The Immigrant Families Trump Separated Years Ago Are Getting Another Raw Deal

The immigrant families separated at the US-Mexico border during Trump’s first administration have gotten some bad news: Essentially, Trump’s second administration is taking away their lawyers and giving them new ones.

The new ones work for the government.

Put another way, the Trump administration, which has the power to deny immigrants’ applications to stay in the United States, will also be helping them fill out those applications. And if that sounds like a conflict of interest, that’s because it is.

Let’s backtrack a bit: In 2018, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the first Trump administration for illegally separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border, with no tracking process or records that would allow them to be reunited. The case dragged on after Trump lost his bid for reelection, and the Biden administration reached a settlement with the ACLU in 2023. The settlement gave separated families a path to obtain asylum in the United States, and it guaranteed them legal assistance as they worked through the complicated immigration system.

Until recently, such legal assistance was offered through Acacia, a nonprofit that specializes in immigrant legal defense. But in April, Trump’s Justice Department told Acacia it would not renew its contract, which ended this week, according to a report by the California Newsroom collaboration. The Justice Department told the court overseeing the ACLU lawsuit that its Executive Office for Immigration Review would provide the legal services instead. This will “maximize efficiency,” the department’s lawyers claimed.

But efficiency for whom? Experts interviewed by the California Newsroom worried that the change in representation would make it easier for Trump to deport the families and separate them all over again. “The government hasn’t shown them that they have their interests in mind,” said Sara Van Hofwegen, who manages legal programs at Acacia.

“It is about as extreme a conflict of interest as you can imagine for the party that is adjudicating matters to provide legal advice,” added David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University.

According to Super, immigrants separated from their families under the first Trump administration—and who no doubt are aware of its current effort to deport as many migrants as possible—would likely be afraid to divulge sensitive information to their new government attorneys. There’s also a risk the government might “trick people into sharing information that might seem to weaken their case,” he added, or that it will take information out of context—falsely claiming, for example, that an immigrant is part of a dangerous gang simply because he has tattoos.

In short, if the Justice Department takes over legal representation for the families, Super said, “it opens “the door wide for them [to get] more information they can distort.”

The ACLU is pushing back against the new arrangement, but it’s unclear whether US District Court Judge Dana Sabraw will sympathize. At a hearing this week, Sabraw said the ACLU had not proved that any harm had already taken place. Its lawyers, he said, could seek relief on a case-by-case basis if they were able to show that the families were missing important legal deadlines because they were not getting appropriate legal assistance.

The next hearing in the caseis set for May 15.

Mother JonesMay 3, 2025, 4:53 PM

After Trump Kills the National Climate Assessment, Scientists Vow to Create Their Own

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

Two major US scientific societies have announced they will join forces to produce peer-reviewed research on the climate crisis’s impact days after Donald Trump’s administration dismissed contributors to a key Congress-mandated report on climate crisis preparedness.

On Friday, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) said that they will work together to produce more than 29 peer-reviewed journals that will cover all aspects of climate change, including observations, projections, impacts, risks, and solutions.

The collaboration comes just days after Trump’s administration dismissed all contributors to the sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA), the US government’s flagship study on climate change. The dismissal of nearly 400 contributors had left the future of the study in question; it had been scheduled for publication in 2028.

“We at AMS see it as vital to support and help expand this collaborative scientific effort .”

The NCA had been overseen by the NASA-supported Global Change Research Program—a key US climate body which the Trump administration also dismissed last month. The reports, which have been published since 2000, coordinated input from 14 federal agencies and hundreds of external scientists.

In its announcement on Friday, the two societies said: “This effort aims to sustain the momentum of the sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA), the authors and staff of which were dismissed earlier this week by the Trump administration, almost a year into the process.”

According to the AMS and AGU, the collection will not replace the NCA but instead create a mechanism for important work on climate change’s impact to continue. “It’s incumbent on us to ensure our communities, our neighbors, our children are all protected and prepared for the mounting risks of climate change,” AGU resident Brandon Jones said.

“This collaboration provides a critical pathway for a wide range of researchers to come together and provide the science needed to support the global enterprise pursuing solutions to climate change,” he added.

Similarly, the AMS president, David Stensrud, said: “Our economy, our health, our society are all climate-dependent. While we cannot replace the NCA, we at AMS see it as vital to support and help expand this collaborative scientific effort for the benefit of the US public and the world at large.”

Speaking to the Associated Press, Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate professor and chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy said the latest collaboration between AMS and AGU is “is a testament to how important it is that the latest science be summarized and available.”

Hayhoe, who was a lead author of reports in 2009, 2018, and an author of the one in 2023, added: “People are not aware of how climate change is impacting the decisions that they are making today, whether it’s the size of the storm sewer pipes they’re installing, whether it is the expansion of the flood zone where people are building, whether it is the increases in extreme heat.”

In addition to widespread dismissals across federal agencies, federal websites have been purged of information pertaining to climate change and extreme weather events since Trump took office in January.

Mother JonesMay 3, 2025, 3:53 PM

“Going to Fallujah Was the Most Horrific Experience of Our Lives”

It’s been just over 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah, a bloody campaign in a destructive Iraq War that we now know was based on a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

But back then, in the wake of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with young men and women who bought the like, and believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism. At first, for Marines trained to fight, their deployment during the “hearts and minds” portion of the US campaign was simply “boring.”

But then they received marching orders for a fight that would prove long and intense. “Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives,” recalls Mike Ergo, a team leader for the US Marines Alpha Company, 1st Battalion. Yet paradoxically, “it was also, for myself, the most alive I’ve ever felt.”

This week on Reveal, we’ve partnered with the nonprofit newsroom The War Horse to join Ergo’s unit as they reunite and try to make sense of what they did and what was done to them. Together, they remember Bradley Faircloth, the 20-year-old lance corporal from their unit who lost his life, and unpack the mental and emotional battles that continue for them today.

In this intimate portrayal, we learn about Faircloth’s upbringing and character, and hear from his comrades about what it was like to be barely adults, yet tasked with clearing insurgents from a city, building to building, in the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War. A situation where you could be shot at from virtually any angle, and it was hard to know who, exactly, was trying to kill you.

The episode also takes us back home, exploring the travails the Marines faced upon returning to the United States, the knowledge they were recruited on false premises, and the complex feelings they still carry today, 20 years later.

This episode originally aired in January 2025.

Mother JonesMay 3, 2025, 10:00 AM

Republicans Seek to Kill California Auto Pollution Rules Using a “Blatantly Illegal” Tactic

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

On a warm July morning in 1943, in the middle of World War II, a thick cloud of acrid smoke blanketed downtown Los Angeles, turning its clear blue skies into an inscrutable brown haze that left Angelenos with burning eyes, noses, and throats. The aerial assault was so intense it sparked rumors of chemical warfare as city officials scrambled to identify the source of one of the city’s first bouts with smog.

Within a decade, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology had isolated the irritant in smog as ozone and identified the primary culprit: hydrocarbon emissions from oil refineries and automobiles, which interacted with compounds in the atmosphere and sunlight to form the health-harming gas.

The unique conditions that shaped Los Angeles—a steady influx of people attracted to a sunny city built for cars and ringed by pollutant-trapping mountains—made it the nation’s smog capital. They also prompted state officials to pass the nation’s first tailpipe emissions and air pollution standards in the 1960s.

Congress, in turn, recognized that California “demonstrated compelling and extraordinary circumstances sufficiently different from the Nation as a whole to justify standards on automobile emissions which may, from time to time, need to be more stringent than national standards.”

In other words, Congress gave California the authority under the Clean Air Act to ask the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver from rules that bar states from passing stricter air and climate pollution rules than the federal government.

But President Donald Trump moved to revoke California’s special status by executive order on his first day in office, as he tried to do in his first term. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Republican-dominated House, with some Democrats, voted to pass three resolutions to revoke the waivers that underlie California’s nation-leading climate and air pollution rules through means that, critics say, abuse the law.

“Trump Republicans are hellbent on making California smoggy again,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

Over several days on the House floor, Republicans, who once championed states’ rights, repeated Trump’s talking points about President Biden’s “radical agenda,” California’s “EV mandate” and decision-making by “unelected bureaucrats” to justify preventing California from enacting the nation’s toughest vehicle-emissions standards.

Democrats countered that Republicans’ resolutions assume illegitimate authority to assail California’s ability to pursue ambitious climate policies and protect its residents from air that is perpetually among the worst in the nation.

Maxine Dexter, an Oregon Democrat, said she opposed the resolutions “that strip away a state’s right to protect its residents from dangerous air pollution.”

More than 156 million people in this country live in counties with dangerous levels of ozone and particulate matter, Dexter said. “And yet, instead of empowering states to raise the bar on clean air, Republicans are telling them to stand down.”

The transportation sector—which includes passenger and commercial vehicles and their fuels—accounts for half of California’s greenhouse gas emissions and 80 percent of its harmful smog-causing pollutants.

On Monday, members of the House Rules Committee set the stage for how Republicans planned to subvert California’s ambitious climate policies. The committee, which controls which bills go to the floor and the terms of debate, considered three joint resolutions to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to provide “congressional disapproval” of the waivers—which the Republican majority called rules.

The decision by the Biden administration to grant a waiver to California “is part of an orchestrated campaign against fossil fuels by EPA bureaucrats who act without regard for the inflation it would impose on Americans,” said rules chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The waiver has been “exploited time and again by environmental activists” to set standards for the rest of the country, Foxx said.

“It gives California unilateral authority to cram its ‘comply or die’ zero-emission truck rule down the throats of every American,” Foxx said. “It would decimate the trucking industry, lead prices of basic commodities Americans rely on to skyrocket and burden hard-working families and truckers everywhere across the nation.”

Regulatory requirements in California, now the fourth-largest economy in the world, can impact markets nationwide. But states are free to adopt or reject California standards as they see fit under certain conditions, in keeping with Clean Air Act amendments passed under Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Several other states have chosen to adopt California’s light- and heavy-duty vehicle regulations.

President George H.W. Bush signs the Clean Air Act in the East Room of the White House in 1990.George Bush Presidential Library and Museum

If Republicans cared about high prices for consumers, they would address the “economic and constitutional crisis facing American families,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat. “One hundred days of economic pain, as Trump’s on again, off again temper tantrum of tariffs tank the dollar, drive up prices, destroy the markets, and threaten a recession.”

In a letter to House leadership on Friday, automakers asked Congress to repeal the waiver supporting California’s Advanced Clean Cars II program, which requires all new passenger cars, trucks and SUVs sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.

In the letter, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the traditional auto industry’s main trade group, urged the House “to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency rule permitting California and affiliated states to ban the sale of new gas vehicles.” A ban on the sale of new gas vehicles “will increase automobile prices and reduce vehicle choices for consumers across the country,” the alliance wrote.

“These CRAs are a pretty naked quid pro quo,” said Rep. Mary Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat on the Rules Committee. “Republicans are giving a massive regulatory handout to their donors in the auto industry.”

The automobile industry spent more than $85 million on lobbying last year, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that tracks money in politics.

The CRA requires federal agencies to submit rules to Congress for review before they take effect. Resolutions of disapproval allow legislators to use the CRA to overturn recently issued regulations. If both the House and Senate vote against a rule, it cannot be reissued in “substantially the same form.”

Yet waivers do not fit the definition of a rule and so are not subject to the CRA, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog, determined in 2023 and again in March. The Senate parliamentarian arrived at the same conclusion earlier this month.

The Senate parliamentarian upheld decades of precedent and confirmed that California’s waivers are not subject to the Congressional Review Act, said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, in a statement. He called attempts to use the CRA “a clearly bogus attempt to undercut California’s climate leadership.”

What’s more, experts say, there is no legal basis for rescinding a Clean Air Act waiver once it’s been issued.

“California emission standards are a matter of life and death .”

When Congress passed the Air Quality Act of 1967, and amended it as the Clean Air Act in 1970, it prohibited states from adopting their own air pollutant emissions standards for new vehicles and their engines. But since California had already passed its own vehicle pollution standards before the 1967 act was passed, Congress allowed the state to seek waivers from the EPA.

Over nearly 60 years, California has received more than 100 waivers.

The California waiver was originally viewed as essential to getting the federal law passed, with the stipulation that federal law would take precedence with exceptions for California under specific circumstances that were submitted to the EPA for review, said Ted Lamm, associate director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Every prior administration has followed the law and issued the waiver under circumstances where it is required and has not contemplated the act of rescinding it,” Lamm said. Revoking a waiver, he said, “doesn’t functionally exist as a legal concept.”

The waiver was created to address California’s unique circumstances of not only pioneering and leading the country in the creation of air-quality and air-emissions control policy, but also of having very specific air-pollution challenges relating to vehicles, geography and industry, Lamm said. “It’s a bedrock part of the Clean Air Act.”

Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for California’s Air Resources Board, which develops and oversees the state’s clean-vehicle rules, said there’s no precedent to use the CRA to revoke California’s waivers.

“By using the Congressional Review Act, the Trump EPA is doing what no EPA under Democratic or Republican administrations in 50 years has ever done, and what the US Government Accountability Office has confirmed does not comply with the law,” Clegern said.

Nonetheless, Congressional Republicans—aided by a handful of Democrats on Wednesday and 35 on Thursday—voted to use that law to cancel three waivers for clean vehicle programs issued under the Biden administration that allowed California to enact stringent car and truck emission standards. Two Democrats from conservative-leaning California districts and nearly three dozen from Ohio to Texas voted to block the waiver underlying the state’s plan to ban gas-powered vehicles by 2035.

“The president has unlocked America’s energy potential, or at least taken a giant step to do so, reopening 625 million acres for drilling, withdrawing from the disastrous Paris Climate Agreement, improving new LNG projects,” said Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican who serves on the Rules Committee, Tuesday on the House floor. “And here before us today, we have what we call CRAs, of the Congressional Review Act, and the purpose of these is to undo burdensome Biden regulations.”

“If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it…But Congress shouldn’t intervene.”

Roy told the Rules Committee that he and his Republican colleagues are using the CRAs to clean up “the disastrous mess of the four years of the Biden administration.”

The CRA gives Congress the power to “look at the ridiculous regulations put in at the last part of the administration,” Roy said, which he called “radical leftist policies.”

Yet Democrats on the Rules Committee pointed out that the three agency actions the Republican resolutions are targeting are not rules. “They’re not covered by the Congressional Review Act,” said Scanlon, the Pennsylvania Democrat.

“While Congress has the unambiguous right to pass legislation to modify or cancel an agency action, what Congress can’t do is use the Congressional Review Act to nullify these three agency actions,” Scanlon said.

Several Democrats argued on the House Floor that attacks on the waivers are not only illegal but would thwart California’s ability to protect its citizens by implementing rules designed to improve air quality and public health.

Mark DeSaulnier, a California Democrat, called the Republicans’ attempt to use the CRA to kill California’s waivers “blatantly illegal.”

Zoe Lofgren, chair of the California Democratic Congressional delegation, called them “completely illegitimate,” citing the GAO and the Senate parliamentarian’s decisions.

Air pollution is responsible for killing millions of people worldwide a year, researchers reported in the journal BMJ in 2023. Fossil fuels are a primary source of these pollutants, they said, pointing to an urgent need for a rapid and just transition to cleaner energy.

A coalition of health, business, labor, faith, environmental, and consumer protection groups have urged representatives and senators to oppose the misuse of the CRA to target “ineligible policies” in multiple open letters to Congress.

“This vote is an unprecedented and reckless attack on states’ legal authority to address the vehicle pollution causing asthma, lung disease, and heart conditions,” said Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

“If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it,” Harris said. “But Congress shouldn’t intervene and try to block state leaders from protecting their residents from dangerous pollution.”

Over several days of debate on the House floor, several Democrats urged their colleagues to consider the health and well being of their fellow Americans.

“Air pollution is directly linked with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and other diseases, and parental and childhood exposure to pollution is linked to long-term health risks adversely impacting babies and young children,” said Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley. “Just one of California’s standards that would be blocked, Advanced Clean Cars II, is estimated to reduce health-care costs by $13 billion over the next 25 years.”

Doris Matsui, a Democrat representing Sacramento, said California has the same “compelling and extraordinary circumstances” today that justified stronger emission standards under the Clean Air Act in 1970. “According to the American Lung Association’s 2025 state of the air report, five of the top ten most polluted cities in America are in California, and that includes my district.”

And California experiences some of the most severe impacts from climate change-fueled wildfires, atmospheric rivers and droughts, Matusi said.

“In Sacramento, we have faced deadly flooding from more intense winter storms as well as longer and more extreme droughts while the foothills above Sacramento are still scarred from the many wildfires we’ve seen in recent years,” she said. “California emission standards are a matter of life and death for my constituents.”

It’s difficult to imagine in today’s polarized political climate, but environmental protection used to be a bipartisan issue. The modern Clean Air Act was passed under President Richard Nixon, a California Republican, and then considerably strengthened in 1990 with penalties for polluters who failed to comply under another Republican, President George H.W. Bush.

At a signing ceremony in November 1990, Bush called the amendments “a long-awaited and long-needed chapter in our environmental history” that would usher in a new era for clean air.

Bush praised the bipartisan efforts of Congress in collaboration with industry and environmental leaders to pass what he hailed as “the most significant air pollution legislation in our nation’s history.”

“In passing the Clean Air Act on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, Congress explicitly granted California the ability to set more stringent vehicle emissions standards to protect public health from California’s unique air quality challenges,” said California’s Padilla.

Over time, as air-quality, emissions and climate challenges became more complex, Republican administrations have shifted and tried to deny the waiver, said UC Berkeley’s Lamm, starting with Bush’s son, George W., in 2008.

“But what’s happening now is a totally different, unprecedented thing that really has no basis in the law,” Lamm said. “To try to actually rescind a waiver that’s been issued, the law does not contemplate that. It’s not how the statute works.”

The administration’s attempts to undercut a system of governance designed by elected representatives of the people is “extralegal,” Lamm said, and “simply contrary to the simple principles of government.”

Mother JonesMay 2, 2025, 5:05 PM

JD Vance Poses With TV Host Who Called for Violence Against LGBTQ People

Steve Deace, the host of an eponymousshow on the rightwing platform Blaze Media, has built a brand around his brash and provocative personality. Deace has entertained his 52,000 YouTube viewers and 274,000 X followers by calling for violence against drag queens and LGBTQ people and ranting that the Democratic party is controlled by Satan. Those comments fit right in with those of thesome of theguests his show hosts, who regularly dabble in antisemitism and argue that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

But just this week, Deace’s track record of extremist rhetoric and guests did not stop Vice President JD Vance from posing for a photo with him. The circumstances of the picture were unclear; Deace posted it on X with the comment, “Had to make a quick stop by the West Wing this morning.”

Deace‘s track record of extremist rhetoric did not stop the vice president.

The extremism watchdog group_Right Wing Watch_ has helpfully rounded up some of Deace’s most colorful and violent statements from his last decade-plus of broadcasting. In February, he announced his intention to “punch Pride Month right in the balls. Hard.” In 2023, he called for the execution of drag queens, saying “pedo-groomers should be executed, by the way. After a fair trial, of course.” In 2022, he called the Democratic Party “a demonic construct, a satanically-influenced entity, and a death cult” and asserted that Democrats were “voting for dudes teabagging their hairy sacks on children at public libraries and public schools.” In 2020, he said, “I want to see antifa members hanging from gallows in Trump ties. That’s what I would like to see.”

Deace’s regular guests include the TheoBros, members of a network of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law. Joel Webbon, a Texas TheoBro pastor who believes the 19th amendment should be repealed and regularly posts about his conviction that Judaism is evil, has appeared on Deace’s show several times. In a March episode, Webbon explained that his antisemitic statements were justified because the Bible called for “hating the enemies of God.” He added, “I do not hate Jews, I wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity.” In an August 2024 episode, Webbon told Deace that he was an abortion “abolitionist,” which is to say that abortion should be penalized as murder.

Another regular guest is Doug Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho, pastor and the patriarch of the TheoBro movement. In the past, Wilson has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence” and called male dominance over women “an erotic necessity.” On a Deace episode last July, Wilson mourned the loss of unapologetically Christian nations, including the United States. In January, Wilson told Deace he believed that senators questioning US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were putting him in the “longhouse,” a reference to a rightwing internet meme about how modern social norms emasculate men. “The only thing worse than the patriarchy will be the matriarchy, I can promise you that!” quipped Deace. Wilson giggled appreciatively. (Hegseth, too, has strong ties to the TheoBros world.)

The photo with Deace isn’t the first time Vance has dipped a toe into the world of the TheoBros. As I wrote last year:

Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher of TheoBro online magazine American Reformer. (The publication’s cofounder, Nate Fischer, later clarified to Mother Jones that Buskirk’s listing in the filing had been a clerical error, and that he was actually a board member of American Reformer.) In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Cohn also surfaced this photo of Vance posing with a bunch of TheoBros in 2023.

Vance isn’t the only politician hobnobbing with Deace. Last month, Deace devoted an entire episode of his show to an interview with TheoBro and Republican Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers, who has said he believes America should be a Christian nation and wants to end no-fault divorce.

Deevers told Deace that he hoped more Christians would soon be in public office, explaining that politicians “can actually be strong convictional Christians,” Deevers went on, who“lead according to the scriptures, and not be in violation of God’s word, and actually stand before him on Judgment Day and [have] him still say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.'”

Mother JonesMay 2, 2025, 10:11 AM

A Massive Power Grab Could Help North Carolina Republicans Steal an Election

Two weeks after the November 2024 election, the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina convened a lame-duck session for the ostensible purpose of passing a hurricane relief bill. But, with no public notice, they snuck provisions into the bill stripping power from the state’s incoming Democratic governor and attorney general and drastically changing how elections were administered.

Most notably, the bill prevented North Carolina’s incoming Democratic governor, Josh Stein, from appointing a majority of members on the state election board and 100 county election boards and transferred that authority to the state auditor, who, for the first time in more than a decade, was a Republican. Democrats and voting rights experts warned at the time that the bill could allow Republicans to overturn Democratic victories by refusing to certify election results and tilting the rules to favor the GOP.

“We are very concerned that some of the appointees to the newly appointed board of elections have a history of anti-voter positions on election law and redistricting issues.”

That chilling hypothetical is now much closer to becoming a reality, after a ruling on Wednesday by the GOP-controlled state court of appeals cleared the way for Republicans appointed by the auditor to take over the state election board effective May 1—at the very moment the board finds itself at the center of an unprecedented legal dispute over the Republican attempt to steal a state supreme court race.

Under Democratic control, the state board has objected to the efforts by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin to throw out tens of thousands of votes and overturn the election of Democratic Justice Allison Riggs, who leads by 734 votes after two recounts, in the last uncertified contest from November.

Griffin is currently challenging more than 5,000 ballots cast by overseas and military voters in six Democratic-leaning counties that voted for Kamala Harris in November, specifically contesting voters who did not provide photo ID from overseas, even though that was not required at the time. Riggs and election law experts say this is a clear equal protection violation, since Griffin is only contesting ballots cast in heavily Democratic areas. If the courts discard those ballots, Griffin has said he will win the election. But the state board has told the courts his challenge applies to only 1,600 ballots in Greensboro’s Guilford County because the other challenges were filed too late, which would make it much tougher for Griffin to overturn the result.

However, if the board, under Republican control, reversed its position and sided with Griffin, it could potentially disqualify enough Democratic votes to swing the election. The board could also fail to properly reach out to voters whose ballots Griffin is challenging in a way that leads to more voter disenfranchisement.

“I fear that this decision is the latest step in the partisan effort to steal a seat on the Supreme Court,” Gov. Stein said in a statement after the appeals court issued its one-sentence, unsigned order on Wednesday. “No emergency exists that can justify the Court of Appeals’ decision to interject itself at this point. The only plausible explanation is to permit the Republican State Auditor to appoint a new State Board of Elections that will try to overturn the results of the Supreme Court race.”

Stein has appealed the decision to the state supreme court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority.

The Trump-backed auditor, Dave Boliek, has no experience running elections and under the law North Carolina would be the only state in the country where the auditor oversees election administration. On Thursday, within hours of the law taking effect, he appointed three board members to give Republicans a majority: Francis De Luca, former president of the right-wing Civitas Institute, which is funded by conservative billionaire Art Pope; former GOP state senator Bob Rucho, author of a notorious pro-Republican gerrymander; and current GOP board member Stacy Eggers. De Luca’s group filed a lawsuit against the state board challenging the results of the 2016 gubernatorial election, where Republican Pat McCrory narrowly lost to Democrat Roy Cooper, attempting to throw out thousands of votes cast during the same-day registration process.

“We are very concerned that some of the appointees to the newly appointed board of elections have a history of anti-voter positions on election law and redistricting issues,” says Ann Webb, policy director for Common Cause North Carolina.

“They’re setting up a board that looks like it’s going to do very partisan, nefarious actions,” adds Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of N.C. For the People Action, a pro-democracy group. “They’re moving very quickly because they see a pathway to steal the North Carolina Supreme Court seat.”

Mother JonesMay 2, 2025, 10:00 AM

Trump’s Rookie Moves Have Created Loads of Uncertainty—Even for Big Oil

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

Last week, the US Department of the Interior announced that it would speed up the approval process for certain fossil fuel projects, proclaiming that environmental analyses that previously would have taken years must now be taken down to, at maximum, a month. While the new procedures are seemingly a gift to the industry, this may actually be terrible news for pipeline developers, drillers, and miners.

“If I were a developer of any of these projects, I would look at this order and smack my forehead,” says Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, the United States’ biggest environmental nonprofit law organization. “I don’t want my project to be authorized pursuant to these laughable procedures. It won’t hold up in court.”

“Virtually anything they do under these new legal procedures will be ripe for a legal challenge.”

The new procedures use President Donald Trump’s “national energy emergency,” proclaimed in an executive order in the first week of his presidency, to shorten timelines for federal reviews, including environmental reviews and reviews attached to cultural landmarks. Reviews that take into account a project’s impact on the environment are particularly truncated under this new policy. Processes that would normally take a year, the Department of the Interior says, must now be completed within just two weeks, while those reviews that might last longer than a year must now be done in under a month.

Experts say, however, that the new timelines are so short that they almost certainly run afoul of the bedrock laws involved: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. Mass, ongoing layoffs inside the federal government—including at Interior, where the Washington Post reported that a quarter of the agency’s staff may eventually be cut—means that there may soon be far too few staff to handle reviews that would be near impossible to fulfill even in normal circumstances.

This leaves any projects that try to break ground under the new timelines open to very easy legal challenges—something that Sankar says is “low-hanging fruit” for people who are impacted by a project and who want to take a developer to court.

“The people who wrote NEPA and the Endangered Species Act meant for the public to be involved, meant for real expertise to be applied, and meant for these to be meaningful ways to protect the environment and biodiversity,” Sankar says. “To shorten these periods to where you can barely get a letter from point A to point B in that time means that they’re not trying to comply at all. The good news is that it’s all so manifestly illegal that virtually anything they do under these new legal procedures will be ripe for a legal challenge.”

These fast-forwarded processes are tied to a part of NEPA that states that agencies can bypass environmental reviews in case of an emergency. Ryan Hathaway, who worked on NEPA-related issues within Interior for more than a decade, says that this emergency justification has been used in the past for concrete events that pose an immediate threat to health and public safety, like wildfires or floods, with specific actions that needed to be taken—rather than a vague and open-ended energy “emergency.”

“There cannot be ‘US energy dominance’ and $50-per-barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.”

“Lawyers are going to have a field day with this,” says Hathaway, who now works as a director at Lawyers for Good Government, a legal nonprofit dedicated to progressive advocacy.

It’s clear these new rules are exclusively a gift to extractive industries like drilling and mining. Solar and wind projects—which the administration has repeatedly attacked, withdrawing leases for offshore wind and ordering a construction halt on projects already underway—are notably absent from the list of projects allowed to undergo accelerated timelines. But ironically, these orders are only contributing to an increasingly uncertain environment for fossil fuel producers under the new Trump administration.

Even before the chaos caused by Liberation Day, Big Oil faced a potential reckoning with the president it helped elect. While the shale oil boom of the early 2010s rewarded executives for increased production, that strategy led to too much supply, leading prices per barrel to drop during the first Trump administration. After prices bottomed out during the pandemic, investors became more careful about unrestrained production.

“It’s not government regulation that’s limiting the production growth rate in the United States. It’s Wall Street,” says Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.

The industry was given a boost in the early 2020s with the worldwide energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but investors kept a cautious eye on prices. Despite President Joe Biden’s climate focus, the US oil and gas industry became the world’s biggest crude oil producer in 2023, and reached a record high of producing 13.4 million barrels per day late last year. The challenge under the Trump administration would become balancing profitability with the president’s goal of unleashing “energy dominance.” Trump, after all, has stated that he wants oil to drop to $50 a barrel—a price far too low to be profitable for the industry.

Each quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas publishes a regional report on the state of the oil and gas industry in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, which includes anonymous survey responses from executives. The vitriol towards the White House in these comments from the first survey of this year, published in late March, shocked analysts.

“The key word to describe 2025 so far is ‘uncertainty’ and as a public company, our investors hate uncertainty,” one anonymous executive said. “This uncertainty is being caused by the conflicting messages coming from the new administration. There cannot be ‘US energy dominance’ and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.”

“’Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry,” another wrote.

Trump has continued to hand out questionable gifts to industry. On Thursday, Interior announced that it had changed some policies around offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that could, according to the agency, increase production in the Gulf by up to 100,000 barrels a day. Meanwhile, Interior is also reportedly assembling a list of fossil fuel deposits on public lands that it plans to open up for production.

Like the accelerated timelines for environmental permitting, these gifts come with significant strings attached. While the Gulf order will help companies currently producing to up their productivity, they’re unlikely to lure new customers to the region: Offshore drilling is expensive, and four-fifths of the more than 2,000 active leases in the Gulf are sitting unused.

And while opening up public lands to drilling may sound like an industry wish-list item, companies faced with an uncertain American regulatory environment—from the looming threat of tariffs to accelerated permitting timelines that could get projects held up in court to promises made under a Republican administration that may be withdrawn the next time a Democrat is president—may not want to invest years and capital in starting up a project in a risky area.

“For more than a century, energy companies have looked at projects in part based on the host country’s political risk, but the United States wasn’t on that list,” Seigle says. “These days we see huge swings in political support for oil and gas, and the trend of reversing the prior administration’s approach. So energy companies and their investors are now thinking about the political risk of energy projects right here at home.”

Mother JonesMay 1, 2025, 11:31 PM

“An Anti-Trans Fever Dream”: HHS Publishes Attack on Gender-Affirming Youth Care

Three months ago, Donald Trump’s administration issued an executive order attempting to stamp out standard-of-care medical treatments for transgender children. Doctors who provided such treatments would be prosecuted, it promised; hospitals would lose all federal funding.

Buried in that order was a clause directing the top federal health agency to publish, within 90 days, a review of scientific evidence and “best practices” for treating gender dysphoria in children. That report is finally here: On Thursday morning, the Department of Health and Human Services published a lengthy document that rails against the evidence base for gender-affirming care for youth and the professional associations that have developed standards for treating them. Instead, it advocates for children with gender dysphoria to be treated only with “exploratory psychotherapy”—a phrase sometimes used as a euphemism for anti-trans conversion therapy, as a previous Mother Jones investigation found.

“It’s a post-hoc justification for a political agenda they wanted to pursue anyway.”

While the review does not make formal recommendations on gender-affirming medical treatments, an HHS press release asserts that the document “makes clear” that “science and evidence do not support their use, and the risks cannot be ignored.”

Experts in transgender healthcare promptly slammed the report, whose authors have not been disclosed, as a political, not scientific, document. “It’s a post-hoc justification for a political agenda they wanted to pursue anyway,” says Kellan Baker, executive director of the Whitman-Walker Institute for Health Research and Policy. “You don’t do good science in 90 days with a ‘research question’ that’s determined by political fiat.”

“The document is marked with the signature of politics, which is antithetical to the way that science is normally conducted,” Daniel Aaron, a physician and associate professor of law at University of Utah, wrote in an email.

Existing standards for trans youth health care, issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), recommend that kids with gender dysphoria receive psychotherapy, but a small minority of trans youth, with the consent of their parents, are also given gender-affirming medical treatments that can include puberty blockers for children who have entered puberty and hormone therapy for teens. Surgery is rare and typically reserved for the oldest adolescents.

Yet the HHS report, in the first paragraph of its introduction, misrepresents the number of youth receiving this care, claiming that “many” of the growing number of transgender teens are being treated with hormones and surgeries.

Trans youth were, of course, an outsized focus of Trump’s campaign—and since reassumingoffice, he’s issued policy after policy aimed at undermining transgender people’s participation in public life. While legal challenges have temporarily stymied some of Trump’s attacks on trans healthcare, other policies have taken effect. The Department of Veterans Affairs is phasing out hormone therapy for trans veterans. Millions in research funding for trans health care has reportedly been canceled. In April, the Justice Department set up a snitch line for anyone to report providers of gender-affirming medical care. Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed her underlings to open criminal investigations against physicians for “female genital mutilation” of trans youth.

Baker predicts that the new HHS report will be used to bolster current and future anti-trans litigation, and to argue that drastic policy changes are merited. “It will be relied upon, it will be cited, every time the government seeks to investigate, prosecute, defund healthcare providers and healthcare institutions that are caring for transgender young people,” Baker says. “It will probably be used in efforts to criminalize parents as well.”

Aaron concurs. “The report will likely be used to restrict transgender health care and to sow confusion among the public.”

Beyond its overtly political nature, experts say the document does not meet scientific standards. The authors of the report, described by the White House as “a team of eight distinguished scholars,” are unnamed—“to help maintain the integrity of this process,” HHS’ press release claims.

“That’s unusual and not typical of the medical literature,” says Alex Dworak, a family medicine physician in Omaha, Nebraska who treats transgender patients. The executive summary, Dworak says, contains inaccuracies, misleading language, and misrepresentations of the kind of care he provides to transgender patients. For one, Dworak points out, the summary claims that “no independent association between gender dysphoria and suicidality has been found”—which Dworak calls “flatly incorrect,” citing a systematic review that found the opposite.

The report also includes a lengthy explainer on Christine Jorgensen, questionable stories about trans health care “whistleblowers,” and a section arguing that the very idea of “gender identity” is undefinable. “It reads like an anti-trans fever dream,” Baker says.

“There’s nothing unusual about the types of studies that we do in trans health—or the level of evidence that underpins [it].”

Baker describes one of the review’s main critiques—a lack of “high-quality” evidence for the treatments given to transgender youth—as a “classic example of using jargon to try to distract and mislead.” Evidence is described as “low” or “high” in quality based on factors like study size and type, as most commonly assessed by a medical research standard known as GRADE. In fact, studies have shown that a very low percentage of treatments across all fields of medicine are backed by what the report calls high-quality evidence. Designing randomized controlled trials—an example of such evidence—is both practically and ethically impossible when studying pediatric and transgender healthcare, experts like Baker maintain. “The evidence for the standard of care for trans people is as strong as the evidence across myriad other areas of medicine,” Baker says. “There’s nothing unusual about the types of studies that we do in trans health or the level of evidence that underpins the standards of care.”

Gordon Guyatt, a professor of medicine and expert in research methods at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, was one of the key developers of the GRADE approach. Guyatt wrote in an email that the report accurately classifies the evidence around gender-affirming care for youth as low or very low in certainty, but that its discussion of ethical issues was “unbalanced.”

The report “suggests that adolescents should be denied the gender affirming therapies under consideration and that people shouldn’t be allowed to do research to address the possible outcomes,” Guyatt wrote. “This seems unbalanced to me and raises the issue of how this report came about, how the team that put together the report was chosen, and the influence that players in the current administration had on the report.”

Dworak emphasizes that the report represents neither established law nor clinical standards—and won’t affect the treatment he provides to his patients. “I want my patients and everyone who’s reading this to know: You are not alone,” he says. “There are people out there who do care for you and think you are important and valuable and want you to survive and thrive.”

Mother JonesMay 1, 2025, 10:26 PM

Thousands Call on the Trump Administration to Return Kilmar Abrego Garcia

On Thursday afternoon, Lorraine Beausejour Crowe, 82, and her daughter Donna Crowe, 60, joined thousands of protesters in the streets of downtown Washington, DC, to rally against the Trump administration’s assault on immigrant workers and communities. The duoheld one sign that read “ICE Is Trump’s Gestapo” and another displaying a photo of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posing in front of men behind bars at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Above the image was a quote from the Nuremberg Trials: “All Germans are to blame for the crimes of Germany, on a level with the leadership of the country—because it was they who chose and did not stop their government when it committed a crime against humanity.”

“What Kristi and her ilk, including Trump, have done is send people to a concentration camp in El Salvador.” Donna, a Virginia resident, said, “There’s no difference.”

The Crowes were two of the tens of thousands who gathered across the country for the International Worker’s Day protest on May Day.In the nation’s capital, organizers brought together members of the Maryland-based group CASA, as well as the National Education Association, and the Service Employees International Union workers, among others. As they marched from Franklin Park to the White House, protesters chanted for immigrant rights and demanded that the Trump administration bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the Maryland man unlawfully removed to El Salvador last month—back to the United States. As one protester’s sign read,“We refuse to live in a country where our neighbors can be disappeared in the dead of night.”

Thousands rally against the Trump administration and demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.Isabela Dias

A couple of weeks after the administration deported Abrego Garcia—who had been granted protection from deportation to El Salvador from an immigration judge—it admitted that his removal had beendue to an “administrative error.” Nonetheless, Trump officials have continued to insist on the unproven allegations that he’s a member of the MS-13 gang and have disregarded a unanimous orderfrom the US Supreme Court to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

For many of the protesters, Abrego Garcia’s case was emblematic of what they consider to be a broader attack on the rule of law, due process, and democratic principles. Ross Wells, a 72-year-old Takoma Park resident described theadministration’s actions as constituting a government “close to afascist regime.”

Wells, who has worked with local communities in El Salvador, recalled the recent Oval Office meeting between Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and President Trump. He said he saw their agenda as being “to roll back democracy and have an authoritarian state.” He was also emphatic that the administration’s claims of powerlessness in being able to reclaim Abrego Garcia from Bukele’s notorious prison were completely false.” If Trump wanted to use his leverage, he said, he could. But the fact is, Wells said, “He doesn’t want to.”

Wells continued, “If we break due process in this country, we’re all doomed. Everyone can be put in jail. President Trump said as much to President Bukele, ‘You need to build five more of these mega-prisons so we can deport the homegrowns.’ We assume without due process, without trial.”

Thousands rally against the Trump administration and demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.Isabela Dias

Others with whom I spoke also emphasized the potential risks for US citizens. “Today Kilmar, Tomorrow you,” another sign said. A 28-year-old, who works in intelligence and asked to be identified as Emma, carried a sign with the words ‘Trump wants to deport US citizens to El Salvador, you’re not safe.”She has been concerned “that many people are ignoring what’s happening right now with the deportations and thinking ‘I’m safe, I don’t have to worry about this as a white American, as a US citizen, somebody who’s lived here my entire life.'” But, she noted, “It’s happening whether they like it or not. There have been US citizens that have been deported.”

At Lafayette Square, protesters gathered to hear immigrant rights advocates and members of Congress speak on a stage with the White House as a background. Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who has been advocating for his return since his removal on March 15, addressed the crowd and demanded justice for her husband. “My husband was illegally detained,” she said, her voice breaking**.** “Abducted, and disappeared, thrown away to die in one of the most dangerous prisons in El Salvador, with no due process—because of an ‘error.'” As the crowd chanted “Bring him home,” she called on the Trump administration to “stop playing political games with my husband’s life.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, demands justice for her husband.Isabela Dias

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House immigration subcommittee, vowed to hold a shadow hearing next week on Abrego Garcia’s case. “We’re here because we say, ‘not on our watch,'” she said, “to Trump’s kidnapping and deporting of immigrants, to going after immigrant workers.” She listed others who had faced deportation such as children who are US citizens and “in the middle of cancer treatments,” legal permanent residents**,** and people with legal visa status whose only issue may have been that they disagreed “with what they say, in a country that is supposed to have free speech for everybody.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) then spoke, describing the Trump administration as “stupid enough” to believe Abrego Garcia had an MS-13 tattoo on his hands based on a photoshopped image. “When you have a father who has a US citizen as a wife with young children being taken to a jail cell for the worst criminals on earth,” she said, “to be treated as if he has committed a crime, when there’s no crime to speak of, that is not the America that we all know, that is not the American we love, and that is not the America the world looks up to.”

“Kilmar, if you can hear me,” Vasquez Sura said, “I love you and keep your faith in God. Know that the children and I are still fighting for you to come back home.”

Mother JonesMay 1, 2025, 9:06 PM

The Supreme Court Is About to Let Religion Ruin Public Education

In modern America, religious education is offered in private schools or in a homeschooling setting. Public education, by contrast, is secular, because the government is not in the business of sponsoring religious indoctrination. But in two cases the Supreme Court heard over roughly the last week, the justicesappear ready to throw out public education as we know it and usher in a new era where tax dollars flow to religious schools and religion can dictate what is taught in public classrooms. When the decisions come down, public education may change forever.

“This is taxpayer-funded, state-sponsored religious indoctrination. You’ve just got to call it what it is.”

On Tuesday, the justices heard arguments in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a case over whether Oklahoma must fund a religious charter school that carries out religious instruction and hosts religious activities, including mass. Rather than consider this an affront to the separation of church and state, four Republican-appointed justices appeared outraged at the idea that a state would fund a charter school focused on language immersion or the arts but not one focused on religious instruction. Without ever acknowledging that the the First Amendment’s establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) prohibits government-sponsored religion, several expressed palpable anger that allowing only secular charter schools was a form of anti-religious discrimination.

“All the religious school is saying is ‘Don’t exclude us on account of our religion,’” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. “If you go and apply to be a charter school and you’re an environmental studies school, or you’re a science-based school, or you’re a Chinese immersion school, or you’re a English grammar-focused school, you can get in. And then you come in and you say, ‘Oh, we’re a religious school.’ It’s like, ‘Oh, no, can’t do that, that’s too much.’ That’s scary.” He continued: “You can’t treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second-class in the United States… And when you have a program that’s open to all comers except religion… that seems like rank discrimination against religion.”

The case comes out of Oklahoma, where state law mandates public charter schools be secular. Nevertheless, the Catholic archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the diocese of Tulsa soughtto create the country’s first religious charter school. Called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, it would be an online school that would infuse Catholic teaching in its curriculum and require students to attend religious programming. The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual School Board granted the charter, but Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, asked the Oklahoma Supreme Court to order the board to reverse course. “This is not [about] free exercise of religion,” Drummond has said. “This is taxpayer-funded, state-sponsored religious indoctrination. That’s what this is. You’ve just got to call it what it is.”

The Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed that the charter was illegal because Oklahoma law requires public charter schools be secular. So the board and St. Isidore appealed to the US Supreme Court. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself because she is friends with a law professor who advised the school. The result at Wednesday’s oral argument was four GOP-appointees who appeared ready to usher in a new era of religious public schools, and three Democratic-appointees who opposed such a move. Chief Justice John Roberts was the only Republican appointee who did not tip his hand, though his questions showed he was skeptical of the argument against religious charter schools.

The arguments technicallycentered on whether public charter schools are indeed public schools or private entities. If they are public, as Oklahoma law defines them, then the guarantee against the establishment of religion is a stronger argument. But if the schools are actually private, as St. Isidore’s insists—along with the charter board and the Trump administration—then it is harder to argue that private religious entities should not be entitled to the same charter contracts as any other organization. Whether they are public or private, however, the bottom line is that charter schools are taxpayer funded, which means the argument is more broadly over public funding of religious education and whether to integrate religious instruction into state education offerings.

“Once you… approve one religion, not another religion, or this religion, there’s going to be strife.”

Justices Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito were the most vociferous defenders of the Catholic charter school, repeatedly suggesting that the only reason one might deny a religious institution tax funding to run a school is anti-religious bigotry. Alito went so far as to suggest that the Oklahoma constitution’s requirement to provide a secular public education was based on anti-Catholic animus. “This whole position that you’re defending seems to be motivated by hostility toward particular religions,” Alito said to Gregory Garre, a former US solicitor general representing Drummond.

Garre pushed back. “I don’t think that the court could treat any prohibition on funding that’s similar as simply motivated by bigotry,” Garre said. “If you did, then I think, frankly, the establishment clause jurisprudence with respect to public schools would come tumbling down.”

Listening to arguments, it seems possible that’s what Alito and some of his colleagues want. In recent years, the court’s GOP majority has increasingly removed the bricks separating church and state, including in the realm of schools. While the Constitution’s establishment clause used to protect separation, conservative justices seem to have decided that the free exercise clause mandates the state can do nothing to maintain it—freedom of religion is increasingly the freedom to bring religion into every corner of American life, including public education.

Alito also suggested that Drummond was motivated by bias against non-Christian religions because of comments in which he suggested Oklahomans might approve of Christian charters, but not charters by religions that the majority views with suspicion. Garre defended his client as simply stating the political reality of state-sponsored religious instruction: “Once you open up government programs and bring people in to becoming part of the government, and approve one religion, not another religion, or this religion, there’s going to be strife that comes from that,” he said. “It’s, frankly, one of the reasons why we have a religion clause in the Constitution to begin with.”

Kavanuagh pounced on Garre’s suggestion that the government picking and choosing which religions got public charter schools could create “strife.”

“It seems like strife could also come when people who are religious feel like they’re being excluded because they’re religious,” he told Garre. “I think you’re missing a portion of the country when you say strife would not result from that kind of outcome.”

As Kavanuagh’s comment demonstrated, the Republican-appointed justices seemed to feel that in America today, it is religious people who are the victims of discrimination and whose needs are ignored.

The Democratic appointees approached the case very differently. They seemed to squarely see public charter schools as public schools and that Oklahoma had the right to decide that its public schools should be nonreligious. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson analogized the situation to a local government that solicits contracts to paint landscape murals on public buildings. If a religious painter proposed a mural full of religious symbols, Jackson queried, would it be a violation of his religious rights for the government to deny him a contract? “Would that person say ‘You are rejecting me as a painter because of my religion’… when, really, what the state is doing is saying ‘We are offering a particular public benefit and the particular benefit is a nonsectarian mural, a secular mural, and to the extent that you’re not wanting that, we’re rejecting your proposal?’”

The court is poised to deliver a one-two punch that profoundly changes public education.

Justice Elena Kagan stressed that in keeping with their faith, religious charter schools might not just teach religious beliefs as fact but also seek to upend state-mandated curriculums and nondiscrimination requirements. Today, St. Isidore’s might promise to teach the content required by Oklahoma law. But why couldn’t a Hasidic community in New York get the state to pay for a yeshiva that teaches only religious texts in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic? The attorney for St. Isidore’s couldn’t deny the possibility.

Kagan later asked Garre to share what he predicts would happen if the Supreme Court found that states must allow religious charter schools—essentially ushering in an era of public religious schools.

“First, every charter school law and the federal charter school program is unconstitutional, because they all require that charter schools be public schools and that they be nonsectarian. So we’re dealing with the confusion and uncertainty that’s created by that to begin with.” From there, Garre predicted some states might end charter programs altogether, disrupting education, while others would push forward and accommodate religious charters. He foresaw fights over whether federal law mandating education for disabled kids wouldapply to charters deemed to be private. Every aspect of this new education regime would go through the Supreme Court. He predicted litigation over which students can attend, who can teach (“can you have a gay teacher?”), and finally, over the curriculum itself. Questions over what can be taught will be mediated not through the local democratic process but through nine Supreme Court justices.

This case alonewill be a bombshell if the court mandates that states begin funding religious schools through their charter school programs. But this term, the Supreme Court is poised to deliver a one-two punch. Last week, the court heard arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which it considered whether religious parents could opt their kids out of lessons that did not conform with their beliefs. Again, the GOP-appointed majority appeared ready to side with the plaintiffsand allow religious parents to pull kids from the classroom when material they object to is taught—a policy that threatens to create a backdoor through which religious parents have veto power over elements of the curriculum and classroom discussion.

In any school that cannot accommodate children leaving the classroom and being provided alternate materials, the religious preferences of a minority seem destined to dictate the curriculum for all. The likely result is the wide elimination of LGBTQ content. Teachers may fear answering a question about a gay politician, for example, or even displaying a picture of their same-sex partner on their desk.

If the justices decide in the next few months to allow religious opt-outs in public schools and the creation of religious charter schools, it’s hard to see how public education will not change profoundly. In many districts, together the decisions would likely meanthe only publicly-funded school options would be either explicitly religious or circumscribed by the religious preferences of certain parents.

President Donald Trump, whose administration has argued for the religious interests in both cases, has ordered the shuttering of the Department of Education and threatened to withhold funding to schools that engage in diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. But the president’s ability to direct public school curriculums is limited, because public education is primarily controlled at the state and local level.

The Supreme Court, on the other hand, can dramatically reshape public education, reaching across geographic boundaries to make decisions for individual districts and schools. When it comes to the religious right’s agenda of returning religion to public classrooms, it’s not the administration that is to be feared the most, but the Supreme Court.

Mother JonesApr 30, 2025, 7:13 PM

Mark Carney, Canada’s Newly Elected PM, Has a Very Squishy Climate Plan

This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer a_nd is reproduced here as part of the_ Climate Desk collaboration.

Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s plan to address climate change is something of a Rorschach test, with the platform laying out a vision that can be interpreted in contradictory ways.

The platform includes commitments to advance major “nation-building” projects like high speed rail, an east-west power grid, producing hydrogen in Edmonton, and prioritizing clean and Canadian procurement for these projects. Liberals are also pitching investments in EV charging networks, issuing “transition bonds” to attract more finance to the energy transition, prefabricated and modular housing to curb construction emissions, and strengthening the industrial carbon price.

But the platform also leaves lots of room for interpretation about the role of fossil fuels in the Canadian economy.

Even though much of the platform describes modernizing the economy and reducing emissions, there is reason to be concerned that oil and gas could feature heavily in a Carney government because of his commitment to Canada becoming an energy superpower for both clean and conventional energy, says Keith Stewart, senior strategist with Greenpeace Canada.

A commitment to cap oil and gas emissions is notably absent from the platform—despite being a signature climate policy from the Trudeau era that has slowly worked through government bureaucracy for four years and is still not yet finalized.

“We’ve heard Carney waffle away from it and then waffle back towards it, and what I am expecting is some kind of emissions cap but with more flexibility mechanisms, which would basically weaken the cap,” Stewart said. “But the fact that it’s not in the platform is concerning.”

The exposure of Canada’s financial sector to fossil fuels “is equivalent to the amount of subprime mortgages that triggered the crisis 12 or 14 years ago.”

Stewart suspects its omission may be a strategy to avoid giving the Conservatives ammunition; the party has accused Carney of being “sneaky” in eliminating the consumer carbon tax while leaving plans in place to cap emissions and maintain the industrial pricing system.

“Is that them trying to not give Conservatives anything to latch onto as they just want to cruise to victory and then they’ll do what they’re going to do? Because they also don’t say they’re not going to do it.”

Asked to clarify whether the Liberal Party is still committed to the policy, a spokesperson for Carney pointed to comments the leader made in early April—in which the leader did not confirm he will proceed with the cap.

“My government is focused on results, and the results of the current consultation on the emissions cap will reflect the importance of efficiently and fairly achieving these objectives,” Carney said on April 9. “My government will work closely with our oil and gas industry to reduce their emissions over time, so that Canadian conventional energy will supply the world for decades to come.”

The spokesperson said Carney is still committed to the cap, but it was left out of the platform because it was a promise made by the previous government. However, a number of policies announced under Justin Trudeau are included in Carney’s platform, such as continuing investment tax credits for clean electricity, clean hydrogen, electric vehicle supply chains and carbon capture, utilization and storage, as well a commitment to finalizing sustainable investment guidelines that had previously been included in Chrystia Freeland’s mandate letter as finance minister.

Laura Tozer, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto specializing in climate politics, energy transition and decarbonization, told Canada’s National Observer she doesn’t want to see backsliding on emission-reduction policies and so it would’ve been good to see a commitment to strengthening the emissions cap in the platform.

“But I also don’t want to put too much pressure on one thing as the thing that’s going to deliver the wind-down of the fossil fuel industry,” she said. By putting too much emphasis on a single policy, it can distract from the suite of measures that are required to transition the country’s economy in a climate safe manner.

Tozer said the Liberal platform contains many good things for climate, specifically referring to electric vehicle support, power grid modernization, investments in rural transit and phasing out fossil fuel use from federal buildings. The fact that climate policies were not siloed in a climate section of the platform, but rather infused across policy areas, she says, indicates Carney’s Liberals see climate concerns as something to integrate across government efforts. But there was an opportunity to put forward a more credible plan too.

“The Liberal platform in some ways shows some missed opportunities to advance this vision of how climate action can bring economic development and affordability for Canadians because it…is mired in propping up dying fossil fuel industries,” she said.

Carney’s Liberal Party hasn’t yet said which energy projects they will prioritize. “Have they not decided yet…or is it they’re just not telling us?”

For Tozer, Carney’s pitch to make Canada an energy superpower in both clean and fossil fuels is a major concern because climate science is clear that to avoid catastrophic warming a managed decline of the fossil fuel industry is required.

For that reason, the big missed opportunity for Carney was to redefine what being an “energy superpower” means in 2025, Tozer said.

“What an energy superpower should mean for Canada in this day and age is support for renewable energy expansion, remaking our communities in ways that are sustainable and a managed decline of the fossil fuel industries that are introducing all of this risk into our economy,” she said.

The risk to the Canadian economy by staying in the oil and gas business is severe because as demand for oil and gas drops as forecasted, the very expensive infrastructure will become stranded, meaning investors won’t recoup costs. That risk is especially acute for Canadian financial institutions.

At a Senate banking committee meeting in May, Brussels-based Finance Watch chief economist Thierry Philipponnat compared the fossil fuel risk to the 2008 housing crisis, calling it imperative that Canada start seriously tackling fossil fuel risks to the financial sector.

“If we don’t, it’s certain that, in human terms, we’ll have a new financial crisis on top of the climate crisis,” he said. “Exposure to fossil fuels is equivalent to the amount of subprime mortgages that triggered the crisis 12 or 14 years ago.”

Previously, Carney has said he does not support legislation like the Climate Aligned Finance Act that would require federally regulated financial institutions, such as banks and pension funds, to align their portfolios with Canada’s emission reduction targets. Carney told a Senate committee last year he disagrees with the bill because it “dictates” how banks should adjust their practices with “punitive” rules.

Stewartcalled the platform a document designed to be open to interpretation, particularly when it comes to building major national projects without detailing what those are.

All major parties are leaning into nation-building projects as a way to strengthen the Canadian economy in the face of economic aggression from US President Donald Trump.

Carney’s top rival, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, outlined in early April 10 projects he would rapidly approve, including LNG Canada Phase 2, Suncor’s proposed bitumen mine expansion and an all-season road to access critical minerals in northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire. (LNG Canada Phase 2 is waiting on a decision from its owner Shell, not the federal government, to proceed.)

Carney hasn’t outlined which projects he is focused on, Stewart said.

“So it’s a question of have they not decided yet?” he said. “Or is it they’re just not telling us so that they can allow everyone to see what they want to see?”

At last week’s debate, Carney endorsed the Pathways Alliance’s carbon capture megaproject as something his government would advance if elected.

“One of the big projects we need to move forward with is carbon capture and storage—the Pathways project—so that we have oil and gas that is competitive not just today, but 10 years from now, 20 years from now,” he said. “As the world uses less, we want to have more market share.”

To achieve that, the Liberal platform proposes extending tax credits for carbon capture investments, using “carbon contracts for difference” to guarantee a price on carbon to derisk emission reduction investments and for Canada to be “a world leader in responsible energy production” by using carbon capture, utilization and storage technology.

With less than a week until voters head to the polls and the leaders’ debates in the rearview mirror, platforms are one of the last opportunities federal parties have to earn support from the public.

An Angus Reid poll published Monday found little is budging voters. Carney’s Liberals maintain about the same lead over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives they enjoyed at the start of the campaign—at 44 per cent to 39 per cent.

Nationally, support for the NDP, Bloc, and Greens have similarly held steady.

Mother JonesApr 30, 2025, 5:27 PM

Mohsen Mahdawi Has Been Released from Federal Custody

Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinianstudent at Columbia University who was arrested on April 14 at his naturalization interview in Vermont, was released on bail from federal custody on Wednesday. He is the first student to be released in the Trump administration’s widening crackdown on foreign students and academics who have been involved in Palestine advocacy while legally studying in the United States.

Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, has lived in the US on a green card for ten years. He is now free on bail pending the result of his habeas petition.

Ruling from the bench, Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford found that Mahdawi, 34, did not pose a danger to the public and was not a flight risk. This was “not our proudest moment,” Crawford reportedly told the courtroom, comparing recent detentions of immigrants and student activists to McCarthyism.

Since the election of PresidentDonald Trump, immigrant academics across the country have been targeted for detainment and deportation, particularly those who are Palestinian or have spoken up for Palestinian rights.The government’s various justifications for these apprehensions, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that Mahdawi’s presence in the US undermines the administration’s efforts to “combat antisemitism” and “the peace process” in the Middle East have prompted widespread alarm among civil rights advocates and immigration experts who warn that the apprehensions are illegal.

Though Mahdawi’s release marks a rare victory for opponents of the Trump administration’s crackdown on protesters, students like Mahdawi’s Columbia classmate Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University, and Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown are still being detained on similar grounds.

As Mahdawi exited the court on Wednesday, he flashed a peace sign to supporters awaiting him with Palestinian flags. “To my people in Palestine: I feel your pain, I see your suffering; and I see freedom and it is very, very soon.”

He also addressed the president directly.

“I am saying it clear and loud. To President Trump and his cabinet: I am not afraid of you.”

Mother JonesApr 30, 2025, 2:33 PM

How Public Schools Became Ground Zero for America’s Culture Wars

Mike Hixenbaugh first knew things had changed when someone on a four-wheeler started ripping up his lawn after his wife placed a Black Lives Matter sign outside their home on the suburban outskirts of Houston.

Hixenbaugh is an award-winning investigative reporter for NBC News. He’s covered wrongdoing within the child welfare system, safety lapses inside hospitals, and deadly failures in the US Navy. But when his front yard was torn apart in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, he saw a story about race and politics collide at his own front door. “They’re targeting us,” Hixenbaugh recalls. “My wife, my kids, me—and it’s about race.”

So like any investigative journalist, he started investigating and soon discovered that “the ugliness of our national politics was really playing out at the most visceral level in these suburbs.”

Hixenbaugh’s reporting about the growing divides in his neighborhood soon led him to the public schools, specifically those in Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas where parents were engaged in heated, emotional battles over race, gender, DEI programs, and the role of public education in the US.

As more than a dozen states sue the Trump administration over its policies aimed at ending public schools’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, More To The Story host Al Letson talks with Hixenbaugh about how America’s public schools have become “a microcosm” for the country’s political and cultural fights—“a way of zooming in deep into one community to try to tell the story of America.”

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

Mother JonesApr 29, 2025, 7:45 PM

Trump’s Attack on ActBlue’s “Dark Money” Was Backed By Dark Money.

President Donald Trump last week told the Justice Department to investigate Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, and claimed in a fact sheet that the order was aimed at “foreign contributions in American elections.”

Republicans quickly touted the order as cracking down on hidden sources of funds in US elections. “The Democrats’ Dark Money scam has gone on long enough,” Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley said last week.

ActBlue last week called Trump’s order part of his “brazen attack on democracy in America,” adding that the act is “blatantly unlawful and needs to be seen for what it is: Donald Trump’s latest front in his campaign to stamp out all political, electoral and ideological opposition.”

Trump’s claim that he can order the Justice Department to investigate a fundraising platform used by his political foes based on vague allegations is part of his ongoing effort to use the government’s powers to target political enemies. It’s not a particularly realistic accusation—the fact sheet claims it’s targeting “straw donor” schemes, where one person donates on behalf of another person. Given the fairly strict limitations on campaign contributions—$6,600 in 2024—any straw donor scheme that wants to inject any noticeable amount of money into an electoral system that had $15.5 billion run through it, is a great deal of tedious high-risk work for a scammer.

On the other hand, in the post-Citizens United era, there are plenty of ways to inject unaccounted-for-money—even theoretically foreign money—into the election. Super-PACs can accept unlimited donations from fairly easy to obscure sources, for instance, which makes the idea of anyone using a small-dollar conduit like ActBlue (or the GOP equivalent, WinRed) fairly silly.

And, notably, the funding for some of Trump’s “data” on an alleged ActBlue “fraud” seems to have come from just such a source: a super-PAC bankrolled by Elon Musk.

Last year, an opaque group called the Fair Election Fund began promising to pay “whistleblowers” who cited election fraud “with payment from our $5 million dollar fund.” That never panned out, but the same organization found more success with a claim that “60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July [FEC] report but did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.”

As Mother Jones reported last year, the Fair Election Fund appears to have generated this finding by blasting out ominous sounding texts and emails telling ActBlue donors their donations had been “flagged,” then tallying people who responded – accurately or not – by checking a box saying they did not recall making the contribution.

But the Fair Election’s fund’s findings have nevertheless become part of an array of GOP efforts to attack ActBlue, which the White House’s fact sheet cited, vaguely, on Thursday. “Press reports and investigations by congressional committees have generated extremely troubling evidence that online fundraising platforms have been willing participants in schemes to launder excessive and prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees,” the fact sheet says.

The Fair Elections Fund shared its findings, which it said cost $250,000 to produce, with conservative media. And in a subsequent ad questioning Kamala Harris’ fundraising, the group exaggerated them. “The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has been accused of stealing our identities to conceal donations from bad actors,” the ad said.

The group’s accusations were later cited by state attorneys general and House Republicans investigating ActBlue. Right-leaning media outlets continue to cite the Fair Election Fund’s findings as the product of a “conservative watchdog group.”

The group’s claims, however, appear to have resulted not from any independent watchdog effort, but as part of a vast dark money effort by Musk aimed at helping elect Trump last year. The New York Times reported in October that the fund was financed by a nonprofit called Building America’s Future, which was bankrolled in part by Musk.

The Fair Election Fund went silent after election day last year. A former spokesperson for the group did not respond to requests for comment.

In a March the Investigative watchdog site Documented reported additional details tying the Fair Election Fund to Musk. The report noted that the Fair Election Fund is housed within a non-profit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as For Which It Stands Fund, formed in 2023 with a single $8.2 million donation. The group is led by Tori Sachs, a Michigan GOP Republican operative who appears to have set up the groups to support Ron DeSantis’ presidential run, which Musk initially supported. The groups appear to have been repurposed in 2024 to boost Trump’s campaign.

The Fair Election Fund allegations last year were part of what appeared to be a broader attack by Republicans on ActBlue. The group’s efforts last year piggybacked on on a 2023 campaign by far right activist James O’Keefe, who accused ActBlue of assigning large numbers of donations to the names and addresses of people who did not remember donating so often.

Various GOP probes into ActBlue, which incorporated the Fair Election Fund findings, have largely failed to turn up evidence of significant donor fraud or foreign donations being channeled through ActBlue. They have instead focused on ActBlue’s past acceptance of some donations without requiring card verification values—the 3- or 4-digit codes on credit cards used to confirm their validity.

That is, they allege the possibility of fraud via the platform, without documenting much actual fraud, or any indication that ActBlue is more susceptible to fraud or straw donor schemes than WinRed.

A House Judiciary Committee report released earlier this month did point to 22 suspected “fraud campaigns” in recent years involving ActBlue, including nine with a “foreign nexus.” But a close look at the report’s findings reveals these were suspected fraud efforts identified by ActBlue itself. And the donations involved were generally tiny.

For instance, the report touts suspected fraud efforts from “Iraq, Jordan, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.” But the ActBlue document that claim is based on indicates it was not an effort at electoral influence but a scam targeting platform users. And the suspect contributions were “all for $1.”

The alleged fraud cited—if real—also represent an infinitesimally small proportion of the donations that went through ActBlue last election. Even if fraud were real, the basic mechanics of ActBlue’s operation as a pass-through for small dollar donations makes the allegation of foreign donors accounting for more than a negligible portion of ActBlue’s fundraising implausible. In the third quarter alone, ActBlue reported to have more than 6.9 million unique donors using their site and channeled $1.5 billion in donations. Republicans have not produced evidence that ActBlue was used for any straw donor scheme at a significant scale, and such a scheme would be extremely challenging to arrange, or hide.

Musk, meanwhile, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to back Trump last year, much of it through dark money PACS that shrouded their spending in secrecy. If Trump really wanted to crack down on secretive election influence efforts, he would start not with small dollar Democratic donors, but with Elon Musk.

Mother JonesApr 29, 2025, 6:33 PM

Facing Corruption Allegations, Albanian Opposition Leader Hires Trump-Linked Lobbying Team

Sali Berisha—the allegedly corrupt leader of Albania’s opposition party—wants help from Donald Trump. And Berisha, or someone backing him, is paying big bucks to get it.

Berisha is seeking removal of a “persona non grata” designation imposed by the US government because of what the Biden-era State Department said was his involvement in “in corrupt acts.” Berisha’s right-leaning Democratic Party of Albania recently hired Florida-based Continental Strategy to lobby the Trump administration under a contract that will pay the firm more than $6 million over two years. While lobbying disclosure forms filed by Continental don’t specifically mention the sanctions against Berisha, they note that the firm has already been in touch with the State Department on behalf of Berisha’s party.

Continental employs a roster of lobbyists with ties to Trumpworld, including Katie Wiles, whose mother is White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. According to the Democratic Party of Albania, or DPA, the hefty tab for Continental’s work is being picked up by the “Make Albania Great Again Foundation”—an organization recently established by a New Jersey contractor and registered at a suburban residential address.

Berisha separately employs Chris LaCivita, who, along with Susie Wiles, led Trump’s 2024 campaign. LaCivita says he was brought on to provide electoral advice for the country’s parliamentary election next month, and that he is not advocating for Berisha in the United States. The veteran political operative has boosted Berisha’s efforts to sell himself in Albania as the candidate who can work with Trump. LaCivita has declined to say how he is being paid. (Trump, who is often willing to weigh in on foreign elections, has not opined on the Albanian contest, or on Berisha’s legal issues.)

The State Department in 2021 designated Berisha, along with his wife, son and daughter, under an “anti-kleptocracy” law that allows the department to bar officials and immediate family members suspected of corruption from entering the United States.

Announcing that designation in 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Berisha—who served as Albania’s prime minster in the 1990s and from 2005 to 2013—has been “involved in corrupt acts, such as misappropriation of public funds and interfering with public processes, including using his power for his own benefit and to enrich his political allies and his family members at the expense of the Albanian public’s confidence in their government institutions and public officials.”

In 2023, Albania’s parliament stripped Berisha of legal immunity. Last year, prosecutors in the country charged him with corruptly helping his son-in-law privatize public land to build 17 apartment buildings in Tirana, Albania’s capital. Berisha seems to be hoping that a victory in next month’s election, along with the possibility of assistance from Washington, will help him clear up his legal troubles—a trulyTrump-like turnabout.

That’s a comparison that Berisha has encouraged. He’s blamed his prosecution on Prime Minister Edi Rama, the leader of the governing left-wing Socialist Party—and on an international leftist conspiracy led by the 94-year-old liberal philanthropist George Soros.

Continental Strategy has deep ties to Trump administration figures, including to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has the power to undo Berisha’s sanctions problem. In addition to Katie Wiles—whom the firm promoted to director of its DC and Jacksonville lobbying offices just after Trump named her mother as his chief of staff—Continental employs Alberto Martinez, a former Senate chief of staff for Rubio. The firm’s founder, Carlos Trujillo, is a former Florida congressman who Trump picked as ambassador to the Organization of Latin American States during his first term.

In a Foreign Agents Registration Act registration filed last week, the firm offered only a boilerplate description of its lobbying plans, saying its work involves steps like “establishing relationships with key stakeholders in the executive and legislative branches to facilitate policy development.”

But Continental appears to have quickly begun using administration connections to make contact with the State Department, which has the authority to remove Berisha’s designation. The firm’s FARA filing notes an April 17 phone call with Dan Holler, Rubio’s deputy chief of staff at State.

The Democratic Party of Albania also hired a separate law firm also run by Trujillo, Continental PLLC, to do legal work on Berisha’s behalf. Legal counsel is generally exempt from FARA, meaning the firm would not have to publicly disclose details of those efforts.

Melissa Stone, a spokesperson for Continental, said the firm “is supporting Berisha through their legal and lobby teams, all of which is being fully disclosed in accordance with the law.” Stone noted that Wiles is not herself registered under FARA to lobby for the Albanian party.

Continental’s contract says it will be paid $250,000 per month over two years for the lobbying work work. But the DPA itself isn’t paying the firm.

Instead, the work appears to be financed through a 73-year-old Albanian American contractor in New Jersey. A contract filed as part of Continental’s FARA registration lists Nuredin Seci as “guarantor.” (The Albanian Top Channel news network reported that Seci is a member of Vatra, a US Albanian diaspora organization.)

The DPA has told reporters in Albania that Continental will be paid by a nonprofit called the “Make Albania Great Again Foundation,” which the party says is funded by Albanian Americans. An organization with that name was established on March 27 this year based at a Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, residence that appears to be owned by Seci’s daughter and son-in-law. The foundation does not have a website or a public footprint, nor does it appear in public listings of registered nonprofits. None of the family members responded to inquiries from Mother Jones.

The opaque funding scheme has drawn criticism from Albanian Prime Minister Rama and, reportedly, scrutiny from an Albanian anti-corruption unit. Albanian media has also questioned the source of the funds Continental is receiving. Some Albanian press outlets compared the financing setup to a 2017 lobbying contract in which the Democratic Party of Albania secured $500,000 in funding, also purportedly from a US businessman with Albanian ties, for lobbying the first Trump administration—an arrangement that resulted in criminal charges, though no conviction, against the party’s prior leader.

Mother Jones reported in 2018 that the funds for the party’s 2017 influence efforts appeared to come, via several shell companies, from Russia. And in 2023, when the State Department issued a summary of a US intelligence review detailing Russian efforts “to shape foreign political environments in Moscow’s favor,” an administration official told the AFP that Russia had spent roughly $500,000 backing the DPA in 2017. The DPA at the time was supporting some policies backed by Moscow. The DPA has denied receiving Russian backing. But last year, a team of investigative reporters at the BBC, the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation, and Finance Uncovered revealed that a Scottish shell company that had paid the US lobbyist who worked in 2017 for the DPA had been secretly owned by a Moscow resident.

In 2017, the head of the DPA sought inroads with Trump, adopting a “Make Albania Great Again” slogan. Berisha has taken a similar tack in 2025, bragging to Albanians that his ties to Trump’s circle will benefit the small country if he wins.

LaCivita has said his work includes zero advocacy for Berisha in the United States. “I was retained to organize and provide strategic political guidance on the [Albanian] Democrat Party and its coalition for the upcoming elections May 11,” he told Mother Jones via text. “I do not lobby or consult in any other capacity other than political and campaigns period.”

LaCivita has not been shy, though, about helping Berisha tout his ties to Trump.

“We want to help elect a prime minister who is a true friend of the United States and who will successfully work with President Trump and the United States,” LaCivita said at a February press conference in Tirana after signing on with Berisha. LaCivita called Rama “a puppet of George Soros,” adding, “You cannot be a puppet of George Soros and a friend of United States.”

LaCivita’s team advising Berisha appears to include former Trump aide Paul Manafort—who was convicted in 2018 of crimes that included secretly lobbying for Ukraine’s former pro-Russian president—as well as longtime Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio. Trump pardoned Manafort in 2020.

LaCivita, who has around 75,000 followers on X, has regularly tweeted support for Berisha and attacks on Rama, and he has amplified Berisha’s criticism of the sanctions imposed by Blinken.

LaCivita’s rhetoric dovetails with efforts by Berisha allies in the US. In February, the DPA’s press director published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner urging Rubio to lift the sanctions on the Berisha; the op-ed suggested that Soros, and his son Alex Soros, were partly responsible for the DPA leader’s legal problems. A separate Examiner opinion piece—headlined “Albania lawfare? How Biden aided Soros’s favorite narco-state”—cites Berisha’s “striking” similarities with Trump.

Another Berisha ally, Fetimir Mediu, met earlier this month with GOP Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and John Cornyn (Texas). Mediu previously negotiated the deal for LaCivita to advise the Democratic Party of Albania, both men have said.

LaCivita has made clear the general message of the efforts to link Berisha to Trump. “I’m exporting MAGA,” he told the New York Times in February. “Make Albania Great Again!”

Mother JonesApr 29, 2025, 2:29 PM

Mistakes Were Made. And Made. And Made Again.

What will you remember about Donald Trump’s second first 100 days? Probably the cruelty and arrogance of the people in charge, and the fecklessness of so many institutions that were supposed to fight back. Maybe the image of the world’s richest men, and some of their wives, sitting obediently in front of the president’s cabinet on Inauguration Day. Or the way the New York Times described Elon Musk as having “extended his arm diagonally upward, palm facing down.” Or the enthusiasm with which the Secretary of Agriculture encouraged Americans to raise chickens. Or the words, “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.”

But personally, I’m going to remember all the mistakes.

I have never seen a government get so many things wrong, in so many different ways. It was like an Obamacare website every 18 hours. It was like the soft opening of Jurassic Park. And these were not the sort of run-of-the-mill snafus that are endemic to any large organization. They all had something in common: People who thought they knew better than everyone else took on work they didn’t understand, and sidelined the people who did. They were making mistakes, quite simply, because the people who didn’t make mistakes were gone, and because there was no one left to tell them not to, or to correct them when they did.

In 100 days the administration has, in no particular order:

“Accidentally cancelled,” in Musk’s words, funding for “Ebola prevention.”
Sent Harvard an “unauthorized” list of demands, which led the nation’s wealthiest university to stop negotiating with the administration and fight back in the courts.
Rescinded job offers for the Veterans Crisis Line, “due to an administrative error.”
Fired Health and Human Services employees that, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “should not have been cut.”
Accidentally fired, and tried to rehire, employees at the National Animal Health Laboratory Network who were working on the administration’s response to bird flu.
Fired, and scrambled to rehire, people responsible for maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
Fired, and then un-fired, workers at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Fired, and then rehired, people responsible for ensuring the safety of medical devices.
Fired workers at the Small Business Administration, then un-fired them, and then fired them again.
Accidentally fired people who had already taken a buyout offer.
Tried to fire 22 US attorneys, but sent the termination emails to the wrong addresses.
“Mistakenly” gave the “normalize Indian hate” guy the power to rewrite Treasury payment systems.
Accidentally published classified information about the National Reconnaissance Office.
Accidentally outed the CIA’s station chief in Kabul.
Shared an unclassified list of new CIA employees via email.
Tried to sell a government complex that includes a secret CIA facility.
Inadvertently put both the Justice Department and the FBI headquarters up for sale.
Accidentally made Brian Driscoll (aka “Drizz”) acting director of the FBI and then just went with it rather than acknowledge the mixup.
Accidentally revealed living peoples’ Social Security numbers as part of their big dump of JFK assassination files, after Trump ordered the documents released with 24 hours notice.
Accidentally cut off the ability of people in Maine to get Social Security numbers for their newborns because, according to the acting Social Security administrator, “it looked like a strange contract.”
Accidentally made it possible for anyone to update the Doge.gov homepage, which resulted in the words “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN” staying up on the site for 12 hours.
Claimed $8 billion in savings on an $8 million contract.
Completely invented a non-existent $50 million program to supply condoms to Gaza.
Hired a new IRS chief—on Tax Day—without telling the Treasury Secretary, leading to the new IRS chief being replaced with yet another new IRS chief three days later.
Paid $2 billion because the acting solicitor general appealed the wrong court ruling.
Submitted an internal legal brief saying that their congestion pricing case against New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is bad, as an unsealed filing in their congestion pricing case.
Added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to an emoji-riddled group chat about war plans in Yemen.
“Accidentally” terminated and then reinstated environmental grants in Michigan.
Cut off funding to food programs “that were not meant to be cut.”
Announced an investigation into a non-existent medical school.
“Mistakenly” removed Jackie Robinson and Japanese-American soldiers from the Department of Defense website.
Imposed tariffs on an island of penguins.
Made tariffs 4 times too high because of an incorrect math equation.
Broke, for 10 hours, the mechanism for actually collecting tariffs.
Accidentally told an immigration attorney from Massachusetts, who is a US citizen, she had to leave the country.
Accidentally told Ukrainian refugees they had to leave the country.
Accidentally detained US citizens in immigration sweeps.
Deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.”
Accidentally pronounced 82-year-old Ned Johnson of Seattle dead.

In a functioning society, many of these actions would lead to resignations and firings. But the list of people who have paid a professional price for making any of these missteps is a bit shorter; other than the Department of Justice lawyers who submitted that congestion pricing brief in court and were subsequently reassigned, it’s honestly not clear if anyone has.

It was an explicit choice to govern exactly like this, to apply the Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” to starving children and cancer research. The driving force behind all of these errors is a carelessness about the world today that stems from a disregard for how it will look tomorrow

If anything, the opposite has occurred. Rather than acknowledge its propensity for pressing random buttons just to see what happens, the administration has codified many of its mishaps as policy. (A fair number, of course, were always matters of principle merely masked as incompetence.) Sending people to prison in El Salvador without due process simply became an official White House position. The precise timing of missile strikes simply became unclassified. A tariff rate that didn’t make sense simply became the tariff rate. We’ve always been at war with the penguin islands. The “emperor has no clothes” parable has no purchase in Trump 2.0—everyone just moves along as before without pants.

That’s not just a reflection of the White House’s sense of impunity; fucking up is the governing philosophy.

“Nobody’s going to bat a thousand, so we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes,” Musk said in the Oval Office in February, with his son, X, sitting on his shoulders. “Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake,” Vice President J.D. Vance said in March. “Part of the DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes,” Kennedy said in April. That, too, was a mistake—the 20-percent were not ultimately reinstated.

It was an explicit choice to govern exactly like this, to apply the Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” to starving children and cancer research. The driving force behind all of these errors is a carelessness about the world today that stems from a disregard for how it will look tomorrow, and a deep-seated loathing of the people who keep the lights on. On a case-by-case basis many of these were accidents. In the aggregate they constitute an ethos: a determination to break things in a way that the next person won’t be able to put back together—to shatter a way of life so thoroughly that in the future, no one will even try.

Mother JonesApr 29, 2025, 2:15 AM

Florida Man Loses Canadian Election

Preliminary results projected by CBC in Canada’s snap federal election, which took place Monday, suggest that the country’s Liberal Party—which is currently in power—will win enough seats in the Canadian parliament to allow party leader Mark Carney to remain Prime Minister, though it remains unclear whether with a majority or minority government.

In some ways, it was the United States—specifically, President Donald Trump—that handed victory to Carney’s party, headed until March by then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Before Trump launched a trade war with Canada and began insisting that the country should become America’s “51st state”—a Trump fixation and source of ire to Canadians—Trudeau was dropping in popularity, as was his party. But in a rousing speech in February, Trudeau—who had already planned to step down—vowed that Canada would fight back:

We will stand strong for Canada. We will stand strong to ensure our countries continue to be the best neighbours in the world. With all that said, I also want to speak directly to Canadians in this moment. I’m sure many of you are anxious, but I want you to know we are all in this together. The Canadian government, Canadian businesses, Canadian organized labour, Canadian civil society, Canada’s premiers and tens of millions of Canadians from coast to coast to coast are aligned and united. This is Team Canada at its best.

Riding the wave of Canadian nationalism that Trump evoked, the Liberal Party was able to maintain its hold on power. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, running on a “Canada First” platform, had been endorsed by Canadian citizen Elon Musk; Musk holds a Canadian passport through his family, including his maternal grandfather, an enthusiastic supporter of apartheid who left Canada for South Africa in 1950. A formal petition to Canada’s House of Commons calling for Musk’s Canadian citizenship to be revoked has garnered more than 300,000 signatures.

Earlier on Election Day, Trump made a Truth Social post seemingly encouraging Canadians to vote for Poilievre—and again floating the idea that Canada should become America’s 51st state. Trump and Musk’s backing may not have helped Poilievre, who rejected Trump’s support in a post on X; many Canadians now see the Liberal Party as their best option against absorption into the US.

complete batshit insanity

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 28, 2025 at 7:49 AM

Mother JonesApr 28, 2025, 6:04 PM

Trump Ramps Up His Unpopular Immigration Crackdown

President Donald Trump is continuing to prioritize his anti-immigration agenda despite multiple polls in recent days showing thatmost Americans disapprove of it.

On Monday, the White House announced that Trump will sign two executive orders, one directing Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to draw up a list of sanctuary cities and states that are not complying with the federal government’s deportation orders, and another that will boost law enforcement capabilities to arrest immigrants.

At an early morning briefing alongside Border Czar Tom Homan, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to justify the plan by reiterating the administration’s go-to—and false—trope that undocumented immigrants disproportionately commit crimes in the US. “It’s quite simple,” Leavitt said. “Obey the law, respect the law, and don’t obstruct federal immigration officials and law-enforcement officials when they are simply trying to remove public safety threats from our nation’s communities.” (In reality, research shows undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.) The orders come just days after a federal judge blocked federal officials from carrying out a previous threat to withhold funding from 16 sanctuary jurisdictions.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump will direct the Justice Department to open civil-rights cases against jurisdictions that he believes favor undocumented immigrants over US citizens. The Journal reports that the executive order cites at least 25 states that have adopted laws that provide immigrants with lower in-state tuition rates at public universities than those available to U.S. citizens. It is not clear which executive order the directive will be part of.

Also on Monday, the White House debuted a set of lawn signs that appeared to highlight undocumented people who have been arrested since Trump’s return to power. The White House account on X posted a video of the signs set to Michael Bublé’s rendition of Nina Simone’s song “Feeling Good.” (A representative for Bublé—who is Canadian and has spoken out against Trump’s desire to annex the country as a 51st state—did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether Bublé has a statement on the video.)

Under Joe Biden, criminal illegal aliens called the shots. Under President Trump, it’s a new dawn, a new day, a new life for America — and we're feeling good. pic.twitter.com/pD7hf1A07G

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 28, 2025

All this seems like an attempt to distract from the fact that, as I reported yesterday, Trump’s poll numbers are in the toilet on the cusp of his 100th day in office, which will come on Tuesday. The polls—from NBC, ABC, and CNN—show that the majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s second term thus far, with broad disapproval on immigration and border security specifically. His administration’s authoritarian approach has included arresting a judge for allegedly helping a man without legal immigration status avoid arrest while in her courtroom; deporting Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process; and seeking to deport international students who have protested Israel’s war in Gaza, as my colleagues have covered.

Spokespeople for the White House did not respond to requests for comment Sunday about Trump’s poll numbers. But Trump did what he usually does when he’s confronted with unfavorable polls: He claimed they can’t be trusted. In an early morning Truth Social post, Trump called them “FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS.”

Mother JonesApr 27, 2025, 3:44 PM

Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Historically Awful

So much for winning.

New polls show that President Donald Trump’s approval rating has hit record lows as he nears the 100-day mark of his second term on Tuesday.

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that Trump has the lowest 100-day approval rating of any president in the past 80 years, with only 39 percent of respondents saying they approve of Trump’s term thus far. The 80-year comparison appears to refer to when Gallup first started measuring public approval of presidents, back during President Harry Truman’s term; according to data compiled by ABC, Trump had the lowest approval ratings of all presidents at 100 days in both of his terms, and he’s the only president to have the disapproval of the majority of Americans only three months into his term.

Seventy-two percent of respondents to the ABC poll also said they believe Trump’s economic policies—such as his tariff-induced global trade war—will likely cause a recession in the short term, and 53 percent believe the economy has gotten worse since Trump took office. More than 60 percent said that his administration does not respect the rule of law and that he is going too far in trying to expand his power. Majorities also disapproved of nearly every other action. The poll asked about Trump’s moves—reducing funding for medical research, shutting down the Department of Education, freezing foreign humanitarian aid, seeking to deport international students, and sending a group of Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process—and they were all disliked.

Meanwhile, a new NBC News Stay Tuned poll found 55 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s approach to his second term. Majorities also disapprove of his handling of border security and immigration and his tariff policy, thepoll found.

There’s more. A CNN poll found only 22 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s approach to the job, with broad disapproval on issues ranging from the economy to managing the federal government, immigration, and how he’s handling foreign affairs.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. So far, Trump has avoided directly addressing the dismal poll numbers; instead, he seems to be making up his own favorable findings. “JUST RELEASED: 99.9% at the Border,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday morning. (It’s unclear what, exactly, he was referring to, as is the source of that statistic.) “There has NEVER been such a difference before. Congratulations America!”

Mother JonesApr 27, 2025, 12:46 PM

In Louisiana, a Judge Just Vacated a Controversial Death Row Case

This article was first published by Bolts, as part of a collaboration with Mother Jones_._

Jimmie Christian Duncan has spent over 26 years on death row at Louisiana’s Angola prison for the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s toddler daughter—a crime he has always maintained never happened. On Thursday, a Louisiana judge dismissed his conviction, vindicating Duncan’s fierce, decades-long effort to prove his innocence.

Between 1976 and 2015, an astonishing 80 percent of Louisiana’s capital sentences were later reversed.

In his order vacating the conviction, District Court Judge Alvin Sharp wrote that Duncan had successfully demonstrated his claim of “factual innocence” based on new evidence that was not available at the original trial. His conviction relied on a so-called bite mark analysis, a method that’s since been discredited and is widely regarded as ‘junk science’, that was conducted by a now-infamous duo, doctor Steven Hayne and dentist Michael West. As I reported in Bolts and Mother Jones last month, Hayne and West have since been found responsible for a host of other wrongful convictions; Duncan is the last man left on death row who had been convicted on the basis of their work.

Louisiana Is Executing Prisoners Again. His Case Shows the Costs.

Duncan’s case fits with a long tradition of wrongful convictions in Louisiana. Between 1976 and 2015, an astonishing 80 percent of the state’s capital sentences were later reversed—nine people have been exonerated off death row in the time that Duncan has been there.

But he is also the first person to receive relief under Louisiana’s factual innocence statute, a reform that the state created in 2021 under Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, which dramatically expanded how prisoners can make innocence claims by allowing people to introduce new facts rather than simply raise constitutional violations as part of their post-conviction review process.

When I spoke to Duncan shortly after he learned about the ruling, he told me he was in shock. “I’m scared to have full joy because I ain’t walked out that gate yet,” he said. “It’s been a really really long and difficult time.” He called his lawyers heroes, saying: “I would need a notepad to write down all the attorneys I would owe thanks to.”

He remains in prison for now; state officials could pursue options to fight Sharp’s ruling or try to seek a new conviction.

I’ve been talking to Duncan about his case for well over a year now as I’ve reported the feature article, which detailed his fight to clear his name during the decades he’s spent on death row. Duncan was arrested in December 1993 and charged with negligent homicide after his girlfriend’s daughter Haley drowned in the bathtub while he was caring for her. But after Hayne and West, who were tasked with the autopsy, reported that Haley had been bitten and raped, Duncan’s charges were upgraded to capital murder and he was convicted and sentenced to death.

Over the years, successive legal teams for Duncan turned up significant exonerating evidence, some of which the prosecution never turned over to his original trial lawyers. Perhaps most damning was the mid-2000s discovery of a shocking videotape that depicted Dr. West pressing a mold of Duncan’s teeth into Haley’s body, appearing to create the bite marks the dentist claimed were already there—evidence that the jury in Duncan’s trial never saw. Despite these discoveries, broader advancements in forensic scientific understanding, and revelations about the extent of Hayne and West’s misconduct, Duncan remained on death row.

In 2024, he was finally granted a new evidentiary hearing. At the hearing this past September, which I attended, Duncan’s legal team presented a series of experts who testified that Hayne and West’s methods were indefensible, that bite mark matching is no longer considered scientifically valid, and that Haley’s death was most likely an accidental drowning.

The judge, in his ruling filed on April 24,determined this testimony to be convincing**.** He wrote that Duncan had “carried his burden” in providing new evidence under the factual innocence statute.

An additional witness, a capital defense expert named Jim Boren, testified about the inadequate representation Duncan received from his trial lawyers, who had never defended a death penalty case before, a common state of affairs in Louisiana in the 1990s. In light of Boren’s testimony, the judge found that Duncan was also entitled to relief under Louisiana’s standard post-conviction review process, which focuses on constitutional violations.

What happens next is uncertain. The district attorney in Duncan’s home parish, Ouachita Parish, Steve Tew, could appeal the decision. He could also choose to retry Duncan on equal or lesser charges, though the burden of proof would be back on the state, and prosecutors would have to contend with the fact that key evidence used against Duncan at his original trial is now discredited. The age of the case also means that other evidence has been destroyed or lost, and some of the initial participants, including Hayne, have passed away.

As of publication, the DA’s office has not responded to my requests for comment regarding their next steps. Duncan’s legal team declined to comment.

This stunning development in Duncan’s case comes at a time when the state’s Republican leaders are actively seeking to execute as many death row prisoners as they can, as well as significantly restrict the post-conviction review process for Louisiana prisoners that Duncan has relied on to prove his innocence.

Landry, the Republican governor who has pushed hard to make state laws more punitive since he took office in early 2024, has derided the 2021 law that created the factual innocence statute as a “woke, hug-a-thug policy,” arguing that it gave too much discretion to DAs to let prisoners go free. In a blog post about the law written while he was running for governor in 2023, he opined: “once a verdict has been finalized, there are no more ‘get out of jail free’ cards.”

After Landry assumed office, the state legislature under his direction amended part of the 2021 post-conviction relief law that established the factual innocence statute, restricting DAs’ power to consider cases for relief and handing more control over the process to the attorney general. They also passed a bevy of laws designed to speed up the machinery of death in Louisiana, including legalizing new methods of execution and shielding execution procedures from scrutiny.

Bill Quigley, a veteran capital appeals lawyer and law professor, told me previously that these changes will mean that “people are going to be executed who wouldn’t be executed if the system was really working.”

In March, the state carried out its first execution in 15 years, using nitrogen gas to kill Jessie Hoffman, a close friend of Duncan’s. “This state has got the wrong agenda, and Jessie had to pay the price,” Duncan told me.

Now, lawmakers have introduced legislation to further limit compensation for wrongfully convicted people and significantly roll back post-conviction relief, which could make it much harder for people in Duncan’s position to appeal their convictions. Duncan fears that the law, if passed, will make it easier to send to the execution chamber the many other people he knows on death row who do not have factual innocence claims but whose cases are marred by procedural violations and other injustices.

“How is that okay?” he asked.

Mother JonesApr 26, 2025, 6:42 PM

Disability Protection Groups in Two States Pause Services After Missing Federal Funds

State organizations that advocate for disabled residents in New Jersey and Arkansas announced this week that they will have to limit their work due to not receiving the full federal funds they are owed by the US federal government.

Each state, territory, and Washington, DC, has a protection and advocacy agency to support the rights of disabled people, including providing one-on-one legal services. These agencies were created by the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act of 1975, which means their work is federally mandated. It’s currently unclear whether all protection and advocacy agencies have been impacted by shortages in federal funds.

“Are we going to a worldview that just contracts all those social services and basically says people must stand on their own or fall on their own?”

NJ.com reported that Disability Rights New Jersey (DRNJ) has received only $1.6 million of the $3.1 million it needs this year to represent disabled people, including those in group homes and in prisons. As a result, the agency—which also receives some state funding—is shutting down its services until May 5, and says it will not be able to make payroll next month if it does not receive its designated federal funds. The White House did not respond to NJ.com‘s request for comment on funding issues.

“We are fighting for our very survival,” DRNJ executive director Gwen Orlowski told NJ.com, noting that some DRNJ attorneys left last year with anticipation of chaos during the second Trump administration. “We’re at a crossroads as an American society.”

In a Facebook post, Disability Rights Arkansas (DRA) announced that it won’t be accepting new cases as of Friday, with exceptions for a few types of cases, due to not receiving all its federal funds.

“This pause allows us to continue to support the clients we have in case funding is not released at all,” the post reads. “In the meantime, DRA will be providing information, referral, and technical assistance only.” The post encourages people who need help to contact their Arkansas state representatives and members of Congress.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has attacked protection and advocacy agencies. First, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy announced in late March that he was closing the Administration for Community Living, which has overseen P&As for over a decade. Then, leaked HHS report draft revealed that the department plans to strip funding for protection and advocacy agencies.

However, Kate Caldwell, director of research and policy at Northwestern University’s Center for Racial and Disability Justice, had told me that this will not likely stick. “If HHS withheld funding or dismantled the program without an actual statutory repeal,” Caldwell said, “it would face multiple lawsuits from disability rights organizations, as well as state attorneys general, for violating the law.”

In the NJ.com article, Orlowski expressed deep concerns about how the Trump administration is pushing forward towards a future where disabled people do not receive the support they need.

“Are we going to a worldview that just contracts all those social services and basically says people must stand on their own or fall on their own?” Orlowski questioned. “I think that that’s where we’re at.”

Mother JonesApr 26, 2025, 6:30 PM

A Small School District Blew Experts Away With Reading Scores—Until Ohio Passed a New Law

In Steubenville, Ohio, many students are considered to be economically disadvantaged. But unlike some similar towns and cities across the United States, standardized testing doesn’t strike fear among members of the school board, principals, and superintendent.

That’s because for the past two decades, 93 percent or more of students in Steubenville’s public schools have scored proficient on state reading tests by the time they’re in third grade.

“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her 2009 book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools. According to research from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third-grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.

But a new law in Ohio put all the small city’s success at risk. Learn more this week on Reveal, as reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from APM Reports podcast Sold a Story.

Mother JonesApr 26, 2025, 5:04 PM

Trump’s Latest Deportation Tear Includes a 2-Year-Old and a Kid With Cancer

On Friday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in New Orleans deported members of two families, including young children and a pregnant mother, under circumstances that have raised serious due process concerns. Among those deported were three children who are US citizens, including a two-year-old who was born in New Orleans and a child with a rare form of metastatic cancer who’d been receiving treatment in the US.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleges that ICE did not allow the mothers and children detained to have substantial or any contact with attorneys and family members, including with the two-year-old’s father.

“If this is what the Trump administration is orchestrating just three months in, we should all be terrified of what the next four years will bring.”

“These families were lawfully complying with ICE’s orders and for this they suffered cruel and traumatic separation,” Mich P. Gonzalez, founding partner of Sanctuary of the South, which provides legal assistance, said in a statement. “If this is what the Trump administration is orchestrating just three months in, we should all be terrified of what the next four years will bring.”

Regarding the child with cancer, Rolling Stone reported that they were “deported out of the country without medication or consultation with their treating physicians,” even though ICE had been notified of the child’s health needs.

The father of the two-year-old filed an emergency petition on Thursday for the child to be released to his custody after he was only able to get one minute on the phone with the child’s mother “before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number,” according to the ACLU. Chief Judge for the Western District of Louisiana Terry Doughty, who is overseeing the case, wrote that there is a “strong suspicion that the Government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process” to Honduras. The court had asked for a phone call with the child’s mother to assess “her consent and custodial rights,” but the US government said that would not be possible, “because she (and presumably [the two-year-old]) had just been released in Honduras.” There will be a hearing on May 16 to further discuss this case.

According to reporting in Politico, the two-year-old (known in papers by the initials V.M.L) has a good chance of being able to return to the United States, but their case reveals a disturbing lack of disregard for constitutional rights:

As a U.S. citizen, V.M.L. is likely to have the ability to return to the United States, setting her case apart from others that have drawn national attention in recent weeks, such as the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Salvadoran native was deported to a prison in his home country in violation of a 2019 immigration court order. But the Louisiana case is the latest concern by the courts that the Trump administration’s rush to carry out deportations is violating due process rights — in this case, the rights of a U.S. citizen child.

“Deporting US citizen children is illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral,” ErinHebert of law firm Ware Immigration said in a statement on these cases. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The speed, brutality, and clandestine manner in which these children were deported is beyond unconscionable,” Hebert wrote, “and every official responsible for it should be held accountable.”

Update, April 26, 2025, 1:12pm ET: A senior official from the Department of Homeland Security wrote in an email that in the case of the two-year-old, “the parent made the decision to take the child with them to Honduras.” The official added: “We take our responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to ensure that children are safe and protected.”

Mother JonesApr 25, 2025, 6:36 PM

Ed Martin Isn’t Coming Clean About His Ties to an Alleged Nazi Sympathizer

Ed Martin, the far-right-activist-turned-acting US attorney for DC, apologized this week for praising an alleged Nazi sympathizer at an event last year.

But Martin’s ties to Timothy Hale-Cusanelli—who is known for wearing a Hitler-style mustache, and who allegedly once told a coworker that the Nazis “should have finished the job”—are far more extensive than just that one meeting.

Martin told the Forward this week that he was “sorry” for bestowing an award on Hale-Cusanelli during an August 2024 event at Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

“I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” Martin said. “At the time, I didn’t know it.”

Martin was not specific in the portions of interview quoted by the Forward, but he seemed to suggest he had previously known only of a photo in which Hale-Cusanelli wore the Hitler-syle mustache, not “the full scope of his repulsive behavior.” Martin reportedly said that he now understands Hale-Cusanelli’s behavior was “clearly far more serious than a singular act that, by itself, might look like a mistake.” Martin’s office did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

Martin’s tenure as acting US attorney is set to expire May 20. His apology appears aimed at softening opposition from lawmakers in both parties as he seeks Senate confirmation to hold the post permanently. It is a notable exception to his general refusal to respond to the overwhelmingly negative press generated by his efforts to help President Trump use the Justice Department as a partisan weapon. It appears that Martin believes his past praise for an alleged antisemite could be particularly damaging to his nomination.

But Martin’s suggestion that he was not familiar with the broader scope of Hale-Cusanelli’s alleged bigotry when he gave him an award is implausible. The prior month—in July 2024—Martin asked Hale-Cusanelli about his alleged extremism during an interview on a podcast hosted by Martin. Martin asserted on the program that the allegations, which emerged in court filings following Hale-Cusanelli’s indictment for entering the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were “leaked” by federal prosecutors in an effort to push the narrative that “MAGA people are antisemitic.”

“I’ve gotten to know him really well,” Martin said of Hale-Cusanelli during the show. “I’d say we’re friends.”

The two men know each other because Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” activist and lawyer for January 6 defendants, served until January 2025 on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit that was launched in 2021 by Cynthia Hughes, a New Jersey activist who refers to herself as Hale-Cusanelli’s “adoptive aunt.” Martin reported on a Senate financial disclosure form that he was paid $30,000 last year to serve on the board. Hughes, who did not respond to a request for comment_,_ has previously said she launched the group as a result of Hale-Cusanelli’s arrest and “incredibly unfair” treatment.

That treatment included court filings in which Justice Department prosecutors called Hale-Cusanelli an “avowed white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer” and cited a litany of antisemitic and racist statements his former colleagues said they had heard him make. In a sentencing memo filed in September 2022, prosecutors also quoted a conversation secretly recorded by an unidentified person, in which Hale-Cusanelli said, “I really fucking wish there’d be a civil war.” In the same conversation, according to prosecutors, Hale-Cusanelli stated that he would like to give Jews and Democrats “24 hours to leave the country” and to have many of them arrested.

Prosecutors also noted a picture of Hale-Cusanelli sporting a Hitler-like mustache and hair style, an image that drew substantial media coverage.

Cusanelli was convicted on all counts at a jury trial this year. The judge — a Trump appointee, who has been skeptical of some J6 cases — panned Cusanelli's testimony on the witness stand, where he claimed he didn't know Congress met at the Capitol. /4 https://t.co/S4nkmnyBoA

— Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) September 3, 2022

Hale-Cusanelli—who has said he has Jewish and Puerto Rican ancestry—testified during his trial that he is not antisemitic or racist. He said the statements prosecutors cited were meant to be “ironic” and “self-deprecating humor” intended to gain attention. Hale-Cusanelli did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

While imposing a 48-month prison sentence, Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, said Hale-Cusanelli’s “statements and actions” make Jews “less safe and less confident they can participate as equal members of our society.”

Martin sounded conversant on the details of the government’s accusations during a more-than-hour-long interview on July 2, 2024, on Martin’s podcast, video of which remains available on Rumble.

“They used your phone and…leaked the photo to say, ‘Look, these people, these MAGA people are antisemitic,'” Martin said. “And the photo was of you…you had like a mustache shaped in such a way that you looked vaguely like Hitler.”

Throughout the conversation, Martin indicated familiarity with the accusations about Hale-Cusanelli that emerged in his court case. Their discussion also referenced the same secretly recorded conversation in which Hale-Cusanelli and a confidential informant talked about Jews and civil war. Hale-Cusanelli told Martin he was drunk when he made the statements later cited by prosecutors.

Martin repeatedly defended Hale-Cusanelli, arguing prosecutors had improperly “leaked” the photo and other material from Hale-Cusanelli’s phone. (Hale-Cusanelli acknowledged that material in fact appeared in publicly filed court documents related to his detention.)

“I really think that your story is now sort of the quintessential example,” Martin said later.

That interview came amid multiple appearances that Hale-Cusanelli made at events with Martin last year. Those include a June 2024 event at Bedminster and the August 14 event at the club where Martin gave Hale-Cusanelli an award for promoting “God, family and country.”

Hale-Cusanelli’s presence at the Bedminster events gained attention when NPR reported on them in September. And Martin’s role attracted notice after he began serving as US attorney in January. Martin’s ties to an alleged Nazi sympathizer were noted in a February bar complaint against him and in a March speech by Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering Martin’s nomination.

Still, weeks later, Martin appeared alongside Hale-Cusanelli—this time at a March 24, 2025, fundraiser in Naples, Florida, for an organization that Martin previously ran.

As I reported with Amanda Moore, Martin was the keynote speaker at the March 24 event. The event was also attended various January 6 defendants, including two who were convicted of seditious conspiracy and whose appeals Martin’s office is still opposing—an apparent conflict of interest. (Moore reports additional details on Martin’s ties to Hale-Cusanelli here.)

Martin did not address this event in his comments printed by the Forward. But at that fundraiser, there was no evidence of distance between Martin and Hale-Cusanelli.

In a speech at the event, Hale-Cusanelli called January 6 “a psy-op led by three-letter agencies.” And he said he had an ally in Martin, who has fired, demoted, and investigated former January 6 prosecutors, even as he has promoted, while US attorney, a conspiracy theory that the FBI had a hand in January 6.

“Led by the current US attorney,” Hale-Cusanelli said in Naples, “we’re starting to see a vast restoration of the truth, which is that January 6 defendants were not criminals, they were in fact the victims…And we will expose these nefarious actors who set us up in the first place.”

In his own remarks, Martin did not denounce those claims.

Mother JonesApr 25, 2025, 5:44 PM

FBI Arrests Judge, in Dangerous Escalation of Immigration Enforcement

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was charged with two felonies after being arrested by federal officers early Friday morning for allegedly helping a man without legal immigration status avoid arrest while in her courtroom on April 18. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Dugan helped direct an undocumented immigrant through a side door in her courtroom and down a private hallway into a public area when the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived to apprehend him.

The arrest of a sitting judge is a pivotal moment in the Trump administration’s escalation of immigration enforcement. It comes just months after the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to push forward criminal cases against local government officials who impede Trump’s immigration crackdown and go after state and local laws in court.

A spokesperson for the US Marshals Service in Washington, DC, confirmed to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Dugan was taken into custody at around 8 a.m. at the Milwaukee County Courthouse in Wisconsin. The spokesperson also told the newspaper that Dugan was charged with obstruction and concealing an individual.

FBI Director Kash Patel posted the news on X on Friday morning, writing that the FBI arrested Dugan “on charges of obstruction” during an immigration arrest operation last week. According to Patel, the judge “intentionally misdirected federal agents” away from their target, allowing the man to evade arrest. (Patel later deleted his post.)

In a press release regarding Dugan’s arrest, Congressmember Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) stated that the Trump administration demonstrated “overreach” with its eagerness to “weaponize federal law enforcement…in particular ICE, who have been defying courts and acting with disregard for the Constitution.”

“It is remarkable that the Administration would dare to start arresting state court judges,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). “It’s a whole new descent into government chaos.”

The man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery, is reportedly in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody at Dodge Detention Facility in Juneau, Wisconsin.

According to interim guidance from a January 2025 memorandum by former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Benjamine Huffman—who served as part of the Trump administration prior to Kristi Noem’s US Senate confirmation—officers can make civil immigration arrests “in or near courthouses” when they have “credible information” that the person in question will make an appearance. In the guidance document, former acting ICE director Caleb Vitello wrote that the directive would “reduce safety risks to the public, targeted alien(s), and ICE officers and agents” and was necessary when jurisdictions “refuse to honor immigration detainers.”

The Milwaukee County Court has not yet responded to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

There could be additional arrests. On Thursday, a former New Mexico judge and his wife were arrested, according to a local Fox affiliate, by the FBI for tampering with evidence after a late February raid of their home and arrest of three Venezuelan men staying in a rented house on the property. All three men arrested on the property are accused of involvement with Tren de Aragua. The former judge called the claim that the men were members of Tren de Aragua “sensationalism at the highest possible level.”

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Flores Ruiz’s arrest is at least the third time that ICE agents have come to the Milwaukee County Courthouse with arrest warrants. Officials took two people into custody in March and early April.

Update, April 25, 2:25 p.m.: This post has been updated to include an additional arrest.

Mother JonesApr 25, 2025, 3:23 PM

DOJ Reverses Grant Cancellations For Crime Victim Support

The Department of Justice has restored two previously canceled grants supporting victims of violent crimes, including domestic violence, following a Mother Jones report on Thursday that highlighted the critical roles the programs played for survivors.

The DOJ informed the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) and the National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) on Thursday night that officials would restore the grants they previously canceled on Tuesday. Those cancelations were reportedly part of mass cuts to grants worth more than $800 million, according to Reuters, that supported victims of gun violence, addiction, and domestic violence. The terminations came as especially ironic in light of President Donald Trump’s campaign trail pledge to “protect women” if re-elected and to offer “unending support to every victim of crime” per a proclamation he issued for National Crime Victims’ Rights Week earlier this month.

Mother Jones was the only news outlet to report on the NNEDV grant cancelation, which supports an email hotline that offers personalized legal information for survivors in English and Spanish. The canceled, and since-restored, $2 million, three-year grant was intended to “increase awareness of and enhance access to its Spanish email hotline services.” On Tuesday, NNEDV officials learned that the remainder of the grant, about a half million dollars, was cut. A spokesperson previously said that while the NNEDV hoped to keep the services going with alternative funding, they would wind up being “drastically reduced.”

In a statement provided to Mother Jones on Friday, Stephanie Love-Patterson, the organization’s president and CEO, said that while officials are “relieved and appreciative” that the grant cancelation was reversed, “the concerns and heartache remain, as this highlights the vulnerable state of services for survivors, which will affect those who need them most.”

As I reported yesterday, advocates and lawmakers are also concerned that further cuts could be coming from the Office of Violence Against Women at the DOJ, which scrubbed funding opportunities from its website in February. The latest reversals follow restorations of other canceled grants to shelters that support survivors’ pets, as I previously reported.

Mother Jones was one of several news outlets that reported on the NCVC grant cancelations on Thursday, which were also reversed. The restored grants include one that supported its VictimConnect Resource Center, a helpline that provides emotional and logistical support to survivors; a spokesperson for NCVC said Thursday that the helpline would indefinitely shutter Friday at 5 p.m. EST as a result of the cancelation of the $2.8 million grant. Another grant, which supported programs for crime victims around the country, was also restored, according to an NCVC spokesperson. A third canceled grant, used to create a resource guide for lawmakers and advocates who want to observe the annual National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, was not restored, the spokesperson added.

“We’re celebrating at NCVC today, but the reality is that our partners in the field, all of whom also provide vital victim services all around the United States are still facing a funding crisis,” Renée Williams, NCVC CEO, said in a statement Friday. “There are thousands of great people in our country who have dedicated their careers to ensuring that victims don’t have to find justice alone. As a society, we owe it to victims and providers to make sure those services remain available.”

Spokespeople for the DOJ did not immediately respond to questions Friday morning.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously bragged about the mass cuts in a post on X, calling the canceled grants “wasteful,” was noticeably silent about the about-face on Friday.

Mother JonesApr 25, 2025, 10:19 AM

China’s Xi Prepares to Eat America’s Lunch as Trump Cedes Leadership on Clean Energy

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

China will continue to push forward on the climate crisis, Xi Jinping has said while appearing to criticize the “protectionism” of Donald Trump’s tariff policies.

The Chinese president was attending a closed-door virtual meeting with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and about a dozen other heads of state and government to discuss the climate crisis.

Xi told the meeting that China would “not slow down its climate actions,” according a draft of his remarks. He did not name the US or Trump but made apparent reference to them while noting that China had “built the world’s largest and fastest-growing renewable energy systems as well as the largest and most complete new energy industrial chain.”

Xi said: “Although some major country’s persistent pursuit of unilateralism and protectionism has seriously impacted international rules and the international order…as long as we enhance confidence, solidarity and cooperation, we will overcome the headwinds and steadily move forward global climate governance and all progressive endeavors of the world.”

After the meeting, Guterres said no government or fossil fuel interest could hold the world back from pursuing a clean energy future. “The world is moving forward, full speed ahead,” Guterres said. “No group or government can stop the clean energy revolution. Science is on our side, and the economics have shifted.”

Guterres did not mention Trump directly but the actions of the US president clearly overshadowed the meeting. The Guardian understands that the US administration was not invited to the online summit.

China’s presence was key. It is unusual for Xi to take part in such meetings but China appears to be attempting to position itself on the world stage as a stable and predictable superpower, a leader to developing countries, an economic partner and a counterweight to the unpredictability of Trump.

The global trade war launched by the US president is hitting the US economy hard, with stock markets plummeting and bond investors seeking other havens for their money.

China has responded by putting controls on some of the minerals and other materials that are critical for clean energy technology such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.

China is snubbing a separate summit to be held on Thursday and Friday in London, hosted by the UK government and the International Energy Agency, to discuss the future of energy security. The US will be represented at the London meeting by Tommy Joyce, the acting assistant secretary for the office of international affairs at the US Department of Energy.

The White House was forced to deny this week that there were plans for new restrictions on the activities of nonprofit organizations that advocate for action on the climate crisis, after widespread rumors of a fresh executive order in the offing.

Guterres told journalists on Wednesday that China, Brazil, the EU, and the other countries and blocs present—including the heads of government of the countries currently chairing the African Union, the Asean group of Asian and Pacific countries, and the Alliance of Small Island States—had expressed “a unifying message” of support for climate action.

He said: “Our world faces massive headwinds and a multitude of crises. But we cannot allow climate commitments to be blown off course.”

At the high-level UN meeting on Wednesday, countries affirmed the collective agreement to put forward their national plans on greenhouse gas emissions by September, before the next UN climate summit, Cop30, which will take place in Brazil in November.

Guterres also urged countries to provide more climate finance to poor and vulnerable nations and set a roadmap for how to deliver the $1.3 trillion a year promised to the poor world by 2035 at last year’s Cop29.

Mother JonesApr 25, 2025, 10:00 AM

At Last, College Presidents Are Standing Up to Trump

When we think of “organizing” we tend to think of protesters—of scruffy and earnest demonstrators taking on giant corporations, of people with cardboard signs standing in the cold or the sun. But, really, organizing is any concentrated attempt of the (relatively) small and many to stand up to the mighty and the few, and the last few days have seen some of the most unlikely and potentially effective organizing in a long time.

In this case, the small and many were not people used to thinking of themselves that way. Instead, they were university presidents and boards of trustees—almost without exception, people of real distinction and power in their communities. I’ve served on university boards and broken bread with hundreds of college presidents (the price of lecturing to their students), and I know the breed: they tend towards the cautious and the conciliatory, but they have big reserves of local influence. They are, invariably, pillars of the community.

And so when Trump decided to try and crumple those pillars, they decided to stand up, circulating a letter that’s now been signed by more than four hundred college presidents. It was—perhaps only after the Hands Off demonstrations and Tesla takedowns—the most effective response yet to the creeping fascism in the Oval Office.

Everyone took their lead and their nerve from Harvard, where president Alan Garber and board chair Penny Pritzker pushed back hard a week ago against the administration’s attempt to basically take over the university in order to enforce something called “viewpoint diversity.” Harvard’s sharp response obviously stunned the White House, which had doubtless been lulled by Columbia University’s pathetic capitulation; as is often the case with bullies, Trump started looking for a way to back down, with his people eventually claiming that they had sent Harvard their diktat “by mistake.”

“We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”

But by that time, the damage had been done—other educational leaders saw both the danger and the opportunity to confront it. For the first time, really, since James Conant in the Second World War, Harvard’s leaders have been serving the role they should as leaders of higher education. The extraordinary privilege of these places comes with the implicit promise that when the chips are down, they’ll actually stand up: that’s why Harvard’s Memorial Chapel is lined with the names of men who went off to die as officers in the world wars. In recent years, the Ivies have been too content to be finishing schools for Morgan Stanley; now perhaps they’re remembering their obligations.

The letter these hundreds of presidents have been signing is not strident or impolite; it acknowledges that there’s always room for improvement in any institution, but it definitely gets the point solidly across: “As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”

The list of signatories is wonderful to read—I’ve been on the majority of these campuses over the years, and so they summon up memories. Grinnell College, in the cornfields of Iowa, where my beloved aunt and uncle taught Latin and Greek to five decades of young scholars; St. Lawrence College, near the Canadian border, where I once gave a June graduation speech in a swirling snowstorm (shortest address ever!); Warren Wilson College, the North Carolina work school where I spent a day working alongside the livestock crew.

My own institution, Middlebury College, is between presidents, so we got both the interim president, Stephen Snyder, and his soon-to-be replacement Ian Baucom; our former president, Laurie Patton, who stepped down in January to head the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, not only signed the letter but did much to circulate it, so of course there’s hometown pride for me. But for lots of other people too: by many reports, alumni have been suddenly mailing in checks to their alma maters.

You could, I suppose, call all of these institutions the “elite,” though a tag that covers both Yale and Framingham State, Princeton and Hudson County Community College, doesn’t mean much. But this is a group of people self-selected to care about the idea of education and the future. They’ve been much abused in recent years, when one interest group after another has beaten up on them for being too hard or too soft on Gaza protesters, too accommodating to students climbing walls, too concerned with trigger warnings; the New York Times ran what seemed like a thousand op-eds attacking Harvard’s Claudine Gay last year for not being sufficiently anti-anti-Semitic. It’s mostly nonsense—college administrators are no better than anyone else at dealing with angry protesters; most of their efforts and expertise are about coming up with new degree programs to address the local nursing shortage, or raising enough money to fix the roof on the fieldhouse.

They take those tasks seriously, and they should. They were attacked for being who they are, by people who despise the very idea of education. Trump confidante Peter Thiel has literally paid kids money not to go to college; his protégé JD Vance has described his alma mater in New Haven as “genuinely totalitarian,” which seems both like nonsense to anyone who’s ever been there, and also a foreshadowing of the administration he now helps helm. So it’s right and refreshing for all these people to be able to say: colleges are good. They’re collections of smart people, passing on their knowledge to the next generation, which is both necessary and noble.

They were attacked for being who they are—by people who despise the very idea of education.

“Colleges and universities,” they write, in words that seem to me both restrained and correct, “are engines of opportunity and mobility, anchor institutions that contribute to economic and cultural vitality regionally and in our local communities. They foster creativity and innovation, provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce, and are themselves major employers. They nurture the scholarly pursuits that ensure America’s leadership in research, and many provide healthcare and other essential services. Most fundamentally, America’s colleges and universities prepare an educated citizenry to sustain our democracy.”

It’s that last bit, about sustaining democracy, that perhaps has not been their strong suit in recent years: if there’s a reasonable complaint against higher education, it’s that it’s perhaps tried too hard to make students feel comfortable, when a little challenge would be a more useful introduction to the hurly-burly of our current democracy. But challenge is what they’re providing now; this is the college president equivalent of gathering on the quad with candles for a vigil. Their document is designed to send a message to Washington (“back off—we’re unified enough to cause you trouble”) but it’s also a teaching document. It says, when someone questions your honor and your purpose, you better stand up.

It’s a lesson that won’t be lost on decent people.

Mother JonesApr 24, 2025, 8:48 PM

Pat Bondi Cuts “Wasteful” Funds to Support Victims of Violent Crime

On Tuesday night, Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA), received an email from the Office of Justice Programs at the Department of Justice (DOJ) that left her devastated.

The message informed her that a federal grant that supported a pilot program to train victim advocates who staff domestic violence shelters, hotlines and rape crisis centers was being cut. The program, called the Victim Advocacy Corps, began in 2022 and selected 15 students from six colleges and universities that serve minority populations to take part in a year-long, paid fellowship at local organizations, including campus-based sexual assault programs, domestic violence agencies and family justice centers. The DOJ notice claimed the grant “no longer effectuates Department priorities,” which it said were focused on “more directly supporting certain law enforcement operations” and “combatting violent crime.”

To Selib, this rationale made no sense. “Our victim advocacy corps members are providing direct victims services in communities across the country,” she told me by phone on Thursday afternoon. “Cutting these programs puts victims at risk and cuts essential lifesaving services.”

The pilot program also aimed to solve turnover among advocates caused by low pay and an uptick in domestic violence that experts attribute to the pandemic and new abortion restrictions. “I would sayquite frankly that our workforce is in crisis,” Selib said. “Our goal with this program was to create a pipeline for the new generation of victim advocates.” Selib had hoped the program would eventually expand nationwide.

Selib’s grant was one of hundreds the DOJ reportedly canceled on Tuesday that supported victims of gun violence, addiction, and domestic violence. According to Reuters, the canceled grants were valued at more than $800 million when they were awarded. In a post on X, Attorney General Pam Bondi bragged about the cuts, alleging the grants were “wasteful” and highlighting a few examples that supported LGBTQ people. She told the Washington Post she has been “a lifelong advocate for victims of crimes against women” and claimed she “will continue to ensure that services for victims are not impacted.”

But experts say that the grant cancelations will, in fact, be particularly devastating for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, who tend to be mostly women and LGBTQ people. These anticipated outcomes are a far cry from Trump’s campaign trail pledge to “protect women” if re-elected and to offer “unending support to every victim of crime” per a proclamation Trump issued for National Crime Victims’ Rights Week earlier this month. (Spokespeople for the Department of Justice and the White House did not immediately return requests for comment from Mother Jones.)

Hundreds of state and national organizations focused on combatting domestic and sexual violence have drafted a letter they plan to send to Bondi, requesting assurance that those services will continue to be funded. “Local, state, and national service providers have been anguished and panicked to receive recent notices terminating their federal grants,” they write. “The terminations of grants, programmatic restructuring, loss of staff, disappearance of [funding opportunities], and lack of communication from DOJ to the field are causing grave insecurity and alarm across the nation” for providers, the draft adds.

Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), said in a statement that the latest cuts “will have devastating, real-life consequences for survivors and their children.” Love-Patterson’s organization provided free legal information for victims, including via an email hotline, for more than 25 years. Its website offers state-by-state information on divorce, custody, and child support laws and its hotline served nearly 6,300 survivors in both English and Spanish. Much of that work was funded by a $2 million grant over three years. On Tuesday, Love-Patterson learned that the remainder of the grant, about a half million dollar, was cut.

A spokesperson said the organization aims to keep services afloat using its other funds, but they will wind up being “drastically reduced.”

The National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) announced that it lost a $2.8 million grant Tuesday that will force it to indefinitely close its VictimConnect Resource Center, a helpline that provides emotional and logistical support. Last year, the helpline supported more than 16,000 victims, according to the organization. “We’re shocked that an administration that claims to care about protecting victims would leave so many vulnerable Americans without access to an essential lifeline,” Renée Williams, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement.

The groupalso lost a grant to build peer-support group programs for crime victims around the country and another grant the team used to create a resource guide for lawmakers.

Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer of The National Domestic Violence Hotline, noted that many organizations that received termination notices were already underfunded, and that the Hotline is anticipating in surge in calls due to the cuts. “Reduction in services and support for victims means more women, men and children will be harmed,” Justice said.

It appears that Bondi has sympathy for some victims, though. The DOJ reversed some cancelations of grants for shelters working to accommodate survivors’ pets, NBC News reported.(Many shelters do not allow pets, which can prevent survivors from leaving their abusers.)

About 24 hours after Jennifer Pollitt Hill, executive director of the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence, received a notice Tuesday night that a grant to help local shelters support pets would be canceled, she got word she would get to keep the funds. Then a third, more personal note arrived, from Maureen Henneberg, deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ. That note said shelters supporting pets were “critical..to broadening the safety net for survivors,” and said that Bondi “personally extends her appreciation” to the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence. “Our understanding is that all the pets grants were reinstated as it is a passion area for the AG,” Pollitt Hill told me.

The most recent round of cuts are the latest challenge facing domestic and sexual violence service providers across the country. Earlier this month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s purge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) led to the elimination of the team working on efforts to prevent sexual and intimate partner violence in the Division of Violence Prevention, as my colleague Kiera Butler reported. The steady depletion of a critical pot of money for providers has also put lifesaving services for survivors in peril long before Trump resumed office, I reported last year.

Even more devastation could be coming. In February, the DOJ’s Office of Violence Against Women scrubbed funding opportunities from its website, leading advocates to worry that those funds could also be cut. More than 100 House lawmakers drafted a letter they plan to send to Bondi on Thursday requesting the DOJ “clarify the status of these grants as soon as possible and take swift action to ensure funding remains available to support survivors and the organizations that serve them,” NBC News first reported.

Selib, who oversaw the pilot program of young victim advocates, is also worried.

“When we cut these services,” she said, “frankly, all Americans are at risk.”

Mother JonesApr 24, 2025, 7:29 PM

A Federal Court Just Blocked Key Parts of Trump’s Anti-Voting Executive Order

A federal judge on Thursday blocked key parts of a sweeping anti-voting executive order issued by President Donald Trump in March. Voting rights advocates described the order as “an astonishing and unprecedented voter suppression” effort that would upend how Americans register to vote, how they cast their ballots, and how their votes are counted.

District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, found that Trump lacked the power to unilaterally change election rules. “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States—not the President—with the authority to regulate federal elections,” she wrote.

For that reason, she blocked the centerpiece of Trump’s executive order—a requirement that voters show documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Trump ordered the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent agency created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, to mandate that information on a federal voter registration form.

Democrats and voting rights groups who challenged the order, including the League of Women Voters and League of United Latin American Citizens, argued that Trump lacked the authority to force the EAC to require proof of citizenship. The order, if enforced in full, would prevent tens of millions of Americans from registering to vote.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 9 percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents like a birth certificate or passport. Trump’s order could disenfranchise many more people than that because it does not specify that birth certificates or naturalization papers can be used to determine US citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote. And because driver’s licenses in most states don’t specify citizenship, those without access to their birth certificate would have to use a passport to register to vote, which 146 million Americans don’t have.

“If this policy were implemented, it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting,” Eliza Sweren-Becker of the Brennan Center told me in March. (The House passed a bill in April, the SAVE Act, that would also require proof of citizenship to register to vote, but it currently lacks the 60 votes necessary to pass in the Senate.)

Judge Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Trump did not possess the power to unilaterally change how Americans registered to vote. “Neither the Constitution nor any statute explicitly grants the President the power to dictate the contents of the Federal Form,” she wrote. “On the contrary, both the Constitution’s Elections Clause and the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] vest control over federal election regulation in other actors, leaving no role for the President.”

In a partial victory for the administration, the judge declined to block other parts of Trump’s executive order, including one provision that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency enhanced power to search for alleged non-citizen voters on state voter lists. (Non-citizens on such a list are exceedingly rare.) Another provision that was not blocked penalizes states that allow ballots to be counted after Election Day, so long as they are postmarked by the day of the election.

“On the present record, challenges to those provisions are premature or properly presented not by these plaintiffs but by the States themselves,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “In fact, many States are already bringing those challenges elsewhere.” Nineteen states, led by Massachusetts, have sued the administration over the executive order, which could lead to further provisions being blocked in subsequent litigation.

Voting rights groups celebrated Thursday’s order.

“President Trump’s attempt to impose a documentary proof of citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form is an unconstitutional abuse of power,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “If implemented, it would place serious and unnecessary burdens on everyday Americans and strain already overburdened election officials. This executive order is part of a broader attack on our democratic elections by promoting baseless nativist conspiracy theories. Today, the court blocked a key strategy of this attack. And we will keep fighting to ensure every eligible voter can make their voice heard without interference or intimidation.”