“The Children Are Being Used as Bait”

In early March, a seven-year-old boy in immigration custody received good news: He would finally be released to his mother’s care. Months earlier, he had been apprehended as an unaccompanied minor while crossing the US-Mexico border. Since then, he had been staying in a facility run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, waiting for his mother, who was already in the United States, to be approved as his sponsor. She had painstakingly jumped through the necessary hoops, submitting the required documents and undergoing a home study to show that she was a safe caregiver. But soon after the boy learned of his imminent release, a new federal policy abruptly made his mother ineligible as a sponsor.

Confused about why he is still in custody, the boy recently told his mother, through tears, that she must not want him after all.

Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are “being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention.”

Some of the kids in custody are appearing in immigration court alone, as a result of recent cuts to federal funding for legal representation for unaccompanied children.

“We don’t know when, if ever, they will be able to reunite with their family.”

“They’re crying, having a lot of anxiety and distress that they are expressing,” says Mickey Donovan-Kaloust, director of legal services at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, one of the lawsuit plaintiffs. “It’s heartbreaking for our team.”

When kids cross the border without a legal guardian and are detained by the Border Patrol, they’re transferred into the care of ORR while they wait for a sponsor—usually a parent or relative—to jump through the necessary hoops to take them in. Teenagers in ORR custody are confined to shelters, which take the form of campuses with a school and recreational areas, while younger children often stay in foster homes. Historically, the kids have been released from ORR to live with their sponsors while immigration courts weigh their cases to remain in the country.

But over the past three months, the Trump administration has rolled out a series of new screening rules that make it nearly impossible for undocumented people to become sponsors. There are now about 2,000 children in custody, far fewer than there were when Trump was elected, reflecting the sharp downturn in people trying to enter the country. Yet those children who are in custody, many of whom arrived at the end of the Biden administration or the beginning of Trump’s second term, are staying much longer.

In December 2024, the average length of stay for a child in ORR custody was about two months. By March of this year, it had nearly tripled, to six months.

In the past, says Donovan**–**Kaloust, if her team was working with a child in ORR custody, “We could say, ‘Yes, we know this is hard, but the case managers are working on it and you’ll be out soon.’ And we can’t say that anymore. We don’t know when, if ever, they will be able to reunite with their family.”

Until March, prospective sponsors could use a foreign passport or national ID, along with birth certificates, verified by the home country’s consulate, to show the US government that they were who they said they were. Now, prospective sponsors—along with everyone else in their household—must present either a US form of identification or a foreign passport with a stamp showing the pending receipt of a green card. They also must present proof of income, such as pay stubs or tax returns connected to their current address, excluding those who are paid in cash or lack formal employment agreements. All sponsors and their household members must agree to be fingerprinted, and, if they claim a biological relationship with the child in custody, they must submit to DNA testing.

The administration claims these changes are in the name of child safety. Trump has said, falsely, that 300,000 migrant children were lost under Biden’s administration. (The number appears to come from a 2024 report finding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement hadn’t served notices to appear in court to 291,000 migrant children.) Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doubled down on the conspiracy at a recent cabinet meeting, claiming that the Biden administration had become a “collaborator in child trafficking for sex and slavery,” and that HHS is “very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children.” HHS posted on X that ORR was “combing through every report, every detail — because protecting children isn’t optional.”

But many immigration experts say the new sponsor screening rules are antithetical to child welfare. In some cases, children have resorted to self-harm “because their reunification has been delayed or entirely prevented over a document that their sponsor literally cannot obtain,” says Molly Chew, who directs the ReUnite Project, which is part of immigrant legal services nonprofit Vecina. “We are weaponizing child welfare as this pretext for immigration enforcement while children sit in detention, increasingly traumatized, indefinitely, waiting for a way out.” (ORR didn’t respond to Mother Jones‘ questions.)

While multiple administrations have struggled over decades to respond to unaccompanied minors crossing the border, politicians on both sides of the aisle have historically supported federal protections that prevent the kids from being immediately deported, including access to legal representation and care under ORR. Part of HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, ORR is not an immigration enforcement agency; its stated mission is to support unaccompanied children through “culturally responsive and trauma-informed” services.

In the past, ORR didn’t share information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the legal status of sponsors. But that, too, has changed under Trump.ICE agents have been given access to ORR’s database of information about unaccompanied children, and agents from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security now accompany ORR on “welfare checks” of unaccompanied children and their sponsors.

Bilal Askaryar, communications director at the Acacia Center for Justice, which provides immigrant legal defense, says some of the welfare checks are virtually indistinguishable from enforcement visits, with uniform-clad ICE officers banging on doors and demanding to be let inside. The message to prospective sponsors is clear, says Askaryar: “You take care of these kids, and it’s now going to put a target on your back.”

“It seems the purpose is to assist with enforcement and to put a chilling effect on people willing to take in children,” says Donovan-Kaloust, of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “The children are being used as bait, basically.”

At the same time that the White House has implemented new screening rules for sponsors, it has also stripped many unaccompanied kids of the legal services that helped them make their cases in front of immigration judges.

In March, the Trump administration abruptly terminated part of a $200 million contract that funds attorneys and other legal services for 26,000 unaccompanied kids, including those in ORR custody. The legal service providers immediately challenged the termination, but while the case is pending, the groups say damage is already done.

“A lot of kids have been going in the past few weeks to the court alone—completely alone,” says Evelyn Flores, managing paralegal at Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which represents children in Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia. “How can a 4-year-old kid attend immigration court completely alone?”

A Gothamist story in late April laid out the scene from one such court hearing. About a dozen migrant children sat in front of a computer screen at a shelter in New York last month as Judge Ubaid ul-Haq explained, “The reason we’re here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States.” The story continued:

The parties included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill while the judge spoke. There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.

Research shows that many unaccompanied children have valid claims for immigration relief, and most unaccompanied kids with legal representation end up being allowed to stay in the country, says Jonathan Beier, director of research and evaluation for Acacia’s program for unaccompanied children. “But not having a lawyer,” Beier says, “makes it virtually impossible.”

The vast majority of those appearing in immigration court without counsel are eventually deported.

The cuts to legal services affect not only kids in ORR custody, but those who had been living with family members. In late April, news broke that the parents of a two-year-old girl in El Paso had both been deported—he was sent to a high-security prison in El Salvador; she was deported to Venezuela—leaving their daughter in ORR custody. The girl has lived in at least four foster homes since March.

Estrella del Paso, which provides legal services to immigrants in El Paso, had been representing the two-year-old before the funding cuts. But the organization was one of many forced to furlough or lay off employees this spring, leaving just six employees to handle the hundreds of children the organization already represented. As a result, staffers weren’t aware of what was happening to the girl it was too late, says CEO Melissa Lopez. “But for this termination order, we would have intervened and likely had, in my opinion, a different outcome,” she says.

The court battle over the terminated legal service contract has left legal aid organizations that represent unaccompanied kids in limbo. In March, the groups sued the federal government over the funding cuts for legal assistance for unaccompanied kids. On April 1, US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin granted them a temporary restraining order, which should have resumed federal funding. But the groups filed subsequent complaints saying that the government was still not complying with the restraining order. Finally, in late April, the government signed a new contract with Acacia, which administers the funding, and Martínez-Olguin ordered the government to continue paying for the legal assistance in a preliminary injunction.

But it remains unclear how long the funding will last; HHS has appealed and filed a motion to stay the judge’s injunction. Some legal aid organizations, like Estrella del Paso, have rehired workers lost to the funding cuts. Others, like the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, have not, fearful that services could be interrupted again.

“It’s a fast-track to deportation for kids that really otherwise would be otherwise eligible for asylum.”

All the while, the Trump administration has directed immigration courts to speed up cases. Some courts have seen the return of “rocket dockets,” in which the court quickly schedules and moves through the proceedings. Immigration advocates argue that the process pressures children to accept removal orders and undermines due process. “It’s a fast-track to deportation for kids that really otherwise would be otherwise eligible for asylum,” says Acacia’s Askaryar.

A recent Republican House budget proposal would further dismantle protections for unaccompanied kids. The budget would omit funding for unaccompanied children’s legal services and require sponsors to pay the government $8,500 before the child could be released to the sponsor’s care; $5,000 could be reimbursed if the child attends every court proceeding.

All told, immigration advocates say, the recent policy changes affecting unaccompanied minors—the new rules for sponsors, the information sharing between ORR and ICE, the funding cuts for legal representation, the fast-tracking of cases—are part of a broader effort to deport kids.

“The government’s been clear that they want to remove as many immigrants as possible,” Donovan-Kaloust says. “Low-hanging fruit is children. If you keep them detained and seal off their access to counsel, the end result will likely be that they’ll get deported.”

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GOP Unveils Sweeping, Brutal Medicaid Cuts

On Sunday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) released budget reconciliation text that outlined extensive cuts to Medicaid planned by the Republican Party—which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office promptly estimated “would reduce the number of people with health insurance by at least 8.6 million” nationwide.

At least $715 billion would be cut from health programs, according to the CBO analysis, but it is unclear how much would be cut directly from Medicaid. Optional services under Medicaid—including physical therapy, hospice, and respiratory care for people on ventilators—would likely face cuts in many states.

“This bill confirms what we’ve been saying all along, Trump and Republicans have been lying when they claim they aren’t going to cut Medicaid and take away people’s health care,” Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a press release Sunday. “Let’s be clear, Republican leadership released this bill under cover of night because they don’t want people to know their true intentions.”

Not all Republicans are on board with the cuts, which appear to be driving fissures within the party. In a New York Times op-ed on Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote the following, echoing the types of stories that both Democratic and Republican legislators have shared to try to stop Congress and President Donald Trump from slashing Medicaid:

If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.

One of my constituents, a married mother of five, contacted me to explain why Medicaid is vital to her 8-year-old daughter, who depends on a feeding tube to survive. Formula, pump rentals, feeding extensions and other treatments cost $1,500 a month; prescriptions nearly double that cost. These expenses aren’t covered by private insurance. The mother wrote to me, “Without Medicaid, we would lose everything — our home, our vehicles, and eventually, our daughter.”

States are also not in the position to replace slashed federal funding and maintain their Medicaid services, as we wrote in January coverage of potential cuts to Medicaid-funded Home and Community-Based Services:

Given that federal Medicaid funds already make up, on average, one-third of state budgets, [Caring Across Generations chief of advocacy] Nicole Jorwic believes that state governments coughing up the extra cost “is never going to happen.” She notes that health funding is a popular target even in blue states like Maryland, where a $3 billion state funding shortfall has put hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for its human services department funds—where Medicaid is housed—on the chopping block.

The proposed cuts would also prohibit Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood for the next decade, which accounts for more than a third of the organization’s budget. Those cuts would affect the provision of services such as pap smears, cancer screenings, and birth control, since Medicaid already does not fund most abortions due to the Hyde Amendment. But abortion opponents and hardline Republicans are pushing to defund the organization regardless as punishment for its abortion services and its historic support for the Democratic party.

On a call with reporters Monday afternoon, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said that Planned Parenthood health centers provide those services to more than two million people annually, and that the majority of the clinics are located in “medically underserved areas, rural areas or areas with health professional shortages.” More than half of its patients use Medicaid and other public insurance programs, she added.

“If patients can’t get care at Planned Parenthood health centers, many will have nowhere to go,” McGill Johnson said, characterizing the proposal as a “targeted attack” and “an attempt to defund a political opponent.”

But the idea appears broadly unpopular. A January poll conducted by the nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem found that nearly three-quarters of respondents—73 percent—oppose defunding Planned Parenthood for services such as birth control, wellness exams, and cancer screenings. Last week, NOTUS reported that some moderate Republicans told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) they would oppose defunding Planned Parenthood. “The fact is that numerous organizations provide critical health care services for women outside of the issue of abortion, and to cut off funding for those services in any way creates a challenge,” one House Republican told NOTUS.

Additionally, the budget reconciliation text aims to weaken the ability the federal government’s ability to negotiate drug costs for Medicare users—a major move put forward by the Biden White House to make medication more affordable for aging and disabled people in the United States, who regularly pay some of the world’s highest drug costs.

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Top-Earning 10 Percent Responsible for the Majority of Global Warming, Study Finds

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

The world’s wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for two-thirds of global heating since 1990, driving droughts and heatwaves in the poorest parts of the world, according to a study.

While researchers have previously shown that higher income groups emit disproportionately large amounts of greenhouse gases, the latest survey is the first to try to pin down how that inequality translates into responsibility for climate breakdown. It offers a powerful argument for climate finance and wealth taxes by attempting to give an evidential basis for how many people in the developed world—including more than 50 percent of full-time employees in the UK—bear a heightened responsibility for the climate disasters affecting people who can least afford it.

“If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50 percent of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990.”

“Our study shows that extreme climate impacts are not just the result of abstract global emissions; instead we can directly link them to our lifestyle and investment choices, which in turn are linked to wealth,”said Sarah Schöngart, a climate modeling analyst and the study’s lead author.

“We found that wealthy emitters play a major role in driving climate extremes, which provides strong support for climate policies that target the reduction of their emissions.”

It has been clearly established that wealthier individuals, through their consumption and investments, create more carbon emissions, while poorer countries located near the equator bear the brunt of the resulting extreme weather and rising temperatures.

The new research attempts to specifically quantify how much that inequality in emissions feeds into climate breakdown. To produce their analysis, the researchers fed wealth-based greenhouse gas emissions inequality assessments into climate modeling frameworks, allowing them to systematically attribute the changes in global temperatures and the frequency of extreme weather events that have taken place between 1990 and 2019.

By subtracting the emissions of the wealthiest 10 percent, 1 percent and 0.1 percent, they modeled the changes to the climate and frequency of extreme weather events that would have taken place without them. By comparing those with the changes that have occurred, they believed they would be able to calculate their responsibility for the crisis the world finds itself in today.

In 2020, the global mean temperature was 0.61C higher than 1990. The researchers found that about 65 percent of that increase could be attributed to emissions from the global richest 10 percent, a group they defined as including all those earning more than $48,600 a year. That includes all those on the UK median salary for full-time employees, which is $49,760.

Wealthier groups bore more disproportionate responsibility still, with the richest 1 percent globally—those with annual incomes of about $166,450—responsible for 20 percent of global heating, and the richest 0.1 percent—the 800,000 or so people in the world raking in more than $608,090—responsible for 8 percent.

“We found that the wealthiest 10 percent contributed 6.5 times more to global warming than the average, with the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent contributing 20 and 76 times more, respectively,” the write in their paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Co-author Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, said: “If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50 percent of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990.” On the other hand, if the whole world population had emitted as the top 10 percent, 1 percent or 0.1 percent had, the temperature increase would have been 2.9 C, 6.7 C, or a completely unsurvivable 12.2 C.

The researchers said they hoped the analysis would inform policy interventions that recognise the unequal contributions to climate breakdown made by the world’s wealthiest, and foster social acceptance of climate action.

The research comes amid intense pushback from countries such as the US, and even cuts from the UK and other European countries, to providing finance for poorer countries to adapt to climate breakdown and mitigate its worst effects.

“This is not an academic discussion—it’s about the real impacts of the climate crisis today,” added Schleussner. “Climate action that doesn’t address the outsize responsibilities of the wealthiest members of society risks missing one of the most powerful levers we have to reduce future harm.”

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Florida Families Could Buckle Under the Pressure of Trump Policies

On a recent Wednesday morning, a hot pink van emblazoned with the words “Keeping South Florida Babies in Need Clean, Happy & Healthy Since 2013” pulled into the parking lot of the North Miami Beach Library. The van’s side door opened, revealing a shelf packed with diapers and a counter stackedwith baby wipe packs.

The van belongs to the Miami Diaper Bank. The nonprofit collects diapers and other supplies from donors and distributes them to families in need, many of whom live in this area of Miami-Dade County. The library is one of their prime locations.

A slow trickle of families, many of them led bymothers pushing strollers, soon began to appear to collect tote bags filled with diapers, baby food, and other essentials. About three dozen families were expected that day. At an event a few days earlier, more than 100 families showed up. Miami Diaper Bank provides 50 diapers per child per month. Sizes range from preemie babies to pull-ups for toddlers; there are larger diapers for children with special needs.

“It’s what I call the falling off middle class.”

Growing inflation and rising housing costs all over the region has meant a greater demand for the nonprofit’s services. Earlier this year, as many as 20 new families signed up every week, up from their customary three to four families per week, says Gabriela Rojas, the bank’s executive director. Most of the roughly 2,300 children they serve per month live in households below the poverty line that rely on federal programs like food assistance and Medicaid, she added. Diaper banks nationwide have noted similar increases in clients, according to the National Diaper Bank Network. According to the network’s data, 46 percent of families nationwide with children under the age of 4 couldn’t afford diapers in 2024.

The cost of diapers has already increased by 20 percent since 2018, and now tariffs are expected to further hike the cost of diapers manufactured or made from materials from abroad. In recent conversations with other Florida diaper banks, Rojas noted, the group discussed the escalating costs of other baby items, like strollers and formula.

The experience at the Miami Diaper Bank is being replicated in social service nonprofits all over the country. Other charities interviewed by Mother Jones already had noted an increase in the number of families needing their support in recent years. And now, with looming federal funding cuts to crucial assistance programs for low-income families, combined with the threat of tariffs, the need will certainly grow, further straining a system that has been on overdrive since the COVID-19 pandemic. “We anticipate an even bigger influx of families looking for us to be their safety net,” Rojas says. Some charities also expressed concern that federal cuts could directly impact them, potentially limiting the services they can provide.

Families with lower incomes never fully recovered from the Covid pandemic, says Elaine Maag, a tax expert specializing in lower and middle-income families at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization. In 2021, an expanded child tax credit for families with children helped keep them afloat. But when the tax cut ended in 2022, “We started noticing families reporting they’re having trouble, once again, paying for basic needs,” Maag says. And families are now facing the possibility of cuts to life-sustaining programs like SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, and Headstart, combined with the threat of tariffs that will raise the cost of everyday goods. The inevitable result will be a rise in poverty with cascading effects on families, particularly those with young children.

“When children don’t have access to appropriate healthcare and appropriate nutrition, especially in those early years, it can have a lifetime of negative effects,” Maag says. Children who are hungry at school, for instance, find it more difficult to learn, which sets them up for potential difficulty in graduating from high school, much less attending college. Later in life, she explains, they likely will need assistance. “So these investments in children very early are important,” she notes.

Volunteers distributed boxes of food and other necessities to 400 families at a recent food distribution event in Sunrise, Fla. Laura Morel

One of the first mothers to arrive at the North Miami Beach library was Naw San. She pushed her daughter’s stroller toward the pink van, her toddler son in Paw Patrol shoes trailing behind her. San says she has been enrolled at the diaper bank since the pandemic. The assistance helps her stretch her family’s income so they can cover other household expenses, like the electric bill and groceries. “I’m really grateful for that,” she says.

Yessenia Bustamante arrived shortly after, pushing a stroller with her two-year-old son, who was wearing a baseball cap stitched with dinosaurs. She walked about ten blocks to the library. For the last five months, the diaper bank has made it possible for her to spend more money on fruit and vegetables for her son. “Things have gotten more expensive,” she says. Bustamante works as a delivery driver and her husband remodels bathrooms. But even with their combined incomes, plus food assistance and the free diapers, it’s been difficult to make ends meet, she says. Recently, her rent also increased. “Little by little, we are getting by,” she says.

More than half of residents in North Miami Beach are immigrants, many of them from Latin America and Haiti, according to recent US Census data, with nearly 15 percent of all residents living below the poverty line. Miami Diaper Bank’s other distribution site—Florida City—also has a large Latin American community that makes up a third of its population. The diaper bank has usually distributed supplies at the city hall parking lot. But with its location right next to a police station, Rojas says she is considering moving their site given the growing collaboration between local police and federal immigration enforcement. “We want them to feel safe and secure coming to get what they need for their kids,” she says.

Charities themselves may also be impacted by federal funding cuts. At Camillus House, which provides services to people and families experiencing homelessness in the Miami area, CEO Eddie Gloria has seen first-hand how rising housing costs in Miami, now one of the most expensive cities in the country, have affected the community. “It’s what I call the falling off middle class,” he says. “Folks who used to be able to get through or get by at least with the area median income are now severely struggling.”

Every night, approximately 1,600 people sleep at shelters or housing units run by Camillus House—including 200 single-family homes for families with children. Residents who are employed pay 30 percent of their gross income toward rent. Camillus House receives funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is among DOGE’s targets. If the cuts happen, Gloria predicts “a crisis of homelessness among families and children that are supported by systems like ours.”

The inside of the Miami Diaper Bank’s van. Laura Morel

Then there are the threatened rollbacks of the SNAP program, which provides food assistance to lower income households, which would place further strain on food banks and pantries. Today, even though unemployment rates remain low, food banks across the country are seeing record high demand, according to Feeding America, which partners with more than 200 food banks nationwide that are on track to provide nearly 6 billion meals this year. But these services are meant to be supplemental, not the primary source of food assistance for families.

Since the pandemic, Feeding Tampa Bay, a Feeding America member that serves ten counties in southwest Florida, saw a 30 percent increase in need—and that has not waned, says CEO Thomas Mantz. “The challenge right now is the increased demand against a potential reduction in resources and that’s never a good trajectory,” Mantz says. “Those are two cars leaving in opposite directions and the gulf only gets wider.”

Village Elementary School is located in Sunrise, a city of 96,000 residents in Broward County where more than one in ten residents live below the poverty line. One Friday morning, dozens of cars were lined up bumper to bumper around the block for an event hosted by a food distribution nonprofit called Joshua’s Heart Foundation, and other community partners.

The goal was to help 400 families that morning. The drive resembled an assembly line, as volunteers loaded boxes, donated by Feed the Children, of pantry goods, produce, toiletries, and children’s toys into cars. At its headquarters in North Miami Beach, Joshua’s Heart distributes groceries to more than 100 families every week. Within a few hours, all the boxes had been distributed.

Joshua’s Heart has remained busy since the pandemic, says Karen Grey, publicist for the foundation. “We don’t know what that’s going to look like as the need increases and as everybody starts to feel the results of tariffs and higher prices,” she says. “The need has never gone away and it’s going to intensify. We have to figure out how to be sustainable through it.”

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Trump’s Latest Conflict of Interest? Accepting a Plane From Qatari Royals

This week, President Donald Trump will head to the Middle East for the first foreign trip of his second term. While he is there, he will reportedly manufacture a new conflict of interest for himself by accepting a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the Qatari royal family.

Trump will use the plane as the new Air Force One until just before the end of his term, at which point the plane’s ownership will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, according to ABC, which first reported the news, citing sources familiar with the proposed arrangement. ABC reports that the gift of the plane—which is reportedly so opulent that it’s known as “the flying palace”—will be announced this week, when Trump visits Qatar.

According to ABC, the White House and Department of Justice concluded that the gift does not constitute bribery because it is “not conditioned on any official act.” The U.S. Air Force will modify the 13-year-old aircraft to meet the standards of a plane used to carry the president, and Attorney General Pam Bondi and top White House lawyer David Warrington reportedly believe that transferring the plane to the Trump library foundation before the end of his term will make the arrangement legally sound.

The approximate value of the plane is approximately $400 million, aviation experts told ABC—and that’s before whatever upgrades the Air Force will make. (And we know Trump likes his gold trimmings.)

Trump has long been obsessed with upgrading the presidential plane. During his first term, the White House awarded Boeing a $3.9 billion contract to build new presidential planes. The work was supposed to be completed by the end of last year and has repeatedly been delayed; earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump commissioned another company, L3Harris, to overhaul the Qatari plane to be ready for use by this fall.

Obviously, despite the administration’s apparent self-delusion that they are not running afoul of any laws or ethics guidelines, questions around the ethics of the gift of the new plane abound—and what Qataris will expect in return. The Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, for example, prohibits any person holding elected office from accepting gifts “from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Several Democrats—including those on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.)—pointed to that rule as evidence that accepting the gift would be illegal. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at the Washington University School of Law, told the Associated Press the news is “outrageous,” adding that the gift is the “logical, inevitable, unfortunate consequence of Congress and the Supreme Court refusing to enforce” the Emoluments Clause.

But as we well know by now, the possibility of breaking laws does not seem to deter the president—who was found guilty on 34 felony counts in the hush-money case in which he covered up payments to Stormy Daniels—from doing whatever he wants.

In fact, Trump has explicitly bent the law to his will. In February, the administration announced it would not enforce one of the strongest anti-bribery and corruption laws—the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—for at least the next six months, as my colleague Russ Choma reported at the time. A legal expert told Choma that the pausing of the law, which prohibits American companies from paying bribes to do business in foreign countries, would make it harder to rebuff foreign officials trying to extort them. “It’s a really good time to be a corrupt official in Russia or Asia,” Jessica Tillipman, the dean of government procurement law at George Washington University, told Choma.

Following his re-election, Trump flouted a law that he signed in 2020 requiring presidents-elect to outline ethics requirements for their transition members; when he finally did share the plan well past the deadline, it did not contain any details about how Trump himself would abide by the code. Since then, high-profile administration officials have also failed to file paperwork showing they divested from Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that owns his Truth Social platform, which several officials held shares in or were on the board of, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote last month.

And as my colleague Mike Mechanic outlined at the time of Trump’s inauguration, several of Trump’s other businesses have also presented major conflicts of interests, and potential national security risks, including: Trump’s Manhattan tower, which reportedly rented luxury condos to foreign governments; his other properties, which have hosted Saudi-backed golf events; international Trump developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; and the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins. We also still do not know who financed Trump’s transition, which his team has declined to disclose after refusing to sign agreements with the General Services Administration that would compel disclosure, as previous presidents have done. And to top it all off, just a couple of weeks ago, the Trump Organization struck a $5.5 billion deal to build an international golf club in Qatar.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

Last year, in a dissent last year, over whether Trump should have immunity from criminal prosecution for “official” acts taken as president, US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” Coupled with the administration’s jailing of its political opponents and flouting of the Constitution, the news of the gift appears to make that characterization accurate. The real threat to our democratic institutions and national interests, then, may not be the foreign kings the Emoluments Clause warned about, but the one sitting in the White House.

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After Jailing of Newark Mayor, DHS Official Warns of “More Arrests Coming”

After the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Ras Baraka, was arrested Friday for protesting outside of a new immigration detention facility, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official is threatening to arrest three more elected officials who were present.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Baraka, who is running for governor, on Friday after he and three Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey—Rep. Robert Menendez, Rep. LaMonica McIver, and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman—sought to enter the facility,called Delaney Hall. The officials said they were conducting an “oversight visit” at the detention center, alleging that city officials and fire inspectors had previously been denied entry. Federal law states that members and employees of Congress have the right to enter ICE facilities for oversight visits and that they do not have to provide advanced notice in order to do so. Videos from the scene show Menendez, McIver and Watson Coleman asking guards to let them in and seemingly being denied.

They were eventually allowed to enter the facility, but Baraka was not. According to Watson Coleman, she and the other representatives went to speak to the mayor after exiting the facility, and that’s when the arrest occurred. Video of Baraka’s arrest shows him, McIver and Watson Coleman clinging to each other as the officers surround them and eventually pull Baraka away. McIver subsequently said in a post on X that ICE “shoved me, manhandled [Watson Coleman], and arrested [Baraka]”; Watson Coleman also said an ICE agent “physically shoved” her during the scuffle.

In a post on X, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and Interim US Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba claimed that Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations,” adding, “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.” But at the scene, McIver said that Baraka was arrested after he had already complied with ICE officials’ directives to leave a restricted area while waiting for the members of Congress to exit the facility, and that he “did nothing wrong.”

BREAKING: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside Delaney Hall on Friday, a member of his staff confirmed to NJ Spotlight News. pic.twitter.com/sGVXbqilLw

— NJ Spotlight News (@NJSpotlightNews) May 9, 2025

Baraka was released from detention within hours and charged with federal trespassing, he said. “I didn’t go there to break any laws. I didn’t break any laws,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday night. Federal and state Democratic officials promptly condemned Baraka’s arrest. Gov. Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) said he was “outraged” by the arrest, calling Baraka “an exemplary public servant who has always stood up for our most vulnerable neighbors.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) blasted ICE’s response in a lengthy statement, saying, “keep your hands off of members of Congress.” Attorney General Matt Platkin (D-N.J.) said Baraka’s arrest was “deeply troubling.”

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka says he's been charged with federal trespassing and calls his arrest "really humiliating and painful." He says he has no regrets about what happened. pic.twitter.com/kVwkfu9Zf1

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) May 10, 2025

But all this has not stopped DHS from threatening to arrest the other officials who were at the scene. On Saturday, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said on CNN, “There will likely be more arrests coming,” alleging that body camera footage shows “some of these members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer.”

Baraka and the members of Congress reject those allegations. Baraka told CNN host Victor Blackwell on Saturday, “None of those people body-slammed any officer.” On CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, McIver told host Dana Bash, “I honestly do not know how to body-slam anyone. There’s no video that supports me body-slamming anyone.” She called for DHS to release the full, unedited body camera footage. Menendez added that there were more than 20 “heavily-armed” ICE agents at the scene, whose faces were covered and who were lacking identification.

DHS did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

Responding to DHS accusing her of "body slamming" an ICE officer, @RepLaMonica tells @DanaBashCNN, "I honestly do not know how to body slam anyone. There's no video that supports me body slamming anyone."@RepMenendez says, "There were a lot of opportunities for DHS, for ICE to… pic.twitter.com/Fhfpq06jHq

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) May 11, 2025

All this comes after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters on Friday that the administration is considering suspending habeas corpus, or the right of individuals to challenge their detention—even thoughit is enshrined in the Constitution and only Congress can suspend it in cases of “rebellion or invasion.”

Consider what something like this could mean for people like Baraka, the New Jersey members of Congress who are being threatened with arrest, or the international students who the administration has jailed on spurious grounds. Through all of this, the administration is sending one message loud and clear: There is no rule of law.

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How Trump’s Dismantling of NOAA Threatens the Keeling Curve—and Why That Matters

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

There are trillions upon trillions of numbers in the world. We use numbers to describe almost every conceivable thing in the universe. But there is one number that surpasses all others for the enormous impact it will have on every living thing on Earth over the next few thousand years. We consider it so important that we’ve dedicated our lives to acquiring and understanding it. Today that number happens to be: 427.6.

This is a measure (known in scientific terms as the mole fraction) of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, in parts per million. It’s part of a continuous chain of observations stretching back across two generations, to 1958, when Dave Keeling recorded the first measurement of 313 parts per million. Keeling maintained this record, known as the Keeling Curve, using a running hodgepodge of short-term grants until 2005, at which point geochemist Ralph Keeling, a professor at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, co-author of this piece and Dave’s son, assumed its stewardship. But now, after 67 years of battling to keep the program funded and provide the data to other scientists around the world, the program faces its most dire threat ever.

The community of researchers making sustained measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide probably numbers less than 30.

Why? Endeavors of this nature—highly precise measurements of a trace gas over many decades—require three basic inputs: knowledge, people, and money. It’s the third one that’s at risk, thanks to the current administration’s attacks on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA provides support for our program both through an annual grant and through invaluable “in-kind” support, such as staffers taking samples for us, maintaining buildings in remote areas where sampling occurs, and running the Mauna Loa Observatory.

The Trump administration has made clear it wishes to gut NOAA’s research enterprise, which is at the center of climate research globally. Already, we’ve seen large-scale firings and rejections of research proposals. Recent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget shows the administration intends to assiduously follow the blueprint of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and shutter the Ocean and Atmospheric Research Line Office.

This is not just a little haircut for a large federal agency—it’s grabbing the scissors and stabbing the agency through the heart. If successful, this loss will be a nightmare scenario for climate science, not just in the United States, but the world. It will also likely spell the end of our ability to continuously update the Keeling Curve.

Against this ominous backdrop, a small group of scientists is scrambling to preserve the ability to know how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. NOAA maintains a global backbone of measurements of carbon dioxide and other gases, not just at Mauna Loa, but at more than 50 stations around the world. In parallel, our program at Scripps maintains records at a dozen stations. Other countries also contribute, but their efforts are almost all focused regionally, leaving the big picture to just a few programs that are global in scope.

Climate change, however, is a global problem, and global networks address the really important questions. Such networks provide critical information on how fast carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are building up in the air from fossil-fuel burning and other processes. They provide information on how much carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere by the oceans and by land plants. They provide information critical to independently verify emissions, to negotiate international treaties, to make decisions now about how much carbon dioxide the world can emit. These observational networks are the factual basis upon which all efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change are based.

NOAA and Scripps play another key role in the atmospheric measurement community. How does the world know that the value of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today is really 427.6 and not 427.7 parts per million? Such differences may seem small, but they are consequential in the realm climate research, and they can be calculated only because a lot of work has gone into calibration. Hundreds of groups can measure carbon dioxide using various off-the-shelf analyzers, but these analyzers first need to be calibrated using compressed air that has a known amount of carbon dioxide in it. Scripps assumed the lead role for preparing tanks filled with known amounts of carbon dioxide and dispensing them to the community until 1995, at which point NOAA took over.

After just three short months of the Trump administration, we are contemplating the abdication of US leadership in oceanic and atmospheric science.

The country and the world are now at risk of losing the only two programs that have played this central role. If the administration has its way, the climate change research community could soon be fully adrift, unable to know with sufficient accuracy how quickly carbon dioxide levels are rising.

Even in the best of times, long-term observations can be very fragile. It is difficult to convince funding agencies to put money into long-term observations because, by definition, they are continuations; they have been done before. Most funding entities, from science agencies to philanthropic organizations, want to be associated with exciting, groundbreaking work, and sustained observations are too routine to scratch that itch. (Dave Keeling records in his autobiography, Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth, that at one point a National Science Foundation program manager demanded that, to maintain funding, he generate two discoveries per year from his record of carbon dioxide levels.)

Another vulnerability stems from the fact that the community of researchers making sustained measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide probably numbers less than 30. Graduate students interested in learning to conduct this arcane work are a rare commodity. Patience and attention to detail are required, and years may be needed to accumulate enough data to answer the key questions or make groundbreaking discoveries. Researchers have to be extremely diligent and exacting to ensure that measurements in 1958 are comparable to those today. Calibration is an endless chore. This scientific pursuit isn’t for everyone.

Perversely, while the Keeling Curve has attained iconic global importance, this actually can hinder, rather than help the funding situation. Environmental programs tend to be organized by geographic domain and discipline—the National Water Quality Program of the US Geological Survey, NSF’s Arctic Observing Network, and the US Forest Service, for instance. Amid these focused efforts, the big picture can be lost. As the climate change field has evolved, we have found it increasingly difficult to find sponsors who accept responsibility for measuring vital signs of the Earth as a whole.

The original Mauna Loa measurements were started during the International Geophysical Year in 1957/1958. This was a massive, remarkable effort, led by the United States and including 67 countries, with the goal (simply put) of measuring every physical attribute possible on the Earth in one year. It led to numerous, important scientific discoveries and the establishment of many measurement programs worldwide. It established the South Pole station, for instance, a home for vital climate research that is still going today. It was a time of enormous optimism, of international cooperation (even during the height of the Cold War), of vast dreams, of global cooperation. And the United States was proud to lead the way.

This sense of endeavor continued into the 1970s, when then-President Richard Nixon—a conservative Republican—established NOAA to better understand the world’s oceans and atmosphere. By the 1980s, the NOAA grew in scope, alongside the Scripps effort, to become the beating heart of global climate science. Now, after just three short months of the Trump administration, we are contemplating the abdication of US leadership in oceanic and atmospheric science and the loss of the largest and most critical observing network for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and their calibration laboratories.

Our colleagues at NOAA are living day to day, not sure if tomorrow will be their last on the job. We pray that common sense will prevail and that NOAA will be spared the worse. Whatever its fate, we will remain in the fight to preserve the world’s ability to measure carbon dioxide levels with whatever support we can muster, a small bulwark against climate science’s new dark age.

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Tufts PhD Student Released From ICE Detention After Chilling Arrest

Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk has been released from an immigration detention center in rural Louisiana in response to an order from a federal judge. Öztürk’s arrest led to nationwide outrage after a chilling video showed plainclothes immigration agents in masks pulling her off the street in Massachusetts in March.

Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish national, has been accused of no criminal activity. Instead, the Trump administration has falsely claimed that she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” In reality, Öztürk co-wrote a op-ed for the Tufts Daily that pushed for divesting from companies with ties to Israel.

“Thank you so much for all the support and love,” Öztürk said outside the Louisiana immigration detention center on Friday. “I am a little tired so I will take some rest. But I really appreciate you being here.”

Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts PhD candidate whose sudden arrest by federal immigration agents made national headlines, walked out of a Louisiana detention facility after a judge ordered her release.

Watch the moment she spoke to supporters outside. https://t.co/rsttOeBNTz pic.twitter.com/KGd4zO1Q68

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) May 10, 2025

At a federal court hearing earlier on Friday, William Sessions III, a district court judge in Vermont, where Öztürk was briefly detained, made clear that the Trump administration had provided essentially nothing to support its decision to detain and attempt to deport Öztürk. “There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the op-ed. I mean, that literally is the case,” Sessions said. “There is no evidence here as to the motivation, absent the consideration of the op-ed.”

“There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence,” Sessions said, according to CBS News. “She has no criminal record. She has done nothing other than essentially attend her university and expand her contacts within the community in such a supportive way.” The judge called Öztürk’s detention a “continued infringement” on her due process and First Amendment rights that also “potentially chil[ed] the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens.”

Michael Drescher, the Justice Department attorney representing the Trump administration, barely spoke and called no witnesses at the hearing, the New York Times reported. He did say that the administration would continue its effort to deport Öztürk regardless of whether she was released from detention.

The judge called Öztürk’s detention a “continued infringement” on her due process and First Amendment rights that also “potentially chil[ed] the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens.”

Mahsa Khanbabai, Öztürk’s lawyer, said in a statement provided to Zeteo that she was “relieved and ecstatic” her client had been ordered released. “Unfortunately, it is 45 days too late. She has been imprisoned all these days for simply writing an op-ed that called for human rights and dignity for the people in Palestine,” Khanbabai added. “When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?”

In early April, Mother Jones reported that Öztürk had suffered three asthma attacks during her first 10 days in detention. As Sophie Hurwitz and Julia Métraux explained at the time:

Öztürk, who studies child psychology, was moved by ICE agents from Massachusetts to Vermont and then to Louisiana, her attorneys report. For nearly 24 hours, her legal team was unable to contact or locate her. En route to Louisiana, she suffered her first of three asthma attacks. Hearings in Öztürk’s case began yesterday, with her lawyers describing the way she was transported across several state lines as “venue shopping” by the government and “an act of either furtiveness or bad faith.” They also revealed that in the days since being moved to a detention center in Louisiana, Öztürk has suffered two more asthma attacks.

Unmanaged asthma can have severe acute outcomes, the most extreme being respiratory failure resulting in death, as well as long-term effects, such as permanently altering a person’s airways. The way to avoid these devastating effects is simple: People with asthma need to have access to their medication, like inhalers, to manage this chronic health condition.

CBS reported that Öztürk suffered another asthma attack during the Friday hearing. She told the court that she had suffered a dozen asthma attacks while in ICE custody, and that they were becoming “longer and harder to stop.”

The Washington Post has reported that, prior to ICE detaining Öztürk, the State Department “determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.” The Post added:

The finding, contained in a March memo that was described to The Washington Post, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for revoking Ozturk’s visa under an authority empowering the top U.S. diplomat to safeguard the foreign policy interests of the United States.

The memo, written by an office within the State Department, raises doubts about the public accusations made by the Trump administration as it has sought to justify Ozturk’s deportation. The Department of Homeland Security has said Ozturk engaged in activities “in support of Hamas,” a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, but neither that agency nor U.S. prosecutors have provided evidence for that claim.

Despite that finding, the Trump administration revoked Öztürk’s visa without notification then quickly detained her. Video of her disturbing arrest attracted national attention.

Federal immigration authorities detained a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University.⁠ The government hasn’t filed any charges against Rumeysa, Ozturk, who was in the U.S. on a student visa, her lawyer said.

Read more: https://t.co/Vs3iLHGAkU pic.twitter.com/29aNJWaJmr

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 26, 2025

Before being targeted by the Trump administration, Öztürk was on track to receive her doctorate in February. She said at the Friday hearing that she was eager to get back to her research on adolescent media use.

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White South African “Refugees” Will Soon Arrive in the United States

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions from around the world. In February, Trump made one exception—ordering the US government to promote refugee resettlement for white South Africans. Now, the first group of Afrikaners is set to arrive.

National Public Radio reports that a flight with 54 Afrikaners will arrive at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC, on Monday. In a highly unusual move, the administration plans to have high-level US officials meet the Afrikaners at the airport for a press conference, according to NPR. The administration is reportedly trying to charter a jet—presumably at US taxpayers’ expense—from Johannesburg to bring in the South Africans.

“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.”

Timothy Young, a spokesman for Global Refuge, a resettlement agency, told the New York Times that thousands “of refugees from across the globe remain stranded in limbo despite being fully vetted and approved for travel, including Afghan allies, religious minorities and other populations facing extreme violence and persecution.” The fact that the Trump administration is bypassing those people in favor of white South Africans who have not met international criteria for refugee status lays bare the white nationalism at the heart of its immigration policy.

Chrispin Phiri, a spokesperson for South Africa’s foreign ministry, said in a statement provided to the New York Times that Afrikaners should not be considered refugees under international law. “It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy,” Phiri stated. (The Trump administration has cut off aid to South Africa based on its specious claim about discrimination against white South Africans.)

Once in the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services will help the South Africans find “temporary or longer-term housing,” according to a government memo obtained by the Lever and the New York Times. The memo states that the US government will also help them obtain “groceries, weather-appropriate clothing, diapers, formula, hygiene products and prepaid phones that support the day-to-day well-being of households.”

The Trump administration approved Afrikaners to come to the United States on an unusually fast timeline. As the Times reports:

Refugees can often wait years in camps around the world before they are processed and approved to travel to the United States. Before the first Trump administration, refugee resettlement took an average of 18 to 24 months, according to the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group for immigrants. Many refugees must wait years longer.

The Afrikaners, however, had to wait no more than three months.

In theory, much of the reason for bringing Afrikaners to the United States as refugees is a land reform law enacted earlier this year in South Africa. Elon Musk and others on the right have seized on the law to argue that white South Africans are being persecuted and are at risk of having their land unjustly confiscated.

Musk and the Trump administration are grossly misrepresenting the situation in South Africa. As I reported in February:

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa did recently sign a controversial law that expands the state’s ability to expropriate land—in some cases without providing compensation. But the law, which was signed by a democratically elected government and is motivated by a desire to address severe injustices imposed on Black people by past regimes, is not what Trump and Musk are making it out to be.

President Ramaphosa wrote on social media that the law is not “a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution.”

The Democratic Alliance, a more centrist and white-led party in South Africa, has opposed the law and has argued it needs to be amended. Nevertheless, the party strongly objected to Trump’s recent move and said in a statement released on Monday that “it is not true that the Act allows land to be seized by the state arbitrarily.” It added that funding cuts could have devastating consequences for vulnerable South Africans, explaining that the country is slated to receive $439 million this year for HIV/AIDs treatment and support. “It would be a tragedy if this funding were terminated because of a misunderstanding of the facts,” the party stressed.

More broadly, land reform is a response to the staggering inequity that still plagues South Africa. As of 2018, nearly two-thirds of Black South Africans lived in poverty, compared to just one percent of white South Africans.

South African business interests have similarly argued that Musk and others are wrong to portray the land reform law in such dire terms. As I also reported in February:

In response to an interview request, Wandile Sihlobo, the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, directed me to an article he recently wrote about why there was no need to panic about the law. Fasken, a major international law firm, has taken a similar perspective. South African lawyers at the firm concluded that, while they have some reservations about sections of the law, it is generally “doubtful if the Expropriation Act will generally affect private property rights as envisaged” in the country’s constitution. Even the leader of AfriForum, a far-right group that largely advocates on behalf of white Afrikaners and vehemently opposes the Expropriation Act, has expressed concern with Trump’s decision to target South Africa so broadly.

None of this has stopped the Trump administration from twisting America’s refugee program—once a symbol of the country’s commitment to those fleeing life-threatening violence—into yet another avatar of white grievance.

On Friday, Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration deputy chief of staff, went as far to say that “what’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created.” His newfound sympathy for allegedly oppressed whites comes after spending much of his adult life smearing immigrants of color.

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“They’re Trying to Kidnap Someone”

This dispatch by Bill Shaner, an independent journalist who writes the Worcester Sucks and I Love It newsletter, was first published by Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World.

I’m driving five miles across the city to check out a tip that there’s an ICE rendition ongoing. I’ve got the scanner on the car stereo as I’m about to pull onto the street in question. It’s a quiet neighborhood, small houses on small lots, people walking dogs, the mailman waving, the lawnmowers running, and I hear the dispatcher: “We have an ICE officer over there who’s allegedly being surrounded.”

“On our way,” the officer responds.

As a local reporter for a decade now, I’ve learned that you can hear the cops at their most honest on the scanner. And as I’m hearing that “surrounded” comment I remember what the city’s police chief told the city council in January:

“We do not do civil detention arrests,” Police Chief Paul Saucier said at the time, reassuring them that they wouldn’t be party to the ICE assault Trump was about to unleash. The police, he said, “do not have the authority to affect a civil arrest.”

What he didn’t say is that if you try to stop the civil arrest, the police will stop you from stopping it.

I park my car on the edge of the scene and all I can hear are the screams—the deafening desperate screams, from a mother, from her daughter, from the woman holding the daughter’s baby.

This morning a few dozen of us here in Worcester, Massachusetts, got to see that unstated fine print in action firsthand. A woman was led by federal agents in cuffs away from her family, through a throng of community organizers trying to stop it, and into an unmarked car. The local police arrived to prevent the community from protecting their neighbor from an unlawful kidnapping. They succeeded, and in the process arrested two of the people who tried to stop it.

I park my car on the edge of the scene and all I can hear are the screams—the deafening desperate screams, from a mother, from her daughter, from the woman holding the daughter’s baby. Wordless screams.

And then I see the mother, a young woman in a green shirt, wailing, crying, held on either side by menacing white men in tactical vests, black neck warmers pulled over their noses in the style du jour for our secret police forces.

Surrounding them are a few dozen community members who were tipped off about the ICE raid and got to it before the police did. Before I arrived, they demanded to see a warrant. The ICE agents refused to provide one, so they created a human chain, which the ICE officers eventually broke through.

I still don’t know her name or where they’ve taken her. The federal officials provided no information to anyone at the scene. But apparently they called the local police for backup. They felt that they were surrounded. Black Hawk Down.

New video shows close-up view of ICE agents slamming the young woman's face into the ground during arrest in neighborhood raid.

"I don't have anyone at home. They arrested my mom, my sister, and a 2-month-old baby," a family member cries out. pic.twitter.com/9vcxEICW5Y

— LongTimeFirstTime (@LongTimeHistory) May 9, 2025

As they’re marching this woman to the back door of the tan unmarked Ford SUV representing her nebulous fate, the community is swarming, surrounding, yelling at the ICE officers. City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, a dear friend and a relentless advocate for her community, is following closest behind them. She’s screaming. “You are cowards.” She’s jogging to keep pace as they march their jackbooted march to the SUV with New York plates. “This is an innocent woman.”

An ICE agent opens the door and the woman’s daughter shrieks—an unforgettable noise of agony. Her mother is about to disappear, into the purposefully vague bureaucratic world of forced removal. The opening of that door, to this shrieking girl…it must look like a life torn apart. Her family fractured. And for what? No one bothers to explain that to her. Perhaps they’re not allowed to. The rules.

The crowd chants “Don’t take the mother!” over and over again as the daughter keeps trying to get back on the hood of the car. More Worcester cops arrive, all helping the ICE agents carry out their rotten senseless work.

The Worcester Police Department steps in at this crucial juncture, among us residents surrounding the car about to take one of our neighbors away. And they do so on behalf of the ICE agents, not us. A Worcester cop comes over, stepping between the open car door and the community, past the ICE agents stuffing the mother into the back seat, and he looks at a woman holding the shrieking daughter’s baby. She’s also wailing in desperate anger and he says—to her—“Stop, stop, stop. They’ll explain. They’ll explain.”

Of course they don’t explain.

The woman’s daughter then jumps on the hood of the car. A Worcester cop pulls her off.

The crowd chants, “Don’t take the mother!” over and over again as the daughter keeps trying to get back on the hood of the car. More Worcester cops arrive, all helping the ICE agents carry out their rotten senseless work.

The deportee’s daughter, a 16-year-old whose name has not been disclosed, held to the ground and cuffed by Worcester police officers. Bill Shaner

When I say ICE, it’s a catchall. These federal agents were wearing a myriad of badges and few of them had name tags. Most of them had “POLICE” written somewhere on their tactical vests. There were ICE insignias, but also Customs and Border Patrol, and one ATF.

A CBP agent, his face cover falling down slightly below his nose, pushes a woman away from the car in the manner of an offensive tackle—elbows out, knees bent, forearms thrusting. Others take the woman’s place.

“This is ICE. This is federal,” one of the WPD officers explains, as if a suitable explanation. Case closed.

We’re on a quiet residential street on a peaceful spring day, the sun beating down serenely, a light breeze. The sort of day you wait all year for. For this mother and her daughter and the little baby it was that sort of day before federal agents showed up, without saying why, intending to bring her to an undisclosed somewhere without even proving they had the legal right_._

The crowd of community members, who these officers ostensibly protect and serve, continues to cheer, “Don’t take the mother, don’t take the mother.” The daughter is still shrieking.

“This is ICE. This is federal,” one of the WPD officers explains, as if a suitable explanation. Case closed.

A woman says, “They don’t have a warrant.” Another says, “They’re trying to kidnap someone.”

As the local cops are clearing the road for ICE’s unmarked SUV, community organizer Maydee Morales confronts them. “Worcester police are not supposed to be involved in this.”

Another officer, frustrated, says, “They don’t need a warrant.” Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they’re concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing.

In the background, a Worcester police officer looks at the desperate woman holding her baby trying to stop the agents from taking her mother and says “Do you want to stay with your baby?” The tacit threat of separation for her protestation of another separation. Later he would complain “She’s putting the baby in harm’s way.” A classic move: “harm” goes undefined because the harm is him.

Maydee, still confronting the officers, says, “Where is the warrant?” Officer Lugo, according to his nameplate, says, “Ma’am we are trying our best but they are federal.”

Morales again asks for the warrant.

“They’re federal.”

“They still need a warrant.”

Another officer, frustrated, says, “They don’t need a warrant.” Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they’re concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing. At this point an ICE agent starts pushing me away, but not very hard. Lazy jabs, his mind elsewhere. Too many people, too much pushing to be done. I return to my pre-push position. I keep filming. I don’t know what else to do.

A Worcester police officer stands between the ICE agents and a crowd of community members. Bill Shaner

A cop pulls his cruiser behind us—we’re boxed in now—and from the intercom says “This is the Worcester Police Department. This is an unlawful assembly, I’m warning you to disperse right now or you will be subject to arrest.”

On the other side of me, a crackle of the scanner from an officer’s vest-mounted radio: “Do I have a car to escort the marshals out of here?”

They don’t need a warrant but they do need an escort.

Next to me is a TV reporter from a Spanish language station and her cameraman. She yells out, “What’s your name?” and the woman responds in Portuguese. I can’t make it out. She asks her age and this one I catch: “dezesseis.” Not a woman—a girl. A 16-year-old girl.

As the car pulls away, nudging into the thick crowd, the daughter shrieks another horrible horrible horrible shriek, communicating the non-communicable as the disappearers take another step toward disappearing her mother. As the car breaks from the crowd she runs after it. A Worcester police officer, his voice frothing with anger, shouts, “Arrest her right now. You are under arrest.” And then four cops swarm her, grab her, throw her to the ground. All the while she’s crying crying crying. Her hair’s caught in her mouth and matted to her face, wet with spit and tears. Four cops hold her pinned to the ground.

Then they march her away. Her and another member of the community who had tried to intervene. They take the pair away from the crowd. I follow. They have the daughter by both arms, same as the ICE agents had her mother. I still don’t know either of their names. Next to me is a TV reporter from a Spanish language station and her cameraman. She yells out, “What’s your name?” and the woman responds in Portuguese. I can’t make it out. She asks her age and this one I catch: “dezesseis.”

Not a woman—a girl. A 16-year-old girl. Now in custody for the crime of reacting in an unruly way to the sudden forceful disappearance of her mother.

I keep asking about the charges. The only cop who doesn’t ignore me explains “I’m not the arresting officer.” The arresting officers go on ignoring me.

We get to the spot where the wagon is set to arrive. I ask again. Eventually I get an answer, and it’s the usual package job: disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, unlawful assembly. The charges they throw on anyone they want to arrest for the sake of arresting them, knowing they’re unlikely to stick. But sticking isn’t the goal. The officer who tells me this has a tactical K9 Unit vest on. He tells me the 16-year-old girl was interfering with police business. “Worcester police business?” I ask. What was the police business here exactly? He looks at me like I’m a smart ass. He doesn’t say anything. I press him again: “Kind of a grey area, huh?”

“Not really,” he says.

Update: In a statement posted to the Worcester Police Department’s Facebook page Thursday night, the WPD said they responded to “a report of a federal agent who was surrounded by a large group of about twenty-five people.” The daughter was charged with reckless endangerment of a child, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. The other community organizer faces charges of assault and battery on a police officer, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (unknown liquid), disorderly conduct, and interfering with a police officer. Both were out on bail by Thursday night, according to local organizers. The name and whereabouts of the woman taken by ICE remain unknown.

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Inside Alabama’s Threats to Prosecute Abortion Helpers

In August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned R_oe v. Wade_, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.

“If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.”

This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help.

This week on Reveal, reporter Nina Martin spends time with abortion rights groups in Alabama, following how they’ve adapted to one of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion policies—and evolved their definition of help.

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Purslane Sex and the City

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

Steps from a public bathroom, across a narrow street from a home goods store in Tokyo, Japan, a tangle of delicate reddish stems fringed with rubbery emerald leaves pokes from a crack in the pavement. Smaller than a discarded Big Mac box, the plant sprawls close to the ground, appearing entirely unremarkable. Put more plainly: Common purslane looks like a weed.

Purslane is so inconspicuous that when Tomohiro Fujita, a biologist at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies in Ibaraki, started studying it in August 2021, he had trouble picking it out in the bustling cityscape. “There were several times when I walked around Tokyo for an entire day without finding a single individual,” he wrote by email. But once he learned to recognize the plant, he found it in all kinds of places. Growing in a lush, tree-ringed quad outside a cafeteria at Rikkyo University, for instance. Or eking out a modest living near a city bus lot not far from Sugamo Station.

Common purslane, known to scientists as Portulaca oleracea, is not just big in Japan. By some counts, it’s the eighth most widely distributed plant in the world. As happy growing in gardens as along roads or parking lots, it has been documented everywhere from Mexico City to Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park to Midway Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean.

“Plants that depend on pollinators to reproduce have to evolve in a very short time to survive.”

No one seems to agree on where purslane got its start—scientists have speculated that it came from India, North Africa, or Australia—but it’s moved around the world for millennia. It came to the Americas well before Columbus; Indigenous people in present-day Ontario were harvesting the plant as early as 1350. In some places, the plant probably hitched a ride with migrating animals or oblivious humans; in others, it traveled first class, brought along for its many medicinal and culinary uses.

Fujita and his colleagues’ recent study helps explain how common purslane continues to find purchase in our increasingly anthropogenic world. Fujita collected seeds from purslane plants at 10 urban sites in Tokyo—including the one near the public bathroom—and from rice paddies and fields at 10 sites outside the city. After growing those seeds into mature plants in a greenhouse, he observed something surprising: the purslane grown from urban seeds was much less likely to open its flowers and bloom than the rural plants. Or, as Fujita and his co-authors poetically phrased it, “the flower does not open in the city.”

Although plants have multiple ways to do the deed, flowers are the decorative boudoirs where fertilization happens. Some common purslane individuals cross-pollinate by swapping pollen with each other. On hot, sunny days, these plants explode with small yellow flowers that open just long enough to let insects carry pollen between plants. Other purslane plants, however, self-pollinate by fertilizing within their own tightly curled buds, which never unfurl to become flowers.

Flowering is so ephemeral that Fujita didn’t spot purslane with open flowers at any of the collection sites either in Tokyo or outside the city. But his team observed the plants’ offspring as they flowered in the greenhouse. While environmental conditions trigger or suppress flowering in most species, a purslane plant’s specific genes dictate whether it opens its flowers for pollination or takes care of business itself. And Fujita found that the vast majority of urban plant offspring—95 percent—never flowered, compared with roughly 76 percent of individuals from rural areas.

The fact that so many more plants in Tokyo carry the genes for closed flowers shows that the urban population is evolving to almost exclusively self-pollinate, Fujita says. Closed buds take less energy to grow, mature earlier than open flowers, and produce bigger seeds, which often develop into seedlings with larger root systems for reaching scant moisture. In dryer, hotter urban environments that tend to have fewer pollinators, these benefits may help purslane survive.

With some 70 percent of the Earth’s surface now altered by human development, the study offers a peek into one way that plants are adapting to urbanization. In a 2022 review, Fernanda Bered, a geneticist at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, found that, globally, urban plant communities are less diverse than those in surrounding areas and tend to feature more introduced and hardy species.

Bered and her coauthors also identified other ways plants respond to urbanization. City plants often grow faster, flower earlier and longer, and make smaller seeds than their rural counterparts. Some plants respond to industrialized environments by growing more slowly in soils laden with heavy metals. And plants exposed to polluted air produce less chlorophyll A, a key pigment for absorbing light, meaning they make less energy and oxygen.

Purslane isn’t the only urban plant turning to solo reproduction. In industrial sites near the port of Antwerp, Belgium, where pollinating hoverflies are rare, common centaury (Centaurium erythraea) produce smaller flowers that are more likely to self-pollinate. In Osaka, Japan, Asiatic dayflowers (Commelina communis) in more urban areas grow reproductive parts that are physically closer together, making self-pollination easier. Bered points out that such strategies give plants a leg up in places where fragmented habitat has made nearby cross-pollinating plants scarce, or where there’s a shortage of pollinators.

“It’s difficult for pollinators like birds, bats, and insects to live in the cities,” Bered says. “Plants that depend on pollinators to reproduce have to evolve in a very short time to survive.”

But “selfing,” as it’s called, can have drawbacks, too. Populations that self-pollinate for generations will likely have less genetic diversity than plants that cross-pollinate, Fujita explains. And lower genetic diversity could make it harder for future generations of urban purslane to weather stressors, particularly as cities become warmer.

For now, though, common purslane is doing just fine: The succulent thrives in full sun and warm temperatures, and its waxy leaves retain precious moisture in paved-over spots like near that Tokyo bathroom. In cities around the world, the plant is winding its way along the cracks between sidewalk pavers, reaching for water and soaking up sun.

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Trump’s Killing of Energy Star Program Will Cost Families a Bundle

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

The federal Energy Star program is among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can, and appliances bearing it save American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes in.

This week, however, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to kill it, the Washington Post first reported. Grist also reviewed a US EPA document obtained by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that shows the program is slated to be “eliminated.”

“Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs,” said Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking member of the committee, in a statement. “By eliminating this program, [Trump] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy.”

“It’s an odd thing that you would jettison a voluntary public-private partnership that costs a rounding error in EPA’s budget and affords consumers billions of dollars of value.”

Launched in 1992, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Energy Star sets efficiency specifications for products ranging from dishwashers to entire homes. Those standards are beyond government-mandated minimums, and Energy Star’s website says the goal is to provide “simple, credible, and unbiased information” people can use to make better decisions.

While Energy Star certification is voluntary, most major manufacturers participate. According to the government, around 9 in 10 households recognize the Energy Star label. Depending on the year, as many as 80 percent say the label “very much” or “somewhat” influenced their purchases. Overall, consumers have bought more than 300 million appliances with the Energy Star label and the program has cumulatively helped avoid 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Energy Star remains one of our most effective bipartisan tools for ensuring energy reliability, affordability, and American competitiveness,” said Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy. She noted the broader economic impact of the program as well, including creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing, retail, real estate, and energy services industries. “Shutting it down is a risk to those jobs.”

For years, though, Trump has complained about efficiency benchmarks for appliances. Lower-flow showerheads, he said, make showers “five times longer.” LED light bulbs make him look orange. People are flushing efficient toilets ”10 times, 15 times” and, with dishwashers, “the electric bill is 10 times more than the water.” These claims are, by and large, inaccurate.

Veracity aside, Trump’s efforts play into a larger culture war against appliance standards—one that the White House has continued to aggressively wage since his second term began.

In February, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced it was delaying efficiency regulation of appliances ranging from central air conditioners and freezers to washing machines and dryers. In March, it said it was withdrawing four efficiency standards that the Biden administration had proposed and was pushing back the implementation date of others. Last month, Trump issued an executive order titled, in all caps, “MAINTAINING ACCEPTABLE WATER PRESSURE IN SHOWERHEADS.”

The Energy Star rollback would likely be the most visible attack yet on appliance efficiency, and it even has manufacturers worried. Last month, more than 1,000 companies, cities, and groups wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin urging him to support the program.

“This would be a very big deal,” said the representative of one manufacturer, who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the potential closure. Energy Star, they explained, helps companies market and move higher volumes of high-efficiency products. “It’s an odd thing that you would jettison a voluntary public-private partnership that costs a rounding error in EPA’s budget and affords consumers billions of dollars of value.”

Beyond eliminating staff, the EPA’s exact plans and timeline for any Energy Star rollback remain unclear. The agency did not respond directly to questions about the program’s future but in an emailed statement told Grist the “EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit the American people.”

Losing Energy Star could have a range of ripple effects. In addition to making selecting products more confusing for consumers, it could hinder people’s ability to qualify for federal, state, or utility incentives that are tied to the certification. There is, for example, a federal tax incentive for building Energy Star homes. Appliance rebates are also often linked to the designation.

“How are those programs now going to know which kinds of appliances they want to give a rebate to or a tax incentive for?” asked Glover. States or utilities could conceivably fill that void with their own standards, creating a patchwork of regulation and incentives. “Having Energy Star that gives a federal standard makes far more sense. It’s certainly easier for consumers to understand what their options are.”

These are among the many details that would have to be worked out if the Trump administration proceeds with its plan.

“I don’t think they expected this kind of pushback,” said Steve Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, about the media attention that the latest change has garnered. “This is getting a lot of publicity.”

The move could also face legal challenges, he said, pointing to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as one possible roadblock for the administration. It directs the EPA and DOE to, among other things, “promote Energy Star-compliant technologies as the preferred technologies in the marketplace” and “preserve the integrity of the Energy Star label.”

Another possibility is that the DOE takes over as Energy Star’s primary administrator. But as with other aspects of the president’s ambitious agenda, it could take time to sort out real-world impact.

If Energy Star is ultimately eliminated, Nadel said the labels would eventually go away—as would potentially billions in consumer savings. But, he added, “Nothing is done yet.”

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Trump’s DOJ Stripped Lifeline Legal Services From the Most Vulnerable Detained Immigrants

On April 3, a Justice Department contracting officer sent the Acacia Center for Justice a “notice of termination for convenience.” The email instructed the nonprofit to discontinue several federally funded programs described as“no longer needed.” Among them was the little-knownNational Qualified Representative Program (NQRP),which appoints government-paid counsel to detained immigrants deemed unfit to represent themselves in court due to serious mental health needs or cognitive disabilities.

The termination notice put the organization and its dozens of legal partners on high alert. As the federal government’s main contractor for this $35-million program since 2022, the Acacia Center for Justice has relied on federal dollars to refer anywhere between 300 to 400cases a year to a network of about 35 direct services providers that includes other nonprofits, small private law firms, and solo practitioners.

The following day, the Washington, DC-based group received another letter, this one rescinding the previous order “until further notice.” As they tried to make sense of the confounding messages, within the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review—charged with managing the US immigration courts system— agency officials were discussing how to reduce the scope of the NQRP and “end representation funded by EOIR,” according to internal emails obtained through litigation. The downsizing, they anticipated, should “allow for representatives to withdraw” from ongoing cases and “facilitate finding other representation.”

The planned defunding wasthe latest in a series of cuts by the Trump administration to legal aid forimmigrants. In practice, it would all but eliminate the only available mechanism for immigration courts to designate counsel to people with mental health needs in detention centers across the United States.

Finally,on April 25, the Justice Department dealt the final blow, notifying the Acacia Center for Justice of its decision to cancel the discretionarynationwide initiative that immigrant rights advocates, attorneys, and former immigration judges say is a lifeline for hundreds, if not thousands, of detained people in immigration proceedings. With the exception of detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington—where court-ordered government-appointed counsel provisions remain in place—advocates anticipate these especially vulnerable immigrantswill go unidentified and unrepresented, left to face potential deportation without a fighting chance.

“What I fear the most is that they are going to languish in detention with no end in sight,” said Lisa Okamoto, program director for the NQRP at the Acacia Center for Justice, “or without understanding what they are facing.” Without federal funding, immigration attorneys are unlikely to take on these highly complex cases since most detainees, many of whom are held in remote detention centers where pro bono assistance is hard to come by, can’t afford legal representation. (The EOIR declined to comment on the termination of the program.)

“What I fear the most is that they are going to languish in detention without no end in sight, or without understanding what they are facing.”

“To think of those people behind bars without anybody telling them where they are or why they are there or what might happen to them…” she said, pausing as her voice became emotional. “And then the serious risk of them being put on a plane and possibly evensent to a country they have no ties to.”

The nationwide government-appointed counsel program was created in 2013 in responseto a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit and settlement order in Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder that established the right to legal representation for immigrant detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington, who have been deemed “incompetent” by an immigration judge to properly defend themselves.

One of the named plaintiffs in the case was José Antonio Franco-Gonzalez, a 29-year-old Mexican man with an intellectual disability. A psychological report had found that his cognitive functions resembled those of a toddler. An immigration judge requested a psychiatric evaluation of Franco-Gonzalez, which concluded that he had no idea what kind of court he was appearing in and it would be “impossible for him to stand trial.”

The judge agreed that Franco-Gonzalez’s case couldn’t move forward without legal representation and decided to put it on hold. But Franco-Gonzalez remained in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), without another day in court. Talia Inlender, then a young lawyer giving “know-your- rights” presentations to immigrant detainees at the Santa Ana City Jail, had learned about his case from an ICE officer. When she met him in late 2009, he had been detained for almost five years. Franco-Gonzalez couldn’t sign his own name to join Inlender’s workshop.

Even today, Inlender, now the deputy director of UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, still remembers her first encounter with Franco-Gonzalez. She said his skin looked almost translucent from the lengthy confinement period and he was practically nonverbal. He didn’t know his birthday or age. And, he had little understanding of his situation other than wanting to be reunited with his family members, many of whom were US citizens and lawful permanent residents.

In early 2010, Inlender’s organization at the time, Public Counsel, and the ACLU sued on behalf of Franco-Gonzalez and another detainee, both of whom were “effectively lost” in the system. Franco-Gonzalez was released from detention three days later. (He went on to become a naturalized US citizen.)“But we knew he wasn’t the only one suffering in immigration detention solely as a result of a mental disability,” Inlender said. Around that time, Human Rights Watch published a report titled “Deportation By Default” noting that people with mental illnesses made up an estimated 15 percent of the detained immigrant population.

So they expanded the case to a class action lawsuit to cover detainees whose conditions—including schizophrenia, severe depression, and dissociative identity disorder—might prevent them from having a fair day in court.In Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the courts found that detained immigrants with mental disabilities facing deportation were entitled to counsel as a reasonable accommodation based on the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In fact, that was the “only means” by which someone not competent for self-representation could exercise their rights.

On April 23, 2013, a federal district judge in California issued a permanent injunction requiring the government to appoint a qualified representative to those immigrants and to grant a bond hearing to detainees who had been in custody for six months or more. The permanent injunction only applied to the three states covered by the lawsuit. But just the day before that injunction, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security announced a policy to “enhance procedural protections,” including processes for mental health screenings and competency hearings, throughout the country.

Today, that nationwide program is being gutted. “I know firsthand the difference it makes to have a fair hearing with a lawyer by your side,” Inlender said. “I think it’s just a devastating blow to due process and to all of the individual people and families that are going to be deeply impacted by the termination.”

Amelia Wilson, a law professor and director of the immigration justice clinic at Pace University who served as the NQRP’s program manager from 2016 to 2018, described the program as a “massive seismic change.” Wilson had been involved in deportation defense work on behalf of immigrants with mental health issues for years. Prior to 2013, she said, it was a “hodgepodge system.” She used to get “clandestine calls from immigration judges” alerting her to unrepresented immigrants on their dockets who needed assistance. Sometimes the information about a potential client came from a DHS attorney or guards in detention centers. “I would take cases that would just appear before me,” she said. “But there was no referral system.”

The rollout of the nationwide policy program was imperfect, Wilson said. But it was an opportunity to offer life-saving legal services, in a formalized way, to more people who otherwise would have been unlikely to receive them. By the time she left, the program had been implemented in 25 locations outside of the original Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction and, as of 2024, more than 2,500 immigrants had been given legal counsel through it.

“We could fund not just the attorney but also social workers, experts, post-release planning so if the person was going to be released on bond or if they won their case, it wasn’t just like, here, open the doors, goodbye, good luck,” Wilson said. Most immigration judges were receptive to, if not enthusiastic about, the initiative. “It was a major shift for the population it was meant to serve—by far the most vulnerable of any immigrant group I can think of.”

“It was a major shift for the population it was meant to serve—by far the most vulnerable of any immigrant group I can think of.”

Detained immigrants in removal proceedings, especially those who are unrepresented, already face an uphill battle. Unlike inthe criminal justice system where someone is considered innocent until proven guilty, immigrants seeking relief bear the burden to prove their case. To be found credible, they usually have to recount past events in detail. For people with dementia, for example, or experiencing memory issues due to traumatic brain injury, that alone can present an obstacle.

Gregory Pleasants, a lawyer who worked in the creation of the government-appointed counsel program, said immigrants with mental health needs were often detained indefinitely and subject to solitary confinement. As a result, their conditions only worsened. “Predictably,” Pleasants said, “people who are detained with mental illness just got deported without being heard by a system that is primarily designed to deny detain and deport.”

Pleasants recalled a former client with schizophrenia who had a recurring delusion about something he called a “re-existence plan.” Eventually, after spending time with the man and his family, Pleasants was able to gather information helpful to the case, and the client was allowed to stay in the United States. “No trial can be fair that leaves a person with mental illness alone before a court, especially one as draconian as the immigration system,” Pleasants said. “Without a lawyer, people don’t have a prayer. They don’t have a chance in hell.”

What theNQRP did was build an infrastructure of skilled lawyers, paralegals, and social workers equipped to provide meaningful and trauma-informed detention and deportation defense. For Pleasants, it represented a “brief gleaming moment” of promise that due process could be realized in the immigration system. The dismantling of the program means “that promise is slipping out of our hands,” he added, “and that’s a grievous loss.”

On May 5, nine legal service providers filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s partial termination ofthe government-paid counsel program. The organizations argue they are faced with an “untenable choice” between having to withdraw representation from some of the roughly 100 affected NQRPcases or continuing the work without payment. Alternatively, they might have to move funds from other critical services and risk staff layoffs.

“We are not talking about a huge amount of money, especially relative to some of the other programs,” said Evan Benz, a senior attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, the only subcontractor providing legal services under the program across Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North and South Carolina. “But these resources make all the difference in these individuals’ lives because without this program there’s no realistic way that they would ever have a competent and qualified attorney to represent them in their case.”

Laura Lunn, the director of advocacy and litigation at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Colorado, has represented somewhere between 20 and 30 NQRP clients in her nine years as a qualified representative. Often, she explained, these types of cases are more time and resource-intensive because of the added challenges of obtaining testimony, collecting evidence, and doing cross-examination. Lawyers may need to rely more heavily on forensic psychology and country condition expert reports, both of which incur expenses.

Some of Lunn’s clients have experiencedaudio and visual hallucinations that prevent them from knowing what’s real and what’s not. These symptoms are further exacerbated by prolonged detention. “Imagine trying to synthesize an immigration case while dealing with those types of external stimuli,” Lunn said. Without legal counsel, people will lose in court not because they lack a strong case, but because they simply can’t present the information needed to an immigration judge.

In some instances, someone’s claim to stay in the United States is based on their disability and how it could make them susceptible to harm or even persecution if they are deported back to their home country. Lately, Lunn has been thinking a lot about one of her clients from South Sudan, a survivor of the civil war who became an orphan as a child. As a result of severe PTSD, he heard voices of people threatening to kill him. Ultimately, he was allowed to stay in the United States. “If he had been flown back there,” Lunn said, “I have no doubt in my mind that he would have been targeted and he would have been killed.”

That man is just one of many people Lunn and her organization have helped over the years. She chokes up thinking about those immigrants whose needs may prompt an immigration judge to determine they should be appointed counsel, only for there not to be anyone available to ensure they have a shot at a reasonably fair process. And she wonders: How much longer can they keep assisting their current clients? The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, which had anticipated more than $310,000 in funding through the NQRP for 2025, has 15 clients whose legal counsel falls underthe now-stricken program.

“People have survived so much in their lives to get to the place where a court appoints a qualified representative for them,” Lunn said. “It’s just heartbreaking to think about them being alone again.”

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Ed Martin’s Derailed Nomination Shows Donald Trump’s Power Is Waning

In late March, Ed Martin, then the embattled acting US Attorney for DC, showed up at a community meeting at a police station to tout his efforts to combat crime in the district.

Martin politely fielded questions from attendees, even answering one from a man who, citing Martin’s widely condemned description of his office as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers,” asked: “How do we as residents trust that you are going to have our back and not be a personal lawyer for the President of the United States, who is a felon and a racist?”

Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for this is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.

Martin responded by citing Matthew Graves, who had occupied his position under President Biden. “My predecessor” also “worked for the guy elected president, for his polices, for his vision,” Martin said. “And that was his preference. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“The president ran on an agenda,” Martin added. “The agenda includes major policy initiatives that a prosecutor has a role in. And I certainly, as you know, don’t shy away from being public about those.”

As far as I know, that is the most that Martin, whose nomination Trump pulled Thursday due to opposition by GOP senators, has said publicly in defense of his wildly controversial tenure.

It was a dishonest downplaying of his effort to make the country’s largest prosecutorial office into an instrument of MAGA retribution, but also telling.

As US attorney, Martin fired, demoted, and investigated January 6 prosecutors, threatened to prosecute congressional Democrats for hyperbolic political statements, suggested his office would investigate DOGE critics and former prosecutors faulted by Trump, and harassed medical journals, Wikipedia and Georgetown’s law school with threats to punish them over their speech.

Martin’s remarks at the community meeting justified these actions as merely the GOP-version of what Democratic prosecutors did under Biden. I don’t know if Martin really believes that, but it’s not true.

US Attorneys do pursue the policies of presidents who pick them, but within legal and normative limits set by the Constitution, Congress, and longstanding practice. No US attorney, until Martin, volunteered to use his office against critics of government policies, including those who “acted simply unethically” and “chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.” No other US Attorney has reportedly attempted to present a grand jury with evidence for a criminal case against the Minority Leader of the US Senate based on five-year-old criticism of the Supreme Court. Nor has a US Attorney personally attempted to use criminal investigative power to seize money from environmental groups awarded contracts by the past administration without having any evidence of a crime.

Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for debasing his office is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.

Martin, though only an acting US Attorney, got a torrent of negative press coverage in part because he loudly volunteered himself as the leader of Trump’s crusade to use the DOJ against his political enemies. As we wrote in a March: “In a new administration defined by a mixture of malevolence and ineptitude, Martin has emerged as an avatar: a typo-spewing henchman of the moment, eager to help Trump transform the Justice Department into a political tool—and unable to shut up about it.”

The evident defeat of Martin’s nomination is a loss, though by no means a death knell, for proponents of the unitary executive theory’s claim that Justice Department prosecutors are the president’s lawyers, and have always been.

With Martin, Trump tried to force GOP senators to confirm an unqualified bumbler and extremist just because he is Trump’s “favorite US Attorney.” That didn’t work. That makes Martin’s derailed nomination a defeat for Trump too.

Trump backed off the nomination after Senate Republicans said they lacked the votes to confirm him. The fatal blow came from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a judiciary committee member who said he would oppose Martin due to his support for January 6 rioters. In January, after initially appearing to oppose Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary, Tillis, who is up for reelection next year, buckled amid heavy pressure from Trump and supported the former Fox News host’s confirmation. Though Martin sought a lesser post, Tillis’ opposition may signal that Trump’s plummeting poll numbers are diminishing his power.

The rejection of Martin’s nomiation is also a sign of the limits of Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of January 6 and the lies that led to it. Martin, as Mother Jones has detailed, was a 2020 election truther who was deeply involved in the Stop the Steal organizing. In the aftermath of January 6, he claimed “antifa” was behind the attack, called it a “hoax,” referred to January 6 attackers as “patriots” and said the marauders who were prosecuted should receive “reparations.” Martin has never renounced those claims. As US attorney, he has continued to promote a conspiracy theory suggesting that the FBI helped plan January 6. He even railed against January 6 prosecutions while appearing, in his official capacity, at a March fundraiser attended by convicted seditionists and an alleged Nazi sympathizer who Martin later tried to distance himself from.

Installing Martin as the head of the office that prosecuted 1,600 people for the attack was a deliberate provocation to anyone, including Republican senators, who rejects Trump’s effort to redefine a deadly attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power as a “day of love.” Ed Martin is a minor figure. But his defeat is a significant sign that Trump’s power to make the government accept his lies is ebbing.

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Is the New Pope MAGA or Woke? Depends Who You Ask.

The Conclave has spoken, and President Donald Trump will not be the next pope. Instead, that designation will go toRobert Francis Prevost, who will be known as Pope Leo XIV, the Vatican announced on Thursday.

Leo, who is 69 years old and was born in Chicago, will be the first American pope following the April 21 death of Pope Francis—and everyone wants to claim it as a win for their side of the political aisle. To some on the right, Leo’s selection is a boon for Trump’s “America-first” administration. To other Republicans, he is not pro-Trump enough, based on a series of seemingly critical posts on his X account. The left, on the other hand, is eating those up.

Trump called Leo’s selection “a Great Honor for our Country” in a Truth Social post congratulating him. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk claimed that voting records show Leo is a strong Republican who has consistently voted conservatively. Some of his prior comments appear to make him indistinguishable from the MAGA crowd: The New York Times previously reported that in 2012, Leo spoke out against what he called “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.” And as a bishop in Peru, he railed against what he called “the promotion of gender ideology” in schools, which he alleged “seeks to create genders that don’t exist.”

But Trump opponents quickly pointed to Leo’s X account as evidence that the new pope may be a member of the resistance. Leo’s most recent repost shared comments from Evelio Menjivar, an auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, who criticized the Trump administration’s seemingly illegal deportations to El Salvador.

Leo also posted two links this year that criticized Vice President JD Vance following Vance’s attempt to use an ancient Catholic concept to justify the administration’s mass deportations of immigrants, which Francis blasted as incorrect. “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” read the headline of one article Leo posted. Ten days later, Leo shared another articlerecounting Vance’s and Francis’ different interpretations of the doctrine. Nonetheless, Vance congratulated him on his selection as pope on Thursday.

In May 2020, at the height of protests following the police murder of George Floyd, Leo wrote: “We need to hear more from leaders in the Church, to reject racism and seek justice.” And during Trump’s first term, Leo shared posts decrying Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and the violence in Charlottesville, where Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”; supporting Dreamers; urging Trump to take action on climate change; and criticizing Trump’s Muslim ban.

Some political strategists and advocates on the left pointed to these posts as evidence that the pope shared their politics. Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters, on the other hand, were triggered. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called him “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis” in a post on X.

“Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to,” she added. “Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”

After far-right activist and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec dug up Leo’s prior X posts, he wrote, “God Save the Church,” and, “The Pope is not infallible on political matters.”

The truth is that only time will tell where Leo falls on the ideological spectrum. As his own record suggests, he will more than likely not be a faithful adherent to either side of the political aisle. Pope Francis was not either. While he supported immigrants and Palestinians under Israeli bombardment and tepidly welcomed gay people into the church, he was firmly anti-abortion, reportedly used an anti-gay slur, and claimed “gender theory…does not recognize the order of creation.”

Like Francis, wecan expect Leo to be fully loyal only to the man upstairs.

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Trump’s New Surgeon General Pick Wants to “Raise the Vibration of Humanity”

On Wednesday, following controversy about inconsistencies in her résumé, President Trump withdrew his nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat to become surgeon general, and gave the nod to alternative medicine practitioner and author Dr. Casey Means.

“Her academic achievements, together with her life’s work, are absolutely outstanding,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States History.”

Her academic achievements include dropping out of a medical residency in otolaryngology because, she says, she was frustrated that the discipline did not focus on “root causes.” Means’ medical license is inactive, according to Oregon medical board records.

Means’ medical opining has occasionally veered in a New Age direction.

Her life’s work includes co-founding Levels, a business that sells glucose monitors, co-writing the book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, and promoting an eight-day online course on metabolic health.

Means has promoted the idea that the national epidemic of chronic disease is attributable to diet and lifestyle choices, an argument that largely echoes the talking points of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That’s no coincidence: both Means and her brother Calley, who describes himself as a lobbyist and evangelist for healthy food, played a central role in advising Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Calley Means, who now works with Kennedy as a White House health advisor, is said to be assisting with the creation of a “Make America Healthy Again” commission, set to focus on chronic disease and preventable illnesses in children—meaning ones influenced by lifestyle factors like diabetes, rather than vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles. Last September, at a four-hour Senate roundtable hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) that was meant to welcome Kennedy’s MAHA movement to the GOP fold, the senator hailed Casey “the person who is the catalyst for this event.”

In her writing and speaking gigs, Casey Means highlights the importance of metabolic health, an enthusiasm for many alternative health practitioners. Like many of them, she assigns a mystically important role to the gut: In Good Energy, Means states that “conditions like depression and schizophrenia” are “tied to poor gut bacteria,” adding that “researchers can identify a person with depression or schizophrenia just by analyzing their gut bacteria composition.” (The study Means appears to be citing specifically says that more research is needed to determine whether there’s a causal link between schizophrenia and the gut microbiome.) She’s also hailed raw dairy, writing how she wants “to be free to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm.”

But Means’ medical opining has occasionally veered in a more New Age direction. She has claimed that “the universe” speaks to her and that people can “manifest” what they want by writing it down. “Perhaps the body is simply the material ‘radio receiver’ through which we can ‘tune in’ to the divine,” she wrote in an October 2024 newsletter. “We will get instructions (through human inspiration and reason) for what we need to do to raise the vibration of humanity and create a sustainable future… The future of medicine will be about light. I don’t exactly know how yet.”

“Humans are out of alignment with the Earth and depleting its life force,” she wrote the next month. “And human bodies are now exhibiting signs of blocking the flow of energy through them. This is insulin resistance. We are the Earth.”

Means’ track record of statements about medicine and health that aren’t backed by science are troubling to Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. He noted that Means’ treatment modality of choice, functional medicine, is not a recognized medical specialty, and that it often involves unnecessary tests and unproven supplement regimens. Functional medicine is “using a veneer of medicine to sell supplements in the hope that these fix a patient’s health problems,” he said. “It is not evidence based.” Jarry was “appalled, yet not surprised in the slightest” about her nomination, which, he said, “shows a continuing disregard for expertise and an embrace of make believe.”

It’s not just people in the scientific community who are displeased with Means’ nomination. Despite seemingly crowd-pleasing views on topics like life forces and raw milk, some of Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine and alternative health worlds have intimated that they see the Means siblings as sinister functionaries of Big Pharma, Big Food, or something much worse. Some of those people greeted Means’ nomination with outrage and dark suspicion, with many claiming Dr. Kelly Victory, a health influencer and ivermectin fan, was Kennedy’s preferred choice.

“I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr…. neither of these siblings would be working… (and that people much more qualified would be).”

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, the founder of the anti-vaccine group Americans for Health Freedom, tweeted that Victory had told her she was being chosen for the position last week, but that she ultimately “was passed over because of her outspoken stance against the mRNA shots. Clearly RFK has no power.” Several other major anti-vaccine figures also tweeted their anger that Victory hadn’t been chosen, including Steve Kirsch, a wealthy Silicon Valley figure turned anti-vaccine crusader. “As surgeon general, @DrKellyVictory would have advocated to pull the mRNA shots from the market immediately,” he tweeted. “Probably why she was not selected. Trump does not want those shots to be pulled.”

Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan also expressed immediate displeasure, tweeting that Means’ nomination was “very strange,” as she hinted at a longtime distrust of the Means siblings.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” she wrote. “I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be). I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn’t President Trump). With regards to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.”

Shanahan didn’t respond to a request for comment about whose “Manchurian assets” she believes the Means siblings to be.

Shanahan’s tweet was, in turn, a quote tweet of Dr. Suzanne Humphries, an osteopathic physician who’s been critical of vaccines. (Humphries appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast last month to promote those views.) Humphries, too, was critical of Means as a choice, tweeting, “I can’t help but think this is a very carefully groomed and selected person. Just about no clinical experience. Talks a great game about everything but vaccines. Feels all wrong. Why? There were so many better choices.”

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The Brain Rot Cabinet

Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration.

“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that. We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

“For people who aren’t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman.”

To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one’s brain to be thoroughly bathed in the corrosive acid of the right-wing internet, where it’s taken on faith that the Biden administration either allowed hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked or perhaps actively participated in that trafficking themselves.

Kennedy’s comments are an excellent demonstration of how, in the Trump era, public statements by administration figures and their congressional backers are heavily influenced by the far-right and conspiratorial internet—sometimes in addled, confused, or strangely remixed forms. Why is Attorney General Pam Bondi promising to release an “Epstein client list” that probably isn’t real?Why is Kennedy also claiming that vaccines are made from “fetus debris,” which is a lie, and promising to fight chemtrails, which don’t exist, but which he recently claimed DARPA is spraying into the sky? Why is Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claiming he wants a Congressional hearing into “what actually happened” on September 11, as he claimed a “controlled demolition” brought down building 7? Why are Donald Trump and Elon Musk reviving a 1970s conspiracy theory which claims that the gold inside Fort Knox might be gone? Why was a government website where Americans could once order free Covid tests has been transformed into a webpage promoting an extremely longwinded version of the still-unproven lab leak theory? Why is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) declaring there were “two shooters” involved in the JFK assassination, before hosting a hearing that in no way proved that?

Rumors, conspiracy theories, memes, jokes, contextless claims and thinly-sourced allegations all now find their way at lightning speed to the White House and to other senior Republican officials, where they’re immediately spat back out in statements and public appearances. These statements make it incredibly clear how deeply online and profoundly conspiracy-brained the modern GOPis—and how much taxpayer-funded time the Trump administration plans to spend pursuing ideas that range from ludicrous to already debunked.

Kennedy, who has previously admitted that he falls for online misinformation “all the time,” and his bald claim that HHS engaged in the trafficking of children caused uproar and confusion, even among the conservative faithful. “If true, this would be a really really big deal,” tweeted collegiate swimmer turned conservative activist Riley Gaines. “Arrest and prosecute!!!!” “HOLY SHLIT,” tweeted Chaya Raichik of the far-right Libs of TikTok.

The way that the claim about 300,000 missing children made it out of Kennedy’s mouth helps to demonstrate how conspiracy theories function in the current, fever-dream version of the GOP. The claim has a long and increasingly convoluted pedigree in right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: versions circulated during the Biden administration, when a self-proclaimed HHS whistleblower named Tara Rhodas claimed the agency routinely released unaccompanied migrant children into the care of people affiliated with gangs like MS-13. Rhodas suspected that these sponsors would then traffic the children.

The claims are a pastiche of true and unproven: in one 2021 case highly publicized by Republican lawmakers, two children were sent to a home where their sponsors had suspected MS-13 ties. Other migrant children—in cases Republican lawmakers have been less excited to discuss—were sent to places where they were labor trafficked, forced to work in slaughterhouses, farms, and factories.

While the Biden administration may have helped create this situation by pressuring caseworkers to move children out of shelters and release them to sponsors as quickly as possible, Kennedy’s more QAnon-ish claim—that 300,000 children have simply vanished into thin air—seems to have its roots in a August 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General. That report found the government “could not monitor the location and status” of all unaccompanied minors known to be in the country, including some 291,000 who ICE had never made steps to remove, and another 32,000 who did not appear for court dates. The report did not state that any of the children had been trafficked. As an expert at the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program explained to CBS, this isn’t a problem of “missing kids” but one of “missing paperwork.”

It’s a very long walk from those facts to claiming that the children are “missing,” let alone being sex trafficked. But by in October 2024, JD Vance claimed during a debate with Governor Tim Walz that 300,000 children were missing. Trump gave a lurid version of the line in a December Time interview. “We have 325,000 children here during Democrats—and this was done by Democrats—who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead,” he said. “What I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents.” That month, incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested that the “missing” youth had been trafficked and pledged to track them down in an interview with the Washington Post where, with no apparent sense of irony or contradiction, he also discussed how the administration would bring back the family separation policy Trump deployed during his first term.

To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one’s brain to be thoroughly bathed in corrosive acid .

But while most people who heard about Kennedy’s claim greeted it with bafflement, reflexive outrage, or, rarely, demands for further proof, according to author and journalist Mike Rothschild, the QAnon community celebrated.

“Kennedy’s comments at the Trump cabinet meeting/praise-a-thon are a great example of a conspiracy theory that makes little sense outside the right wing influencer bubble, but a cause for celebration inside it,” Rothschild, who has written a book about QAnon and another on antisemitic conspiracy theories, explains.

Whether he knows it or not, Rothschild adds, “Kennedy is pushing hardcore QAnon-style moral panic to an audience of devotees who are desperate for Trump to finally sweep away the bad guys and deliver on the promises Q made years ago,” namely to uncover sex trafficking being conducted by high-level Democratic politicians.

“For people who aren’t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman,” Rothschild adds. But Q and its ilk are so mainstream on the right now that it’s finding a large and receptive audience.”

Embracing conspiracy theories has worked incredibly well for the current GOP and Trump administration, a way to keep their base captivated and profitably enraged. In one ongoing example, a February attempt to release Epstein names and flight logs to a group of conservative influencers quickly turned into a mess once it became clear the files weren’t new at all. Nonetheless, Attorney General Bondi has continued to insist new information on the case is forthcoming, claiming this week that the FBI is combing through “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children.” While Rep. Luna’s first JFK hearing did not produce the second gunman she’s said she’s in search of, she has pledged to keep working to provide “needed transparency about federal secrets to the American people,” including about the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

And while Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has provided no further information about the 300,000 children he claims are missing, there’s no question that their speculative existence will be mentioned again, whenever it might be politically profitable to do so.

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FEMA Will No Longer Go Door-to-Door to Assist Disaster Victims

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

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making significant changes to how it will respond to disasters on the ground this season, including ending federal door-to-door canvassing of survivors in disaster areas, WIRED has learned.

A memo reviewed by WIRED, dated May 2 and addressed to regional FEMA leaders from Cameron Hamilton, a senior official performing the duties of the administrator, instructs program offices to “take steps to implement” five “key reforms” for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire season.

Under the first reform, titled “Prioritize Survivor Assistance at Fixed Facilities,” the memo states that “FEMA will discontinue unaccompanied FEMA door-to-door canvassing to focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues, improving access to those in need, and increasing collaboration with [state, local, tribal, and territorial] partners and nonprofit service providers.”

“Going door-to-door, especially in critically hit areas, to share information is very important…Getting rid of it completely is really going to hamper some things.”

FEMA has for years deployed staff to travel door-to-door in disaster areas, interacting directly with survivors in their homes to give an overview of FEMA aid application processes and help them register for federal aid. This group of workers is part of a larger cadre often called FEMA’s “boots on the ground” in disaster areas.

Ending door-to-door canvassing, one FEMA worker says, will “severely hamper our ability to reach vulnerable people.” The assistance provided by workers going door-to-door, they say, “has usually focused on the most impacted and the most vulnerable communities where there may be people who are elderly or with disabilities or lack of transportation and are unable to reach Disaster Recovery Centers.” This person spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.

“Door-to-door canvassing is another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” Geoff Harbaugh, FEMA’s associate administrator for the Office of External Affairs tells WIRED in an email. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, FEMA is changing how it operates and reforming its policies to better support disaster survivors and the American people. President Trump’s recent executive orders empower states to effectively respond to natural disasters and provide resources at the community level.”

Todd DeVoe, the emergency management coordinator for the city of Inglewood, California, and the second vice president at the International Association of Emergency Managers, says that in his years of working in disaster management he has seen how many survivors don’t get information about recovery or resources without door-to-door outreach—despite emergency managers using strategies like direct mailers and radio and newspaper ads.

“Going door-to-door, especially in critically hit areas, to share information is very important,” he says. “There’s a need for it. Can it be done more efficiently? Probably, but getting rid of it completely is really going to hamper some things.”

FEMA’s door-to-door canvassing became a political flash point last year during Hurricane Milton, when an agency whistleblower alerted the conservative news site The Daily Wire that one official had told workers in Florida to avoid approaching homes with Trump yard signs. Former FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability during a hearing last year that the incident was isolated to one employee who had since been fired. The employee, in turn, claimed that she acted on orders from a superior and that the issue was a pattern of “hostile encounters” with survivors who had Trump yard signs.

Republicans on the Oversight committee alleged that they had received information indicating “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” throughout FEMA. In March, the agency fired three more employees following an internal investigation into the issue.

The Office of Professional Responsibility “investigation found no evidence that this was a systemic problem, nor that it was directed by agency or field leadership,” Hamilton wrote in a letter sent to Oversight chair James Comer.

The canvassing controversy made it into the White House’s 2026 budget, released Friday, which decries “woke FEMA grant programs” and proposes cutting $646 million from “non-disaster” FEMA programs.

“FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the President in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated,” the budget document states. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There is no mention in the FEMA memo of the investigation or recent controversy and no reasoning provided for ending the door-to-door canvassing process. FEMA has deployed door-to-door canvassing in states with federal disaster declarations approved under the Trump administration: An agency press release from March mentions teams going door-to-door in West Virginia following February’s severe storms.

The memo comes at a turbulent time for the agency as it prepares for disaster season. In late April, CNN reported that FEMA stood to lose around 20 percent of its staff in buyouts as part of cuts related to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Last week, Politico reported that the administration had stopped approving allocations for a crucial hazard-mitigation program just a few weeks after news broke that the agency would end one of the federal government’s biggest climate-adaptation programs.

Some of the other reforms in the memo include directives for the agency to “emphasize assistance available from other partners” over federal aid, as well as to emphasize efforts to rely on local- and state-run recovery centers rather than federally run ones, “reducing the need to establish FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers and optimizing support for state and locally led recovery efforts.” The memo emphasizes that the agency intends to “respect the primacy of states, territories, and Tribal Nations in disaster response.”

“Our role is to support our partners, not replace them,” the memo states. “FEMA does not act alone.”

DeVoe says that like many of the responsibilities being shifted from FEMA to local response, the task of surveying survivors door-to-door will now fall to local and state responders. These groups may be hard-pressed to find the budget and manpower, especially as federal programs and grants keep getting cut.

“California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Florida, Texas—they’re going to be OK,” he says. “It’s going to be those smaller states—are they going to be OK?”

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DOGE Killed Dozens of Grants That Supported Women Workers

President Donald Trump has repeatedlypromised to support women, grow jobs, and revive American manufacturing in his second term. But a recent round of cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to undermine all three of those supposed priorities.

On Tuesday, the Department of Labor (DOL) terminated more than two dozen grants to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology, and to fund programs to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and workplace harassment. The grants were administered by the Women’s Bureau, an office created by congressional mandate in 1920 to support women’s employment.

This article, the first to report on the grant cancellations, is based on communications with four current and former Labor Department employees familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau, and five of the affected grantees, some of whom also provided copies of termination notices. Experts and advocates say the cancellations will undermine women’s safe participation in the workforce at a time when Trump has promised “a boom like no other” and “millions and millions of new jobs.” They also threaten to reverse the progress women have made in the trades: Research conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR)—a Washington, DC, think tank that researches women’s employment—has found, for example, that the number of women working in construction grew by nearly 30 percent from 2018 to 2023. (Spokespeople for DOL, the Women’s Bureau, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

“A lot of these programs have been designed to help women get into the pipeline of some of these male-dominated jobs, and make those jobs safer places for women to be,” said Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at IWPR. “Any administration [would] value programs that help overcome these barriers…This is clearly not doing that.”

DOGE sees it differently. In a Tuesday night post on X, the office bragged about cutting millions “in wasteful DEI grants” at DOL, including cuts to “gender equity awareness training.”

But DOGE’s cuts may not be legal: The two-year grants are mandated by a bipartisan act of Congress passed in 1991 that aimed to get more women into apprenticeships and nontraditional careers, and required the Labor Department to make support and training grants to that end.

The most significant Women’s Bureau cancellations affected the congressionally mandated, two-year Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants, which support recruiting and training women in industries where they constitute less than 25 percent of workers, including construction, manufacturing, and information technology. Grantees from the past two years received notices on Tuesday that their funding was immediately being terminated. Four of the termination notices reviewed by Mother Jones state that the programs do not support the department’s “priorities for its grant funding, including with regard to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” (Trump, of course, signed an executive order on his first day in office seeking to purge DEI programs across the federal government.)

Last year, the Women’s Bureau awarded $6 million in WANTO funding to nine organizations, the department’s largest-ever award; the year before that, it awarded $5 million to seven groups. The only grant not canceled on Tuesday, according to DOL sources, was one given to Chicago Women in Trades, which is suing the administration for its anti-DEI executive orders.

Nora Spencer, founder and CEO of Hope Renovations, a North Carolina nonprofit that supports and trains women to work in construction, was in a workforce development meeting on Tuesday when the Labor Department notified her that her organization was losing about $300,000 of a $700,000 grant, which it used to support job training for 76 participants, including recent high school graduates and people in their 50s and 60s, with tools and materials, instructors’ salaries, and internship stipends—and about half of which it was still counting on reimbursement for. The internship program will now have to be shuttered, Spencer said, and she may be compelled to make changes to the way the organization is staffed.

The termination notice justified the cancellation by quoting Spencer’s grant application, in which she wrote that Hope Renovations sought “to increase the number of women…in construction.”

“It was so blatantly sexist,” Spencer told me. “It stung to see that from my own government.”

The cancellation did not make economic sense to Spencer, either: The construction industry, she pointed out, is already expected to take a hit from Trump’s tariffs and mass deportations, given the role that immigrants play in the field, as my colleague Isabela Dias has written. Plus, research has shown that the industry will need to hire more than half a million new skilled workers per year to keep up with demand, especially in light of its aging workforce: More than 40 percent of the current construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031, according to the National Center for Construction Education and Research.

“To be losing a development program at a time that’s really critical to bringing on workers, it’s insulting to the industry,” Spencer said. “I’ve worked with builders who are like, ‘I don’t care what gender you are, I need to know if you can swing a hammer or if you can pull wire.'”

Vermont Works for Women, a nonprofit that supports women’s and young people’s career development, is also losing the nearly $400,000 WANTO grant it received last year. That grant helped fund training for about 55 women and nonbinary people per year for careers in construction and renewable energy, and to launch a new pre-apprenticeship program in the semiconductor and advanced manufacturing industries, according to its executive director Rhoni Basden. That program, which was going to kick off this fall, is now on indefinite pause. The news, she said, came as “an absolute shock.”

“It completely dismantles [the] only progress that has been made within these industries,” Basden said, adding that half of Vermont’s population consists of working-age women. “This is a prime program to help fill multiple gaps that our state is experiencing.”

Moore Community House, a nonprofit in Mississippi, lost more than $700,000 in funding for its Women in Construction program, which has already trained nearly 200 people and was counting on $250,000 in further reimbursement. Branden Forshee, the organization’s CEO, pointed out that Mississippi has some of the country’s highest poverty rates for women and children. “Workforce training programs like this one are so important in this area,” Forshee said, “and taking funding from that, again, it directly contradicts [Trump’s] goal” of creating jobs.

A Labor Department employee described the WANTO program as “definitely life-changing for a lot of women,” saying the funding “gives [women] a career path they might not have had before.” Another DOL employee said the DOGE cuts would mean that fewer women “are going to be exposed to these different career paths” or “have the opportunity to get careers in these industries that have family-sustaining wages.”

A separate set of Biden-era Women’s Bureau grants known as FARE—Fostering Access, Rights, and Equity—that focused on preventing and addressing gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace were simultaneously canceled, DOL sources said. Last year, that program awarded $1.4 million in grants to four community organizations, according to an archived version of its webpage.

The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence used a FARE grant to create a toolkit to help employers identify signs of domestic violence, said the coalition’sCEO, Meghan Scanlon. The organization was also about to begin creating a more in-depth training program on the topic for employers, staff, and supervisors, which will no longer proceed, she said.

While it’s not unusual for new administrations to create new programs, it is unusual for officials to claw back funding that a previous administration already promised to pay out, Labor Department sources said. And the cancellations are especially ironic in light of Trump’s campaign-trail promise to “PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”

“He’s literally taking away the enforcement mechanisms for protections,” Bahn, of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said, calling the move “absurd.” (As I have reported, the Trump administration also reneged on that promise by gutting the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health and cancelling grants for programs supporting crime victims.)

A pair of smaller DOL grants—one focused on projects to get women and people of color into infrastructure jobs, and another to reduce gender and racial disparities in state paid leave programs—were also canceled, according to the same departmental sources.

Spencer, who runs the formerly Women’s Bureau–funded construction program in North Carolina, expects DOGE’s latest cuts to come back to haunt the Trump administration.

“We live in an industry that is very much filled with people who voted for Trump, and I think there’s a lot of feeling right now in [the] industry that they’re just overlooking people who voted them in,” Spencer said. “I think things like this are just going to exacerbate that.”

Update, May 7: This article has been updated to distinguish outstanding and total grant amounts provided to North Carolina nonprofit Hope Renovations.

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24-Hour Vigil to Save Medicaid Takes Over National Mall

At a 24-hour vigil to protect Medicaid on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) was to the point: to protect democracy, Medicaid has to be protected, too.

The vigil, which kicked off Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET, is hosted by the advocacy group Caring Across Generations and will be livestreamed until it ends Thursday; beyond Raskin, the event featured speakers including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) alongside disability advocates and Medicaid users, in response to a series of White House attacks and cuts on health services spearheaded by President Donald Trump, his advisor Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Sometimes,” Raskin said, “people say to me, ‘Well, is it more important to go and fight for democracy and judicial independence and the right to vote, or is it more important to go and fight for Medicaid and Social Security?’ That’s a false choice. It’s all the same.” The United States, Raskin said, needs to represent everyone—not just people like Trump and Musk.

Since February, Republicans in Congress, at Trump’s prompting, have been pushing a federal budget that would entail up to $88 billion in annual cuts to Medicaid’s $600 billion budget, which supports some 72 million users. While President Trump has repeatedly promised not to cut Medicaid directly, the budget proposals before Congress won’t be possible without drastic cuts to the social safety net.

“What they’re doing with the budget is to destroy community,” Pelosi said. “Community has a word—unity—in it, and that is what we have to be: completely unified in our fight for Medicaid, for Medicare, for Social Security, for SNAP.”

“We will be out here as long as it takes!” Maria Town of @aapd-disability.bsky.social highlights that Medicaid allowed her to have physical therapy and her mom to have respite care.

[image or embed]

— Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) (@autisticadvocacy.org) May 7, 2025 at 10:53 AM

For disabled people who rely on Medicaid, those cuts would almost certainly mean a reduction of services, including funding for home care workers—if it doesn’t lead to their being kicked off the service altogether. Raskin cited one Maryland constituent who had shared with him that Medicaid was what made it possible for him to live independently and work.

“This is a matter of life and death for millions of people across the country,” Raskin said. “So the question is, what kind of America are we going to be? Are we going to be in America for dictators and plutocrats and theocrats and autocrats, or are we going to be an America for all the people?”

The vigil, Raskin said, helped to demonstrate that Americans were “not going to allow” Donald Trump to sign a widely harmful budget into law.

“It is through American democracy that we’ve created Medicaid, that we’ve created Social Security, that we’ve created Medicare,” Raskin said. “We are not going to allow them to tear it down.”

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A Holocaust Tale for Today

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

Imagine a situation in which the threat of fascism is so pressing that you consider sending your children to another country. That’s what happened decades ago for the family of Julian Borger, the world affairs editor of the Guardian. Borger has long been a keen observer of wars, global crises, and international relations. His work is an essential read for anyone looking to make sense of our mad world. But with a new book, Borger has cast his gaze back to the 1930s and a piece of family history he stumbled across only recently.

After Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938, Borger’s grandparents and his father, Robert, then 11 years old, as well as all the families of the Jewish community of Vienna, became targets of the vicious antisemitic campaign waged by the Nazis and their Austrian allies. Soon after the Germans’ arrival, as the Borgers were being forced to give up their radio shop and subjected to hate, humiliation, and violence, they managed to find a way to send their only son to the United Kingdom. And, as Jews were being sent to labor camps, they, too, escaped Vienna.

This is quite the moment to be writing about Nazi authoritarianism and the Holocaust.

That’s as much of the story as Julian knew. No details. His father never talked about what happened. But not long ago, through an odd coincidence, Julian discovered that his grandparents had taken out a three-line ad in the Manchester Guardian—the previous name of the newspaper where he works—looking for a Brit who would take in his son. He started poking about and discovered that other Viennese Jewish families had done the same and that scores of Viennese children had found refuge from the Nazis because British citizens responded to these pleas. The result of his subsequent investigation is a wonderful book that is both a personal memoir of hidden history and a gripping account of the fates of these Jewish children, including his dad: I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust. This is quite the moment to be writing about Nazi authoritarianism and the Holocaust. Julian was kind enough to talk with me about the book and what insights about today he’s gained from digging into the past.

How did you first uncover this unknown past about your father?

It was the archivist at the Guardian who found it. In late 2020, at the end of the first Trump term, I was talking to an American immigration lawyer. She was trying to stop the deportation of West Africans, in particular Cameroonians, to their home country, where, in the midst of civil war, they were likely to be killed or tortured. She made a remark about how we keep reliving the same traumas, generation on generation. And she mentioned how her dad had escaped from Vienna in the late 1930s, and she said it had something to do with the Manchester Guardian, the original name of the newspaper. It reminded me that in our family lore the Manchester Guardian had something to do with my dad coming out of Vienna.

This gave me the idea of asking our archivist. Because the Guardian was coming up to its 200th anniversary, I thought it might make for an interesting story. I mentioned to him there was something about my father. The next day, he wrote back and said, “Is this it?” Attached to the email was an advert I’d never seen before. I had thought that maybe there had been an article in the paper about Brits taking in Viennese children. I had no idea there had been an ad with such a personal plea.

Courtesy Julian Borger and the Guardian archives

The wording of it was straightforward but emotional: “I Seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11. Viennese of good family.”

When did it appear?

On August 3, 1938. This was five months after the Anschluss, and the lives of Jews in Vienna were becoming more precarious with every passing day. They had lost their jobs, their livelihoods. My father, like other Vienna Jews, was removed from his school and put into a separate Jewish school. I only learned much later some of the things that happened to my family in those months, because this was something we never talked about. This advert opened the door to the buried history of my family.

“Children could leave without having to pay the various exit taxes the Nazis demanded. Parents had to decide to send their children away, not knowing if they’d be able to join them.”

What happened with the advertisement your grandfather placed? Were there many responses?

My father was lucky that my grandfather did this early. These adverts began to appear late July 1938. A couple of Welsh school teachers in Caernarfon, Wales, who were looking for ways to help saw it. They could see what was happening in Central Europe. They wanted to make a difference and help in any way they could. They started corresponding with my grandparents. They even traveled down to the Home Office in London to make sure the paperwork was speeded up. At the time, you could get a child out of Austria if or she had a sponsor in a destination country willing to look after them and pay for their education. It was much harder for adults. So Jewish parents in Vienna had to make this decision. Do we all stay together, or do we at least try to save our children?

How long did the process take?

The advert was published in August, and in October, he was traveling to the UK. At this point, the Nazis were focused on getting Jews out. This was before the final solution. Children could leave without having to pay the various exit taxes the Nazis demanded. Parents had to decide to send their children away, not knowing if they’d be able to join them.

After you saw the ad, you realized there was an untold story here not just about your family. What did you do next?

After first experiencing the surprise of seeing my grandparents pleading for the life of my father, I realized he was not alone. In that block of adverts, there are five other kids. So I searched the archives and found 80 children advertised this way in the Manchester Guardian. It seemed obvious to me, as a journalist, that I had to find out what happened to all of them. That is the starting point of the book.

Of those 80, how many did you track down?

Mostly all of them. I was able to find out what happened to them. But when it came to locating those for whom there was someone who could talk about them, that was a smaller number. Within that group, there were seven who left very full accounts of what had happened to them, mostly in memoirs written for their families. There was one survivor of the children from these adverts still alive, in her 90s, and living in Connecticut. I came across her late in the project, after I had despaired of finding anyone still alive. I mainly talked to the children of these people. In each case, I would send them the advert. And in all but one case, they’d never seen or heard of the advertisement.

What happened to your father’s parents?

They both survived. His mother got out of Vienna with a visa for domestic work. There was a shortage of maids at that time in Britain. She was able to travel out of Vienna with my father. But her visa did not allow her to have a child with her in Britain. So she could not look after him or stay with him. Then, with the help of his foster parents, they were able at the last moment in 1939 to obtain a visa as an agricultural laborer for my grandfather. That part of the family all survived. Others did not.

But did they all unite at some point?

They never lived together again as a family. My father stayed with his foster parents in Wales until he went to university.

The book starts with a dark day in 1983 when you’re in your 20s, come home, and learn your father, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University, has just committed suicide. Is there a connection between that and the story you’re telling in this book?

His foster mother definitely thought so. When my father took his life, it was my job to ring round people, and the person I left until last was his foster mother. Her immediate reaction was to say he was Hitler’s last victim: “They got to him in the end.” This came as a complete shock to me. It was something we just didn’t talk about. We didn’t talk about the past. In the note he left, he didn’t mention any of this. But she was quite adamant about it.

Much later, when I was researching this book, I realized why she seemed so certain. That’s because she was the last person he went to see before taking his own life. Tragically, she was away that weekend. He hung around the house for a little bit and then disappeared. When I called her, she knew that he’d come looking for her and that she’d been away. She felt he was trying to revisit that part of him, the boy who turned up as an 11-year-old refugee on her doorstep, and wanted to reconnect with that part of his life. At the time that didn’t mean much to me or our family because it was a piece of his life we didn’t talk about. It took on greater significance nearly 40 years later when I found the advert and began investigating my father’s early years.

“We could now remember people who had died under the Nazis who had been completely blotted out of our family history. We grew up thinking that as a family we survived scot-free. But it turned out there had been people who had perished in our family.”

The British are famous for being reserved when it comes to their emotional lives. Did you ever have any inkling of how your father’s experiences as a young boy—living in Nazified Austria and escaping—affected him?

There’s the British stiff upper lip. He definitely wanted to see himself as British. But I also found this attitude was widespread among these refugees. At least half of them did not mention the past and the adverts to their families until quite late in life, when they came under heavy pressure to talk about it. I also found this among the survivors from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The vast majority did not want to burden the next generation. It was a conscious decision: The trauma stops with me, and the next generation shouldn’t know. I believe that was his approach, and that was why he rebuffed any attempt to talk about his past. I once tried to do a school project on the Anschluss, thinking he’d help me. But he was very standoffish and did not want to get involved.

You’re best known as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian covering crises and foreign affairs around the globe. What was it like to write a memoir?

It goes against the grain in news-oriented journalism to write in the first-person singular. It was counterintuitive for me and felt self-indulgent. But the driving force behind writing the book was chronicling the extraordinary stories of these seven survivors. And the price for doing that was to tell this very painful story of our family that we had tried to block out. That ended up a blessing, because I found out a lot that had been hidden from our family that we could be proud of. We could now remember people who had died under the Nazis who had been completely blotted out of our family history. We grew up thinking that as a family we survived scot-free. But it turned out there had been people who had perished in our family. They just were not mentioned; their pictures were not on our walls. I’m grateful the book pushed me in a direction so that they now will be remembered. I went to visit their graves in Vienna—for those who had graves. On each it says, “unvergessen.” Unforgotten. That was a promise not kept. This book was a way of redeeming that promise.

You say some of these stories of these children are remarkable. Give me one.

Can I give you three? One is a guy called George Mandler, who lived very close to my dad in Vienna and was just a bit older. He came to Britain. But many Jewish refugees there in 1940 thought Britain was going to fall. Most of the kids in this book ended up getting on boats and going to the US. He did that and later signed up with the US Army and became one of the Ritchie Boys, an organization of refugees—many Jewish from Central Europe—who were trained to be intelligence officers and sent back to the front lines to interrogate German prisoners and conduct counterintelligence operations. (They were trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland.) Mandler helped to chase the remnants of the SS through the forest of post-war Germany. He and two other Ritchie Boys came across an SS hideout in the middle of the woods in Germany and discovered a trove of Nazi cash. They decided to divide the loot among themselves as a kind of restitution and never told anyone else—until he wrote about it in a memoir for his family.

There was one girl who ended up in the Shanghai ghetto, a forgotten episode of the Holocaust. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took control of the international settlement in Shanghai and didn’t know what to do with the Jews. After Japan and Germany became allies, the SS showed up and advised the Japanese to put all the Jews on an ocean liner and torpedo it. That was too much for the Japanese, and, as kind of a compromise, they rounded up the Jews, placed them in a ghetto, and significantly worsened conditions. But the majority of these Jews survived. This woman, Gertrude Langer, in a long interview about Shanghai, gave a fantastic description of what that was like and also described pre-war Shanghai, a town essentially run by two Iraqi Jewish families and like a little Vienna. This was a whole episode of Jewish history I knew little about.

The third one is a boy named Fred Schwarz, who didn’t get as far as Britain. He got stuck in Netherlands, in a Nazi transit camp called Westerbork, and then was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He and his brother survived all of it, and he described their harrowing experiences in intimate details in a book he published in Dutch called Trains on a Dead Track. It’s one of the most extraordinary accounts of survival I’ve ever read. It’s so intimately and precisely remembered, and he recounts these extraordinary scenes at the end of the war, when the camp inmates and their SS guards were both desperately trying to flee the Red Army and reach the American forces.

Working on this book, no doubt, caused you to think more about the Holocaust than we are generally accustomed to doing. But as a journalist, you’ve covered many horrors and genocidal actions. Did working on this book change how you see the Holocaust?

No matter how black or dark an idea we have of the Holocaust, it’s still impossibly tainted, because all our accounts of the Holocaust are from people who survived it. This book contains the tales of survivors, but I’m very aware these are the stories of a small minority who got away. The great unknown is all the stories of the people who did not survive. Maybe that is so overwhelming and too difficult for us to absorb. We learn our history of the Holocaust out of the mouths of people who survived.

The dead don’t speak.

Yes, the dead don’t speak.

There’s a tendency to make comparisons between what is happening now in the United States and what occurred in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. I believe we should learn from history but also be cautious in drawing parallels. After spending so much time researching what happened in Vienna, which was a liberal and cosmopolitan city where Jews had become well established in the highest reaches of society, do you see anything from that period relevant for Americans today?

Several things. One is that among these well-established Jewish families was a conviction that it couldn’t possibly happen here. The Nazis could come in, but it couldn’t last too long, because we are too civilized, and Vienna is too civilized. In that situation, it was the pessimists who survived and the optimists who were killed. Similarly, it was the wealthy Jews who were killed. They had more to lose by leaving, so they stayed.

“This is a reminder of how fragile are the things that we take for granted in terms of civilization and how quickly it can change—and how there are, without doubt, among us people who would enthusiastically take part in atrocities against their neighbors.”

The second thing I found notable was the overnight transformation of the Viennese people. The people who my family, my father, my grandparents saw as schoolmates, neighbors, and friends turned on them overnight when the Nazis arrived. When my grandfather was on his hands and knees with the other Jews being forced to clean the sidewalks, he was spat on and jeered by the people in his district. Many of them he knew. This is a reminder of how fragile are the things that we take for granted in terms of civilization and how quickly it can change—and how there are, without doubt, among us people who would enthusiastically take part in atrocities against their neighbors. There are potential psychopaths among us. What matters is how permissive the environment is. That’s a lesson we learned in Vienna, but also in Yugoslavia and in Rwanda—how fragile is this idea of civilized society.

One of the biggest surprises of the book for me was learning that my great aunt, who was a very diminutive and rather eccentric woman who dressed like it was still the 1930s and who was a terrible hypochondriac and neurotic—a figure of some derision within our family—was a hero of the French Resistance. She was a communist who went to Paris and then to the south of France and became part of a German-speaking network within the resistance that was used to infiltrate German camps, bases, and office. Her son, who was like a brother to my father, was sent to Austria to report on factories and if necessary, sabotage or foment unrest. But the Gestapo learned the identities of the members of his network and came for him. He ended up being taken back to Vienna and tortured to death by the Gestapo.

Our family didn’t know any of this history. My great aunt knew but she didn’t tell anyone. After the war, she went back to Vienna. Her husband and her son were dead, and she lived out the rest of her days a sad figure, existing rather than living. As incurious children, we would visit her and have no idea of her history and what she had been through. That’s a powerful lesson. You just don’t know about people.

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North Carolina GOP Judge Finally Concedes After Six-Month Effort to Steal Election Fails

Six months after the November election, Republican state supreme court candidate Jefferson Griffin finally conceded to Democratic Justice Allison Riggs on Wednesday after his unprecedented effort to throw out thousands of votes and overturn Riggs’ win was rejected by a federal court.

Two recounts affirmed Riggs’ 734-vote margin of victory after the election, but Griffin, an appeals court judge, refused to concede and challenged the eligibility of more than 65,000 voters. He presented no evidence of illegal voting, but two GOP-dominated courts in North Carolina—the state of appeals and state supreme court—green-lit his scheme to throw out enough votes to potentially reverse Riggs’ win.

On Monday, however, federal district court Judge Richard Myers, who was appointed by Donald Trump, overruled the state courts in North Carolina and ordered the state board of election to certify Riggs’ election. “You establish the rules before the game,” he wrote. “You don’t change them after the game is done.”

Riggs celebrated the ruling in a statement: “After millions of dollars spent, more than 68,000 voters at risk of losing their votes, thousands of volunteers mobilized, hundreds of legal documents filed, and immeasurable damage done to our democracy, I’m glad the will of the voters was finally heard, six months and two days after Election Day. It’s been my honor to lead this fight–even though it should never have happened.”

“This is a righteous victory for democracy and a clear defeat of political gamesmanship,” added DNC Chair Ken Martin. “For 200 days, Republicans in North Carolina sought to overturn the will of the people, hijack a state Supreme Court seat, and systematically undermine basic faith in our elections.”

Even though he was ultimately unsuccessful, Griffin’s six-month effort to overturn the election did tremendous damage to the democratic process.

Riggs’ victory maintains the 5–2 Republican majority on the state supreme court. But it gives Democrats a shot at retaking the court before the critical 2030 redistricting cycle, when the court could oversee new legislative maps. That’s one reason the race was so hotly contested. “We’ve knocked over the first domino that we need to for Democrats to take back the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2028,” Riggs told me after the election.

Even though Griffin was ultimately unsuccessful, his six-month effort to overturn the election did a tremendous amount of damage to the democratic process. He got much further than Trump didin 2020, convincing two state courts in North Carolina to throw out thousands of otherwise lawful votes after two recounts had affirmed Riggs’ victory and every other election from November had been certified. That will go a long way toward making election subversion the norm rather than the exception, especially in states, like North Carolina, where Republicans control the top courts and election boards.

Democratic State Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls called Griffin’s attempt to steal the election “a bloodless coup.” Voting rights activists referred to it as “a nonviolent version of January 6.” Just like Trump’s effort to overturn the election inspired election deniers to seize positions of power across the country, what played out in North Carolina could embolden other losing candidates to go to extreme lengths to contest future elections.

“His effort to change the rules after an election is unprecedented,” Riggs wrote in one legal brief. “And if Judge Griffin succeeds, the implications are staggering. Rather than suing before an election to challenge rules they do not believe are valid, candidates will have an incentive to say nothing and wait to see if they win. Then if they lose, they will drag out elections through litigation for months, seeking to throw out votes until they win. Never again will North Carolina voters walk out of the voting booths knowing that their votes will count, and the court system will be flooded with lawsuits after every election seeking to challenge votes all over the State.”

Sadly, that dangerous precedent may now have been set even though Griffin ultimately lost. Republicans are getting closer and closer to achieving their ultimate goal of toppling democracy altogether.

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Aviation Industry “Failing Dramatically” on Climate, Insiders Say

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

The aviation industry is “failing dramatically” in its efforts to tackle its role in the climate crisis, according to a newly formed group of aviation professionals.

They say they are torn between their passion for flying and their concern for the planet and are calling for a fundamental transition of the industry, including controlling flight numbers.

The group, Call Aviation to Action, says the industry is overly optimistic about emissions-cutting technology and trapped in a business model that demands ever-growing flight numbers. The lack of significant climate action from the industry risks it being destroyed, the group says, as heavy regulation from outside will become necessary as the climate crisis intensifies.

Karel Bockstael, a co-founder of the group, and a vice president of sustainability at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines until 2022, said: “We see the good that aviation can do but we also see that we must reinvent our industry to restore its positive contribution to the world.”

Due to their international nature, carbon dioxide emissions from aviation are excluded from the national plans that countries submit to the UN’s climate body. Instead, the UN’s aviation body, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), is tasked with tackling the planet-heating gases.

“As a commercial pilot, I’m trained to recognize risks and act, and the climate crisis is one we can’t ignore.”

Bockstael said: “My view is ICAO have been failing dramatically on that responsibility, because the only thing it came up with after eight years of discussion is the Corsia scheme, which is nothing more than carbon offsets for the growth of aviation above a certain threshold, exporting your problem to another industry.” The scheme has been criticized as “unambitious and problematic” and has yet to require any airline to use a carbon credit.

He said: “If we do not act, by 2050 aviation emissions will be about a quarter of all human-caused emissions—that will be really a very shameful position.

“We love the magic of flying but we foresee it being destroyed. That’s what we want to prevent. We hope our initiative will help a really big group of aviation professionals to speak up, because we think they’re the silent majority. We need to break the silence and encourage our industry leaders to become part of this transition.”

The Guardian has previously been contacted by numerous aviation professionals concerned about the climate crisis but who felt unable to speak publicly.

The group said it had already signed up dozens of professionals before its launch on Tuesday, including engineers and airport and airline executives.

A spokesperson for ICAO said: “ICAO is committed to developing technically robust aviation standards and guidance material that can be implemented worldwide to drive progress towards the net zero carbon emissions goals that governments have set. As a politically neutral standard-setting body, we do not comment on the positions or activities of specific external parties.”

Tom Reynolds, an airline pilot and member of Safe Landing, a global group of climate-concerned aviation workers, said: “As a commercial pilot, I’m trained to recognise risks and act, and the climate crisis is one we can’t ignore. But I believe we’re on the cusp of a new jet age. With bold leadership, investment and the right policies, we can build an aviation industry that celebrates and preserves the beauty of flying for generations to come.”

Flying causes more CO2 emissions than any other form of transport per mile and is dominated by rich passengers, with 1 percent of the world’s population responsible for 50 percent of aviation emissions. The industry’s climate plans are rated “critically insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker.

ICAO forecasts a doubling of passenger numbers by 2042, and the industry argues that more efficient aircraft, sustainable fuels and Corsia can control CO2 emissions. The ICAO has been accused of having been captured by the industry, the Guardian reported in February.

Independent experts say the feasible scale of measures to cut aviation emissions is extremely unlikely to compensate for such a doubling in traffic, with, for example, fuel-efficiency improvements now stalling. The CEO of Qatar Airways called the airline industry’s emissions goals a “PR exercise” in 2023.

Bockstael said: “The absolute impact of aviation is still on a pathway up despite all the longer-term aspirations of ICAO [of net zero by 2050].”

The Call Aviation to Action group said the industry should set targets for absolute emissions cuts in line with science-based CO2 budgets and stop “lobbying against climate policies.” The industry should also acknowledge that managing global demand for flights in a fair way is part of the solution, it said.

Bockstael said the cost of emissions-cutting technologies would increase the price of flying but that additional measures, such as flight or carbon taxes, could be needed to keep passenger numbers at sustainable levels. Such constraints on demand must be fair, he said, offering equitable access to flying in developing countries and addressing heavy frequent flyers in rich nations.

Finlay Asher, an aerospace engineer and member of Safe Landing, said: “As an engineer, what really excites me is that the Call Aviation to Action proposals would lead to a new golden age of innovation. Our industry is in need of an upgrade: new aircraft designs, new forms of zero-carbon power and new airport layouts to support these. The research, development and operation of this new air transport system will not only create more jobs but also make flying greener, cleaner, quieter and more accessible to society.”

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Nikole Hannah-Jones: Trump Is Erasing Black History

President Donald Trump’s second term has swung a wrecking ball at diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and programs throughout the country. Few writers seem better suited to explain this unique moment in America than Nikole Hannah-Jones.

A New York Times journalist and Howard University professor, Hannah-Jones has spent years studying and shaping compelling—and at times controversial—narratives about American history. In 2019, she created The 1619 Project, a series of stories and essays that placed the first slave ship that arrived in Virginia at the center of the US’ origin story. Today, the Trump administration is pushing against that kind of historical reframing while dismantling federal policies designed to address structural racism. Hannah-Jones says she’s been stunned by the speed of Trump’s first few months.

“We haven’t seen the federal government weaponized against civil rights in this way” since the turn of the century, Hannah-Jones says. “We’ve not lived in this America before. And we are experiencing something that, if you study history, it’s not unpredictable, yet it’s still shocking that we’re here.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks to Hannah-Jones about the rollback of DEI and civil rights programs across the country, the ongoing battle to reframe American history, and whether this will lead to another moment of rebirth for Black Americans.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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Trump Is Eager to Defund Harvard, Yet Publicly Subsidized Hate Groups Get a Pass

One particularly surreal aspect of Donald Trump threatening the tax-exempt status of Harvard, one of the nation’s oldest and foremost educational institutions—and excluding it from federal research funding for refusing to heed the administration’s oversight demands—is the fact that even some of the nation’s most hateful and antidemocratic entities qualify as tax-exempt charities. As I explain in my book, Jackpot:

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation is broadly defined as an organization with religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. There are charities dedicated to “fostering appreciation” for camellias and “promoting the medium of American mime.” (The latter, last I checked, had more than $6 million in assets.) In 2017, according to one investigative outlet, the National Christian Foundation—one of the largest faith-based donor- advised funds—distributed more than $19 million of its donors’ money to tax-exempt charities that were anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant.

Among the NCF’s leading recipients is Alliance Defending Freedom, a network of Christian lawyers that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group for its antigay activities. The Alliance collects tens of millions in tax-exempt donations each year. It has expressed support for foreign laws criminalizing sodomy, represented business owners in court who refuse to serve LGBTQ customers, opposed transgender troops, and even disputed that the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, in Laramie, Wyoming, was a hate crime.

I bring this all up because acting US Attorney Ed Martin, Trump’s ill-fated pick for permanent US Attorney for the Washington,DC, district, apparently had a cozy relationship with the white nationalist group VDare. According to a 2024 report from Media Matters, Martin has called himself a “big admirer” of the nonprofit group. (His nomination appears doomed, albeit for unrelated reasons.) Media Matters wrote:

Martin also repeatedly hosted VDare leader and white nationalist Peter Brimelow on his now-defunct radio program The Ed Martin Movement. During an episode that aired on November 29, 2018, Martin praised Brimelow as “a guy worth listening to” and told him, “I’m always glad to give you a voice, you’re always welcome here.”

VDare, which suspended its activities last July, was an active tax-exempt charity during Trump’s first term. In 2018, too, the Trump administration reinstated the tax-exempt status of white nationalist Richard Spencer‘s National Policy Institute, which had its status revoked automatically for failing to file mandatory 990 tax returns for three years running.

It is telling that a president who never questioned the tax-exempt status of white nationalist groups is now suggesting his IRS might take a hard look at Harvard’s.

Of course, even that simple suggestion would seem to violate federal law, which states explicitly (emphasis mine): “It shall be unlawful for any applicable person”—the president, vice president, any of their staffers, or any cabinet member—”to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.” (The law was passed post-Watergate to ensure that no administration could weaponize the IRS as President Richard Nixon sought to do.)

Even if Harvard has some issues to work out related to alleged antisemitism, US taxpayers continue to subsidize nonprofits that exist largely to stoke anti-immigrant and religious hatred. If we are compelled to support these kinds of groups in the name of “education,” we’d best be compelled to also support legitimate institutions of higher learning. As I wrote in the book:

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who slaughtered those Black parishioners in Charleston, wrote that he was motivated by “black on white” crime propaganda he discovered on the website of the nonprofit Council of Conservative Citizens, one of whose former board members, a self-described “race realist” named Jared Taylor, runs the like-minded New Century Foundation, another tax-exempt nonprofit. VDare Foundation, a vehemently anti-immigrant journalism nonprofit, has collected more than $5 million over the past decade. Its website features headlines such as “Milwaukee Shooting: Six Out of Eleven Mass Shootings in 86% White Wisconsin Are by Minorities or Immigrants” and “NYPD Releases Pic of Suspect in Tessa Majors Killing. Guess What? He’s Black.”

Taylor’s New Century Foundation also appears to be inactive these days, and an entirely unrelated nonprofit exists under the same name. When I reached Taylor by phone circa 2020, he told me he disagreed with Roof’s motive of starting a race war (“that’s immoral”), but said “his grievances were understandable.” Taylor also disputed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of the Council of Conservative Citizens and New Century as white nationalists, saying, “I call myself a ‘race realist’ and a “white advocate.’ ”

Alas, our current, Orwellian, administration—with its nasty scapegoating of immigrants and clumsy attempts to erase the historical contributions of women, LGBTQ people, and nonwhites from the public commons under the guise of eliminating “DEI”—has proved itself a “white advocate” at the expense of just about everyone else.

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RFK Jr. May Have Inspired Acting US Attorney’s Harassment of Medical Journals

Ed Martin, the acting US Attorney for Washington, DC, had recently been peppering medical journals with “vaguely threatening” letters accusing them of acting as “partisans” in scientific debates.

Those missives are just one genre within a barrage of communiques Martin has sent to perceived Trump foes—congressional Democrats, special counsel Jack Smith, a former Mueller prosecutor, nonprofits and Georgetown law—since taking office in January, part of a clumsy effort to turn the nation’s largest prosecutorial office into an organ of his boss’s retribution.

But the letters Martin addressed to prominent publications, including the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and JAMA, and lesser-known journals such as CHEST, published by the American College of Chest Physicians, have been among the weirdest.

The US Attorney in DC has no evident authority over the tax status of medical journals published in other jurisdictions. Martin, who has no prosecutorial experience, let alone a scientific background, also seems to lack any understanding of, or interest in, how peer-reviewed journals work. His letters ask whether the publication in question accepts submissions from scientists with “competing viewpoints,” and inquire about how they “handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled their readers.”

The letters fail to acknowledge the strong First Amendment protections scientific journals enjoy against the government telling them what to print.

But the reason for Martin’s bizarre campaign against medical publications became clearer Monday night, when Trump, in a social media post attempting to resuscitate Martin’s declining hopes of Senate confirmation, said Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. believed Martin’s confirmation “is IMPERATIVE in terms of doing all that has to be done to SAVE LIVES and to, MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN.”

Martin also had a little-noticed meeting with Kennedy on March 18 at HHS.

Thank you @USAEdMartin for our great discussion today on ways we can work together to MAHA. https://t.co/SixDTx5Vu0

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 19, 2025

Martin began writing to the medical journals the following month. “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publication…are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” he wrote to CHEST, before asking about the inclusion of competing viewpoints. Martin also questioned the journals about the influence the National Institutes of Health exerts over “the development of submitted articles.”

These lines of questioning track views expressed by Kennedy. As the New York Times recently noted, Kennedy attacked NEJM on a podcast last year as an example of a journal that had taken part in “lying to the public” and “retracting the real science.” Kennedy, then a presidential candidate, said he planned to use federal criminal and civil statutes against the journals. “I’m going to litigate against you under the racketeering laws, under the general tort laws,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to sue you unless you come up with a plan right now to show how you’re going to start publishing real science.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon declined to comment on whether Martin targeted the journals at Kennedy’s direction. But Nixon cited the March 18 meeting where the men agreed to work together.

Kennedy’s apparent role in Martin’s missives is an ominous development for science publishers. Martin’s odds of confirmation declined on Tuesday, when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Judiciary committee, announced his opposition. If not confirmed, Martin will have to leave office on May 20, after which Jeb Boasberg, the chief judge of the DC District Court, whom the Trump White House also has attacked, would be charged with picking an interim attorney to serve until the Senate confirms a presidential nominee.

But a Kennedy campaign against scientific journals and other institutions will likely carry on in some form. Though Martin’s nomination may be dead, MAHA will live at least a bit longer.

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Trump-Appointed Judge Blocks GOP Plot to Steal North Carolina Election

The unprecedented GOP attempt to overturn a Democratic victory in a North Carolina State Supreme Court race suffered a major setback Monday night at the hands of a stalwart conservative judge who was appointed by Donald Trump.

In a lengthy ruling,federal district court Judge Richard Myers rejected the effort by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin to throw out thousands of votes. Myers ordered the state board of election to certify Democrat Allison Riggs’ 734-vote victory.

On April 11, six months after the election, the Republican-dominated state supreme court—still short-handed from the contested election**—**had green-lit Griffin’s attempt to invalidate enough ballots from overseas and military voters to potentially reverse Riggs’ victory. Democratic Justice Anita Earls called that decision “a bloodless coup.”

“It’s hard to envision a more ‘severe restriction’ than retroactive invalidation of one’s vote.”

On Monday,Myers overruled the state Supreme Court’s decision. “This case concerns whether the federal Constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals,” he wrote. “This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible. To this court, the answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”

Myers found that the state court decisions agreeing with Griffin’s legal challenges would violate “the equal protection and substantive due process rights of overseas military and civilian voters.” He prominently cited Bush v. Gore, the landmark 2000 case in which the US Supreme Court found that a manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated voters’ rights to equal protection under the law because it only applied to three large, Democratic-leaning counties.

“Today, we won,” Riggs said in a statement. “I’m proud to continue upholding the Constitution and the rule of law as North Carolina’s Supreme Court Justice.”

After two recounts had affirmed Riggs’ victory, Griffin initially challenged 60,000 ballots cast by early and mail-in voters who had allegedly submitted incomplete voter registration forms, even though all of them showed ID when they voted. But Griffin didn’t identify a single instance of someone who had voted illegally, and his list including example after example of lawful voters who had been wrongly challenged—including Riggs’ own parents.

The North Carolina Supreme Court rejected that aspect of Griffin’s challenge, but itallowed him to selectively target the ballots of military and overseas voters from heavily Democratic counties who did not show ID when they voted from abroad because it was not required at the time, according to rules codified by the state election board before November. Griffin asked the court to throw out more than 5,000 ballots cast by voters in six Democratic-leaning counties, which he said would result in his victory.

Myers found that this scheme violated those voters’ equal protection and due process rights. “As a consequence, overseas military and civilian voters who cast a ballot in Guilford County are required to undertake additional efforts in order to have their votes counted,” he wrote. “Their neighbors in Randolph, Alamance, and Rockingham Counties need not. That disparate treatment between similarly situated voters, based solely on their casting of ballots in ‘different counties,’ amounts to ‘a constitutional violation’ of the Equal Protection Clause.” He also wrote that “retroactive invalidation of overseas military and civilian voters’ ballots violates their substantive due process rights.”

Griffin additionally challenged close to 300ballots cast by US citizens living abroad whose parents had established residency in North Carolina. The state Supreme Court ordered those ballots thrown out with no opportunity for the voters to prove their eligibility, even though the law granting voting rights to those so-called “never residents” was unanimously passed by the North Carolina legislature in 2011 and at least 30 people on the list had voted in North Carolina before. “The court finds that post-election ballot disqualification for individuals erroneously designated as Never Residents constitutes a substantial burden on the right to vote,” Myers wrote.

The 68-page opinion—authored by a conservative federal judge—represented an emphatic defeat for Griffin. “It’s hard to envision a more ‘severe restriction’ than retroactive invalidation of one’s vote,” Myers wrote.He called Griffin’s post-election challenge “an attempt to change the rules of the game after it had been played” and added that the“court cannot countenance that strategy.”

Myers gave Griffin a week to appeal the order before the state board certified the result. Election law expert Rick Hasen predicted that further appeals would be rejected, including by the US Supreme Court, given the strength of the due process and equal protection arguments.

Riggs’ victory would maintain the 5-2 Republican majority on the state Supreme Court. But it would give Democrats a shot at retaking the court before the critical 2030 redistricting cycle, when the court could oversee new legislative maps. That’s one reason the race was so hotly contested. “We’ve knocked over the first domino that we need to for Democrats to take back the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2028,” Riggs told me after the election.

But even if Griffin ultimately loses, which now appears likely, his monthslong effort to steal the election sets an extremely dangerous precedent. He got much further than Trump didin 2020, convincing two state courts in North Carolina to throw out thousands of otherwise lawful votes after two recounts had affirmed Riggs’ victory and every other election from November had been certified. That will go a long way toward making election subversion the norm rather than the exception, especially in states where Republicans control state courts.

It shouldn’t be considered a major victory for democracy when an election result is certified six months after the contest has concluded. But that’s where things stand in Trump’s America.

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Why is Everybody Hating on Richie Rich?

For kids like me, who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, comics were a big deal. Our media landscape otherwise consisted mainly of books and records, commercial radio, and, in my family’s case, a small black-and-white TV with a coat hanger antenna that got four staticky channels. So we periodically raided our piggy banks and headed to the Stop-N-Go for candy and comics. My favorite was Richie Rich.

Richie was wildly popular, a brave and generous little fellow with unfathomably wealthy parents. He’s 9 or 10 years old in the comics, with a signature outfit consisting of white booties, blue shorts, a black jacket, and a white shirt with a big red bowtie. (He’s a teenager, with outfits less Little Lord Fauntleroy, in the 1980s cartoon series—ditto the 1994 Macaulay Culkin movie.)

Swimming pools filled with cash, monogrammed ships and planes. All part of the Riches’ over-the-top aesthetic.NBCUniversal

Had someone compared you to Richie back in the day, you might have thanked them. After all, he used his vast wealth for good. But Richie’s reputation has fallen upon hard times. “We all knew Trump was richie rich scumbag,” one Bluesky user wrote in March. Another posted, in reference to the Virginia governor and Trump sycophant Glenn Youngkin: “‘Richie Rich’ Youngkin (R), thinks poor people should just fucking stay poor.” A third circulated a parody comic book cover, “Richie Reich,” featuring a dour Musk/Richie hybrid doing the Nazi salute. It got more than 1,100 likes.

“Richie is so misunderstood,” laments 30-year-old news producer Jonny Harvey, whose late grandfather, Leon, along with brothers Alfred and Robert, churned out hundreds of issues of Richie Rich on their family-friendly Harvey Comics imprint from 1960 through 1982—with an encore from 1986 to 1989, when the company was sold—in addition to titles like Little Audrey and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Richie would not appreciate being associated with Elon Musk.Gretchen Kent

“I think people believe he’s this spoiled rich kid,” says Harvey, who is working on a documentary about the late family business. “Because of the blond hair, because he was the son of a multimillionaire, people make that [Trump] comparison. And there couldn’t be anything further from that.”

Something clearly has shifted in our culture that we would so defame this icon of upper-crust benevolence. As a journalist who covers inequality and the author of a book, Jackpot, about the American wealth fantasy run amok, I decided it was time to revisit Richie to try to understand how economic changes since his heyday might account for the transformation. As it turns out, there are important lessons here for grownups, even if you’ve never heard of “the poor little rich boy.”

The Richie comics, in retrospect, are wildly incongruous. Richie’s family (much like Trump’s) is comically ostentatious. His mom is a jewel-laden socialite, his dad some sort of industrialist. They have swimming pools filled with cash, piles of gleaming gemstones, safes swollen to bursting, and driveways paved with gold bars—not to mention monogrammed ships and planes and swank mansions. The “help” includes butler Cadbury, robot maid Irona, and Bascomb, a chauffeur who shuttles Richie around in a stretch limo. Their dog, Dollar, has dollar signs for spots.

It’s all quite over the top, and that’s part of the appeal. Billionaire and former Dallas Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban, raised in a middle-class Pittsburgh family, “loved, loved, loved Richie Rich,” he told me via email. “Watching the cartoon was like driving around wealthy neighborhoods, dreaming of one day being able to afford one of the palatial homes I never thought I would ever even walk inside.”

Yet Richie is no snob. His endless money is leavened by courage, loyalty, and sheer goodness. Despite his vast fortune, he steers clear of the trust-fund kids, opting instead to share his adventures with public school pals. Richie’s besties, Freckles and Pee-Wee Friendly, basically live in a shack. “It was so funny,” says Angelo DeCesare, who wrote and drew Richie for Harvey Comics from 1978 to 1980. “It looked like this beat-up old thing with boards. They really made them poor!” Gloria Glad, Richie’s sweetheart, is the proverbial middle-class girl next door.

“Reggie was a jerk. The idea was to be more like Richie..” says former Harvey Comics artist Angelo DeCesare. “Reggie was presented as the guy who always got his comeuppance.”NBCUniversal

Plots typically involved Richie using his limitless resources to bail out a friend, help solve somebody’s problem, or foil the bad guys forever scheming to steal his family’s wealth. In a paper, York University marketing professor Russell Belk summarized one 1966 story like this: “To keep his girlfriend Gloria’s father from being transferred out of town, Richie Rich buys a hot dog factory for $500,000 and has her father made general manager. The man Richie outbids for the plant is his father, who was buying it as a gift for Richie’s next birthday.”

The Harvey neighborhood crew includes a Black kid—quite the rarity in mainstream comics back then, though race is never referenced: Tiny’s distinguishing trait is his diminutive stature. “It was a way of showing that we’re all part of the same neighborhood, that we all have the same aspirations…that we all can have fun together,” Kathy Jackson, a professor of media at Virginia Wesleyan University, told Jonny Harvey in an interview for his film. “Certainly, in the 1960s, in the age of civil rights, that had important ramifications.”

Most of Harvey’s founders, artists, and writers were first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants, more than a little familiar with ethnic bigotry. Their mission was to sell comics by creating stories that appealed to kids, encouraged them to read, and imparted good values along the way.

Richie would be appalled by the thought that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” as Elon Musk told Joe Rogan in February. He would never, as Musk did on X, brag about a weekend spent “feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Nor would he terrorize federal workers or seek Medicaid reductions to facilitate tax cuts for his family. He wouldn’t slash research funding, either—Richie loves scientists and inventors. He’d be inclined to build them new, cutting-edge labs—and gleaming hospitals for the sick, and cozy abodes for the unhoused.

Because Richie Rich is not an asshole.

He is, alas, entirely fictional. “There was no such person like that in the world, who had that kind of money and would use it in the way Richie did,” DeCesare told me. To longtime Harvey Comics editor Sid Jacobson, “Richie was his idealized fantasy of what he really wished the wealthy would be; they would be kind,” says son Seth Jacobson, 67, who remembers hanging out with his late father’s team at their offices in Manhattan’s old Gulf and Western Building. “My dad was a diehard Democrat,” he recalls. “He wanted taxes to be higher for the rich and the upper middle class. He wanted universal health coverage.”

Some Richie characters were more in sync with the Mar-a-Lago crowd, like Reginald Van Dough, Richie’s greedy, scheming cousin, and Mayda Munny, a snooty social climber who is desperate to woo Richie away from Gloria but inevitably fails because Gloria loves Richie despite his money, not because of it. “Those comics were very moral. That’s what I liked about them,” says DeCesare. “Reggie was a jerk. The idea was to be more like Richie. Be generous, kind, have empathy for your fellow human beings. Reggie was presented as the guy who always got his comeuppance.”

Ideally, children are encouraged to share and tell the truth—and to care about others. As we grow up, some people continue to embrace those values. Others clearly don’t. As for Richie’s parents, the question of what it might take to amass and protect such riches or who may have been exploited in the process is never explored. Did Mr. Rich, like even the “good billionaire” Warren Buffett, have vast holdings in polluting industries or take advantage of obscure (if scandalously legal) tax avoidance strategies? We’ll never know. Richie exists in a realm free of adult politics, unscathed by what one wealthy Silicon Valley denizen described to me as the “blasé weirdness” experienced by the heirs to vast fortunes—think Succession. (“My wife and I are doing our best for that not to happen,” Cuban told me. “I hope my kids are more like Richie.”)

The values Richie embodied, and our notion of noblesse oblige—the duty of society’s richest to behave with honor, generosity, and responsibility toward those with less—have waned in tandem with a staggering rise in wealth inequality. In 1960, if your salary exceeded $60,000, every additional dollar was taxed at a rate ranging from 71 percent to 91 percent. This helped keep our financial differences in check. But the tax cuts signed by President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s chopped the top bracket from 70 percent to 28 percent. Two years after he left office, Congress enabled a type of trust—by accident, the lawyer credited with inventing it told me—that America’s dynasties now use routinely to transfer vast fortunes, often billions of dollars, to offspring without paying a dime of inheritance tax.

Since Richie’s heyday, we’ve also witnessed the rise of the zero-sum mindset embodied by Trump and his minions. Namely, the idea that every transaction has a winner and a loser—and you do not want to lose. This ethos is now standard operating procedure for a subset of the superrich, compelling ultrawealthy parents to bribe and cheat their children’s way into elite colleges, as revealed in the 2019 scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. It also helps explain why more than 84 percent of that year’s incoming college freshmen—whose collective top priority in 1969 was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life”—selected as their new No. 1 goal: “being very well off financially.”

A uniting myth of America for scrappers and strivers and immigrants is that of a land of opportunity, despite the bigotry that has pervaded our laws and culture. (Leon Harvey would have excelled in advertising, grandson Jonny told me, “but Jewish sons of Jewish immigrants mostly could not get the advertising jobs.”) The distribution of wealth in Richie’s day was by no means egalitarian, but it was markedly more so than today. The notion of a child of superrich parents attending public schools and mixing with poor and middle-income kids was less laughable in 1965, when the pay ratio of CEOs to typical workers at the nation’s 350 largest companies was 21 to 1. By 2019, the ratio had soared to 320 to 1.

A real child of billionaires today probably wouldn’t be running around with poor kids like Freckles and Pee-Wee.NBCUniversal/Sally Edelstein archive

Such vast resource differences contribute to what social scientists call “income segregation,” and I like to call “wealth flight.” “The things that people can afford tend to dictate the spaces that they inhabit,” explains Cornell sociologist Kendra Bischoff, who studies the phenomenon in collaboration with Stanford’s Sean Reardon. Rising inequality increases “the spatial separation of people of different incomes,” she told me. When parents opt into private schools, elite sports leagues, and other exclusive activities for their children, “those are the kinds of structural conditions that lead kids to be a lot less likely to hang out with each other,” and that lack of exposure very plausibly “limits their understanding of the world and decreases empathy for people who are different than them.”

There’s that word again—the one that, in the Trumpian mindset, belies weakness. Indeed, there’s good evidence that people of higher socioeconomic status tend to be less empathetic than their lower-status counterparts. “We find that people who are relatively well-off are less likely to orient to others in social environments,” says Paul Piff, a psychologist who studies wealth and behavior at the University of California, Irvine. What’s more, he says, “upper-class individuals show—both explicitly, they talk about it, and physiologically—reduced signs of compassion, less sympathy. They’re less moved by the needs of others.”

Who’s to know if hoarding money makes some people callous or whether less-empathetic people are simply more prone to pursuing materialistic aims? Cuban restated a theory I’ve heard numerous times, that great wealth merely amplifies a person’s character: If you’re a Reginald sans dough, you’ll end up a Reginald Van Dough. But “if you were nice and caring” before you hit the jackpot, you’ll remain a good person—and have more resources to do good. “Where I think people deviate from that is during the grind to make money—to get to having more than you ever dreamed of,” Cuban says. “That grind is filled with uncertainty for all those not born wealthy. That’s where you focus on your company, often to the exclusion of others. Families. Relationships.”

The ramifications of America’s wealth divide have grown clearer as the Trump regime lays waste to agencies and programs that the families of Richie’s friends might have relied upon and seeks to privatize federal services and enact more tax breaks for the wealthiest 0.01 percent—a group who began this year with an average of $938 million in estimated household assets, and whose share of the nation’s overall wealth has more than quadrupled since 1976, even as the middle class’s share has dwindled.

Richie Rich was a good egg, if a Fabergé one. But today, as America’s wealthiest have fallen in line behind the most egregiously materialistic human being ever to occupy the Oval Office, Richie seems like an anachronism. Remember that Gulf and Western Building where Harvey Comics once had its offices? In the mid-1990s it was acquired by a consortium that included a certain New York City real estate developer. Now it’s the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

The irony, as they say, is rich.

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Bird Populations Are Declining Across North America

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

Bird populations across North America are falling most quickly in areas where they are most abundant, according to new research, prompting fears of ecological collapse in previously protected areas.

Analysis of nearly 500 bird species across North America has found that three-quarters are declining across their ranges, with two-thirds of the total shrinking significantly.

The study, published in the journal Science, indicates that former strongholds for bird species are no longer safe, particularly in grasslands, drylands, and the Arctic.

Some of the study results suggest that we are “seeing fundamental changes to the environments around us.”

In one of the most ambitious uses of citizen science data so far, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology used observations from eBird, a popular application used by birdwatchers to record sightings, to model changes between 2007 and 2021. The granularity of the data allowed researchers to track the rate of change in 10-square-mile segments across North America, showing dramatic declines in areas where less than two decades ago bird species had thrived.

“We’ve known for several years that a lot of bird species in North America have been declining. With this study, we were aiming to understand in much finer spatial resolution where birds were declining and where they might be increasing. Rather than having a range-wide trend to see if a species is going up or down, we want to know where it is going up and down,” said Alison Johnston, director of the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling at the University of St Andrews, UK, who led the study.

“The main ecological finding is that the locations where these species were thriving in the past, where the environments were really well suited to birds, are now the places where they are suffering the most,” she said.

The researchers said further studies were needed to explain the reasons behind the changes, many of which were dramatic, with populations falling by more than 10 percent a year in some areas. Global heating and habitat change were put forward as the main theories behind the shifts, but Johnston said they ultimately did not know.

“The way I interpret this result is that it’s indicative of major changes in our world,” she said. “The fact that where birds used to have strongholds, where there used to be a lot of resources, where the environments were really suitable, are now the places where they are declining most, that suggests to me that we are just seeing fundamental changes to the environments around us. The birds are like the canary in the coal mine,” she said.

The research adds to a recent series of studies that have documented severe declines of birds in nature reserves and protected areas.

Despite the worrying overall picture, the researchers found pockets of stability in bird populations in their analysis, such as the Appalachians and western mountains. In addition, 97 percent of all bird species had some pockets where their populations were increasing.

The team at Cornell University has previously developed methods for reliably converting citizen science observations in apps such as eBird into data that can be used to monitor population changes in a single species. The study authors only included results that had passed strict reliability checks.

Amanda Rodewald from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a professor and co-author on the study, said the methods would allow conservationists to target their efforts.

“It is this kind of small-scale information across broad geographies that has been lacking and it’s exactly what we need to make smart conservation decisions,” she said. “These data products give us a new lens to detect and diagnose population declines and to respond to them in a way that’s strategic, precise and flexible. That’s a gamechanger for conservation.”

Ian Burfield, a global science coordinator with BirdLife, who was not involved in the study, welcomed the research and said it highlighted areas for further investigation.

“North American birds are one of very few taxonomic groups and regions where such data exist to facilitate this approach. This emphasises the vital need for more field data collection, both through formal monitoring schemes and citizen science efforts, in many other parts of the world, especially in the biodiversity-rich tropics,” he said.

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