day before, writing in a post on X on Monday: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” That day, he wrote, he had gone to Texas to comfort the family of the second unvaccinated child to die in the Texas outbreak and attend her burial services; the girl, Daisy Hildebrand, died last Thursday at eight years old, according to her obituary. (An unvaccinated person in New Mexico who tested positive for measles died last month, but the official cause of death in that case remains under investigation.)

But an apparent conversion to now supporting the measles vaccine—which he has long questioned, despite evidence showing it is highly effective—this is not.

The very same day Kennedy sent the X post from Texas, he shared another post in which he boosted baseless treatments offered by two doctors with anti-vaccine histories: “I also visited with these two extraordinary healers, Dr. Richard Bartlett and Dr. Ben Edwards who have treated and healed some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children using aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin,” RFK Jr. wrote. According to CNN, Bartlett faced discipline by the Texas Medical Board in 2003 for “unusual use of risk-filled medications”; he also promoted an experimental concoction of drugs to treat COVID-19, which was not supported by evidence. Edwards, for his part, described the measles outbreak as “God’s version of measles immunization” and advocated that people treat it by drinking green juice or water with sea salt “and go sit outside and listen to a bird chirp,” the Washington Post reported.

The conflicting messages come after Kennedy also promoted aerosolized budesonide, which is used to treat symptoms of asthma, and clarithromycin, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, to treat measles in a Fox interview last month. But health officials say there is no evidence to support the use of either as a treatment for measles. “Promoting unproven medications for measles treatment puts children at unnecessary risk, and the only way to prevent measles is by vaccination with the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine,” Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases, said. As my colleague Kiera Butler reported, Kennedy also promoted cod liver oil as a treatment for the latest measles outbreak, despite there being no supporting evidence.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called on RFK Jr. to step down on Wednesday, pointing to last week’s mass firings at HHS, his reported plans to tell the CDC to stop recommending fluoride in water, and his forcing out of the FDA’s top vaccine official last month.

“His mixed messages on vaccines are confusing and his support for unproven alternative therapies for measles has perpetuated their use,” Benjamin said in a separate statement provided to Mother Jones asking specifically about the CBS interview that aired Wednesday. “He has demonstrated his incompetence to continue to lead our nation’s health efforts.”

That lack of competence was once again displayed in his interview on Wednesday, when Kennedy also claimed in the CBS interview to be unaware of more than $11 billion worth of funding cuts affecting “local and state programs addressing things like infectious disease, mental health, addiction, childhood vaccination,” as LaPook described it. “I’m not familiar with those cuts,” Kennedy said, before claiming they were “mainly DEI cuts.”

But that’s not true. As LaPook pointed out, one of the cuts was for a $750,000 grant for studying adolescent diabetes. “I didn’t know that,” Kennedy said. “And that’s something that we’ll look at.”

Another thing Kennedy does not appear to know? That the measles vaccine is safe and effective, and there is no reason to trust the remedies he and his conspiracy theorist cronies are pushing.

Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

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Gabbard’s Pick to Run Counterterrorism Center Aided Start of a Right-Wing Paramilitary Group

When Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, went looking for someone to head the National Counterterrorism Center, she landed on Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, past CIA officer, and twice-failed MAGA congressional candidate in Washington state, who, as the Associated Press reported, “stands out for the breadth of his ties to a deep-seated extremist fringe.” During his first campaign in 2022, Kent consulted with white nationalist Nick Fuentes on social-media strategy. He also had a member of the Proud Boys on his campaign staff, and he embraced as a supporter and ally Joey Gibson, the leader of Patriot Prayer, a Christian nationalist group.

But his associations with far-right extremists began prior to his attempt to win a congressional seat. In 2020, Kent helped boost the organizing message of a new right-wing paramilitary outfit that called itself the 1st Amendment Praetorian.

On September 20, 2020, Robert Patrick Lewis, a former Green Beret and QAnon supporter, posted a long thread on Twitter (now X) that announced the formation of the group. Lewis declared that a band of “military, law enforcement & intel community veterans” had come together to protect the First Amendment rights of conservatives. He presented a harsh, conspiratorial, and paranoid view, claiming, “There are Marxist & leftist politicians aiming to lock down total control over our populace.” He asserted, “Their tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups such as ANTIFA & BLM demand total subservience to and adulation of their specific view of the world.” And he maintained the “corrupted Main Stream Media does their best to tarnish the reputation and destroy the lives of any public or private citizen who dares step up to them or fight back against their narrative.”

Lewis called on “military, law enforcement or intelligence community” veterans to join 1AP and fight back. In an apparent sign of support, Kent reposted this thread.

Lewis noted that 1AP would be providing security services for right-wing rallies and marches, including those “with a large number of high-profile, conservative VIPs speaking & attending.” For one event, he said he needed veterans to provide “physical security, intelligence/surveillance and to serve as team leaders for small security & intelligence and intelligence cells.” He promised, “we will keep your names confidential and our personnel records & communications will be encrypted.” He added, “This group was formed to protect attendees at President Trump’s campaign rallies.”

Soon after forming 1Ap, Lewis presented it not only as a security service for the right but as an intelligence operation. He told Fox News, “Our intelligence shows that no matter who wins the election, they [Antifa] are planning a massive ‘Antifa Tet Offensive,’ bent on destroying the global order they are not beholden to any one party. Their sole purpose is to create havoc, fear, and intimidation.” (No such uprising occurred.) After the election, 1AP claimed it was collecting evidence of fraud. On January 6, as the riot began at the Capitol, Lewis tweeted, “Today is the day the true battles begin.” (He later said he was at the Willard Hotel, not Capitol Hill, that day.)

Lewis’ 1AP did provide security at various events featuring far-right extremists. According to the final report of the House January 6 committee, during a December 12, 2020, rally of pro-Trump election deniers in Washington, DC, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing, anti-government militia, “coordinated” with 1AP “to guard VIPs, including retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne.” (Both Flynn and Byrne were prominent promoters of the crackpot conspiracy theory holding that the 2020 election was stolen form Trump.) Months later, Lewis and 1AP provided security at a QAnon conference in Dallas, where Flynn essentially called for a military coup in the United States.

On social media, Kent has often boosted posts from Lewis. At one point each complimented the other for a podcast appearance. When Kent ran for Congress, Lewis expressed his support for him on social media. In a 2022 Telegram post, Lewis said that he knew Kent “personally” and “wish I could personally vote for him.” In January, 1AP posted on Telegram that there were “mumblings” that Kent could be appointed to lead the National Counterterrorism Center and that this “would be a very good thing. I could not support this more strongly.”

Mother Jones sent Kent, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center a list of questions about Kent’s support for 1AP and his relationship with Lewis. Neither Kent nor the agencies responded.

Kent has an established record as an extremist and promoter of conspiracy theories. During his 2022 run, he called for charging Dr. Anthony Fauci with murder to hold him “accountable” for the “scam that is Covid.” He promoted Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged against him. He backed the idea the January 6 riot was orchestrated by the Deep State to discredit Trump and his supporters. He referred to the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.” He pushed the notion that billionaire Bill Gates was seeking to “control the food supply” and “control housing” to force people to “live in the pod eat the bugs.”

Like Gabbard, Kent has no experience in leading a large intelligence organization. (After serving in the Army, he was a field operative for the CIA for a short time.) Both Kent and Gabbard were on the infamous Signalgate chat. As head of the NCTC, Kent will have the responsibility for monitoring and preventing both foreign and domestic terrorism. But his past as a conspiracy theorist and his association with far-right extremists raise questions about his analytical abilities and his capacity to assess threats of domestic terrorism that arise from the right. His association with 1AP and Lewis is just one more reason to wonder about his judgment.

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New Trump EO Would Punish States for Combating Climate Change

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at “protecting” American energy from “state overreach.” The move, some energy experts say, is a legally dubious federal overstep designed to undermine the rights of states and local authorities to combat climate change.

The order claims “many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.”

It specifically points to Blue-state policies like Vermont’s Superfund rules, which require fossil fuel companies to pay for damage to the climate, and California’s cap-and-trade program as examples of efforts to “dictate national energy policy.” In Section 2 of the order, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify state laws or policies “burdening” access to “domestic energy resources that “are or may be…unconstitutional, preempted by Federal law, or otherwise unenforceable.”

What might some of those state laws be? According to the executive order, that could include any effort to address “climate change,” support “environmental justice,” or reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, among others.

That’s not the end of it. The order also directs the attorney general to “expeditiously” take action to “stop the enforcement of State laws and continuation of civil actions” determined to be illegal.

It’s unclear whether this will stand up in court. Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told E&E News that the executive order is “toothless” and that Trump “has no authority on his own to nullify state laws.” Journalist David Roberts, who runs the clean energy newsletter Volts called the order on Bluesky, “wildly, unambiguously unconstitutional” and “dictator shit.”

Others on social media noted the president’s contradiction of traditionally conservative values. As climate reporter and Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt put it on Bluesky, “States rights! But only when the states agree with us[.]”Climate scientist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributing author Zeke Hausfather posted, “So much for federalism…” And Tulane environmental studies professor Joshua Basseches wrote, “Federal overreach has historically been a crusade of the Right, but these times are wild and different.”

This new White House executive order says that the US Attorney General is going to prevent states from implementing democratically passed laws regarding climate change and clean energy. It scarcely needs stating at this point that this is wildly, unambiguously unconstitutional. Dictator shit.

— David Roberts (@volts.wtf) 2025-04-09T05:42:55.516Z

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Trump’s “Pincer Attack” on Journalism Is Working. But There’s Hope.

David Folkenflik occupies a unique role at NPR: He’s a journalist who writes about journalism. And that includes the very organization where he works, which is once again being threatened by conservatives in Washington.

The second Trump administration has aggressively gone after the media in its first few months. It’s kicked news organizations out of the Pentagon. It’s barred other newsrooms from access to the White House. And Trump supporters in Congress have targeted federal funding for public media.

In late March, the heads of NPR and PBS testified on Capitol Hill to defend public broadcasting from Republicans accusing them of political bias. Meanwhile, some major news organizations seem to be capitulating and bending to the will of the Trump administration.

Folkenflik, who’s been covering media for two decades for NPR, says journalism across the country is facing a two-pronged attack from both commercial and political forces.

“You’re seeing sort of discrete and specific and seemingly almost comedic attacks. You don’t say ‘Gulf of America’? Get to the back of the line,” Folkenflik says. “I think it’s actually part of a larger effort to control the flow of information.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Folkenflik talks to host Al Letson about this unprecedented moment for journalists, why more media outlets seem to be bowing to pressure from the Trump administration, and how journalism can begin to win back public trust.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

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Solar Has Been the World’s Fastest Growing Power Source for 20 Years Running

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

The world used clean power sources to meet more than 40 percent of its electricity demand last year for the first time since the 1940s, figures show.

A report by the energy thinktank Ember said the milestone was powered by a boom in solar power capacity, which has doubled in the last three years. The report found that solar farms had been the world’s fastest-growing source of energy for the last 20 consecutive years.

Phil MacDonald, Ember’s managing director, said: “Solar power has become the engine of the global energy transition. Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force. As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world’s ever-increasing demand for electricity.”

Overall, solar power remains a relatively small part of the global energy system. It made up almost 7 percent of the world’s electricity last year, according to Ember, while wind power made up just over 8 percent of the global power system.

The fast-growing technologies remain dwarfed by hydro power, which has remained relatively steady in recent years, and made up 14 percent of the world’s electricity in 2024.

Hydro power is one of the modern world’s oldest renewable energy technologies, and made up a large proportion of global electricity in the 1940s—when the power system was about 50 times smaller than it is today.

The continuing growth of solar means clean power—including nuclear and bioenergy—is on track to expand faster than the world’s overall electricity demand, according to Ember. This should mean fossil fuels beginning to be squeezed out of the global power system.

Ember had previously predicted that 2023 would be the year in which emissions from electricity reached a peak, after a plateau in the first half of the year.

Climate experts hoped then that emissions would begin to fall, but a series of heatwaves across the globe ignited a surge in demand for electricity to power air conditioning and refrigeration systems, which caused fuel electricity to grow by 1.4 percent that year.

The report, which accounted for 93 percent of the global electricity market across 88 countries, found that the surge in demand pushed emissions from the global power sector up by 1.6 percent to an all-time high last year.

MacDonald said heatwaves were unlikely to ignite a similar demand surge in the year ahead—but the increasing use of electricity to power artificial intelligence, data centers, electric vehicles, and heat pumps was expected to play a bigger role in the world’s appetite for electricity.

Combined, these technologies accounted for a 0.7 percent increase in global electricity demand in 2024, double what they contributed five years ago, the report found. “The world is watching how technologies like AI and EVs will drive electricity demand,” MacDonald said. “It’s clear that booming solar and wind are comfortably set to deliver, and those expecting fossil fuel generation to keep rising will be disappointed.”

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Why Elite Colleges Aren’t Pushing Back on Trump, and Why Silence Is Dangerous

America is witnessing an unprecedented series of attacks on higher education that commenced well before Donald Trump was re-elected, amid the contentious protests that followed Hamas’ attacks on Israel and Israel’s ruthless (and ongoing) retaliation on Gaza and its inhabitants.

But Trump, as president, has taken matters much further. Claiming antisemitism, his administration is revoking student visas and arresting students who have engaged in nonviolent protests or expressed opinions on social media or in innocuous op-eds. The government’s pauses, reviews, and cancellations of grants and contracts at top universities—including new funding freezes totaling $1 billion for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern—are creating havoc. And its attempt to cap federal funding for the indirect costs of medical research, though tied up in court, could prove devastating to research universities, some of which have already fired staff, imposed hiring freezes, and slashed or postponed graduate programs in response. Now Republicans are considering a tenfold tax increase on endowment investment income for certain universities to help pay for up to $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

All told, these actions amount to the most profound crisis US colleges and universities have ever faced, with likely ripple effects on regional economies and employment, public health, and medicine. Indeed, they have thrown the future of America’s leadership in science and innovation into question.

Yet, instead of speaking out forcefully and cracking open their endowments to cover any shortfalls, most top schools have hunkered down, and even, in Columbia’s case, cut a deal with the administration. Only a few university presidents, including Princeton’s Chris Eisgruber and Wesleyan’s Michael Roth, have had the courage to stick their necks out.

To better understand why, I reached out to Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at the University of California, Merced, who studies the “financialization” of higher ed, and who argued, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that elite institutions can absolutely afford to fight—and should.

Trying to walk too fine a tightrope between the schools’ needs and the interests of wealthy donors, after all, is a high-risk endeavor. In Eaton’s view, “pretending that these attacks aren’t political and not making a political strategy to push back is a fatal error.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Few college presidents have spoken out publicly about these attacks. It’s baffling to me that our top colleges—and law firms, for that matter—aren’t fighting en masse to protect the interests of their students and faculty. What do you make of the reluctance?

By their nature elite universities are conservative—as in cautious—institutions, and I don’t think that equips them well to deal with a full frontal assault like this. Also, elite universities are tied to other elites, especially from the world of finance, who themselves are somewhere between the lines with Trump, and have some sympathy for the Trumpist attacks on diversity and inclusion as university values. So that’s part of what we’ve seen that’s frozen these institutions in their tracks—why they are reacting like deer in the headlights.

Right. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers just had an op-ed in the New York Times in which he decries colleges’ emphasis on identity politics as opposed to academic excellence, in hiring and so forth.

I think that’s the same Summers op-ed where he says [to Harvard]: Don’t be intimidated, spend the endowment—which is pretty different than what we’ve seen from Columbia and a lot of the other elite schools. Summers has played a different role for a long time than your conventional university president. He was the secretary of the Treasury. He’s highly political and has been engaged in politics, and this is a political struggle. Universities like to pretend to not be political—and there are plenty of ways they shouldn’t be, in order to foster free speech and open debate. But pretending that these attacks aren’t political and not making a political strategy to push back is a fatal error.

Wasn’t it this sort of waffling that got them into trouble in the first place amid the Gaza protests? Everybody wanted administrators to issue statements, and they didn’t really know what to do. They’d already spoken up on other things, in support of Ukraine or whatever. And now it looks like they’re stuck back in this mode of indecision.

Yeah. You know, the primary job of an elite university president is to raise money from donors, and if you’re spending a lot of your day talking to your wealthiest alumni—who may have donated to Trump or may feel sympathetic with Trump’s critiques of diversity at the university—it’s hard for folks who spend their day in those social circles to imagine pushing back.

That gets at my next question. Your research examines the relationships between what you call “financialization” and inequalities in higher education. Can you explain how your work applies to the current situation?

Yeah. So, my book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower, shows a radical increase in the proportion of elite university board members coming from finance, particularly private equity and hedge funds. If you go back to the ’80s, private equity and hedge funds didn’t really exist. Investment bankers were prominent on university boards but it’s nothing like today. And these are folks who have some official reach in university policy, and who are the primary fund-raisers—a main job of board members is both to donate a lot and to raise money from other donors.

We saw the activation of these ties around the Gaza war protests, with a subset of wealthy donors saying they wanted to suspend donations to the university until protests were suppressed. It’s not hard to imagine that board elites from Wall Street who were always uncomfortable with elite universities embracing diversity and inclusion see an opportunity to push back, and Trump has opened the space for it to be okay to oppose this.

And of course, their complaints often involved perceived antisemitism at Harvard and so forth, with rich alums like Bill Ackman chiming in. It does seem, in any case, that college presidents are under extraordinary pressure to align themselves with the interests of trustees and top donors.

You often don’t quite see how a system works and the preferences of different actors, their roles in the system, until the system is threatened by disruption. I don’t think anybody was terribly attuned to the dispositions of the financiers on university boards 5 or 10 years ago because, outside of a crisis, donors weren’t engaging to pressure the university to be one thing or another. Since the Gaza war and allegations of antisemitism, and now even more so with the Trump attacks, the preferences and dispositions of these donors may become more visible.

A lot of them must be aghast to see colleges they care about taking such a hit.

Yeah. A proactive, offensive university strategy would be to say no to Trump, to try to weather the storm by tapping the endowment and by turning to alumni of all wealth levels, to say, “Help defend your alma mater. Now is the time that we need you.”

You wrote that top colleges can afford a fight. I think we have 16 schools now with endowments over $10 billion, yet many are cutting deals, and in some cases graduate programs. Why would any private foundation, let alone an educational one, hoard money in the face of such a crisis?

I have to give Larry Summers credit for saying endowments are not to be admired; they are there to be spent in a crisis. And I acknowledge President Obama for saying the same. But universities have become attached to steadily growing their endowment as a status object. And that course of action is at this moment potentially fatal for the university as we know it.

We think of endowments as one giant pot of money, but really they consist of thousands of individual gifts, most earmarked for specific purposes.

To an extent. Even the Columbia endowment, which is smaller than Harvard and Princeton and Yale—it’s $15 billion. By my recollection, several billion is entirely unrestricted. The University of California, which has a smaller endowment, especially relative to its size, has billions in unrestricted funds. You know, another implication here is that universities should be seeking to raise more unrestricted endowment funds. But as Summers says, as a former Harvard president: Believe me when I say you can spend the endowment, even restricted funds in it.

I don’t quite know how that works. I assumed these are legal contracts.

No, it’s true. The law that governs this allows for, in a crisis, you can act in extraordinary ways. Now universities should not undertake this haphazardly. One of the things that endowments are dedicated to is financial aid for low-income students. Most of the very elite colleges have become debt free. So, I’m not saying they should dig into that funding to protect other things. The point is, endowments are huge resources. They have been used to weather past crises, including the 2008 financial crisis and the early months of Covid. And they must be again to defend the university.

The University of California, at the beginning of Covid, liquidated $1.8 billion of its Blue and Gold endowment—an additional 8 percent. That’s more than doubling the (normal) expenditure, which is less than Columbia would have to do to weather the $400 million in cuts. There are a lot of different financial mechanics a university can use to tap its endowment.

Do you think elite universities, either financially or in terms of hewing to liberal orthodoxies, have gone too far in ways that make them susceptible to these right-wing attacks?

The culture side is not my area of expertise. But one thing I can say is that you really can’t divide the financial practices and the exclusiveness of elite universities from their culture. If you go back to the 1970s, Princeton had a pretty big endowment, but it only spent about $10,000 per student from the endowment each year, after adjusting for inflation. Today, Princeton spends $180,000 per student on operations because the endowment has grown so much, and the public is right when they see the Ivy League as more inaccessible than ever. Princeton has only increased its enrollment by a fraction, even as it’s gotten wealthier by more than tenfold. Our problem is that, in the public imagination and political discourse, college is [schools like Princeton and] Harvard, even though in reality, college in the US is—

Penn State?

Right, or Michigan State—a regional public university or commuter college. Seventy percent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded by public universities, but the persistent exclusiveness of the Ivy League has put a target on the back of all universities, because all universities are imagined to be like them. So [the problem is] actually not too much diversity and inclusiveness; it’s the disingenuousness of discourses of diversity and inclusion at elite schools while they enroll only a tiny fraction of students, overwhelmingly from the very wealthy. If you need a citation, look at the Harvard economist Raj Chetty.

Another thing is, universities are mostly thought of as colleges, but they also do research that leads to technological innovation and lifesaving medicines. They run hospitals. But those things are still done in a culture of elite superiority, rather than conceived of as immensely valuable services in the public interest.

And related to their failure to expand in the face of rising demand, their wealth has exploded on the public’s dime, given all the tax-free growth of their endowments. Which brings us to the proposed tax increase...

One other stat I’ll throw at you is that, up until recent years—and it may still be the case—UC Berkeley, not the most equitable and accessible of public universities, enrolled more low-income Pell Grant recipients than the entire Ivy League combined! That’s because Berkeley grew its enrollment a lot over the last 50 years to make space for more students, including students from lower and middle-class backgrounds.

And that doesn’t mean worse students. Just kids who grew up with less.

Yeah, the thought experiment of: What if Princeton enrolled twice as many students and only spent $90,000 a year per student from the endowment? I think it would still be an extraordinary university.

Okay, so Republicans want to raise the tax on endowment investment income from 1.4 percent to 14 percent or more for colleges with high endowment to student ratios. I’ve been critical of the way private foundations hoard public wealth, and so maybe they should be taxed more. But how do you think such a tax will affect the educational missions of elite institutions?

I mean, it’s a sham! These institutions will figure out ways around it no matter what Trump does. I favor taxes on the wealthiest endowments if they fail to use their resources to provide a sufficient public good, either by enrolling more students or by doing other important things in the public interest. But this is about punishing schools for perceived inclusiveness.

Democrats and elite universities have left themselves vulnerable to these tax proposals, which will be used opportunistically to fund tax cuts for billionaires. We leave the door open by not developing a progressive policy that incentivizes endowments to be used in the public interest. But that is not what this proposal is—nor what it will ever be.

If you really cared about public good, you’d impose the tax on all private foundations, not just elite universities.

Yeah. And it’s telling what they actually use the revenue for. The 2017 endowment tax [the current 1.4 percent income tax was imposed by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] was to help offset the Trump tax cut for wealthy people. That is what this will be, but it’s also to punish these institutions.

As I think I said in my op-ed, universities are some of the first institutions that autocrats attack, and that’s because they provide space for free debate and free speech that can challenge and criticize the autocrat. So it’s not a coincidence that Trump is going after universities, perhaps more aggressively than any other institution in American society.

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There’s One Thing Elon Musk Might Be Right About

Elon Musk is not always wrong. Musk’s prediction back in February that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect” was certainly right, if understated. And on Tuesday, the billionaire, like a broken clock, may have hit the target again when he attacked Peter Navarro—the Trump trade adviser and key architect of the president’s thus-far disastrous tariffs—as “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

To be sure, Navarro, who likes to be called “Dr. Navarro,” has PhD in economics from Harvard. He has a powerful position advising the president, as he did in Trump’s first term. And he possesses an apparent surfeit of self-confidence. But Navarro has done a some really dumb shit, creating notable datapoints supporting Musk’s thesis.

Got Himself Thrown in Prison for Contempt

Navarro spent four months in prison last year for contempt of Congress, an experience he has attempted capitalize on by claiming to be a victim of the same deep-state “lawfare” that supposedly beset Trump. “I went to prison so you won’t have to,” Navarro proclaimed at the Republican National Convention last year, shortly after leaving lockup.

In fact, Navarro went to prison because he not only refused comply with a subpoena from House January 6 committee, but also refused to show up or meaningfully respond to the committee.

Here’s what I wrote after Navarro’s super short trial:

Courts have long recognized that presidents can sometimes assert executive privilege to deny Congress information on confidential advice from executive branch advisers. But the power is limited. Presidents have to actually invoke privilege. Subjects of congressional subpoenas, even if they have a real privilege claim, have to engage with lawmakers and specify what they can and can’t share.

That’s where Navarro screwed up. In an emailed response to a committee lawyer who informed him of a subpoena seeking information related to his actions in the lead up to January 6, Navarro wrote “executive privilege” without explaining further. He later claimed Trump had privately told him to invoke privilege, but he never documented that instruction and didn’t show up for a scheduled deposition or bother to say if he had information the subpoena sought.

Prosecutors argued in court that Navarro’s decision to largely ignore the request broke the law. If he wanted to argue executive privilege, he needed to assert it in response to specific questions and explain if he had documents he was not providing due to privilege.

“You are not a victim,” US District Court Judge Amit Mehta told Navarro while sentencing him. “You are not the object of a political prosecution.”

“These are circumstances of your own making,” the judge added.

Helped Trump Lie About the 2020 Election

Navarro emerged in late 2020 as key enabler of Trump’s false claims that he was the rightful winner of that year’s election. Navarro produced an eponymous report claiming, not persuasively, that voter fraud cost Trump the race. Navarro also helped devise, according to a book he published, a plan called the “Green Bay Sweep” that sought to use objections to the congressional certification of electoral votes as a way to stop Joe Biden from taking office. (One problem with Navarro’s attempt to claim “executive privilege” to the January 6 committee was that, by then, he’d already hawked a book on the topic.)

Worked For a Fraudster

Before he went to prison, Navarroheld the title of “international ambassador” for the so-called New Federal State of China, an outfit founded in 2020 by Stave Bannon and Guo Wengui, a onetime Chinese billionaire real estate tycoon who became a MAGA-boosting media mogul after fleeing to the United States in 2015.

The New Federal State of China claimed to be a government-in-waiting prepared to take over China after what, Guo argued, was the inevitable fall of the Chinese Communist Party. But in a trial last year, federal prosecutors argued the group was part of massive con by Guo, a scheme in which Guo won support from Chinese emigres and persuaded them to invest in businesses he launched, including a crypto venture Guo claimed would become China’s official currency. The NFSC did not have employees and did little beyond hold occasional events. But Navarro, along with Bannon, helped give the organization legitimacy and the appearance of ties to Trump. Guo who was convicted of nine felonies, including racketeering conspiracy and securities fraud. Navarro was not accused of any crimes related to his work for Guo.

Navarro has refused to comment on his work for the group, which appears to have involved showing up at events held by Guo and doing interviews with a Chinese-language news outfit Guo launched. It’s not clear if Navarro was paid.

Quoted a Made-Up Identity In Books

Navarro reportedly got a job in Trump’s first term after Jared Kushner searched Amazon for a person who has aggressively pushed for a confrontational trade policy with China. In five of Navarro’s books, the New York Times reported in 2019, Navarro quoted a source called Ron Vara—an anagram of Navarro’s name—who offered statements that supported Navarro’s arguments. Vara, the Times reported, is “apparently a figment of Mr. Navarro’s imagination”—a mini-scandal that Musk gleefully invoked Tuesday.

By any definition whatsoever, Tesla is the most vertically integrated auto manufacturer in America with the highest percentage of US content.

Navarro should ask the fake expert he invented, Ron Vara.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 8, 2025

Navarro, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer has written, “has blamed every problem in America, including abortion, on trade issues and the death of manufacturing, which he sees as China’s responsibility.” And he has pushed ultra protectionist arguments that contradict basic economic theory, but which now prevail in the White House.

Navarro has told Trump what he what he wants to hear on trade, enabling the incoherent tariffs that even many hardcore Trump backers won’t defend. Even Elon Musk knows that is really dumb.

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SCOTUS Allows Trump to Send Venezuelans to a Salvadoran Mega-Prison

In a Monday evening ruling, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to resume the removals of Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang under the unprecedented use of the wartime Alien Enemies Act. The decision, lifting a district court’s temporary restraining order halting the removals, was 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the Democratic appointees in dissent.

The ruling is a significant win for the Trump administration. Still, it did set limits on President Donald Trump’s plans for mass, summary deportations—each detainee must be afforded a chance to challenge their removal under the Act in court.

The justices did not address the underlying question in the case: whether Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act, a law intended to be invoked during times of war, to claim a non-state actor like Tren de Aragua is perpetrating an “invasion” of the United States. Instead, the decision focused on a procedural question of how and where the plaintiffs should have brought their case. The majority ruled that “legal challenges to an individual’s removal under the Alien Enemies Act must be brought in habeas petitions in the district where they are detained.”

But this is no mere technicality: How and where the question is asked in court will have massive implications—and not just for Venezuelan nationals who must defend themselves from inside detention, possibly without lawyers. While the justices required meaningful opportunities to challenge removal in court through a habeas corpus petition, there is no certainty that the government will provide that opportunity, nor that there will be any way to remedy the situation if anyone (including a US citizen) is whisked away without first getting their day in court. As Georgetown Law’s Stephen Vladeck wrote, in forcing plaintiffs to fight their removal through individual habeas petitions, “the Court is effectively bringing a pea-shooter to a gunfight.”

Still, “to the extent the Government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, “it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court.”

“The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison.”

The majority’s decision raises the likelihood that individuals will be deprived of their rights and removed. The decision brought to a halt class-wide relief under the Administrative Procedure Act, without any deliberation about whether that was an appropriate decision, and requires detainees to challenge their removal in the jurisdiction where they are detained. That discussion will likely be in the most conservative courts in the country—because the administration can transfer anyone to the Southern District of Texas before informing them of their impending removal.

The court green-lit Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act despite implicitly acknowledging that it may as well have been illegally applied up to this point to the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador without due process. Moreover, it did so without considering that the administration had sought to dodge judicial compliance in its zeal to deport hundreds of Venezuelans in what had all the traits of a public relations gimmick. This willingness to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt despite the history of this case is a sign that a majority of the justices either agree with Trump’s actions or are willfully blind to the danger they pose to the rule of law. “The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent. “For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning.” For the majority, however, concern seemed lacking.

The decision prompted strong dissents from both Sotomayor and Jackson, who warned of irreparable harm to those wrongfully removed, while chiding the court for using its so-called “shadow docket” to make consequential decisions outside the regular judicial process—no lower court decisions, no full briefing, no oral arguments, no reasoned opinion. Just an edict a few paragraphs long with enormous consequences.

Sotomayor scolded the Trump administration for whooshing off hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador “in a shroud of secrecy” on March 15, as well as for taking the position that there’s nothing they can do to bring the men back from a notorious Salvadoran prison. She raised the question of what happens if someone is sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, by mistake, or if the courts later decide that the president didn’t have the authority to use the Alien Enemies Act in this way. Indeed, the Supreme Court allowed removals under a regime more prone to error without first deciding what happens to someone who is unlawfully removed.

“The Government’s resistance to facilitating the return of individuals erroneously removed to CECOT,” Sotomayor wrote, “only amplifies the specter that, even if this Court someday declares the President’s Proclamation unlawful, scores of individual lives may be irretrievably lost.” Sotomayor continued: “The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”

In a sign of how seriously wrong Jackson believes this decision to be, she compared it to Korematsu, the disgraced ruling upholding the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II. “Make no mistake,” she wrote, “we are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences.”

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Why Is Trump’s New Jersey US Attorney Headlining a Far-Right Conference?

On Friday, March 28, Alina Habba, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, was sworn into office as the interim US attorney for New Jersey. As the state’s top federal prosecutor, she will oversee the work of 170 lawyers responsible for everything from prosecuting terrorism, public corruption, and gang activities to defending federal agencies in court. The high-profile post was once held by such luminaries as US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

So it came as a bit of a surprise three days later when I received this text: “Join Eric Trump & Alina Habba Sept 25-26” for promoter Clay Clark’s “Make American Business Great Again” conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Clicking the accompanying link, I learned that, for $250, conference attendees will hear inspirational words from Habba and other minor MAGA celebs and learn how to grow their business through search engine optimization, branding, sales training, and more!

It’s an unusual event for a US attorney, even an interim one, to participate in. But then again, Habba isn’t your typical federal prosecutor. Indeed, she has no prosecutorial experience of any kind. One of her most famous cases led a federal judge in Florida to sanction her and Trump for nearly $1 million in 2023 for filing a frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,” US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks wrote of the suit in his order for sanctions. “Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim.”

While she may not have a typical prosecutor’s résumé, Habba has loads of experience headlining Clark’s conferences.

This will be epic. Making your business great by getting tips from successful businesses people. Tickets are limited Get yours today.
With @TheClayClark @EricTrump @AlinaHabba @AmandaGrace_AOG pic.twitter.com/uGbsUFHN1v

— Dr. Stella Immanuel MD (@stella_immanuel) April 1, 2025

Clark is a former DJ and failed Tulsa mayoral candidate turned conspiracy theorist who rose to conservative prominence fighting mask mandates during the pandemic. “Make American Business Great Again” is a spin-off of the far-right Christian nationalist ReAwaken America tour that he created in 2021 with Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn. For three years, the pair barnstormed across the country doing events that featured a mash-up of MAGA luminaries, anti-vaxxers, election deniers, “prophets,” and QAnon devotees.

The last ReAwaken America event took place in North Carolina in October shortly before the election. Habba was there along with a rogue’s gallery of MAGA stars who’d once been prosecuted by the very Justice Department she is now part of. There was Simone Gold, the anti-vax doctor who served nearly 60 days in prison after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge related to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. International underwear model John Strand, who’d joined the mob inside the Capitol alongside Gold, took the stage only a few months after serving a year in prison on a felony conviction related to the riot. (Strand and Gold were among the 1,500 or so January 6 rioters Trump pardoned after taking office.)

Former (and current) Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro appeared, fresh off a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with a January 6 committee subpoena. And let’s not forget Trump confidant Roger Stone. Just before Stone headed to prison on a 40-month sentence for lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction charges related to the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump commuted his sentence and later granted him a full pardon.

Trump’s election seemed to have dampened the demand for more ReAwaken events, especially now that regulars like Habba are in the administration. (FBI Director Kash Patel used to peddle his children’s books about Donald the King in the tour’s exhibit halls.) But Clark has continued to host periodic conferences focused on business development.

The September event will include some veterans of the ReAwaken tour. Not only will it feature Habba and the president’s son Eric, but attendees will be treated to talks from Stella Immanuel, a Texas doctor and pastor who rocketed to fame during the pandemic and became one of the nation’s leading prescribers of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which she promoted as cures for Covid despite evidence that the drugs don’t work for it. Immanuel also believes that sex with “tormenting spirits” is responsible for gynecological problems. Rounding out the lineup will be Amanda Grace, a self-proclaimed prophet who warned attendees at a 2023 ReAwaken conference about the proliferation of technologically advanced “mermaids and water people” spreading perversion across the United States.

A Federalist Society meeting this is not.

Generally, Justice Department officials shy away from political appearances. “It harms public confidence in the rule of law for a United States attorney to be a prominent speaker at a conference with a partisan political or ideological focus,” says New York University law school ethics professor Stephen Gillers. “To avoid that, we have traditionally relied on good judgment and self-restraint.”

Good judgment and self-restraint, though, seem to be in short supply in the Trump administration thus far. Habba isn’t the only interim US attorney who seems to be blurring the boundaries between political activity and government service. Last month, acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin headlined a Florida fundraiser for Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, a conservative group he ran before joining the administration. The event was attended by January 6 defendants, including former members of the Oath Keepers militia who are still appealing their seditious conspiracy convictions in cases overseen by his office.

Over the weekend, the Nevada Independent reported that interim US Attorney for Nevada Sigal Chattah had called in to a state Republican Party meeting, potentially in violation of Justice Department rules that prohibit political appointees from participating in political activities or holding party positions. Chattah has been a national committeewoman for the Republican National Committee, and the meeting agenda indicated that she was scheduled to give a report. As of Monday, she was still listed on the RNC website as holding the party post.

Habba was tapped for the US attorney post in spite of her regular appearances at Clark’s events, or her fondness for Flynn, the ReAwaken tour’s animating force. Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the US during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump pardoned him in November 2020. Last year, he premiered an eponymous documentary about his legal ordeal. When it was released, Habba tweeted: “Thrilled to congratulate my friend and one of the all-time greatest patriots General Michael Flynn on his new movie sharing his incredibly important story.”

Like the conferences he emceed, Flynn has been a prominent promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that Democrats and Satan-worshipping elites are running a secret global child sex ring, one they believe Trump will vanquish. The ReAwaken America tour frequently featured Q-related figures, such as the editor of George magazine. Originally created by the late John F. Kennedy Jr., George has been revived by QAnon believers who think Kennedy is still alive and is going to help Trump fight the pedophile cabal. (The magazine recently featured Habba’s fellow conference headliner Amanda Grace in a long Q&A.)

Habba, too, has appeared on QAnon-adjacent podcasts and suggested that many of the court cases brought against President Trump were the work of Satan. “There’s God’s plan and then there’s the demonic plan,” Habba explained to Grace in January 2024 when she appeared on the online prophet’s YouTube show. “We need to fight these people that are obviously coordinated and are trying to have a crusade of election interference.”

Obsessed with pedophile rings, QAnon adherents have turned human trafficking into their cause célèbre. Flynn himself now heads a nonprofit group that purports to fight child trafficking. Perhaps it’s no surprise then, that one of Habba’s first acts as New Jersey’s interim US attorney was to create a task force to combat human trafficking. “There will be zero tolerance for human trafficking in New Jersey,” she tweeted on April 1. “One of my first orders of buisiness [sic] was creating a Human Trafficking Task Force and appointing an incredibly talented and passionate Assistant US Attorney to lead it.”

The New Jersey US attorney’s office did not respond to questions about whether Habba still intends to attend the conference in September, nor did Clay Clark. As interim US attorney, she is allowed to stay in her post for only 120 days unless Trump formally nominates her for the job and the Senate confirms her. Should that not work out, her tenure could end just in time for her to hit the circuit in September.

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Trump’s Bureau of Land Management Pick Is a Pit Bull for the Fossil Fuel Industry

This story was originally published by Public Domain, a Substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

When rancher Ammon Bundy and his armed posse stormed into Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016 in a failed attempt to seize public land for themselves, Kathleen Sgamma, then the vice president of the Western Energy Alliance, issued a brief condemnation. She described the militants as “serious lawbreakers.” Sgamma reserved the bulk of her ire, though, not for the armed men in Oregon, many of whom were inspired in part by a fringe Mormon theology, but for the US government itself.

In a 2016 blog post that appears to have been deleted, she went on a lengthy diatribe against the land management policies of the United States that,in her view, led to the Bundy takeover. Among her chief complaints: “The situation arises from too much federal ownership of land in the West,” she wrote. “Whereas in the East and Mid-West lands were transferred as private property to individuals for farms, by the time the West was settled the government retained a vast amount of land.”

Sgamma, who thinks there is too much federal public land, is now President Trump’s choice to lead the federal government’s largest land management agency. Trump nominated her in mid-February to be the next director of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that oversees more than 246 million acres on behalf of all Americans. In addition to enforcing bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the BLM director oversees oil and gas drilling on federal land. The agency is also responsible for the conservation of iconic western species, including the greater sage grouse. In all of these realms, and others too, Sgamma will have to contend with a thicket of conflicts of interest.

Sgamma is best known as a passionate activist on behalf of oil and gas corporations. She is a long-time leader and current president of the Western Energy Alliance (WEA), a litigious trade group that represents drillers and other fossil fuel companies that operate on federal land. In that role, she has served as industry muscle, so to speak, attacking in court, in the media, and in the halls of power any policy, rule or regulation that hinders the oil industry’s ability to profit on public lands. Her organization’s methods have sometimes sparked controversy.

In Project 2025’s manifesto, Sgamma and others accuse Joe Biden of waging a “war on fossil fuels” and bemoan the amount of land and minerals under federal ownership.

In 2014, for instance, a secret recording of the WEA’s annual meeting revealed that the trade group had invited the Washington, DC, public relations operative Richard Berman to speak to its members. Berman was there to solicit money to fund a PR campaign called Big Green Radicals that would target environmentalists opposed to the oil industry.

During his speech, Berman told the audience they should think of their fight against environmental organizations as “an endless war.” He told them that they could either “win ugly or lose pretty.” He assured the assembled oil industry operatives that if they funded his campaign he could protect their anonymity while going on the offensive against environmentalists, using emotions like “fear” and “anger” to try to turn public opinion against green groups.

In the end, Berman’s Big Green Radicals campaign did just that. Among other things, it put out a report titled “From Russia with Love” that portrayed American environmental groups as the puppets of shadowy Russian interests. Republicans in Congress quickly latched onto the report despite its thin sourcing, recycling many of its claims to argue that groups like the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club are the “useful idiots” of Russia.

The Western Energy Alliance used similar tactics to undermine greater sage grouse conservation in the American West. When the Obama administration was considering listing the greater sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act due to the species’s precipitous population decline, WEA launched a PR campaign, running ads that disparaged grouse advocates and scientists. The Obama administration ultimately declined to list the species under the ESA, instead opting to have the BLM and Forest Service issue land-use regulations that could help prop up the species. Though those regulations have not stopped the continued loss of grouse habitat across the West, they are likely to be further weakened under the new Trump administration.

WEA frequently turns to the courts to prevent new rules, regulations or fees that could inconvenience public land oil drillers. In May of last year, for instance, the group and its industry allies sued the Bureau of Land Management after the Biden administration raised royalty rates on public land drillers, from 12.5 percent to 16.7 percent.

If she is confirmed, Sgamma’s appointment will likely raise thorny questions about conflicts of interest. She will have substantial influence over sage grouse policy, royalty rate policy, public lands oil leasing, and many other issues that have been at the center of her work for the fossil fuel industry. Will she sign an ethics pledge that recuses her from these and similar policy matters? Will she be too conflicted to function?

Sgamma’s appointment to the helm of BLM also complicates Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, the sweeping policy blueprint that MAGA operatives compiled to guide Trump in a second term. Sgamma co-authored a section of the manifesto’s chapter on the Interior Department, in which she and others accuse Biden of waging a “war on fossil fuels” and bemoan the amount of land and minerals under federal ownership.

The Project 2025 chapter that Sgamma contributed to was authored by William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of BLM during Trump’s first term and has a long record of advocating for federal lands to be transferred to states or sold to private interests. It stops short of calling for the outright pawning off of federal lands. Instead, Pendley casts the federal government as a bad landlord and argues that a Republican president should “draw on the enormous expertise of state agency personnel” and “look for opportunities to broaden state-federal and tribal-federal cooperative agreements.”

When it comes to how federal lands are managed, Project 2025 contains a comprehensive fossil fuel industry wish list written by Sgamma and two other industry allies. The manifesto calls for opening vast swaths of the federal estate to increased drilling, rolling back already-protected landscapes, expediting permitting, slashing the royalties that oil and gas companies pay to drill on federal lands, and weakening regulations that might complicate increased development. If confirmed as BLM director, Sgamma would play a pivotal role in carrying out Trump’s pro-fossil fuel energy vision to the direct benefit of her trade group’s members.

As she prepares to lead the BLM, does Sgamma still believe there is too much federal land? Is she a partisan of the so-called land transfer movement, a movement led by Utah politicians who would like to divest the American public of their ownership stake in millions of acres of federal land? Will she seek to sell off BLM land? Given her record, how will she avoid conflicts of interest as she oversees the government’s vast onshore oil and gas leasing program? Will she manage public lands for multiple use, including conservation and recreation, or will extractive industries be her sole priority?

Sgamma did not respond to these and other questions, nor did the WEA make her available for an interview. Berman’s organization did not respond to a request for comment.

Sgamma’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Thursday, April 10 before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

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Republicans Are Stealing a North Carolina Judicial Race. They Won’t Stop There.

On April 1, Republicans and Elon Musk decisively lost their bid to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court. But three days later the GOP came closer than ever to overturning the election of a Democratic justice to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

On April 4, two Republican judges on the North Carolina state court of appeals issued an extraordinary ruling tossing out more than 60,000 votes challenged by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who trails Democratic justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes in the last uncalled race of the November 2024 elections. Two recounts affirmed Riggs’ victory, but instead of accepting that outcome, Griffin and his allies on the bench have followed Donald Trump’s 2020 Big Lie playbook to build support for invalidating the election. The key difference is, this time, Republicans could actually succeedin changing the rules for an election that has already occurred to flip the result. It’s January 6 without the insurrection, or if the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Trump’s bogus election challenge.

The decision to overturn the election, if upheld, will have ramifications far beyond North Carolina. It will give Republicans a playbook for how to overturn future ones, institutionalizing election denial within the party at a time when democracy is under threat in so many escalating ways.

“This does not just affect North Carolina,” Riggs told Democratic lawyer Marc Elias. “This is like dropping a match in a really dry forest. And if we let this kind of anti-democratic effort take hold, we will not be able to contain it. So this is a fight for the very soul of democracy.”

Like Trump, who sought to overturn the votes of large urban centers in key swing states in 2020, Griffin has cherrypicked the type of ballots he wants thrown out.

He’s specifically challenged the eligibility of 60,000 voters with incomplete voter registration records, such as a missing driver’s license or Social Security number. But those registrations were incomplete only because that information was not required at the time or did not appear in state databases because of clerical errors. All of those voters showed identification when voting in 2024. And all of them voted by mail or during early voting, a group that is disproportionately nonwhite, young, and less likely to be registered Republicans. His list of challenged ballots included example after example of lawful voters—including Riggs’ own parents.

“The scale of this should be deeply troubling to anyone who has any respect for the rule of law,” Riggs told me after the election. “With 60,000 people, it is everyone’s friend, it’s everyone’s family member, it’s everyone’s neighbor. There’s no one who doesn’t know someone on that list.”

“If we let this kind of anti-democratic effort take hold, we will not be able to contain it. So this is a fight for the very soul of democracy.”

The second group of ballots Griffin challenged—and the court ruled should be thrown out—came from voters who lived overseas, including members of the military. Even though Griffin voted that way twice as a member of the Army National Guard, he said those ballots should not count because they did not show strict forms of photo ID when submitting their votes, even though the State Board of Elections specifically exempted overseas voters from the state’s new voter ID law, which went into effect for the 2024 cycle. The election board unanimously rejected Griffin’s effort to invalidate those ballots during a hearing in December.

Griffin contested the votes of overseas voters only in four heavily Democratic counties where Riggs won an average of 65.5 percent of votes. It was akin to Trump asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2020 to throw out 221,000 ballots only in the counties encompassing Milwaukee and Madison, which the court rejected. “This calculated challenge to voters in just four Democratic-leaning counties would pose a clear equal protection problem under the US Constitution,” Riggs wrote in a legal brief.

The last group of ballots Griffin challenged, and the court invalidated, came from 267 North Carolina residents who have never lived in the state but whose parents were eligible North Carolina voters, such as military members or religious missioners, before leaving the United States.

The Republican judges on the court of appeals voted to reject these 60,000-plus votes because “the inclusion of even one unlawful ballot in a vote total dilutes the lawful votes and ‘effectively ‘disenfranchises’ lawful voters,” they wrote.

But perhaps the most galling part of Griffin’s challenge is that he hasn’t uncovered a single instance of an ineligible voter casting a ballot. He just doesn’t like the voting methods they used, where they voted from, or who they may have voted for.

“Every single voter challenged by Petitioner in this appeal, both here and abroad, cast their absentee, early, or overseas ballot by following every instruction they were given to do so,” Democratic Judge Toby Hampson wrote in a fiery dissent. “Their ballots were accepted. Their ballots were counted. The results were canvassed. None of these challenged voters was given any reason to believe their vote would not be counted on election day or included in the final tallies.”

He said the court’s ruling would set a dangerous precedent. “Changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes in an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution,” Hampson added.

Riggs appealed the decision to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has a 5–1 Republican majority with her recusal. It issued a temporary stay on Monday, but is likely to ultimately affirm the court of appeals given its hard-right leanings.

Election law experts believe the federal courts could step in, given how Griffin is seeking to change the rules of the election after the fact and challenge only certain types of ballots. “The court’s decision appears to violate the well-established federal due process principles that govern the resolution of state (and federal) election disputes,” wrote Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University Law School. Ben Ginsberg, who represented the Bush-Cheney campaign during the 2000 Florida recount, said that the state appellate court “has gone where no court has gone before.” Riggs, herself a longtime voting rights lawyer, said on Friday that she believed “this fight ends in federal court.”

The appellate court gave voters with incomplete registrations or those who did submit photo ID from overseas 15 days to affirm their eligibility before instructing the state election board to toss their votes and readjust the count, which Griffin believes will result in his victory. Hampson called that step “a fiction that does not disguise the act of mass disenfranchisement the majority’s decision represents.”

Confirming the eligibility of 60,000 otherwise lawful voters in a two-week period five months after the election will be a massive hurdle for Democrats and pro-democracy groups. “There can be no doubt that tens of thousands of voters—through no fault of their own—will be unable to cure their registrations or ballots in time,” Riggs’ campaign said in a legal filing.

“The judges went rogue and just created this cure process,” added Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of the pro-democracy group North Carolina For The People Action. “It’s a logistical nightmare to track down 60,000 people to get them to correct something they shouldn’t have to correct. Their votes count for all the other races but not for this race. It’s an incredibly desperate attempt to rewrite the rules for just this race.”

Unlike the courts that rejected Trump’s effort to overturn the election on more than 60 occasions in 2020, Republican judges in North Carolina have bent over backward to help Griffin.

The chief judge of the appeals court, Chris Dillon, chose the panel of judges that heard Griffin’s appeal. Chief Justice Brian Newby, who Griffin has called a “good friend and mentor,” appointed Dillon as the top judge last year, breaking with precedent to oust sitting Republican judge Donna Stroud, who was deemed too liberal by hard-right Republicans. Fellow Republican judges, including Griffin and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr., donated to a primary campaign against Stroud. One judge who ruled in favor of Griffin, Fred Gore, ran a “joint campaign” with him in 2020 where they shared the same platform. (The other Republican judge who sided with Griffin, John Tyson, was charged with misdemeanor assault in 2021 for reportedly almost striking Black Lives Matter protesters with his car.)

As the case winds its way through the courts, the effort to overturn the election has been gathering momentum, like a slow-moving train crash that no one is willing to stop.

“The North Carolina Republican Party is one step closer to stealing an election in broad daylight,” said state House Minority Leader Robert Reives said on Friday.

Democracy isn’t dying in darkness this time. Republicans are nullifying it in plain sight—and using this as a road map for 2026 and beyond.

“I absolutely believe it’s a test case,” said Price Kromm. “It’s a test case for whether an election can be overturned after the election with different rules. If this is allowed to go through, it creates a blueprint for how future losing candidates can subvert the will of the voters by litigating through partisan courts.”

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A Whistleblower Says Trump Sent the US Marshals to Try to “Intimidate” Her

A whistleblower who testified in Congress today is accusing the Trump administration of trying to “intimidate” her with help from the US Marshals Service, the law enforcement agency of the federal judiciary.

Liz Oyer, the former US pardon attorney who was fired last month, says Justice Department leaders dispatched two special deputy marshals to her house on Friday night—days before she was scheduled to speak with lawmakers about her concerns with the firing of career employees and what she describes as “corruption” at the department. “You appear to be using the Department’s security resources to intimidate a former employee who is engaged in statutorily protected whistleblower conduct,” Oyer’s attorney Michael Bromwich, a former Department of Justice inspector general, wrote in a letter to Justice Department leadership on Monday. He said dispatching special deputy marshals to Oyer’s home was “both unprecedented and completely inappropriate.”

“You appear to be using the Department’s security resources to intimidate a former employee.”

As I reported earlier today, this is not the first time US marshals have acted in strange ways since President Donald Trump came to office. In a deep-dive, I looked at how the law enforcement agency has been recruited recently to help Elon Musk, Trump’s right-hand man. Since January, the US Marshals Service has deputized members of Musk’s private security detail, helped his Department of Government Efficiency get inside a federal agency it was trying to dismantle, and even prodded federal judges to move more quickly on Jan. 6 cases.

For more on Oyers’ testimony, check out some of today’s news coverage. And if you’re confused about the Marshals Service and its recent activity—or if you’re curious to hear experts explain why we should care about it—head to my explainer. As one former DOJ official told me, “the risk to people’s civil rights is enormous.”

Oyer: Perhaps the most personally upsetting part of the story is the lengths to which the leadership of the department has gone to prevent me from testifying here today. On Friday night, I learned that the Deputy Attorney General’s office had directed the department’s Security… pic.twitter.com/Ah3wx9HD37

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 7, 2025

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