ICE Agents Concealing Their Faces: Can They Really Do That?

On Saturday, as locals opposed to the federal immigration raids clashed with law enforcement in Los Angeles County, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to disparage the “Radical Left” protesters, and added that “from now on MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED at protests.” He went even further on Sunday, calling for the immediate arrest of masked protesters. The irony is hard to overstate, given that the protests were driven, in part, by footage of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents snatching people off the street.

In one notable incident last month, ICE agents raided a popular Italian restaurant in San Diego, arresting kitchen workers before the evening dinner rush. The execution of such a low-risk raid by agents in tactical gear wearing face coverings and toting assault rifles infuriated onlookers and stirred conflict. “No one’s got their names, no one’s got their faces showing!” one person reportedly yelled as a similar scene unfolded at a Mexican restaurant in Minneapolis the next day.

“Lower your mask!” someone else demanded.

The recent concerns over masking by immigration officers first took holdin March after a viral video showed six plainclothes agents arresting Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk on a Boston area sidewalk. “We’re the police,” they said as they restrained her, their mouths and noses covered by cloth.

“You don’t look like it,” someone off camera said.

The concerns grew more dire in May, when masked officers arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside an immigration detention facility in New Jersey, and spread furtheras ICE agents with ski masks and other face coverings began popping up elsewhere—most notably in Blue states such as California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington. In Virginia, after ICE officers entered a courthouse in plain clothes and a balaclava to arrest two men, a prosecutor considered pressing charges against the officers, saying that onlookers might have thought they were kidnappers. “[A]rrests carried out in this manner could escalate into a violent confrontation, because the person being arrested or bystanders might resist what appears on its face to be an unlawful assault and abduction,” Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley said.

There are instances—like a raid on a murderous cartel or a mafia stronghold—in which it might seem reasonable for police to hide their identities. But routine immigration arrests don’t appear to meet the public threshold for such behavior. “Don’t they need to identify themselves, give a name and badge number, something to that effect?” Felipe De La Hoz, a contributing editor at The New Republic, wrote of the queries he was hearing.

Likewise, Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent turned immigrant rights activist, said her online followers were asking her, “How do we know it’s ICE?”

“If they are legitimate law enforcement agents carrying out a proper arrest under the law, why are they hiding their identities?” asked CNN law enforcement analyst John Miller, who has worked for the NYPD as a deputy commissioner and the FBI as an assistant director.

“At what point will we as a nation find ourselves with a secret police?” wrote Walter Olson, a fellow at the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute.

What are officers suddenly so afraid of—or, as Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch put it recently, “Why are ICE agents such cowardly wusses?”

“Citizens don’t have a constitutional right to know an officer’s identity.”

Masking by immigration agents is actually not new. During Trump’s first term, New York advocacy groups documented instances of officers in black masksrefusing to identify themselves during dawn raids on immigrants’ apartments, and plainclothes agents encircling a taxi with guns to arrest someone, never saying who they were. “Sometimes, people don’t want to be on TV or the internet,” an officer with Homeland Security Investigations told New Brunswick Today in 2017.

But lacking actual data, the experts I spoke with said, it’s unclear whether we’re seeing a true increase in masking by federal authorities over Trump’s first term, or merely an increase in attention paid to the issue.

One reason for the recent proliferation of news stories, according to Budd, the former Border Patrol agent, is that ICE now operates in public spaces more brazenly than it did in the past. Historically, most ICE arrests—which are for civil violations, not crimes—took place in detention settings such as local jails, in cooperation with police who may have picked up an undocumented immigrant for another offense. But lately, the agency seems hellbent on beating its chest out in the open. “They are [making arrests] very publicly when they don’t need to,” Budd says, “to let everybody else know: This is what’s coming for you.”

Although some of ICE’s recent tactics are unprecedented (like sending immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador without a hearing), others (like masking, and not using judicial warrants) are old hat, except now it’s more in your face, “in your schools and your churches,” Budd says.

It’s also happening on a larger scale. The Trump administration has recruited agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Prisons, the IRS, the Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to bolster its deportation dragnet, in addition to local and state police via so-called 287(g) agreements. Back in January, at least two agencies assisting US immigration officials urged their personnel to be “camera ready,” as CNN put it, which basically meant ensuring that their uniforms were clearly identifiable. Last month, by contrast, theFlorida Highway Patrol apparently instructed troopers not to wear name tags while participating in ICE operations, according to an email obtained by News 6, because “there has been a lot of activity and many recordings of us posted online when working with ICE.”

Also in May, the federal government asked journalists at the San Francisco Standard to blur the faces of ICE agents in photographs taken after the agents arrested people at an immigration court—“out of a concern for the safety of our personnel.” (The paper declined.) “They know they are following orders that are violating the Constitution and their oath,” Budd says. “That’s why they mask.

Masks have been a familiar sight since the pandemic, so it’s easy to forget that wearing them in public technically has been illegal for decades in much of the United States—except on Halloween. In the 1940s and ‘50s, many states banned masks in reaction to the Ku Klux Klan, whose members shielded their faces to terrorize Black people. (The laws weren’t passed to protect victims, the ACLU notes, but rather because Southern politicians favored segregation and believed the Klan’s violence hurt their cause.)

New York state has an anti-mask law on the books since 1845, passed in response to anti-rent riots. It prohibits public gatherings of three or more people in disguise. But as writer Melissa Gira Grant pointed out for The New Republic, the law has been enforced selectively—often against activists and working-class people. Masquerades, once a popular form of entertainment among the rich, were allowed, for example, whereas a theater troupe demonstrating against the Vietnam War, anarchists sporting bandannas on May Day, and protesters with Guy Fawkes masks during Occupy Wall Street have been targeted.

In April, Trump officials asked Harvard to “implement a comprehensive mask ban” with a punishment “not less than suspension” for violators, suggesting that student protesters opposing Israel’s war on Gaza might defy rules without consequences if they were allowed to conceal their identities. (Columbia University capitulated to similar demands from the administration in March.)

“Courts have found time and again” that people who shot police who didn’t clearly identify themselves still had a right to self-defense.”

Historically, police in the United States have rarely masked on the job other than for certain undercover operations and SWAT raids—and during the pandemic. But there isn’t any federal law regulating the practice. “Citizens don’t have a constitutional right to know an officer’s identity, ” says Justin Nix, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who studies police legitimacy.

Police dress codes are usually determined by local jurisdictions, notes Ian Adams, an assistant criminology professor at the University of South Carolina. Typically cops are required to wear their assigned uniforms, which seldom include masks, he says, but there’s room for variation. Chicago police officers may use a “protective balaclava” in riot control situations, provided they get approval from their boss and it’s “worn in such a manner that the face is not covered.” New York City police can wear a black balaclava during winter patrols as long as they’re also wearing their uniform hat and duty jacket, their face is fully showing, and the temperature outside is expected to fall below 32 degrees. On an online forum for police officers, one commenter wrote in 2009 that their department allowed helmets and protective eyewear that partially obscured their face during raids, but “we had an old school Sheriff once that said, ‘Only bad guys wear a mask to work.’”

Of course, many officers don’t wear traditional uniforms—they’re detectives, say, or they work for agencies like the FBI, or they are focused more on surveillance than public-facing patrols. ICE often lets agents work in plain clothes during field operations. Civilian windbreakers, bulletproof vests, khaki pants, or an ICE T-shirt are all common attire, according to Budd.

But federal law does require immigration officers to identify themselves when making an arrest. Specifically, they must state their affiliation with ICE or another federal law enforcement agency “as soon as it is practical and safe to do so,” and state their authority to detain the person, according to the regulation. In the video documenting the arrest of Öztürk, the Tufts student, you can hear her ask, “What’s going on?” One of the men confronting her on the sidewalk says, “Okay, we’re the police, relax.” Others made similar comments as they escorted her to a black SUV.

Regular police must follow similar rules, though identification can happen in different ways—including, for instance, a show of lights and sirens during a car chase. The ID requirement is, in part, for the officer’s safety: If people don’t realize it’s a cop approaching them (or chasing them or breaking into their home), they may assume it’s a criminal. “Courts have found time and again” that people who shot police who didn’t clearly identify themselves still had a right to self-defense, says Craig Futterman, who founded the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago Law School.

Within the rules, police have discretion to decide what’s “practical and safe,” and saying “we’re police” probably satisfies the law, the experts I spoke with said. But Congress has recently tried to encourage officers to be more transparent. In 2020, amid the George Floyd protests in DC, the first Trump administration deployed unidentifiable law enforcement officers to the streets, as my colleague Dan Friedman reported at the time. Afterward, lawmakers passed a bill requiring officers to visibly display “the individual’s name or other individual identifier” and the branch or agency they worked for. But the new requirement only applies to protests or other “civil disturbances,” and includes an exception for officers who don’t normally wear uniforms, so it wouldn’t have made a difference for the recent immigration arrests.

Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine nevertheless sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other officials in May expressing concern about the masked agents. “The failure..to promptly and clearly identify who they are and the authority under which they are acting has led witnesses…to justifiably question the law enforcement status, authority, and constitutionality of ICE officers and agents and their operations,” they wrote.

At a hearing earlier that month, Rep. Julie Johnson (D-Texas) asked Noem what she was doing to ensure that ICE agents are not masked when they approach someone. “I just put myself in the situation of that woman from Tufts,” Johnson said.

“ICE agents always identify themselves to individuals that they’re encountering,” Noem replied. “If they’re wearing something over their faces, it’s oftentimes because that agent has been involved in undercover operations or needs to be able to continue the investigative work that they do on a day-to-day basis.”

Homeland Security’s media team has proffered other explanations: “When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as police while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by known and suspected terrorist sympathizers,” a spokesperson told CNN. (Variations on the quote have swapped “terrorist sympathizers” for “known and suspected gang members, murders [sic] and rapists.”)

After the San Diego restaurant raid,ICE acting director Todd Lyons said some officers have received death threats and been harassed online. “I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks,” he told reporters, “but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, their family on the line, because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is.”

Though ICE agents probably have little to fear from “terrorist sympathizers,” they do have lots of people angry with them, and doxxing has been an issue. In 2020, amid the protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder, the Associated Press reported that the personal information of many police officers—including home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses—had been leaked on social media. Earlier this year, activists posted flyers in a Southern California neighborhood with the names, headshots, and phone numbers of ICE agents working in the area. Last week, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced a bill that would punish people who doxx federal law enforcers with up to five years in prison.

“There are a lot of social media postings out there, a lot of crazy people that are waiting to have their fuses lit,” said Jerry Robinette, formerly a special agent in charge of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio, Texas, who says he understands why officers are masking. In April, a Texas man was arrested after threatening to shoot ICE agents in his neighborhood.

“Wearing a mask isn’t undercover work, it’s trying to hide who you are…so you can’t be held to account.”

“I’ve actually seen social media posts about how they should be killed,” Budd told me. “With how gun crazy this country is, I would take it seriously as well.” Still,she added, “agents don’t have to be doing these high-profile arrests like this in the middle of the street. The way they are doing it is causing this.”

But if public safety is the biggest concern, she and other critics say, then masking might make it worse. In addition to cops potentially being mistaken for criminals, authorities in multiple states arrested people allegedly impersonating ICE agents for devious purposes. In South Carolina, a man posing as an immigration officer detained a group of Latino men in their vehicle and took away their keys; he was later charged with kidnapping, impersonating an officer, petty larceny, and assault and battery. In Philadelphia, three people allegedly tried to enter a Temple University residence hall wearing shirts that said, “Police” and “ICE.”

“Are you aware,” Rep. Johnson asked Noem, “that your materials, ICE agents’ jackets and the sort, are available on Etsy for $20? Anybody can do that, throw a mask on, and run around and terrorizing people of color without any regard…because your agency does not have proper protocols to make sure their agents are clearly identified and marked when they are executing their jobs.”

Etsy aside, anonymous law enforcement agents are a problem because they are more difficult to hold accountable for misconduct, says Lauren Bonds, executive director of the nonprofit National Police Accountability Project. “Even if you’re not suing, if you just want to file a complaint, an officer being in plainclothes makes it really hard to know whether they’re with the sheriff or an ICE agent,” she says.

Radley Balko, the former Washington Post reporter who wrote Rise of the Warrior Cop, recalled a situation in which DEA officers raided the home of two innocent women, whose subsequent lawsuit was dismissed because they were unable to figure out the officers’ identities. “Wearing a mask isn’t undercover work, it’s trying to hide who you are so you can’t be identified, so you can’t be held to account for what you do,” says Futterman.

Arrests like Öztürk’s have led some observers—from the Cato Institute to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu—to question whether ICE is becoming like a secret police force. “[T]his idea that we are going to allow some kind of paramilitary force to bloom that is not in any way…accountable to the Constitution of the United States? We’ve got another thing coming,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) posted on social media.

Whatever you call them, it’s clear that masked officers are stoking widespread fear. “The students I’m talking to are looking out the window, wondering if every car with tinted windows is filled with ICE agents coming to snatch and disappear them,” Eric Lee, a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association who is representing immigrant students, told CNN.

“Frankly, when people want to terrorize people, they wear masks,” Budd told me, thinking back to the laws passed against the KKK decades ago. ICE is “doing it with purpose,” she added. “The chaos is what they want.”

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Trump’s Tariffs Will Drive Up PPE Costs, But Organizers Are Ready

With the impact of Donald Trump’s bevy of tariffs on foreign goods—including Covid protective gear—around the corner, Covid Safe Colorado knew it neededmore masks to ride the wave. The organization, which has distributed masks and tests across the state since 2023, was able to arrange an order for hundreds of thousands of masks from supplier Concentric Health Alliance—paying only shipping costs—through a negotiation that ran from March to April and will supply it for the foreseeable future.

A majority of respirators—high-quality masks that function better than surgical masks for protection from airborne diseases—are produced in China, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics—and as the Trump administration moves to limit Covid vaccine access, masks will play an even more crucial role in minimizing the spread of the disease.

After months of negotiation, flip-flops, shock announcements, and market chaos, Trump’s tariffs against China are still active, mostly at 30 percent. That’s lower than the president’s earlier threats of China tariffs north of 100 percent—but still a huge figure that guarantees disruption for manufacturers and buyers. After a court ruling in late May, the tariffs briefly looked to be blocked, but a federal appeals court allowed them to continue the next day.

“To be honest, the chaos isn’t surprising,” said Katrina, Covid Safe Colorado’s co-founder, “as this administration creates it at every turn.” But organizers with mask blocs, they said—which provide PPE and other Covid-related services at the community level—are “already those types of people with sentinel intelligence that are looking five steps ahead.” (Katrina, like other organizers interviewed for this article, asked to be identified by first name only.) Sox, an organizer with Mask Bloc OKC in the Oklahoma City area, is one of several who still expects “shortages or price increases that make the masks that are most popular inaccessible.”

“We’ve developed our own DIY logistics network.”

Mask blocs began to be formed in 2020, early in the Covid pandemic, to address trouble affording PPE among low-income people, who are more vulnerable to developing Long Covid and more likely to be exposed in work and other settings. Around 150 other such groups exist across the country; they tend to have a high proportion of organizers who are chronically ill and disabled, and who face greater risks of Covid complications. Andtheir reach and benefits go beyond the pandemic: Earlier this year, mask blocs in Los Angeles filled in the gap left by local governments by providing high-quality masks to protect locals from wildfire smoke. Other mask blocs I spoke with, including Covid Safe Colorado, similarly provide masks for environmental disasters.

Many mask blocs will work together to take advantage of economies of scale, including by pooling resources to gather large quantities of masks through auctions, says Celeste of Charlotte Mask Bloc, which operates in North Carolina, the only state to legislate a statewide mask ban.

“Since we’ve**—we, the larger network of mask blocs—**developed our own DIY logistics network, we can expand and contract our activities quickly based on current conditions,” Celeste said. “This is all possible because we aren’t selling masks and don’t have to make sure that every mask makes a profit. We just buy and give away as we have the resources.”

“Part of the strategy of this administration is to exhaust us and overwhelm us and to confuse us.”

But Celeste, like other organizers, has been concerned about the effect of a tariff-driven economic squeeze on the donations that keep mask blocs afloat. “People who tend to support us are people who will be more affected by the entire economic problem that’s occurring,” Celeste said. “We need to find more support, just broadly for that reason, because our mask bloc members tend to be more poor.”

Another problem facing mask bloc organizers: hostility around masking, which can be especially prominent in conservative areas: “I get coughed on or harassed 10 out of 10 times when I leave my house,” says Sox, in the Oklahoma City metro area.

While the organizers I spoke with are confident that they will weather the storm, worries remain. Covid Safe Colorado and Charlotte Mask Bloc have faced challenges keeping up their inventory of masks for children, one of the goals of the former group’s recent large buy.

Kiki, an organizer with Tucson Mask Bloc—which stocked up on masks as early as January in anticipation of Trump administration chaos—says that one tenet of her organization is to work on “crip time,” a term in some disabled communities that involves, in part, finding ways not to respond to news like tariffs, vaccine restrictions, and mask bans with constant, immense urgency.

“We’re really trying to be thoughtful about just taking a deep breath,” Kiki said, “and knowing that part of the strategy of this administration is to exhaust us and overwhelm us and to confuse us.”

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Trump Is Lusting for Violence

With tensions still lingering after National Guard members descended into Los Angeles this weekend, sending protesters who had been demonstrating against ICE’s workplace raids into clashes with law enforcement officials, President Donald Trump on Monday appeared determined to escalate the chaos.

“IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT,” Trump wrote on his social media platform. “I promise you they will be hit harder than they have ever been hit before. Such disrespect will not be tolerated!”

He also again labeled the protesters, an overwhelming majority of whom have been peaceful, “insurrectionists.” The threat, redolent with violence and aggression, carried eerie echoes of his 2020 use of the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” in response to protests in the wake of George Floyd’s police killing.

The post followed Trump expressing full-throated support for California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s arrest despite not having broken any laws. “I would do it if I were Tom,” Trump told reporters on Monday, referring to ICE acting director Tom Homan. “I think it’s a great idea.” The endorsement came hours after Homan appeared to dial things back, admitting that there hadn’t been any serious discussion about arresting Newsom.

California has since sued the Trump administration over his efforts to “manufacture chaos and crisis” for his political benefit. But together, Trump’s enthusiasm for violence and threats to arrest a sitting governor, after a weekend spent invoking an obscure law to deploy National Guard members when no such rebellion had been taking place, showed that legal issues are unlikely to chasten a president who is increasingly comfortable leaning into authoritarian tendencies.

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A LAPD Helicopter Claimed Cops Identified Protesters From Above and Would “Come to Your House”

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Los Angeles County over the weekend to protest immigration raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In response, federal, state, and local authorities have all escalated a brutal crackdown against the anti-ICE demonstrators, with law enforcement deploying tear gas, bean bags, and rubber bullets against protesters and journalists alike, and President Donald Trump activating state National Guard members in defiance of Governor Gavin Newsom’s wishes.

“This is a chilling statement.”

On Sunday, according to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Police Department made another escalation, flying over a group of demonstrators in downtown LA in a helicopter and announcing, “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.”

The threat was greeted with extreme concern by civil liberties and digital privacy groups; if it was a true statement, it suggests that the LAPD could be using facial recognition to identify and retaliate against protesters. And if it is false, warned Jonathan Markovitz, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, it is still an overt attempt to frighten and intimidate demonstrators.

“This is a chilling statement,” he told Mother Jones. “Even if it were a joke, it was clearly designed to make the public afraid to exercise its First Amendment rights to protest and to hold government officials, including LAPD officers, accountable for their actions.”

Markovitz added that the announcement is “unfortunately, consistent with LAPD’s heavy-handed approach to the protests, which demonstrates a complete lack of respect for free speech rights. Threats to use government surveillance capabilities to punish people who are exercising those rights are fundamentally antidemocratic and authoritarian.”

Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also found the statement concerning. The EFF is a digital rights group and often opposes what it says are inappropriate or illegal surveillance measures.

“You have constitutionally protected rights to protest,” Guariglia says. “When you have somebody wielding surveillance in a specific way to try to chill and deter people from protesting, that’s a violation of your constitutional rights.”

While that surveillance threat was made explicit by the helicopter’s loudspeaker, he adds that if “you see a drone flying over a protest, the exact same threat is implicitly made.”

With increasingly sophisticated facial recognition tools, Guariglia added, “the real fear has always been that a helicopter or a drone will fly over a crowd and generate a list of all the people who have attended the protest. At that point it’s a recipe for reprisals and retribution by the police for your politics.” In response, the EFF has developed guides on surveillance self-defense and to help protesters identify both visible and non-visible forms of surveillance they might encounter.

When participating in public protests and demonstrations, Guariglia says people should think “about the security of your digital devices,” and take steps like “putting your phone on airplane mode, or making sure you don’t take pictures that include the faces of other protesters, or turning face ID off to unlock your phone.”

“If you get arrested and your devices are seized,” he adds, that step can leave demonstrators more confident that data on their phones will be secure.

The LAPD uses helicopters constantly, on what City Controller Kenneth Mejia has said is an “almost continuous basis.” According to a 2023 audit by Mejia’s office, the aircraft spent “a disproportionate amount of time in certain communities,” while running up annual operating costs to taxpayers of about $50 million. The audit also found police used helicopters for less-than-essential reasons, including to fly officers to an annual chili cook-off and a ceremonial flight over a golf tournament.

The LAPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The “Twisted” History of Trump’s Legal Theory for Using Troops Against Protesters

On Saturday, President Donald Trump called 2,000 California National Guard troops into Los Angeles in response to growing protests against the administration’s worksite immigration raids. The peaceful demonstrations had started on Friday following reports of enforcement crackdown operations targeting undocumented immigrants across local businesses in downtown LA and near a Home Depot in the heavily immigrant suburb of Paramount.

A presidential memo called the troops into federal service to quell a supposed “rebellion” and protect US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government officers, as well as federal property. The order also authorized the Secretary of Defense to employ members of the Armed Forces to conduct “military protective activities.”

This is the first time since 1965 that a president has deployed federalized National Guard personnel without the request from a governor. California Governor Gavin Newsom said the president is responsible for a “manufactured crisis” and vowed to sue the Trump administration over what he called a “serious breach of state sovereignty.” (Trump said, in response, it would be good to arrest Gov. Newsom.) Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass attributed the intensified clashes between protesters and law enforcement to the immigration raids and an “escalation that didn’t have to happen.”

On Monday, Mother Jones spoke with Chris Mirasola, a University of Houston assistant law professor who focuses on the law regulating military deployments within the United States, about the statutory authority and legal theory the Trump administration has invoked, the limits of what the National Guard troops can do on the ground, and the potential for more aggressive actions by the federal government.

What is the legal rationale and authority that the Trump administration has invoked to deploy 2,000 members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles?

The president is doing two things in this presidential memorandum. First, and this is implicit in the text of the memo, he’s relying on a theory of inherent constitutional authority to use the military to protect federal functions, persons, and property. You won’t find this text anywhere in a statute or in the text of the Constitution. Instead, it’s been implied by executive branch lawyers.

The second is a statutory authority to bring these 2,000 National Guard personnel onto federal duty orders. As a general matter, members of the National Guard are civilians—so they need some kind of order to bring them into a state duty status or a federal duty status. The president’s relying on this statute, 10 U.S.C. 12406, to bring them into a federal duty status.

It’s this statute—that talks about rebellion—that has been particularly controversial.

In your recent Lawfare article, you write that this inherent constitutional authority theory—known as “protective power”—has a “twisted history.” Why is that?

The earliest antecedent to this legal theory was in 1850 by President Millard Fillmore, who asserted an inherent constitutional authority to use the military to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston in the face of the refusal of state authorities to detain an accused enslaved person, Shadrach Brown. President Millard Fillmore was the first to assert this kind of inchoate constitutional power to use the military to detain this man so he could be essentially deported back into slavery in the South. Those are the historical roots of this power.

Over time, the executive branch has, in some respects, changed its understanding of the legal basis for this authority. Now, the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice tries to link this theory of presidential power to the text of the Take Care Clause, for example, in ways that are pretty different from what we originally saw. When I talk about the conflicted, convoluted history, it’s largely due to the fact that the executive branch has been relatively inconsistent in how it’s justified this expression of presidential power. It was the same theory of constitutional power that the Trump administration invoked during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Under the presidential memorandum signed on Saturday, what can these National Guard troops do and what can’t they do?

The big dividing line is that the National Guard can’t do any law enforcement activity. The executive branch has traditionally understood the protective power to include actions that fall short of what is prohibited by what’s called the Posse Comitatus Act, a very old statute that prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement functions.

It means that the National Guard currently can’t be used to conduct arrests. It can’t be used to conduct an immigration raid. Instead, what they can do are things like ensure that no bodily injury is done to an ICE officer, or to prevent protesters from forcibly entering the federal detention facility.

Some have observed that the deployment of these federalized troops could be a “precursor” to more aggressive actions by the government in the event of escalating violence, including potentially invoking the Insurrection Act. How do you assess that risk?

I see these authorities as existing on an escalation trajectory, where the far end of that trajectory culminates in an Insurrection Act. I could imagine them wanting to incrementally move along this escalation trajectory from something more minimal like what we’re seeing now to something more robust later. Because if they’re worried about litigation in an Insurrection Act context, then what you want is a record of lesser actions failing in some way, right?

Even amongst folks who are really bullish on using the military within the United States, there is a reluctance on using active duty military for this kind of domestic response and instead preferring a more minimal use of the National Guard. But on the other hand, [the administration has] been incredibly bullish on using the military in a far broader range of domestic contexts than we’ve seen historically. Their appetite for using the military far exceeds anything that I can think of meaningfully past World War II. There has generally since the worst of the military responses to the Vietnam War been an unwillingness across parties to use the military when there are domestic protests or unrest unless absolutely necessary. And that is just not this administration’s understanding of the role of the military in the United States.

As the situation continues to develop on the ground, what warning signs will you be paying attention to?

First, whether there are additional National Guard deployments to cities beyond LA in response to these protests. That would be incredibly concerning as this proliferates. The second thing I’m looking at is the scope of activities that these National Guard are doing. Do they remain in the defensive posture that we’ve seen over the past 24 hours, or do we see pressure for them to do more than what has historically been authorized under the protective power?

The third thing I’m looking at is whether the Pentagon moves beyond using the National Guard to using active duty forces for these activities—because the protective power is worded broadly enough to contemplate using National Guard or active duty personnel, and that would be also escalatory.

The skill set that is needed to de-escalate these kinds of interactions with civilians is not part of the usual training of a soldier, an airman, a Marine. This is an area of incredible concern, especially if these missions are being developed on the fly without sufficient time for the Pentagon to develop detailed rules for the use of force.

Finally, there’s the possibility ever present, as long as these protests are continuing, or if they worsen, that the president decides to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Which was last invoked during the 1992 Los Angeles riots…

The issue that we see in this entire area of law is that we have statutes which are incredibly old, using language that is antiquated with incredibly significant delegations of authority and discretion to the president in ways that we don’t tend to see in domestic legislation.

A lot of the reforms that people have been urging for is a tightening up of all of these statutes to make the president have to show something much more definitive about the federal government’s incapacity before the military is used. It’s the failure of the past decade of politics that we don’t have that as a guardrail against the excesses that we’re seeing right now. In many ways, it is on Congress, which has not been able to muster the political wherewithal to make this a priority.

One of the greatest checks on the president’s ability to use the military in domestic response situations is Congress’s power of the purse. These deployments are very expensive and they were not budgeted for. If they expand, they’re only going to get more expensive, which is going to require the Pentagon to either move money around or to ask Congress for more money. Those are moments of choice when Congress can decide whether to honor that request and, if they don’t, then the trade-off that the Pentagon has to make between their traditional foreign affairs and national security functions and the domestic missions that we’re seeing right now just comes into starker relief. It makes the decisions more difficult.

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A Federal Program to Protect US Cities Against Extreme Heat Has Just Evaporated

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

Straddling the border with Mexico along the Rio Grande, the city of Laredo, Texas, and its 260,000 residents don’t just have to deal with the region’s ferocious heat. Laredo’s roads, sidewalks, and buildings absorb the sun’s energy and slowly release it at night, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. That can make a hot spell far more dangerous than for people living in the surrounding countryside, where temperatures might stay many degrees cooler. The effect partly explains why extreme heat kills twice as many people each year in the United States than hurricanes and tornadoes combined.

To better understand how this heat island effect plays out in Laredo, the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last summer and enlisted more than 100 volunteers to drive around the city taking temperature readings. Edgar Villaseñor, the center’s advocacy campaign manager, worked with a company called CAPA Strategies, which created the map below. (Red shows where it’s hottest in the afternoon and blue where it’s coolest—notice the disparities between neighborhoods.)

CAPA

But Villaseñor wanted a more interactive map to make it easier to navigate. He also wanted to hire someone to take thermal pictures on the ground in the hottest neighborhoods so that the center could create an interactive website for Laredo’s residents. He reckoned the city council could use such a site to figure out where to install more shading for people waiting at bus stops, for instance. So he applied for a $10,000 grant through NOAA’s Center for Heat Resilient Communities, which was funded through the Biden administration’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The research center was ready to announce on May 5 that the Rio Grande nonprofit, along with 14 city governments, had been selected to work closely with its researchers to tailor plans for addressing urban heat, according to V. Kelly Turner, who co-led the Center for Heat Resilient Communities. But the day before the announcement, Turner received a notice from NOAA that it was defunding the center. Turner says it sent another termination-of-funding notice to a separate data-gathering group, the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring, which was created with the same IRA funding. (When contacted for this story, a NOAA representative directed Grist to Turner for comment.) “The funding just stopped,” Villaseñor said. “I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

“We would have had a really robust roadmap that would be really applicable to all cities across the country.”

It’s the latest in a flurry of cuts across the federal government since President Donald Trump took office in January. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has canceled hundreds of grants meant to help communities curb pollution and make themselves more resilient, such as by updating wastewater systems. NOAA announced last month that it would axe a database that tracks billion-dollar disasters, which experts said will hobble communities’ ability to assess the risk of catastrophes. Major job cuts at NOAA also have hurricane scientists worried that coastal cities—especially along the Gulf Coast—won’t get accurate forecasts of storms headed their way.

The defunding of the Center for Heat Resilient Communities came as a surprise to the group’s own leaders, who said they will continue collaborating with cities on their own. Though its budget was just $2.25 million, they say that money could have gone a long way in helping not just the grantees, but communities anywhere in the US. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm and momentum for doing this kind of work, and we’re not going to just let that go,” said Turner, who’s also associate director of heat research at the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We’re going to continue to interface with [communities], it’s just going to be incredibly scaled down.”

The program would have been the first of its kind in the US. In an ideal scenario, the Center for Heat Resilient Communities could have developed a universal heat plan for every city in the country. The challenge, however, is not only that heat varies significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood—richer areas with more green spaces tend to be much cooler—but also that no two cities experience heat the same way. A sticky, humid 90 degrees in Miami, for example, will feel a whole lot worse than 90 in Phoenix.

Turner and her colleagues at the research center had planned to work with a range of communities—coastal, rural, agricultural, tribal—for a year to craft action plans and discuss ways to construct green spaces, open more cooling centers for people to seek shelter, or outfit homes with better insulation and windows. “If the community was in a heavily vegetated, forested area, maybe urban forestry wouldn’t be the strategy that they’re interested in learning more about,” said Ladd Keith, director of the Heat Resilience Initiative at the University of Arizona, who co-led the center. “It might be something more about housing quality.”

The researchers had also planned to help communities determine who’s most at risk from rising heat, based on local economies and demographics. Rural economies, for example, have more agricultural workers exposed in shade-free fields, whereas office workers in urban areas find relief from air conditioning. Some cities have higher populations of elderly people, who need extra protection because their bodies don’t handle heat as well as those of younger folks.

While each city has a unique approach to handling heat, the 15 communities chosen represented the many geographies and climates of the US, Keith said. With this collaboration, the researchers would have been able to piece together a publicly available guide that any other city could consult. “We would have also learned quite a lot from their participation,” Keith said. “We would have had a really robust roadmap that would be really applicable to all cities across the country.”

The funding from NOAA might be gone, but what remains is the expertise that these researchers can still provide to communities as independent scientists. “We don’t want to leave them completely hanging,” Turner said. “While we can’t do as in-depth and rigorous work with them, we still feel like we owe it to them to help with their heat-resilience plans.”

Villaseñor, for his part, said his work won’t stop, even though that $10,000 grant would have gone a long way. He might rely on volunteers, for instance, to take those thermal images of the Lardeo’s hot spots. “I’m still trying to see what I can do without funding,” he said.

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More States Consider Curbing Drug Testing at Childbirth

A growing number of states are considering legislation to set up protections for patients who might be drug tested when they give birth.

Three of the bills were introduced following an investigative series by The Marshall Project and Reveal that exposed the harms of drug testing at childbirth — including how many patients are often reported to child welfare authorities over false positive or misinterpreted test results, and how women have faced child welfare investigations and removals over medications the hospitals themselves gave them.

In New York, a bill that would require hospitals to obtain consent from patients before drug testing has been advancing. Two proposed bills, in Arizona and Tennessee, failed to make it out of their legislative sessions.

“We know when there’s secret drug testing, families are often torn apart,” said New York state Rep. Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat from Manhattan, who noted cases of women who were reported to child welfare over positive tests caused by poppy seeds and prescribed medications. “This is not some theoretical discussion we’re having here. This is really something that occurs.”

“Can you imagine if someone took the baby from you out of your arms or never even let you hold your child?”

The New York bill, versions of which were first introduced by Rosenthal beginning in 2019, has faced years of resistance from state lawmakers. Similar efforts in Minnesota, Maryland and California also failed in prior legislative sessions. But in New York, The Marshall Project’s reporting on hospital drug testing helped convince more lawmakers to get on board, according to activists who lobbied for the legislation.

If passed, the law would permit hospitals to drug test birthing patients and their newborns only if medically necessary. It would also require them to obtain informed consent from patients before drug testing them, which would include disclosing the potential legal consequences of a positive test result.

Similar bills were introduced this year in Tennessee by both a Democrat and Republican. Sen. Janice Bowling, a Republican from Tullahoma who frequently advocates for parental rights, was first approached about the issue by a progressive advocacy group and quickly saw the bipartisan appeal. She said she was shocked to learn that women had been tested and reported over false positive tests caused by poppy seeds, the heartburn drug Zantac and other legal substances.

“Can you imagine if someone took the baby from you out of your arms or never even let you hold your child?” she said. “Taking children from families because a state entity says they have the authority to determine whether or not you’re a fit parent, that’s a slippery slope.”

After a particularly contentious legislative session, the bill failed to make it out of committee. Bowling said she plans to take up the bill again in 2026.

In Arizona, lobbyists and activists said they plan to pursue a similar informed consent bill next legislative session, in addition to continuing to pursue a more far-reaching bill that was introduced but failed to advance this year.

“If the trust between a doctor and patient is broken, that will lead to much more severe consequences for the child and the mother.”

The Pro-Choice Arizona Action Fund and the reproductive advocacy group Patient Forward began pursuing the legislation following a Reveal and New York Times Magazine investigation in 2023 that detailed the story of an Arizona woman whose baby was placed in foster care after she was reported to child welfare authorities for taking prescribed Suboxone during her pregnancy. Current Arizona law requires healthcare providers to contact child welfare anytime a baby is born exposed to controlled substances, including legal medications such as Suboxone and methadone.

“We were like, how does this happen? What are the mechanisms in place that allow this to happen?” said Garin Marschall, co-founder of Patient Forward. “We wanted to understand what we could do to make sure that it didn’t happen again.”

The proposed legislation would have revised Arizona law to bar positive drug tests alone as a reason for a child welfare report or investigation. If healthcare providers have no concerns about abuse or neglect, the law would require hospitals to notify the health department instead of child welfare authorities. Other states, such as Massachusetts and New Mexico, have passed similar laws, while hospitals around the country have also made changes to their drug testing policies.

In New York, advocates said their bill has historically faced resistance from lawmakers who worry that asking patients for consent to test them for drugs will lead more women to decline such tests. But healthcare providers interviewed by The Marshall Project have said it’s rare for patients to decline a drug test, and even so, drug tests rarely provide useful medical information. Doctors don’t typically need drug tests to identify or treat babies exposed to substances in the womb, and a positive test does not actually prove that a parent has an addiction, the experts said.

Instead, studies have found that screening questionnaires, which collect certain information from patients, such as their partner’s history of drug use, are effective at identifying someone with an addiction without putting them at risk of needless child welfare intervention. Doctors have found that maintaining open communication with patients is also the best way to help them, whereas studies show more punitive policies lead women to avoid prenatal care altogether.

“If the trust between a doctor and patient is broken, that will lead to much more severe consequences for the child and the mother,” Rosenthal said. “Everyone does better if that doesn’t happen.”

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

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“No,” Trump Says, He Does Not Want to Repair Relationship with Musk

Trump has made it official: He and Elon Musk are (probably) never getting back together.

In an interview with NBC News on Saturday, the president was uncharacteristically restrained when asked if he had any desire to repair the relationship with the ex-DOGE head following Musk’s meltdown on X this week. Asked if he wanted to repair his relationship with Musk, Trump answered simply: “no.”

The blowout was caused by a series of posts on X. Musk railed against Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and his tariffs, which Musk claimed will cause a recession in the second half of this year. Musk also alleged Trump is in the Epstein files (that post has since been deleted). When NBC asked if Trump thought his relationship with Musk was over, Trump reportedly replied: “I would assume so, yeah.”

“I’m too busy doing other things” to talk to Musk, Trump told NBC, adding, “I have no intention of speaking to him.”

“I think it’s a very bad thing, because he’s very disrespectful,” Trump added of Musk’s statements. “You could not disrespect the office of the President.” Trump also told NBC that Musk’s since-deleted claim that he was involved with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation of minors was false and “old news,” and that he had not given his prior threat to cancel Musk’s companies’ government contracts any further thought. He said he believes Musk is “so depressed and so heartbroken” and that his opposition to the reconciliation bill was ultimately “a big favor” because it “brought out the strengths of the bill.”

But Trump does not appear to be fully confident that Musk will not affect the bill. If Musk funded Democrats to run against Republicans who vote to pass the bill, “he’ll have to pay the consequences for that,” Trump told NBC. He added that they would be “very serious” but did not provide further details. Musk does not appear to have specifically suggested he plans to fund Democrats for this purpose, but he has urged voters to “fire all politicians who betrayed the American people” in the next election.

As I reported last week, Musk told CBS Sunday Morning that bill “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” adding, “I actually thought that, when this ‘big, beautiful bill’ came along, it’d be like, everything he’s done on DOGE gets wiped out in the first year.” (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill would add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, which would essentially cancel out DOGE’s purported government savings of $175 billion.) The personal attacks he launched against Trump on X just a few days later came as a stark reversal for Musk, who said in the CBS interview that while he did not agree with everything the administration did, he did not want to create “a bone of contention” by publicly feuding with officials.

Trump’s glib assessment of the death of what was probably the world’s most powerful—and insufferable—bromance runs counter to the hopes of other top Republicans who are hoping the men will reconcile. On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told host Jonathan Karl that he hopes “these two titans can reconcile.”

“I think the president’s head is in the right place…he can’t get caught up in a Twitter war,” Johnson added. “I think all this will resolve. There’s a lot of emotion involved in it, but it’s in the interest of the country for everybody to work together and I’m going to continue to try to be a peacemaker in all this.”

Speaker Mike Johnson on the Trump-Musk feud: “Hopefully these two titans can reconcile. I think the president’s head is in the right place … There’s a lot of emotion involved in it, but it’s in the interest of the country for everybody to work together.” https://t.co/YiL5SRNqtS pic.twitter.com/uNlPrMi7ih

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) June 8, 2025

And in a Friday appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance said Musk’s comments attacking Trump were “a huge mistake” but said that he hoped Musk would come crawling back to Trump’s corner. “I hope that eventually Elon kind of comes back into the fold,” Vance said. “Maybe that’s not possible now, because he’s gone so nuclear, but I hope it is.”

“Cool,” Musk responded to a clip of Vance’s comments posted on X.

billionaire w/ @JDVance pic.twitter.com/l5eM9a6p5u

— Theo Von (@TheoVon) June 7, 2025

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The ICE Policy That Set Off Chaos in LA

The chaos that unfolded in Los Angeles over the weekend was sparked by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at workplaces, a controversial policy that seems designed to appease the Trump administration’s desire to increase the number of deportations at all costs.

The policy to raid workplaces, reportedly pushed by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and other top Trump administration officials, comes as ICE has tried to increase its deportation numbers. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?'” one ICE official told the Washington Examiner last month. White House Border Czar Tom Homan has also told reporters: “You’re going to see more work site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation. We’re going to flood the zone.”

This weekend, there was backlash in Los Angeles. ICE targeted places with large numbers of immigrant workers, including the garment district and a Home Depot in the city of Paramount. At a news conference on Friday, Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, said there were seven raids throughout LA and that more than 45 people had been detained. Local news outlet KTLA also reported that raids took place at two clothing stores, and that the Department of Justice told reporters Friday raids were focusing on workers with “fictitious employee documents.” (In a post on X Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security said its operations in LA this past week led to 118 arrests, though it was not immediately clear how many of those came from workplace raids.)

The raids kicked off protests, which led to violent clashes between citizens and law enforcement. Among those arrested was union leader David Huerta, President of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West, which represents more than 750,000 service workers statewide. US Attorney Bill Essayli said in a post on X that Huerta “was arrested for interfering with federal officers and will face arraignment in federal court on Monday.” The union [countered][10] that Huerta was “peacefully observing” and said he was [treated][11] for injuries sustained during his arrest; SEIU is planning to [hold][12] a Monday morning rally on his behalf in downtown LA.

In a [post][13] on Truth Social Saturday night, Trump called California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass “incompetent” and alleged without evidence that the protesters were “often paid troublemakers.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt [announced][14] in a statement Saturday night that Trump was deploying 2,000 members of the National Guard to LA—the first time since 1965 a president has done so without a request from the state’s governor, [according to][15] the Brennan Center. As of about midnight Sunday, though, the National Guard had not yet been deployed, [according to Bass][16], despite [claims][17] from Republicans they had quelled protests.

Miller’s call for “everybody” to be arrested is a key distinction from Trump’s campaign trail pledge to focus on deporting “criminals.” But as my colleague Isabela Dias [writes][18], they have expanded the definition of that work to encompass anybody who enters the country illegally:

How has the White House squared this? By labeling all undocumented immigrants as criminals, even though unlawful presence in the country is a civil, not criminal, violation. When asked for the number of ICE arrests conducted so far that have specifically targeted immigrants with criminal records, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “all of them,” adding, “because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and, therefore, they are criminals.”

Workplace raids were also a feature of the first Trump administration: ICE officials turned up at [poultry plants in Mississippi][19], [7-Elevens, a meatpacking plant in Tennessee, and other sites in Ohio][20]. But experts [say][21] they are not even the most effective way to increase deportations, given their cost and the effort involved.

And as Isabela has [written][22], these raids, coupled with subsequent deportations, could cripple the US workforce—particularly in industries such as construction, food services, health care, and domestic labor:

According to a 2016 [report][23] by the Center for American Progress, deporting 7 million workers would “reduce national employment by an amount similar to that experienced during the Great Recession.” GDP would immediately contract by 1.4 percent, and, eventually, by 2.6 percent. In 20 years, the US economy would shrink nearly 6 percent—or [$1.6 trillion][24]. Trump’s plan would lead to a dire shortage of low-wage workers, which would “bring on a recession while reigniting inflation,” [predicts][25] Robert J. Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration.

This may come as a shock to most Americans. A new CBS News/YouGov poll out Sunday shows that the majority of Americans—53 percent—[believe][26] the Trump administration is prioritizing the deportation of “dangerous criminals.” But the latest raids show that workers are among Trump’s targets, regardless of whether or not they have a criminal record.

As Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, said at the news conference on Friday: “Looking like an immigrant does not make you a criminal.”

[10]: http://for peacefully observing [11]: https://seiuca.org/press-releases/2025/06/06/seiu-california-president-david-huerta-injured-detained-at-ice-raid-in-los-angeles/ [12]: https://x.com/seiucalifornia/status/1931511980449579404 [13]: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114646378582957392 [14]: https://x.com/PressSec/status/1931520821471928407 [15]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/us/trump-national-guard-deploy-rare.html [16]: https://x.com/MayorOfLA/status/1931612804446077244 [17]: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lr423svo4h2t [18]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/trump-deportation-criminals-statistic-ice-you-cant-only-deport-criminals/ [19]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/08/ice-workplace-raids-mississippi-tennessee-morristown/ [20]: https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2018/07/the-children-are-an-afterthought-ices-workplace-raids-are-tearing-immigrant-families-apart/ [21]: https://time.com/7177304/trump-mass-deportation-raids/ [22]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/trump-mass-deportation-plan-immigration-border-patrol-ice-dhs-migrants-undocumented/ [23]: https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/10/massdeport1003-summary.pdf [24]: https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-budgetary-and-economic-costs-of-addressing-unauthorized-immigration-alt/ [25]: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/05/21/trumps-plans-for-mass-deportation-would-be-an-economic-disaster/#:~:text=Besides%20being%20cruel%2C%20deporting%2011,a%20recession%20and%20reigniting%20inflation. [26]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deportation-immigration-opinion-poll/

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“Green Aviation” Exception in GOP Budget Bill Is a “Big, Beautiful” Bipartisan Boondoggle

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” that Republicans are pushing under President Trump would roll back almost all the clean energy incentives that Democrats enacted under President Biden, shredding federal support for solar, wind, nuclear, electric vehicles, and other climate-friendly technologies. But it would make a lavish exception for one supposedly green form of energy that isn’t green at all: farm-grown jet fuels.

Aviation, which generated about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonize, and the US aviation industry has committed to using so-called “sustainable aviation fuels” to reach its net-zero climate goals. But using crops like corn and soybeans to produce fuel instead of food not only increases food prices and global hunger, it spurs farmers around the world to tear down more forests and plow up more grasslands to create new farmland to replace the lost food. That’s why farm-grown biofuels have been a climate problem masquerading as a climate solution for cars, and they would have the same problem in planes.

In a particularly egregious policy twist, the GOP bill would not only extend Biden’s tax credit for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) until 2031, it would also ban any consideration of those land-use emissions when calculating which fuels are sustainable. That would be like banning consideration of smokestack emissions when calculating which power plants are sustainable. And in legislation that otherwise slashes energy spending, the biofuels giveaway would cost US taxpayers an extra $45 billion.

Using vegetable oils for a quarter fourth of global aviation fuel, one expert notes, would require 40 percent of global cropland—an area twice the size of India.

But such is the power of US agricultural interests, which are increasingly worried that electric vehicles will crush demand for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel on the road and have been furiously lobbying Washington to create new demand in the sky. In case there was any confusion about the purpose of the biofuels provision, it’s not in the energy policy section of the Big Beautiful Bill: It’s in the section that claims to “Make Rural America Grow Again.”

The political twist is that it’s not just a Republican provision. While the overall bill has no Democratic supporters, and even some Republicans have objected to its assault on other energy subsidies, the biofuels carve-out has strong backing from farm-friendly Democrats, who created the original tax credit for SAFs in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. There’s always been broad bipartisan support for the federal mandate requiring corn ethanol to be blended into gasoline, and even though the overall Big Beautiful Bill aims to dismantle Biden’s climate policies and extend Trump’s tax cuts, its biofuels language was lifted from a bipartisan “Farm to Fly” bill explicitly designed to get ethanol to qualify for SAF credits of up to $1.75 a gallon.

“It’s shocking but it’s not surprising,” says Dan Lashof, a climate scientist and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. “Agriculture has an extremely well-oiled lobbying machine. So even as Congress guts all these things that reduce emissions to save money, they get Congress to spend lots of money to expand the one thing that increases emissions.”

The impacts on the global landscape could be dramatic. An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that producing about 10 percent of US jet fuel from SAF by 2030—an explicit Biden Administration goal—would require about half the US soybean crop, occupying enough farmland to cover the state of Nebraska.

Princeton senior research scholar Tim Searchinger has calculated that using vegetable oils like soybean for one fourth of global aviation fuel would require 40 percent of global cropland, an area twice the size of India. Flying a plane with corn ethanol would be particularly inefficient; it takes 1.7 gallons of ethanol to make a gallon of jet fuel, and producing ethanol uses almost as much fossil fuel as ethanol replaces.

The world is already losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds, most of it to agricultural expansion, and heightened demand for feedstocks like corn, soy, canola, and palm could overrun vast swaths of forests and undeveloped land, releasing its sequestered carbon and eliminating its ability to absorb atmospheric carbon in the future. The European Union specifically excludes the use of crop-based fuels for aviation because the land-use effects are so devastating, but even when Biden was still president, the US farm lobby was fighting to make sure that didn’t happen here.

At one Biden cabinet meeting in 2023, agriculture secretary and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack handed treasury secretary Janet Yellen a one-page briefing document, flagging it as a high-priority issue. Yellen’s high-priority issues usually involved inflation, threats of recession, and global economic crises, so she was perplexed to read a page of acronym-laden biofuels-industry talking points about the methodological superiority of the GREET computer model over the CORSIA model for calculating carbon emissions from ILUC.

One environmentalist likened a GOP provision that would disregard land-use life cycles in emissions calculations to a legislative decree that pi equals nine.

“Can someone tell me what this is about?” she later asked her top aides.

It was about billions of dollars, because the CORSIA model put enough emphasis on “indirect land-use change” to make crop-based aviation fuels ineligible for tax credits, while the farm-friendly GREET model downplayed ILUC enough to give corn and soybeans a chance to look sustainable. The stakes of this purportedly technical debate were so high that Biden climate czar John Podesta led a boringly named Sustainable Aviation Fuel Lifecycle Analysis Interagency Working Group to hash it out.

As I recount in my forthcoming book We Are Eating the Earth, the working group held weekly meetings that were clearly less about improving climate analytics than justifying the creation of a lucrative new market for farmers. “Nobody talked about the elephant in the room,” one administration official recalled. “It was theater of the absurd.”

The GREET modeling implied that all of Iowa’s corn production could be converted to ethanol while inducing virtually no farmers anywhere on Earth to expand their fields to grow more grain, but the results didn’t have to make sense when Biden was declaring at an Iowa ethanol plant that “we want to see facilities like this all over the Midwest.”

In 2024, the Biden administration agreed to use GREET—and since even GREET didn’t make ethanol look quite climate-friendly enough to qualify for credits, Vilsack secured several additional conditions that made the model even more favorable for farm-grown fuels. He barely even pretended the decision was driven by science in his public statement, hailing it as “a great beginning as we develop new markets for…home-grown agricultural crops.”

The initial US biofuels mandate for cars, in 2007, unleashed a torrent of deforestation in the Amazon, but Nikita Pavlenko, director of fuels and aviation for the International Coalition for Clean Transportation, says the farm lobby’s influence in Washington helped persuade the White House to ignore fears of a reprise. “We spent two years wrangling,” he says, “and in the end everyone who wanted to take land-use change seriously got steamrolled.”

A technician fills a Virgin Atlantic plane with biofuel before a demonstration flight last year.Virgin Atlantic

Today, only 0.3 percent of the world’s aviation fuel is classified as sustainable: Most of it is recycled cooking oil that’s genuinely climate-friendly because it doesn’t use farmland or spur deforestation. United Airlines has an ad campaign touting its commitment to making SAF from waste instead of crop-grown feedstock, featuring Oscar the Grouch as its “Chief Trash Officer.” Environmentalists also hope to see planes fly on “green hydrogen” produced with clean energy; pongamia oil made from the seed of a climate-friendly tropical tree; and electricity, at least for short-haul flights.

But for the airlines, the most scalable alternative fuel opportunity would be subsidized crop-based fuels, which is why they have joined farm interests to push the current Congress to extend the SAF credit and make it even easier for farm-grown SAF to qualify. The Biden team had already diminished the role of indirect land-use change in its emissions analyses—the critics say its ILUC value should have been at least five times higher, and perhaps 40 times higher—and the US has already built enough biorefineries since 2021 to increase its production capacity for crop-based SAF sixfold.

Still, the industry lobbyists wanted to make sure that ILUC would pose no threat whatsoever to fuels brewed from crops, and they got what they wanted on page 208 of the Big Beautiful Bill: “The lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions shall be adjusted as necessary to exclude any emissions attributed to indirect land-use change.”

This is like Congress dictating that financial regulators can’t look at how much banks owe their creditors when determining whether they’re solvent; one environmentalist compared the provision to a legislative decree that pi equals nine.

“It’s hard to build a constituency for addressing an issue that seems so technical.”

“There’s a lot of hype about how this kind of legislation can jumpstart SAF and make a lot of money for farmers, and I think that’s right,” says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, who runs the Breakthrough Institute’s food and agriculture program. “I just don’t think that’s good.”

Abraham Lincoln liked to tell a riddle: How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? His answer was four: A tail is still a tail, even if you call it a leg. And using farmland to grow fuel still induces the expansion of farmland elsewhere to grow more food, even if emissions analysts aren’t allowed to acknowledge those indirect land-use changes. The brazen ban on even evaluating indirect land-use change could create problems for airlines that want to sell carbon credits for using alternative fuels, since a Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance, funded by Jeff Bezos, is working with environmental groups to make sure the credits are scientifically credible. But it’s not clear how much buyers like Microsoft and Meta really care about scientific credibility.

In any case, the biofuels lobby tends to get its way in Washington. The Biden administration issued an “emergency waiver” to get more ethanol blended into gasoline last summer, and the Trump administration plans to issue the same waiver this summer. The first specific item the Trump White House mentioned in a May 8 press release hailing its preliminary trade deal with the UK was increased access for US ethanol, with celebratory quotes from the US Grains Council, the Renewable Fuels Association, and the National Corn Growers Association. Those groups have a lot of influence, and it’s hard to imagine politicians bucking them over the proper way to assess indirect land-use change in life-cycle analyses.

“It’s hard to build a constituency for addressing an issue that seems so technical,” Lashof says. “And even if we could, it’s even harder to fight the farm lobby.”

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The Trump White House Is a Giant National Security Red Flag

Imagine working as a White House communications expert when, on a brisk February morning, you look up to see a crew of unannounced Elon Musk associates climbing the roof of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. You squint and quickly learn that this unit belongs to Starlink, the very company you had identified as posing serious security concerns. But there they are, scaling the roof to install internet service for the White House.

That’s essentially the scenario outlined in a stunning new report from the Washington Post today, alleging that DOGE and Trump administration officials outright dismissed concerns from the White House’s communications team that Musk’s Starlink internet service was rampant with security risks. That reportedly included an exceedingly flimsy WiFi network that could rival your own personal setup:

A “Starlink Guest” WiFi network appeared on White House phones in February, prompting users only for a password, not a username or a second form of authentication, according to the people. That WiFi network was still appearing on White House visitors’ phones this week.

The government’s reliance on Starlink is not new. On the contrary, the US depends on Musk’s business heavily, throughout vast corners of our military and national security apparatus. But the Post‘s reporting once again demonstrates the stunning authority with which DOGE and Musk, at least before his spectacular blowup with the president this week, have been able to wield within the Trump administration. This latest revelation is just the latest national security red flag to come from the Trump administration: the Qatar plane, Pete Hegseth’s entire personality, confirmed hackers, etc.

Starlink is now one of several government contracts that could be on the chopping block now that President Trump and Musk are on the outs. (This, regardless of what you think of Musk, would pull the feud into blatantly lawless territory.) But regardless of the fate of Musk and Starlink, the core stupidity of Trump’s White House remains intact. Don’t be too surprised to see unannounced workers have started climbing the rooftop once again.

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The Trump-Musk Wrestling Match Is Far From Over

After a public wrestling match that featured ugly insults and Jeffrey Epstein accusations, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk appear to have dialed down their fury in time for the weekend.

But tensions still simmer. Late Friday, Musk, one of the Republican Party’s biggest donors, once again backed the idea of a new political party to represent what he described as the “80 percent in the middle.” He also continued to post a string of attacks against the president’s sweeping tax and spending bill, signaling that the billionaire had no intention of dropping the very criticism that prompted the feud to break out in public this week. Meanwhile, Trump on Friday was still defending himself from Musk’s explosive allegation that the president is named in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The social media activity on both sides signalled that the fighting was far from over. What happens next is anyone’s guess. But like any high-profile divorce that takes a vicious turn, I imagine that the parties involved are using this relative quiet to weigh more nuclear options, including the cancellation of Musk’s government contracts. Trump suggested so himself. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” the president posted on Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it.” If carried out, my colleague Jeremy Schulman argues, the move would likely be illegal and a direct threat to democracy.

Trump clearly has the upper hand in this nasty spectacle. But even with Musk as MAGA-pariah, DOGE is clocking in critical wins that many warn will have profound consequences for everyday Americans and their most sensitive personal information: The Supreme Court on Friday allowed Musk’s team to gain access to Social Security information. A separate order issued on Friday also protected DOGE from having to answer freedom of information requests.

So, the current score between Trump v. Musk? America loses, again.

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This Obscure but Powerful “Dark Roof” Lobby May Be Making Your City Hotter

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

It began with a lobbyist’s pitch.

Tennessee Rep. Rusty Grills says the lobbyist proposed a simple idea: repeal the state’s requirement for reflective roofs on many commercial buildings.

In late March, Grills and his fellow lawmakers voted to eliminate the rule, scrapping a measure meant to save energy, lower temperatures, and protect Tennesseans from extreme heat. Grills, a Republican, said he introduced the bill to give consumers more choice.

It was another win for a well-organized lobbying campaign led by manufacturers of dark roofing materials.

Industry representatives called the rollback in Tennessee a needed correction as more of the state moved into a hotter climate zone, expanding the reach of the state’s cool-roof rule. Critics called it dangerous and “deceptive.”

“The new law will lead to higher energy costs and greater heat-related illnesses and deaths,” state Rep. Harold Love and the Rev. Jon Robinson wrote in a statement.

It will, they warned, make Nashville, Memphis, and other cities hotter—particularly in underserved Black and Latino communities, where many struggle to pay their utility bills. Similar lobbying has played out in Denver, Baltimore, and at the national level.

Industry groups have questioned the decades-old science behind cool roofs, downplayed the benefits and warned of reduced choice and unintended consequences. “A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t consider climate variation across different regions,” wrote Ellen Thorp, the executive director of the EPDM Roofing Association, which represents an industry built primarily on dark materials.

But the weight of the scientific evidence is clear: On hot days, light-colored roofs can stay more than 50 degrees cooler than dark ones, helping cut energy use, curb greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce heat-related illnesses and deaths. One recent study found that reflective roofs could have saved the lives of more than 240 people who died in London’s 2018 heatwave.

At least eight states—and more than a dozen cities in other states—have adopted cool-roof requirements, according to the Smart Surfaces Coalition, a national group of public health and environmental groups that promote reflective roofs, trees, and other solutions to make cities healthier.

Industry representatives lobbied successfully in recent months against expanding cool roof recommendations in national energy efficiency codes—the standards that many cities and states use to set building regulations.

The stakes are high. As global temperatures rise and heat waves grow more deadly, the roofs over our heads have become battlefields in a consequential climate war. It’s happening as the Trump administration and Congress move to derail measures designed to make appliances and buildings more energy efficient.

The principle is simple: Light-colored roofs reflect sunlight, so buildings stay cooler. Dark ones absorb heat, driving up temperatures inside buildings and in the surrounding air.

Roofs comprise up to one-fourth of the surface area of major US cities, researchers say, so the color of roofs can make a big difference.

Just how hot can dark roofs get?

“You can physically burn your hands on these roofs,” said Bill Updike, who used to install solar panels and now works for the Smart Surfaces Coalition.

Study after study has confirmed the benefits of light-colored roofs, which typically cost no more than dark roofs.

A study by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that a cool roof on a home in central California saved 20 percent in annual energy costs.

In a three-story rowhouse in Baltimore, Owen Henry discovered what a difference a cool roof can make.

Living in a part of the city with few trees—and where summer temperatures often climb into the 90s—Henry wanted to trim his power bills and stay cooler while working in his third-floor office. So in 2023, he used $100 worth of white reflective roof paint to coat his roof.

Henry said he and his wife immediately saw the indoor temperature drop. They reduced their electricity use by 24 percent.

Owen Henry shows off his white roof in Baltimore.Courtesy Owen Henry

Known for its durability, a black synthetic rubber known as EPDM once dominated commercial roofing. But in recent years it has been surpassed by TPO, a plastic single-ply material which is typically white and is better suited to meet the growing demand for reflective roofs.

Leading EPDM manufacturers—including Johns Manville, Carlisle SynTec, and Elevate, a division of the Swiss multinational company Holcim—have fought against regulations that threaten to further diminish their market share.

Kurt Shickman, former executive director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance, said those companies have the money to hire top-notch lobbyists who know their way around hearing rooms—and who are on a first-name basis with decision makers.

The EPDM industry has paid for research that has asserted that the impact of cool-roof mandates is inconclusive, and that insulation plays a bigger role in saving energy than cool roofs.

In an emailed response to Floodlight’s questions, Thorp argued that many of the studies cited to support cool roof mandates leave out important factors, such as local climate variations, roof type, tree canopy, and insulation thickness.

And she pointed to a recent study by Harvard researchers who concluded that white roofs and pavements may reduce precipitation, causing temperatures to unexpectedly increase in surrounding regions.

But Haider Taha, a leading expert on urban heat, identified multiple flaws in the Harvard study, stating, “The study’s conclusions fail to provide actionable insights for urban cooling strategies or policymaking.”

When Baltimore debated a cool roof ordinance in 2022, Thorp’s group and the Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association (ARMA) lobbied hard against it, arguing that dark roofs are the most efficient choice in “northern climates like Baltimore.”

In cold climates, industry representatives note, cool roofs can lead to higher winter heating bills. “Current research does not support the adoption of cool roofs as a measure that will achieve improved energy efficiency or reduced urban heat island,” Thorp wrote in a letter to one council member.

Multiple studies show otherwise. They’ve concluded that reflective roofs do save energy and cool cities by easing the “urban heat island effect”—the extra heat that gets trapped in many city neighborhoods because buildings and pavement soak up the sun.

Researchers have also found that even in most cold North American climates, the energy savings from cool roofs during warmer months outweighs any added heating costs in the winter.

Despite the opposition, Baltimore passed a cool-roof ordinance in 2023.

Opponents of cool roof requirements like Baltimore’s say they oversimplify a complex issue. In an email to Floodlight, ARMA Executive Vice President Reed Hitchcock said such rules aren’t a “magic bullet.” He encouraged regulators to consider a “whole building approach”—one that weighs insulation, shading, and climate in addition to roof color to preserve design flexibility and consumer choice.

Henry, the Baltimore homeowner, said he thinks the city’s ordinance will help all residents. “Phooey to any manufacturer that’s going to try and stop us from maintaining our community and making it a pleasant place to live,” he said.

Elsewhere, the industry’s lobbyists have notched victories. They’ve lobbied successfully against a cool-roof ordinance in Denver and against stricter standards set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)—a professional organization that creates model standards for city and state regulations.

The current ASHRAE standard recommends reflective roofs on commercial buildings in US climate zones 1, 2, and 3—the country’s hottest regions. Those include most of the South, Hawaii, almost all of Texas, areas along the Mexican border and most of California.

“We’ve been able to stop all of those…mandates from creeping into climate zone 4 and 5,” Thorp said in a recent interview.

Another group headed by Thorp—the Coalition for Sustainable Roofing—worked with the lobbyist to propose the bill that eliminated Tennessee’s cool-roof requirement.

That rule once applied to commercial buildings in just 14 of the state’s 95 counties, but an update to climate maps in 2021 expanded the requirements to 20 more counties, including its most populous urban area—Nashville.

Brian Spear, a homeowner in Tempe, Arizona, has lived in the Phoenix area since the 1980s, back when there were fewer than 30 days a year when the temperature reached 110 degrees. Last year, there were 70 of those days—the highest on record—followed only by 2023, when there were 55 days of 110 degrees plus.

These days, summer mornings start out scorching, he says, “and I feel like if you go outside between 10 and 4, it’s dangerous.”

Spear says he’ll soon replace the aging roof on an Airbnb home that he owns. After weighing the usual concerns—cost and aesthetics—he has chosen a surface that he believes will help rather than harm: a gray metal roof with a reflective coating.

“If someone told me you couldn’t put a dark roof on your house…I’d understand,” he said. “I’m all about it being for the common good.”

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These Veterans Fought for the US. Now They’re Fighting Trump’s VA Cuts

On Friday afternoon, thousands of veterans who fought wars on behalf of the United States descended on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to fight something else: cuts proposed by the Trump administration.

Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has moved to slash and burn the federal workforce—and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is no exception. Already, the sprawling agency serving America’s 16 million military veterans has fired 2,400 probationary workers and proposed eliminating an additional 15 percentof its workforce—about 80,000 people.

Veterans rely on the VA for help with critical needs like counseling for addiction and PTSD, prostheses, senior services, and treatments for cancer stemming from exposure to toxic chemicals. Medical research by VA doctors and scientists not only saves veterans’ lives, but benefits civilians; over the years, the breakthroughs have included pacemakers and CT scans.

“Veterans are the canary in the coal mine for how the rest of Americans are going to experience health care,” an Army veteran from Maryland who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan told Mother Jones.

In addition to protesting job cuts, many in the crowd were incensed by Trump’s executive order to ban trans people from the military. “It is a shame that we’re letting hard-working, able-bodied, willing people go in a time of great need in our military,” said a DC resident who says his trans friend is being forced out of the Navy.

Organizers opted to hold the protest on Friday in part because of its historical significance: June 6 is the anniversary of D-Day, when the US military and Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in 1944 to help end World War II.

The rallyfeatured a performance by Dropkick Murphys and speeches from former congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), an Air National Guard veteran, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who lost both legs after her helicopter was shot down in Iraq.

“We are sick of politicians promising to look out for veterans when they are on the campaign trail and then abandoning them when they take office,” Duckworth told the crowd.

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Newark Mayor Ras Baraka on Defying ICE and Charting a New Course for Democrats

In May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka made headlines when he was arrested during a protest outside of an immigration detention facility in New Jersey and charged with trespassing. Baraka has staunchly opposed the reopening of the 1,000-bed detention center, called Delaney Hall, since Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a deal with the private prison company that owns it. The trespassing charge against Baraka was later dismissed, but he told supporters that he had been “targeted” by the Trump administration for speaking out. On Tuesday, he filed a lawsuit against Alina Habba, the interim US attorney for New Jersey, claiming that he had been maliciously prosecuted.

The encounter drew national attention at an opportune moment for Baraka, whose gubernatorial campaign has gained unexpected traction. An idiosyncratic figure, he is known for his radical political upbringing and his surprising success addressing violent crime in Newark. He is the son of Amiri Baraka, the firebrand poet and activist who spearheaded the Black Arts Movement,and Amina Baraka, also a central figure in the city’s Black cultural and political scene. Baraka followed in his parents’ shoes in both regards. In 2003, he performed a spoken word poem on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He was a school teacher and public school principal before becoming mayor in 2014.

As mayor, Baraka has been unapologetically progressive on most counts and shown an unusual willingness to experiment with policy. During his tenure, Newark conducted a guaranteed income pilot program, allowed 16-year-olds to vote in school board races, and, in an effort to boost homeownership, held a lottery that allowed residents to purchase city-owned properties for $1. Newark has seen significant decreases in most categories of crime since Baraka took office and, in 2022, homicides hit a 60-year-low. Baraka notably broke from the left in 2020, when he rebuffed calls to defund the police and described it as a “bourgeois liberal” stance that did little to address systemic problems.

Baraka is perhaps the most interesting personality in a crowded Democratic primary to replace term-limited New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. He is running to the left of a field that includes Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop; US Rep. Josh Gottheimer; US Rep. Mikie Sherrill; former state Sen. Stephen Sweeney; and Sean Spiller, president of the state’s largest teacher’s union. Sherrill, a former Navy pilot, pulled ahead of the pack with a 17-point lead in a recent poll. Baraka and a handful of other candidates were clustered around 11 percent.

It’s highly likely that the general election will also be competitive. President Donald Trump recently campaigned for former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, who is favored to win the Republican primary. And last November, Kamala Harris won New Jersey by only six points—a significant downturn from Biden’s 16-point victory in 2020.

So it is remarkable that Baraka has centered his campaign on a full-throated defense of immigrants. The positions that have cemented Baraka’s popularity in Newark may not play as well in a state-wide primary—or in the general election. New Jersey is mostly suburban and around 60 percent white. If he wins, Baraka would be the state’s first Black governor.

Earlier this week, I traveled to Newark to interview Baraka. It was a sweltering afternoon, and the downtown business district was sedate. Outside of a Kenyan restaurant, an aide pointed to the city’s changing skyline as evidence of the success of the mayor’s housing agenda: There were several high-rise apartment buildings going up, each representing hundreds of affordable units. Inside, I met Baraka, who was wearing a gray suit and a floral tie. Though he is a commanding presence on the debate stage, he was soft-spoken and unhurried during our interview. He seemed a bit world-weary—the primary is in its home stretch. Early voting is already underway, and election day is this Tuesday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was it like growing up in Newark with two very prominent artists and activists as parents?

I grew up in the heart of the South Ward, and the block was filled with its share of folks who were prominent in our community. We always had people come over—artists and musicians and poets and community activists from around the world.

It was pretty different growing up in that kind of environment. Early on, we were a part of what was called the African Free School [an alternative community school founded by Baraka’s parents]. My parents were also involved in electing the first African American mayor of Newark [Kenneth Gibson] and in the 1972 National Black Political Convention. There was both positive recognition from the community, and people who didn’t like my father. He was always center stage, whether you wanted it to be that way or not.

What your parents were doing was community activism, which is very different from running for public office.

Completely different.

How did you decide to get involved in electoral politics?

I was a community activist when I was a teacher. We would always be marching and protesting down to City Hall. And I wondered, why are we coming here to this building?

When I was 24, I ran for mayor. We raised $10,000 from fish fries and poetry readings. I remember debating [Newark Mayor] Sharpe James and William Payne [who later became a state assemblyman]. It’s like you’re in a fight and you get hit a couple of times, but you don’t get knocked out. You think, “Oh, I can handle this.”

That was my first foray into understanding what political power meant, as opposed to just having a defensive strategy. What does it mean to go on offense?

One of your platforms at the time was universal healthcare. Do you think that coming into office requires giving up on some of that progressive idealism and moderating?

No. I think that all of the things that we’re trying to do can get done. But they have to get done in this way. I just told somebody yesterday that I’m a Democrat because that’s the only weapon we have. The Democratic Party is the tool that we have to push the ideas we want to push, and organize the things we want to organize—right until something else is created.

All of the things that we’re trying to make happen—whether it’s universal healthcare or free education—that struggle is protracted, and it may take stages. But we have to do our part until other people can take it a little further than we can. There were no breakfast programs in schools until the Black Panthers started them, and public housing was an issue that came from the community. A lot of these things may start in a humble, small place and become more universal, more acceptable, through education and advocacy.

How do you strike a balance between meeting people where they are and persuading them on issues?

I learned that early on. I lost a lot of races because I thought I was right and other people were wrong. It was actually me being wrong, because I could not unite what I was saying to the things that they thought that were important.

My mother used to say you can’t bring people to the community meeting if they’re hungry. You got to feed them first, and then they’ll come to the meeting. The reality is, we have to meet people’s needs in order to make them care about the things that we think are important. To talk to them about why they don’t have food in the first place, right?

I think the Democrats have it a little backwards. They like to have these discussions without people eating. People have to eat first, then you can talk to them about billionaires who are taking their resources away.

This seems like a good time to turn to Delaney Hall and your sustained activism around the administration’s immigration agenda. Why has that been so central for you?

I think what these people are doing is dangerous, and if we allow it to continue to happen, many of us will be in jeopardy. Our lives, our rights, our democracy will be in jeopardy.

So it’s more than just what the polls say. You’re not pushing for things simply because they’re popular. I would imagine that people’s sentiment prior to Trump’s re-election is completely different than what it is now. Across this country, people are coming out of their houses, videotaping and trying to stop ICE from kidnapping people off the street.

Are you able to talk about your arrest and the lawsuit that was just filed?

The irony is that they keep saying that we tried to get arrested. Well, you don’t have to try to get arrested. They were itching to do that from the very sight of me.

They had no lawful reason to arrest me. Trespassing is a state charge that you get a summons for. You don’t get handcuffed, fingerprinted, have a mug shot taken, and be interrogated in a room. That doesn’t happen for a Class E misdemeanor, certainly not here in New Jersey.

These people violated my rights, and, more importantly, they violated the constitution of this country. They think they can do it arbitrarily, and nobody should say anything about it. So I don’t agree with that. I think somebody should say something about it.

What’s the significance of the Trump administration potentially targeting an elected official?

They just don’t care. And that’s really the danger of it. The cameras, the videos, should give you some pause, but it doesn’t. They lied on TV. When I got out of the holding cell, I had to listen to these people saying all this stuff that didn’t happen: that we broke the law. That the Congresswoman [LaMonica McIver] assaulted people. That we slammed ICE agents, and we barged our way into this place. All of this was not true. I thought I was in The Twilight Zone. And so we just started dropping the footage everywhere, so they could see what these people are manufacturing—lies.

I want to turn to the governor’s race. Affordability has been a common platform in the Democratic primary, but it was also one of the most persuasive issues that Trump ran on last November. Nationally, Democrats have had trouble convincing voters that they’re willing to prioritize affordability. How are you confronting that?

I think the Democratic message is right. People want the message; they just don’t like the messengers. We’re now yelling and screaming at Donald Trump’s spending plan that’s given some billion dollars of tax breaks to the wealthy, but the Democrats have talked about doing the same thing. The party of working families has not helped working families.

Health care in New Jersey is too high. Insurance companies and hospitals are killing us economically, and nobody is reining them in. LLCs are buying up all these properties and driving our mortgages up artificially, and nobody is reining them in. Childcare costs are higher than people’s rent. We can’t solve these problems. We don’t have the will to, and so people lose faith in our ability to govern.

Democrats are mistaking other Democrats staying home for approval for Donald Trump. It’s not approval for Trump. It’s disapproval for you.

You’ve campaigned on your record as the mayor of Newark, but this city is demographically and geographically different from the rest of New Jersey. How do those accomplishments translate to statewide issues?

The issues are the same: housing, crime, the environment, access to education and opportunity. We have reduced people’s healthcare costs in Newark. We have created homeownership. We have reduced crime.

It’s a mistake to think there are Black problems and white problems. Black people have a specific and unique history in this country that causes us to experience problems disproportionately. Doesn’t mean that other people don’t have them.

Maybe it’d be useful to talk specifically about affordable housing, which is an issue that can be very divisive in some of the suburban areas of the state. How are you talking to voters about your platform on that?

When people think of affordable housing, they think of a 30-story housing project full of poverty and violence. That idea is fueled by prejudice and racism. But affordability is a problem for everybody in New Jersey. In order to drive your taxes down, drive your rents down, drive your mortgages down, you have to build more housing. That’s just simple supply and demand that you learn in capitalism. Nobody disagrees that we need to build more housing. They just disagree on how and where.

When you’re out in the suburbs talking to those voters, who are predominantly white, are you trying to change the face of affordable housing?

The atmosphere has changed it for us. We just have to state it right. People know their children can’t afford to live here. They’re spending 30 or 50 percent of their income on rent. They’re living in their childhood bedrooms and attics and basements. When I say it, people laugh, because they know it’s true.

They know who these people are, right? I don’t have to change their face. It’s them. Your taxes are going up. You’re one month away from not being able to pay your mortgage, because it’s going up. It’s getting incredibly hard for you to sustain yourself. That resonates in everybody’s community, even in the suburbs.

To end on a lighter note, a video of you performing on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam has been featured in Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour. Did you know that was happening?

I didn’t know that she was going to do that. I was shocked and humbled. I wrote that decades ago, fresh out of college. I would have never known—I didn’t even know Beyoncé when I wrote that. I don’t think there was a Beyoncé.

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America’s Gas Pipeline Buildout Is Mainly for Exports—Not Energy Independence

More than three-quarters of new gas pipeline capacity under development in the US would feed additional liquefied natural gas exports rather than supporting domestic energy needs, a new report concludes.

Greenhouse gas emissions tied to that new capacity would be far larger than the current climate pollution from all coal-fired power plants nationwide, according to the report, published Monday by the Center for Energy & Environmental Analysis. CEEA is a recently formed think tank based in Arlington, Virginia, that focuses on energy and environmental policy.

“The money flowing to gas pipeline infrastructure is not slowing and is intended to push US gas production even higher from its current record levels,” Jeremy Symons, president of the CEEA and a former federal climate policy advisor, said in a written statement. “This buildout will extend our dependency on natural gas for decades to come, slowing the transition to cleaner, more affordable alternatives.”

Planned natural gas transmission pipelines would add 99 billion cubic feet per day of additional capacity, a figure just below the total volume of US natural gas production in 2024, according to the report. The 10 largest planned pipelines across the country—and 80 percent of total capacity of active pipeline projects—are intended to export gas overseas as LNG, based on the authors’ assessment of federal data and other public records.

The additional gas shipments would have significant implications for climate change. If all of the pipelines are built and run at full capacity, carbon dioxide emissions from burning this additional gas would be two and half times greater than the CO2 currently released from all US coal-fired power plants, the report found.

This doesn’t include emissions of methane, a climate super pollutant and the primary component of natural gas. Methane emissions occur at every step of the natural gas supply chain—from wellheads and pipelines to LNG vessels and end users—as the gas leaks or is intentionally vented.

“If we are just exporting our emissions to other countries, that’s still going to cause climate change.”

Methane emissions from the additional pipelines would pack a climate punch nearly twice that of CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants over a 20-year period, according to the report.

The amount of gas leaks from the oil and gas sector will likely increase as the Trump administration rolls back the industry’s methane regulations, the report noted.

“We know from hundreds of thousands of aerial and satellite measurements that methane leaks from oil and gas production are far worse than we previously realized, which makes the climate footprint of natural gas as bad as coal in many regions of the country,” said Danny Richter, a senior fellow with CEEA and the report’s lead author. “We had a clear path to clean up the methane problem, including the methane emissions reduction program enacted by Congress in 2022 as well as EPA regulations for the oil and gas industry. But that pathway has been shut down by the current administration.”

A fee on excessive methane emissions from oil and gas producers implemented under the Biden administration was rescinded by the Trump administration on May 12.

“It is clear from the beginning of this ‘report’ that it was created with the outcome already determined and no desire to provide facts,” an EPA spokesperson told Inside Climate News. “US methane emissions have been falling for decades thanks to American innovation, not heavy-handed government regulations, while domestic production of oil and gas has exponentially increased. According to EPA, methane emissions in the United States decreased by 19% between 1990 and 2022.”

Measurements in the field have repeatedly shown that reported methane emissions far understate actual releases.

The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry group, did not respond to a request for comment.

The report is based on US Department of Energy data on 104 pipeline projects currently under development. It is unclear whether all of the planned pipelines will be built. Fifty-four of the projects, slightly more than half of all pipelines under development, have either not yet been approved or are on hold.

This includes one of the largest proposed pipelines, the $45 billion Alaska Nikiski LNG project. The pipe, which proponents have sought for decades, would transport gas 805 miles from Alaska’s North Slope to an LNG export terminal in southern Alaska. Completing the proposed export terminal, a retrofit of an existing import terminal, is included in the project’s projected cost.

The developer, the Alaska Gasline Development Corp, has applied for permits for the pipeline, many of which were approved during the last Trump administration, but still requires more.

President Donald Trump has directed agencies to speed up permitting and roll back environmental protections. He touted the Alaska Nikiski LNG project in an address to Congress earlier this year as “truly spectacular” and said “the permitting is gotten.”

Arvind Ravikumar, co-director of the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, cautioned that the report included figures for carbon dioxide emissions of gas burned by end users in other countries that import the LNG. “The way international carbon accounting works in this space is that you count only those emissions that happen within your national border,” Ravikumar said.

However, David Lyon, a senior methane scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said including emissions from burning the gas, wherever it occurs, made sense. “Climate change is global,” Lyon said. “If we are just exporting our emissions to other countries, that’s still going to cause climate change and have impact.”

However, Lyon noted that in some cases, building gas pipelines could actually help reduce emissions. For example, in the Permian basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico—the largest oil and gas producing region in the country—gas is often flared, or vented, due to a lack of sufficient pipeline capacity.

In such cases, additional pipelines could help reduce flaring and its associated emissions. But it would be better to avoid drilling new wells in areas that lack sufficient pipeline capacity in the first place, Lyon added.

In comparing greenhouse gas emissions associated with the planned pipelines to those of coal-power plants, the report only compares CO2 emissions between the two fuel sources. Elsewhere, the report discusses methane emissions from the gas supply chain, but does not consider methane emissions from coal mines that feed coal-fired power plants. A recent peer-reviewed study comparing the greenhouse gas emissions of LNG and coal found methane emissions from coal mines were relatively modest compared to coal’s CO2 emissions.

In addition to permitting issues, economic forces could also limit the number of pipeline projects that get built in the coming years, or the extent to which completed pipelines operate at full capacity. China, the world’s largest importer of LNG, stopped taking US gas entirely in March in response to US tariffs on Chinese goods.

Symons said the ongoing pipeline buildout could commit the US to significantly larger LNG exports for decades to come. “This locks in more fossil fuel dependency that future presidents won’t be able to make go away,” he said. “Policies like tax incentives come and go, but pipelines are forever.”

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Republicans Want to Ban Pets From Domestic Violence Shelters

A new Trump-backed attack on domestic violence services just dropped—and this time, it’s targeting survivors’ pets.

Tucked inside the 1,200-page appendix to the White House’s budget request to Congress is a proposal to eliminate a grant program, funded by the Agriculture Department and administered by the Department of Justice, that provides domestic violence shelters with money to support survivors’ pets. Advocates say the program, known as PAWS, helps fill a critical gap despite its relatively small budget of $3 million: Many domestic violence shelters do not allow people to bring their pets with them, which can prevent survivors from leaving their abusers or lead them to return to them, according to a survey conducted by the Urban Resource Institute (URI) and the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

“Survivors won’t leave, they can’t leave, if they’re going to leave their pets behind,” said Lauren Schuster, vice president of government affairs at URI, a New York City-based domestic violence service provider that lobbied for the creation of PAWS and received one of the program’s first grants. “Pets are often the only source of unconditional love that a survivor experiences when they’re in abusive relationships. So many leave [abusers] with little more than the clothes on their backs, their children and their pets, and to have them be forced to make a decision [to leave their pets] is too much for them to bear.”

The PAWS funds were first distributed in 2020, after being authorized as part of the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill. Since then, more than 44 PAWS grants have been distributed to organizations across 26 states, according to Schuster and Nancy Blaney, director of government affairs at the Animal Welfare Institute, an organization that also lobbied for the creation of the program. URI received a $600,000 grant during the first year of PAWS’ distribution, which funded food, supplies, and veterinary care, Schuster said. Now, all 24 of their New York City shelters are pet inclusive, thanks to private funding and some other government grants the organization has secured, she added.

The proposal to eliminate the program comes as just the latest example of the Trump administration’s attacks on domestic violence services. The DOJ previously canceled hundreds of grants that were reportedly valued at more than $800 million and supported victims of domestic violence and other crimes. Some of those cancelations were subsequently reversed following repots from Mother Jones and other news outlets.

The administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion and transgender people have also led domestic violence service providers to purge resources offering particular support for LGBTQ survivors. Trump’s short-lived federal funding freeze also threw the nonprofits providing services to survivors into disarray. The federal budget also proposes eliminating the office focused on violence prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While this is not the first time a presidential budget has proposed cutting the program—Biden’s proposed budget last year did, too—advocates say the threat feels more pressing now, in light of the ways the Trump administration has already undermined support for domestic violence service providers and survivors.

Congress has signaled they could move forward with decimating PAWS. On Thursday, the House Appropriations Agriculture Subcommittee passed a version of their budget bill that lacks funding for the PAWS program.

“It’s disappointing to see the failure to understand the importance of these grants to these individuals and how much it means to provide those resources so domestic violence survivors can get out of a dangerous situation,” Blaney, from the Animal Welfare Institute, said.

The proposal to cut the funds is also puzzling in light of the fact that Attorney General Pam Bondi previously reversed grant cancelations that offered similar support for pets, and extended her personal appreciation to some of those service providers, NBC News reported. “Our understanding is that all the pets grants were reinstated as it is a passion area for the AG,” Jennifer Pollitt Hill, executive director of the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence, which had its canceled grant for pet support restored, previously told me. Now, though, Bondi’s office could lose grants that offer similar critical support. (Spokespeople for the DOJ, the USDA, and the White House did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

Democratic Whip Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), who sponsored the House version of the 2017 bill proposing the creation of the grant program, expressed her disappointmentsaid in a statement provided to Mother Jones on Thursday. “By raiding the PAWS Act to give their mega-donors a tax break, Republicans aren’t just abandoning vulnerable animals—they are betraying women, children, and families.”

Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said that shelters often do not allow pets for a variety of reasons, including having lack of access to funds or because survivors may be scared of or allergic to certain pets. But that can have tragic consequences for survivors. Love-Patterson recalled an incident from her days working as an advocate at a domestic violence shelter that did not accept pets. When one of the survivors had to leave her golden retriever at home, and “her husband called her regularly just so she could hear him torturing the dog,” Love-Patterson told me.

“She oftentimes had one foot in the shelter and one foot going back home,” she added. “That was her baby.”

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Judge Calls Trump’s Deportation Operation Kafkaesque In Blistering Opinion

On Wednesday, District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to provide the due process it denied to Venezuelans in March when it sent them to a Salvadoran megaprison.

The order means that the roughly 140 men sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act—a rarely used 18th-century wartime power—must be provided with a chance to argue their cases in court. Boasberg’s order follows two Supreme Court decisions holding that people targeted under the Alien Enemies Act are entitled to due process under the Constitution. The decision provides the first real hope of the men being released since they arrived at CECOT in March. (The case does not cover the approximately 100 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador who were subject to removal under other authorities.)

For now, Boasberg is not ordering the Trump administration to follow a specific set of steps to ensure the men receive due process. Instead, he is asking the government to suggest its own way of doing so. “Given that such a remedy may involve delicate questions relating to diplomacy and national security—core Executive Branch functions—the Court will proceed in measured fashion,” Boasberg explained. “It will begin by allowing the Government to propose how it will ensure that the CECOT Class receives the process it is constitutionally due. That process must nonetheless be forthcoming.” (If Boasberg finds that process insufficient he could order the administration to take more specific steps.)

The judge made clear in the decision that the government is already on a short leash. The case began with him ordering the government to “immediately” turn around the two planes headed for El Salvador carrying Venezuelans being removed under the Alien Enemies Act. The government refused to do so. (A criminal contempt inquiry launched by Boasberg in response is now ongoing.)

The government’s conduct in the case was contemptible enough for Boasberg to turn to Franz Kafka. The first paragraph of the 69-page decision reads:

One morning, Kafka’s Josef K. awakens to encounter two strange men outside his room. As he gets his bearings, he realizes that he is under arrest. When he asks the strangers why, he receives no answer.” “We weren”t sent to tell you that,” one says. “Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.” Bewildered by these men and distressed by their message, K. tries to comfort himself that he lives in “a state governed by law,” one where “all statutes [are] in force.” He therefore demands again, “How can I be under arrest? And in this manner?” “Now there you go again,” the guard replies. “We don”t answer such questions.” Undeterred, K. offers his “papers” and demands their arrest warrant. “Good heavens!” the man scolds. “There’s been no mistake.” “[O]ur department,” he assures K., is only “attracted by guilt”; it “doesn”t seek [it] out . . . . That’s the Law.” “I don”t know that law,” K. responds. “You”ll feel it eventually,” the guard says.” (Page number citations have been removed for readability.)

After, Boasberg compares K.’s predicament to that of the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. “In the early morning hours, Venezuelans held by the Department of Homeland Security at El Valle Detention Facility in Texas were awakened from their cells, taken to a separate room, shackled, and informed that they were being transferred,” the judge explained. “To where? That they were not told…When asked, some guards reportedly laughed and said that they did not know; others told the detainees, incorrectly, that they were being transferred to another immigration facility or to Mexico or Venezuela.”

The Venezuelans at CECOT have now been held incommunicado for more than two months. They have not been allowed any calls to family members, much less the lawyers advocating on their behalf in the United States. Instead, they are stuck in one of the world’s worst prisons with no idea of when (if ever) they will get out.

According to the Trump administration, the men are in El Salvador because they are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But the administration has provided almost no evidence to support that claim. It has refused repeated requests from Mother Jones and other outlets to refute overwhelming evidence that it falsely accused many—if not most—of the people it sent to CECOT of gang membership.

Instead, in a formulation worthy of K.’s tormentors, a senior Department of Homeland Security official has told me and other reporters that it would be “insane” to “share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one.”

Boasberg is showing little patience for the government’s obfuscation. “In our nation—unlike the one into which K. awakes—the Government’s mere promise that there has been no mistake does not suffice,” he wrote on Wednesday. “Any government confident of the legal or evidentiary basis for its actions has nothing to fear from that requirement. It is, after all, ‘central to our system of ordered liberty.’”

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Trump’s New “Supercharged” Travel Ban

On Wednesday, the Trump administration issued a new travel ban on foreigners, primarily targeting people from countries in Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Under the guise of protecting the United States against “foreign terrorists” and national security threats, this executive order amounts to an even more sweeping bar than the infamous travel ban on Muslim majority nations President Donald Trump implemented during his first term.

“There is no evidence this is making us safer.”

The reinstated travel ban represents the administration’s latest attack on immigrants. Slated to go into effect on Monday, June 9, it prohibits most travel and lawful immigration from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. It also limits entry for travelers from seven other nations: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

The rationale for the restrictions, according to the presidential proclamation, is based on “foreign policy, national security, and counterterrorism” concerns. The executive order states that the countries hit with the restrictions lack proper vetting and screening processes for issuing passports and other civil documents and have high visa overstay rates. It also mentions the nations’ willingness (or lack thereof) to take back deportees from the United States as a factor.

There are a number of exemptions to the ban: travelers who already have valid visas, green card holders, Afghan nationals eligible for a special visa for assisting the US government, and immediate relatives of American citizens. It also carves out exceptions for “ethnic and religious minorities facing persecution in Iran,” dual citizens traveling with a passport from a country not listed in the proclamation, and athletes coming for the World Cup orother major sports events.

The 19 countries targeted by the travel ban represent more than 475 million people, the American Immigration Council noted. “The travel bans of the Trump administration’s first term never demonstrated any meaningful value as a national security tool,” Jeremy Robbins, executive director of the organization, said in a statement. “Sweeping national origin bans declare many innocent people to be a threat based on factors they cannot control in their home countries. There is no evidence this is making us safer.”

Other immigration policy experts and observers have raised questions about the Trump administration’s justification for the severe travel restrictions. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute pointed out that there’s little evidence to support claims that immigrants from the countries covered by the ban commit acts of terrorism at any significant rate.

A single terrorist from those countries murdered one person in an attack on US soil: Emanuel Kidega Samson from Sudan in 2017. The annual chance of being murdered by a terrorist from one of the banned countries from 1975 to the end of 2024 was about 1 in 13.9 billion per year.

— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) June 5, 2025

Upon announcing the executive order, President Trump brought up the recent attack in Boulder, Colorado, against a group of demonstrators calling for Israeli hostages in Gaza to be released. The perpetrator of the attack is an Egyptian national who authorities say entered the United States on a tourist visa in 2022 and later applied for asylum; this, Trump said, “has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals.” Egypt, however, isn’t included in the list of countries targeted by the executive order. When asked about it, Trump said that Egypt “has been a country that we deal with very closely, they have things under control.”

This iteration of the travel ban mirrors the authority the Trump administration invoked the first time around to bar travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, giving rise to nationwide protests and lengthy legal battles. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a third version of Trump’s embattled travel ban that also impacted Venezuela and North Korea.

“With the return of a supercharged Muslim and African Ban and the racist exclusion of certain people from the ability to seek safety and refuge,” Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition and one of the leaders in the resistance against the Trump 1.0 travel ban, said in a statement “Donald Trump and his enablers are attacking the very concept of America itself.”

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Humanitarian Parole Is Over. Now Comes the Fear.

Last week, the US Supreme Court lifted an order from a Massachusetts district court that hadmaintained humanitarian parole protections in place for about 530,000 immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua who had been living in the United States legally under a Biden-era program. Advocacy groups in South Florida condemned the decision that will inevitably impact scores of immigrants and their families living in the area.

In 2022, after immigration authorities noted an increase in the number of immigrants arriving at the border from these four countries, the Biden administration created a parole program known as CHNV (which stands for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans). The new program allowed applicants to come to the United States legally for two years as long as they passed background checks, hada sponsor based in the US, and had traveled to the US at no cost to the government.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration revoked CHNV, citing in a Federal Register notice that the program is “unnecessary to achieve border security goals.” Attorneys representing CHNV recipients challenged the decision, and on April 14, a Massachusetts district judge blocked the termination of the program. This month, the Trump administration requested a stay from the US Supreme Court, which was granted on Friday, May 30.

At a virtual press conference hours after the decision was announced, Karen Tumlin, director of the Justice Action Center, and an attorney in the case, said the Supreme Court’s decision “enacted the largest mass de-legalization program in US history.”

“Let me be clear. This is for a group of people who had lawful status until this morning, but who the Trump administration has forcibly rendered undocumented overnight,” Tumlin said, “and that should send a shiver down everyone’s spine.”

“This order gives ICE a green light to grab these immigrants and deport them to the hell they escaped from in a legal way.”

In Miami, Florida, the following Monday, representatives from several immigrant advocacy groups held a press conference to highlight what this decision would mean for the local community. Standing behind a lectern draped with flags from Cuba, Venezuela, and Haiti, Paul Christian Namphy, political director for the Haitian community organization Family Action Network Movement, noted that immigrants who were directly affected by the Supreme Court’s decision were not present at the gathering because of “the dangers that they are facing right now.”

“These individuals followed a rigorous legal process and are now being punished while their legal status is still being litigated,” Namphy said. “The court opens the door to mass deportations, family separations, and economic disruptions.”

Silvia Muñoz, a member of the Cuban American Women Supporting Democracy organization, said immigrants enrolled in the parole program had faced hardships in their countries, such as food shortages and violence. The Biden administration intended for the parole program to offer them a humane and legal way to come to the US. “This order gives ICE a green light to grab these immigrants and deport them to the hell they escaped from in a legal way,” she said. She called on Republicans “who believed Trump’s promise to deport immigrants did not include their loved ones, to raise their voices in protest and total disregard for human life.”

Adelys Ferro, director of the Venezuelan American Caucus, said that the Trump administration’s agenda against immigrants targets all nationalities, pointing to another recent US Supreme Court decision that allowed the Trump administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status protections for about 350,000 Venezuelans. “The attacks against immigrants are everywhere,” she said. “It’s not only one nationality. It’s all of us. They don’t want immigrants here.”

Hours after Friday’s decision, Jack Maguire, development manager of the advocacy group Florida Immigrant Coalition, told Mother Jones that immigrant communities in the Miami area were already experiencing immense fear and anxiety in the wake of other anti-immigrant decisions by the Trump administration. And, as I wrote in April, Florida also leads the nation in the number of law enforcement agencies that are collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that requires all county jails to cooperate with ICE requests to detain immigrants booked into their facilities.

Add to these concerns, the threatened deportations would separate more families and negatively influence the state’s economy, he added. “Businesses are going to start losing employees,” he says. “The effects are going to be felt very immediately by the people with these statuses. But it’s also going to be felt community-wide.”

The decision is not a final ruling on the merits of the case, Tumlin from the Justice Action Center added, “We’re committed to ensuring that our clients and the class members get a full-and-complete hearing as quickly as possible.” Thisdecision would cause “irreparable harm,”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “It undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”

Angel Leal, an immigration attorney in the Miami area, said he’s heard from humanitarian parole clients in recent days who are fearful of what will happen next in their cases. Many parole recipients have pending applications for other forms of relief. But still, in those cases, “they’re concerned and they’re scared.”

“Even if everything’s been done correctly, and whatever immigration benefit they qualify for has already been applied for,” he said, “the sense of insecurity that it can all be taken away at any time is really what’s concerning to us and to our clients.”

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Trump Wants To Eliminate a 105-Year-Old Office That Supports Women Workers

When the Secretary of the Department of Labor (DOL), Lori Chavez-DeRemer, testified before the House Appropriations Committee last month, she seemed to assure worried lawmakers that the more than century-old, congressionally-mandated Women’s Bureau was here to stay.

“The Women’s Bureau is in statute,” Chavez-DeRemer said in response to a question from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) about DOGE’s cancelations of congressionally-mandated grants designed to get women into jobs in construction and manufacturing, as Mother Jones previouslyreported. Indeed, the Women’s Bureauwas created through a law enacted in 1920 to promote the welfare of women at work, improve their working conditions, and boost their abilities to earn good livings.

But a summary of the Labor Department’s budget request for the next fiscal year, released by the agency on Friday, shows the department is proposing to entirely eliminate the Women’s Bureau—which it calls “an ineffective policy office that is a relic of the past”—for the first time ever. The budget brief, a summary that agencies release detailing their annual budget requests, states that the DOL will work with Congress to repeal the statutes mandating the existence of the Women’s Bureau as well as the aforementioned grant program that was already canceled. President Donald Trump’s budget request to Congress, released Friday, also proposes eliminating the Bureau. The effort comes as Republicans’ latest attempt to dismantle the Bureau, which they started working towards during Trump’s first term.

Nine current and former DOL staffers told Mother Jones the move reflects the Trump administration’s ambitions to encourage more women to stop working and instead stay home to raise children. “It really feels like a specific [effort] to get women out of the workplace,” said Gayle Goldin, former deputy director of the office under the Biden administration. “We really still need the Women’s Bureau, because we need to be able to identify what the problems are, see where the barriers are for women in the workplace, and ensure that women have full capacity to enter the workplace in whatever job they want.”

Former staffers also say it reflects the Trump administration’sbroader devaluing of issues primarily affecting women—despite Trump’s claims that “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE” in his second term. The DOL staffers, along with outside experts, say they fear that eliminating the Women’s Bureau will lead to a rollback of women’s gains in the workforce.

Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a DC think tank, disputes the DOL’s characterization of the Women’s Bureau as “a relic of the past,” pointing to data that shows the gender wage gap widened for the first time in 20 years post-pandemic and that women’s labor force participation rate has decreased since peaking in the 1990s.

“The Women’s Bureau has historically played a role in helping the [DOL] understand both the causes and consequences of economic trends like this, which can only be effectively addressed with timely research and policy analysis,” Bahn said.

Spokespeople for the Labor Department and the White House did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.

Multiple former DOL staffers described the Women’s Bureau as “small but mighty.”

Despite a relatively tiny budget that makes up less than one percent of the department’s overall spending, the Bureau has historically played a key role in passing federal laws including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. More recently, their research on state-level paid family and medical leave laws led multiple states to pass such laws, former DOL staffers said. Staff members also provided briefings to lawmakers in Congress based on their data to help inform policies to support women workers.

“It’s not something that is a household name,” Goldin, the former deputy director, said of the Bureau, “but it is something that really makes a difference to working women.”

Since its creation, the office has conducted regular research on women’s workforce participation by county, the gender wage gap by race and occupation, and child care prices nationwide. One former DOL employee described the Women’s Bureau staff as “that voice in rooms where no one was saying anything about working women..[and] asking, ‘What about childcare? What about paid leave? What about the gender wage gap?’” (Several current and former DOL staffers were granted anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out; a department official previously threatened staff who spoke to journalists with “serious legal consequences,” including criminal charges, ProPublica reported.)

The Bureau also administered grants to support job training and address gender-based harassment in the workplace, which grantees said offered critical support and helped women secure well-paying jobs. The office also hosted in-person training sessions nationwide to ensure workers knew their rights and to help other federal agencies implement programs to support women’s well-being and equity at work.

Wendy Chun-Hoon, former director of the Bureau under the Biden administration, said it’s “laughable” for the DOL to propose cutting an agency that manages to do so much with such a small budget. “Our dollar probably goes further than anyone else’s,” she said.

Since Trump’s second term began, the office’s work has essentially been at a standstill. The Bureau has lost about half of its approximately 50-person staff through a combination of buyouts and resignations. DOL staffers said the Bureau’s public-facing work—such as blog posts commemorating International Women’s Day and National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, new data analyses, and funding opportunities for employers—has essentially been paused since Jan. 20, leaving those who remain without much work to do. “There doesn’t seem to be much interest from the Secretary’s office so far in engaging with [the Bureau] and trying to see what [the Bureau] can do to enhance their priorities,” one DOL staffer said.

“The instructions that we got were essentially anything that had [the word] ‘gender’ had to come down.”

The little work that staffers have been assigned since Trump resumed office has been focused on appeasing the new administration. Soon after Trump’s Inauguration, Women’s Bureau staffers received what they believed was a bizarre directive, according to multiple current and former DOL staffers: Scrub the Women’s Bureau website of terms including “inequity,” “gender identity,” and in some cases simply “gender,” because they could run afoul of Trump’s executive orders seeking to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion across government and to erase transgender people from public life. One former Women’s Bureau staffer said there were multiple staff members working on the project full-time for two to three days. “The instructions that we got were essentially anything that had [the word] ‘gender’ had to come down,” the staffer said.

Some prior references to the gender wage gap were changed to refer to instead the “sex earnings gap.” And webpages that once housed extensive resources and reports on gender-based violence and harassment at work and the impacts of gender and racial inequalities affecting women workers were deleted entirely, which one former DOL staffer called “a huge loss.” (Archived versions of the webpages are still available through the Wayback Machine.)

In its attempt to justify eliminating the office, the budget brief claims that “the Women’s Bureau has struggled to find a role” as women’s workforce participation has increased since the office’s creation in 1920, and that “its work is not always closely coordinated with, or informed by, the agencies that actually have the resources to address the issues at hand.” But current and former DOL staffers say those allegations are baseless.

“We know full well that women’s labor force participation continues to be much lower than men’s,” one former DOL employee said. “Clearly there’s plenty more progress we could make.”

Staffers also noted examples of the Bureau’s work helping other federal agencies address the concerns of women workers: In 2022, for example, the office collaborated with the Department of Transportation to raise awareness of sexual harassment and assault in the trucking industry, and also worked with the Department of Commerce to require that companies seeking large amounts of funding through the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act submit proposals to make childcare accessible to workers.

“This administration came out saying that they were going to ‘defend women’ and that they were ‘pro-worker,’” said Chun-Hoon, the former director, “and they’ve demonstrated they’re anything but either of those things.”

Republicans have long been wary of the Women’s Bureau.

During Trump’s first term, the administration sought to slash its funding by more than 75 percent, though that did not end up happening because of pushback from advocacy groups and Democrats. And in 2023, House Republicans unsuccessfully tried to eliminate the Bureau for the first time in at least a decade.

While Project 2025 did not outright call for the elimination of the Women’s Bureau, it alleged the office “tends towards a politicized research and engagement agenda that puts predetermined conclusions ahead of empirical study” and said the Bureau should “rededicate its research budget towards open inquiry, especially to dissentangle the influences on women’s workforce participation and to understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.”

For supporters of the Women’s Bureau, a cruel irony is that Thursday marks the office’s 105th birthday. If it is, in fact, eliminated before it turns 106—which Congress would have to approve—one DOL staffer predicted that “women are going to be left behind.” For the Trump administration, though, that may be the goal.

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How the Legacy of the “Bonus Army” Inspired a Modern Protest Movement of Military Veterans

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

Whenthe promises politicians made went unkept, when they were left without any reasonable alternatives, American veterans took to the streets by the thousands, forced to become their own advocates.

The year was 1932, and the men who’d served in World War I were demanding the bonus pay they’d been promised for their years fighting in Europe. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or the “Bonus Army,” veterans hitchhiked and rode freight train boxcars from all over the country to get to Washington, DC. They protested for months, and the entire nation took notice.

In 2025, a new Bonus Army has assembled and plans to rally in Washington on June 6 to protest the administration’s cuts to Veterans Affairs and federal employment, where veterans and their families comprise 30 percent of the workforce.

“The federal workforce is one of the only places in the entire country that truly takes into account the merit of military service, and [the cuts are] something that really pisses me off,” said Will Attig, a protest co-organizer and executive director of the Union Veterans Council, which advocates for veterans jobs and a robust VA.

Now “veterans that serve their country are being called the worst type of names and are being told that they’re DEI hires, being told that their jobs are handouts, that they’re lazy bums,” he said. “We can all agree, veterans need jobs. Veterans do better when they have good jobs, and taking that pathway away and then disrespecting the thousands, the tens of thousands of veterans that play those roles” is enraging.

The new efforts bear the name and the legacy of thousands of American soldiers who took to the streets almost a century ago, and they echo generations of veterans who have advocated for their benefits and applied their moral weight to right wrongs.

The Bonus Army protests of 1932 led to the GI Bill more than a decade later. Vietnam veterans not only protested the war in Southeast Asia, but two veterans—Sens. John McCain and John Kerry—helped lead the reconciliation efforts. Gulf War veterans steadfastly pushed to have Gulf War syndrome and the effects of Agent Orange recognized and VA benefits to treat it.

“All veterans were willing to give their lives in service to their country. In other words, we ‘walked the walk,’” said historian and veteran Marc Leepson. “And that gives us a good measure of credibility, if not gravitas” when advocating for certain issues.

The Birth of Military Protests

Much of modern military protest traces back to the original Bonus Army, according to James Ridgway, a veterans law scholar and lecturer at George Washington University.

Then, veterans had been promised deferred compensation for their World War I service, but it wouldn’t be paid until 1945. As the Great Depression worsened and families became desperate, veterans demanded their bonuses early. They marched from Oregon to D.C., where more than 10,000 camped on the National Mall and on the banks of the Anacostia River.

There, Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler gave a rousing speech that is still quoted today.

“You have just as much right to have a lobby here as any steel corporation,” Butler said. “Take it from me, this is the greatest demonstration of Americanism we have ever had… Don’t make any mistake about it: You’ve got the sympathy of the American people. Now, don’t you lose it!”

Even so, at the order of then-President Hoover, the assembled thousands were routed from their protest site at bayonet point by a battalion of soldiers, machine gunners, cavalrymen, and tanks from the same Army they served in.

When images of the Bonus Army’s burning camp made the front pages of newspapers and theater newsreels across America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was running against Hoover for the presidency that year, reportedly told an aide, “This will elect me.”

Roosevelt, who promised a “New Deal” that would provide relief and economic security for all Americans, including veterans, won the election that November by a landslide, securing 57% of the popular vote.

The struggles of WWI veterans served as a cautionary tale for Roosevelt, who signed the GI Bill in 1944. This historic law provided low-interest loans, trade education, and a college education to servicemen returning from World War II.

Veterans Fight for Truth and Treatment

Just a few decades later, the pendulum swung back with young soldiers returning from the Vietnam War. They were called “losers” by politicians and World War II veterans who did not have the same rates of post-traumatic stress disorder as their successors.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War demonstrated during 1976 U.S. Bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia. (Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons)

When the Vietnam veterans began to get sick from their exposure to Agent Orange or were stricken with severe addictions to help manage their PTSD, they struggled to file claims with the Veterans Benefits Administration.

As a combat lieutenant in 1969, Bobby Muller was shot while leading a charge and was paralyzed from the waist down.

After suffering deplorable conditions in a Bronx VA hospital, Muller co-founded the Vietnam Veterans of America in 1978. The VVA advocates for veterans’ issues like combating homelessness, ensuring adequate care for disabled veterans, and assisting veterans seeking government benefits and services. Today, there are nearly 90,000 VVA members in 650 chapters across the US.

“Nobody can speak for the dead,” Muller said in a 2019 interview with Binghamton University. “But I was in a position to speak for the living that had been severely damaged.”

Veterans advocacy has not just focused on winning benefits. In the spring of 1971, a young lieutenant who’d commanded a swift boat in the Mekong Delta named John Kerry spoke to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In addition to vividly retelling the findings of the Winter Soldier testimony earlier that year into war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Kerry laid bare the criminality many veterans felt embodied the United States’ involvement in the war.

“We could come back to this country, and we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country … not the Reds … but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out,” Kerry testified.

Kerry, along with McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, would later push the Clinton administration to restore diplomatic relations with that country. McCain noted that his war experience afforded him a unique position. “I knew I wasn’t taking much of a political risk by advocating for normal relations. It was hard to accuse me of bad faith, and I felt pretty safe from criticism,” he later said. In the 1990s, veterans returning from the Persian Gulf also had to fight for benefits to treat their service-related injuries.After serving as an Army cavalry scout in Kuwait and Iraq in 1991, Paul Sullivan experienced chronic respiratory infections and neurological symptoms. He met other Gulf vets in VA hospital waiting rooms. They compared notes and shared their fury at being told their conditions were “temporary” and “not related to their service.” At the time, the burden heavily fell on veterans seeking to get medical care through VA.

“Veterans trusted each other, and veterans believed each other that we were exposed to toxins and that we were sick,” Sullivan said. “Then we demanded very clear objectives from VA: Why are we sick? … How are we going to get better, and who’s going to pay?”

Gulf War veterans collaborated with Vietnam Veterans of America and the Veterans of Foreign Wars to lobby for access to care and benefits from the Veterans Administration in a battle that went on for decades, according to Sullivan, who served as executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.

This collaboration led to the successful passage of the Veterans Benefits Improvements Act of 1994, the Persian Gulf War Veterans Act of 1998 and subsequent laws, all of which made it easier for veterans to access the health care needed to treat service-related illnesses.

That tenacity continued as veterans and their families slept on the steps of the Capitol building in 2022 to pressure senators to pass the PACT Act, which extended benefits to those exposed to toxins during their service.

Veterans and their families pressured Congress to pass the PACT Act to extend benefits to veterans exposed to toxins during their service. (Photo courtesy of Rosie Lopez-Torres)

Now, veterans are using a combination of their combat experiences and subsequent inadequate treatments to lobby for expanded clinical studies of psychedelics.

“After two decades of sustained combat and a persistently high veteran suicide rate, there is growing urgency—and willingness—to pursue innovative treatments for the challenges veterans face,” says Amber Capone, co-founder of Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions. “Veterans have a remarkable ability to transcend political divides and build consensus around otherwise contentious issues.”

Texas House Rep. Mike Olcott was unconvinced about a $50 million bill to research using the psychedelic drug ibogaine to treat substance use disorders, PTSD, and other mental health conditions until he spoke with a group of people, including Amber’s husband, Marcus, a former Navy SEAL.

“As a former scientist, I said ‘I’ve got to talk to someone who’s actually been through this,’ because I was very skeptical,” Olcott said. After Marcus Capone described his own experiences, Olcott remarked, there are “really good reasons to support this bill, and I’m looking forward to voting for it.”

When the Bonus Army of 2025 arrives in the Capitol on June 6th, they will have an opportunity to use this same force multiplier of veterans’ voices. Organizers say they want to protect federal employment for veterans and military families, hold politicians accountable for cuts that harm service members and families, and stop the “weakening of the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

“I think that reminding our fellow Americans that people who choose to step forward and serve—like veterans and civil servants—they should be honored not demonized,” said Scott Cooper, a Marine pilot who served numerous tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and will join the June 6 protest. “I believe in my core that citizenship can’t be a spectator sport, so I need to participate and help, no matter how small that contribution is.”

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A Doctor’s Impassioned Defense of Later Abortions

Dr. Shelley Sella kept a journal from the very first day she got on a plane to go work for George Tiller, the third-trimester abortion provider who was assassinated in 2009. As the first woman to openly provide third-trimester abortions in the US,she spent nearly 20 years commuting from her home in California to Tiller’s clinic in Kansas, and then, after his murder, to the storied Southwest Women’s Options abortion clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Sometimes Sella’s journal entries focused on medical protocols, she tells me: “How much misoprostol did I give her? How much Pitocin?” But mostly, she recorded the stories of her patients and the circumstances that led them to her clinic. “I would think, ‘If people could hear these stories, they would have such a different attitude about third-trimester abortion.”

Going public with those stories felt like an imperative after Sella’s retirement in 2021, a few months before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Her newbook, Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care, is part memoir, part education tool, part defense of a deeply stigmatized form of medical care—one that is likely becoming more common as post-Roe abortion bans lead to delays for patients. Sella focuses on six lightly fictionalized patients and their families, including a couple who learned their baby would likely die shortly after birth, a cancer patient needing an abortion so she could start chemotherapy, a scared teenager who hid her pregnancy from her parents for months, and a victim of domestic abuse. Interwoven is Sella’s own story—her path out of a violent childhood, her coming-of-age during the 1970s feminist movement, and her years as an unfulfilled OB-GYN.

One of Sella’s main goals is to demystify what third-trimester abortion involves: typically, an injection to stop the fetus’ heart, then induction of labor, then a few days later, a stillbirth. Patients receive emotional support—a chaplain at Tiller’s clinic; midwives, doulas and group counseling sessions in Albuquerque—and decide whether they want to see and hold their baby (the word most patients use, Sella says). The process is intense, expensive, and heart-wrenching.

“Third-trimester abortion is like first- and second-trimester abortion, except that people are more desperate.”

Sella’s other goal is to challenge mainstream reproductive rights advocates who avoid talking about later-term procedures out of fear that voters will be unnerved, rather than see them as a necessary part of maternal health care and the fight for reproductive autonomy. “I believe now is the time to reevaluate what it means to be pro-choice,” she writes.

I met up with Sella at a rock-climbing gym in Berkeley, California, where she spent years taking her son for lessons before discovering how much she loved the sport, too. She arrived for our conversation on her bike, sporting purple overalls, a canvas tote bag, and socks printed with pink flamingos—colorful footwear became a wardrobe staple years ago, to cheer up patients who would often stare at the floor when they talked. “Third-trimester abortion is like first- and second-trimester abortion, except that people are more desperate,” she tells me. “And I think we should care for those who are the most desperate, the most vulnerable, the most marginalized.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You retired in 2021, after almost 20 years of providing later abortion care. What made you decide you needed to write this book?

There are so many books about abortion, but no one has written anything about third-trimester abortion. So we just hear anti-abortion rhetoric about it, which is scary and wrong. Or ifwe do hear the very human stories in the third trimester, they’re invariably about fetal indications where the fetus, the baby, has a serious medical condition.

We don’t hear all the other stories. It was very intentional to have three patients in the book with fetal indications and three patients with maternal indications—patients who have medical conditions that make it dangerous for them to continue the pregnancy or who have really difficult life situations. They want their child, if it were born, to have a good life. They don’t think that they can provide that under the circumstances that they’re living under. The fetal-indication patients have the same thought. They want their child to have a good life, but they think that because of the baby’s medical conditions,their child will suffer for as long as it lives.

There’s so much stigma and uneasiness surrounding later abortion. What were the most important messages for you to get across to your readers?

I want people to have an understanding of this care that goes beyond the politics of it, or the legal ramifications. These are real people who are facing difficult situations. I want readers to understand that gestational limits don’t reflect the reality of people’s lives—that these circumstances are not tied to a clock or to a calendar.

Who do you most want to read it?

Everyone.

Of course.

But the main audience are the pro-choice people who are having a hard time with third-trimester abortion. There are a lot of them. They want to be supportive, but they feel uncomfortable, they feel conflicted.

It’s okay to have those feelings. It’s okay to say, “Hey, I don’t know about this, I’m not sure.” That’s fine. You can still support patients who need that care and advocate for laws that don’t place gestational limits. I don’t think people need to support third-trimester abortion care wholeheartedly. But it would be very helpful if there was a movement that recognized the importance of this care.

Did you ever have doubts, in a particular case, about whether you were doing the right thing?

No, I felt very clear. It was unusual to feel conflicted. And if I did have doubts, I would go back to the patient and look at their situation, and that was the end of the conversation in my head. Let me give you an example: “She’s already got five kids. She’s working two jobs. The guy’s in jail. Her housing situation is terrible, and she’s in the third trimester.”

There’s the answer. I would do the exercise of, “Wait a minute. It’s not about me, it’s not about the decisions I would make”—which, anyway, you never know what decisions you would make. You don’t know until you’re in that situation.

“The main audience are the pro-choice people who are having a hard time with third-trimester abortion. There are a lot of them.”

There was a time in your life when you thought you might be in that situation. You were abused as a child.

In the past, when I would give a talk, I would say something like, “I had a difficult childhood experience.” That was a step towards saying what it really was. Incest. I want to name it.

It wouldn’t be an honest book if I didn’t. And if it wasn’t going to be honest, then I didn’t want to write it, because my childhood experiences—and this is something I only realized years into doing this work—were the underlying impetus.

Childhood trauma is part of what drove you to do this work.

In my early 20s, working at the Los Angeles Feminist Women’s Health Center and in medical school, I just had this kind of radical passion. It was exhilarating. It was this time of ferment. The women’s health movement was growing. Everyone was a lesbian feminist, everyone—I’m exaggerating [laughs]—was wearing flannel and jeans. I was very strident and dogmatic. I don’t know that I put all the pieces together.

And then as you get older, you have experience, and you get more reflective. It took a long time to realize I wasn’t just a burgeoning feminist who sees the world, recognizes the patriarchy and the male control of medicine, and has a critique of that. Yes, that’s all true, but that’s intellectual.

I wonder whether the pace of the clinic helped me slow down. Third-trimester abortion care takes time. It’s not a fast-paced setting. You have time to develop relationships with people, hear their stories, sit with them.

It’s not like I took care of so many victims of incest, but I did take care of some. I had to be very careful. This is their life. This is not about me, it’s about them. I was always very conscious of that with patients, but more so in those situations. Some, I would see with their parents, who supported them in a very loving way. And I was so appreciative that they had someone who really was there for them.

A lot of abortion-rights activists and Democratic politicians ignore third-trimester abortion. Recently, we’ve seen states pass constitutional amendments to protect abortion access—but only in the first two trimesters or to the point of “viability.” Those amendments still let states ban later abortion, just like Roe v. Wade did.

Yeah. The amendments are not good, actually. They enshrine in state constitutions this notion of “viability.” I wonder about people who have their own conflicted feelings about abortion care later in pregnancy and if they let those feelings determine what they think will succeed politically. A lot of it is how you educate and inform people. I think you can frame the issue in a way that helps voters see the humanity of the person who needs the care.

Now’s the time to push back on viability and gestational limits, because Roe has been overturned. Roe was problematic from day one, and it only got more and more problematic as there were more and more restrictions passed. So to think, “Let’s go backwards and restore Roe,” to me, is wrong thinking. We have an opportunity to think big.

When people talk about “viability” they’re usually talking about the 23- or 24-week point during pregnancy, when a doctor decides that the fetus could survive outside the woman’s body. You lay out an idea of “viability” in the book that’s much broader.

The usual notion of viability is entirely about the fetus and its ability to survive outside the womb, with or without artificial support—meaning medical intervention, mechanical technology. By “support,” they don’t mean adequate economic financial support, housing, educational opportunities, family support. They’re only talking about the fetus, and they’re not at all talking about the woman, the patient. So I think that’s problematic.

It’s not anything I made up. It’s not some radical notion. Well, maybe it is a radical notion, I guess.

“Radical” is a loaded word.

Or maybe “holistic,” to use the 1970s, 1980s term. The pregnant person decides whether the pregnancy is viable to them—not the court, and not the state. It’s that individual person’s definition, because that person knows best, and we should trust them to make the best decision.

The usual notion of viability is entirely about the fetus and its ability to survive outside the womb, with or without artificial support. . . . They’re only talking about the fetus, and they’re not at all talking about the woman.”

The book is a way to introduce this concept to a more mainstream audience and to start questioning this outdated notion of viability, which is so constraining and dangerous because of how it’s used to criminalize patients: “This is a viable fetus, you ingested drugs, so you’re guilty of child abuse.” Or medical people use that viability line to deny emergency care to people who are miscarrying: “Even though your water has broken and you’re bleeding, the fetus is viable because its heart is beating, so we have to wait.”

You were one of very few abortion providers in the country doing third-trimester or post-viability abortions. Now that you’ve retired, how do you think about your legacy?

I’m happy to debunk that myth that there’s a shortage of third-trimester providers. There are more than you realize. They’re young, and they’re energetic, and their model of care is not exactly the same as mine. They’ve got their own thing going. All power to them.

The model of care that we offered at Southwest Women’s Options was such an important part of why I embraced this work so much. When I was in residency, when I was an OB-GYN, I was frustrated. It was so mechanistic. The demands of the institution where I worked determined the kind of care I could provide. In Albuquerque, it was the opposite. We could care for patients how I thought everyone should be cared for in every medical setting. I felt like we were treating patients with such a high level of love.

I didn’t do it on my own. It was a whole group of people working together to create this incredibly beautiful practice. I’ve worked with lots of people, I’ve trained lots of people, and it gives me a tremendous amount of satisfaction for them to see this model of care. They may not be in settings where they can offer it. But at least they saw it and they experienced it. The patients certainly experienced it. They saw that they were important, that it was important for them to be cared for. Maybe they saw what’s possible, what good care means.

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Here’s One Biden Climate Provision Republicans Are Unlikely to Kill

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

Dig down about a mile or two in parts of the United States and you’ll start to see the remains of an ancient ocean. The shells of long dead sea creatures are compressed into white limestone, surrounding brine aquifers with a higher salt content than the Atlantic Ocean.

Last summer, ExxonMobil sponsored weeklong camps to teach grade school students from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi about the virtues of these aquifers, specifically their ability to serve as carbon capture and sequestration wells, where oil, gas, and heavy industry can bury harmful emissions deep underground. In one exercise, students were given 20 minutes to build a model reservoir out of vegetable oil, Play-Doh, pasta, and uncooked beans. Whoever could keep the most vegetable oil (meant to represent liquified carbon dioxide) in their aquifer, won.

This kind of down-home carbon capture boosterism is a relatively new development for the oil and gas giant. Over recent years, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies have spent millions lobbying for government support of what they see as industry-friendly green technology, most prominently carbon capture and storage, which many scientists and environmental activists have argued is ineffective and distracts from eliminating fossil fuel operations in the first place. According to Exxon’s website, it’s evidence that they are leading “the biggest energy transition in history.”

Now that Congress has turned its attention to rolling back government spending on renewable energy, it appears that most of the climate “solutions” being left off the chopping block are the ones favored by carbon-intensive companies like Exxon. Corporate tax breaks for carbon capture and storage, for instance, were one of the few things left untouched when House Republicans passed a budget bill on May 22 that effectively gutted the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation. What remained of the IRA’s clean energy tax credits were incentives for nuclear, so-called clean fuels like ethanol, and carbon capture.

“The argument is, ‘This is a win for the climate, it’s a win for energy dominance.’ [But] it’s really a budget buster with no guardrails at all.”

When the IRA was passed in 2022, there was immediate backlash against the provisions for carbon capture. “Essentially, we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing a private sewer system for oil and gas,” said Sandra Steingraber, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Science and Environmental Health Network.

The tax credits for nuclear power plants, which produce energy without emitting greenhouse gases, are meant to spur what President Donald Trump hopes will be an “energy renaissance,” bolstered by a flurry of pro-nuclear executive orders he issued a day after the budget bill cleared the House. Projects will be able to use the tax credits if they begin construction by 2031; wind and solar companies, however, will lose access to tax credits unless they begin construction within 60 days of Trump signing the bill, and are fully up and running by 2028.

That the carbon capture tax credit was never in danger of being revoked is a testament to its importance to the oil and gas industry, said Jim Walsh, the policy director at the nonprofit Food and Water Watch. “The major beneficiaries of these tax credits are oil and gas companies and big agricultural interests.”

The carbon capture tax credit was first established in 2008, but the subsidies were more than doubled when it was tacked on to the IRA in order to get former senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s vote. Companies now receive $60 for every ton of CO2 captured and used to drive oil out of the ground (a process known as “enhanced oil recovery”) and up to $85 for a ton of CO2 that is permanently stored. As roughly 60 percent of captured CO2 in the United States is used for enhanced oil recovery, detractors see the tax credit as something of a devil’s bargain, a provision that props up an industry at taxpayer expense.

How much carbon is actually captured by these projects is also a matter of debate. The tax credit requires companies that claim it to self-report how much CO2 they inject to the Internal Revenue Service. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, is in charge of tracking leaks. There are tax penalties if captured carbon ends up leaking, but those penalties only apply if the leaks occur in the first three years after injection. Holding companies accountable is made more complicated by the fact that tax returns are confidential, and Walsh cautions that there is very little communication between the EPA and the IRS. Oversight is “very, very minimal,” added Anika Juhn, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research firm.

“You can keep some really played out oil fields going for a long time, and you can get the public to pay for it,” said Carolyn Raffensberger, the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, explaining the potential impact of the budget bill. “So the argument is, ‘This is a win for the climate, it’s a win for energy dominance.’ [But] it’s really a budget buster with no guardrails at all.”

Existing carbon-capture facilities have been plagued by technical and financial issues. The country’s first commercial carbon capture plant in Decatur, Illinois, sprung two leaks last year directly under Lake Decatur, which is the town’s main source of drinking water. When concentrated CO2 hits water it turns into carbonic acid, which then leaches heavy metals from rocks within the aquifer and poisons the water.

Although a certain level of public health concerns come with many emerging technologies, critics point out that all of this risk is being taken for a technology that has not been proven to work at scale, and may actually increase emissions by incentivizing more oil and gas production. It could also strain the existing electrical grid—outfitting a natural gas or coal plant with carbon capture equipment can suck up about 15 to 25 percent of the plant’s power.

The tax credits exist “to pollute and confuse people,” said Mark Jacobsen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, who has argued that there is essentially no reasonable use for carbon capture. They “increase people’s [energy] costs and do nothing for the climate.”

But the technology does have its defenders among scientists. The 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called an increase in carbon capture technology “unavoidable” if countries want to reach net-zero emissions. Jessie Stolark, the executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an umbrella organization of fossil fuel companies, unions, and environmental groups, contends that arguments like Jacobsen’s unnecessarily set the technology against renewables. “We need all the solutions in the toolkit,” she said. “We’re not saying don’t deploy these other technologies. We see this very much as a complementary and supportive piece in the broader decarbonization toolkit.”

Stolark said that carbon capture didn’t make it out of the budget process entirely unscathed, as the bill specified that companies could no longer sell carbon capture tax credits. So-called “transferability”—the ability to sell these tax credits on the open market—has been invaluable to small energy startups that have struggled to secure financing in their early stages, according to Stolark. The Carbon Capture Coalition is urging lawmakers to restore transferability now that the bill has moved from the House to the Senate.

Still, the kinds of companies likely to claim carbon capture tax credits—often major players in oil and gas, ammonia, steel, and other heavy industries—are less likely to rely on transferability than more modest companies (often providers of renewable energy), whose smaller tax bills makes it harder for them to realize the value of their respective tax credits.

“A lot of the factories, the power plants, the industrial facilities deploying within the next ten years or so, are expected to be these really big [facilities] with the big tax burdens,” said Dan O’Brien, a senior modeling analyst at Energy Innovations, a clean energy think tank based in San Francisco. “They’re not the type of smaller producers—like small solar companies—that are reliant on transferability in order to monetize the tax credit.”

To some observers, keeping the carbon capture credit looks like a flagrant giveaway to the oil and gas industry. Juhn estimated that the credit could end up costing taxpayers more than $800 billion by 2040. Given the House bill’s aggressive cuts to social programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Juhn finds the carbon capture credit offensive. “When we look at these other programs, where we’re nickel and diming benefits to folks that could really use them, what does that mean? It’s gross.”

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The 4chan-Coded Ideology Behind Elon Musk’s War on Normies

In September, Elon Musk amplified a post from Autism Capital—a pro-Trump X account that he often reposts—that read: “Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective ‘is this true?’ filter. This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.” Musk called the claim, which originated on the infamous web forum 4chan, an “interesting observation.” His repost was viewed 20 million times.

Musk is the world’s most prominent—and most powerful—autistic person. It’s not something he conceals; notably, he mentioned it during a 2021 monologue on Saturday Night Live. Only “autistic” wasn’t the term he used. Musk told the SNL audience he had Asperger’s syndrome, a term struck from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 2013 and largely disused in psychiatry.

But Asperger’s has persisted in popular culture, even as psychiatrists have ditched it. As a shorthand for autistic people with low support needs, it has gradually become an armchair diagnosis that’s often used to sidestep the baggage or consequences that come with calling someone autistic. It means not autistic autistic; autistic, but not quite. The words “mild” or “high-­functioning” are never far off. “Aspies,” in this vision, are socially inept, technically gifted, mathematically minded, unemotional, blunt. They can probably code.

At its best, the cultural rise of ­Asperger’s­ has yielded somewhat positive (if still flattening) depictions in media: Think ­Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. But who are we talking about when we talk about Aspies? The answer is bound up with ideas about white men—who were disproportionately given the label—and decades of underdiagnosis of other autistic people.

Musk isn’t oblivious to Aspie stereotypes. He’s used them to get off the hook: “I sometimes say or post strange things,” he told the SNL audience, “but that’s just how my brain works.” He’s worked them into his self-promotion: In a 2022 TED interview, Musk called himself “absolutely obsessed with truth,” crediting Asperger’s with his desire to “expand the scope and scale of consciousness, biological and digital.” And he’s deployed them politically: By pushing the line that empathy is a “fundamental weakness,” Musk both reminds audiences of the discarded, dehumanizing idea that a lack of empathy is an autistic trait and implies that his own cold detachment from humanity is the best way to project strength in Donald Trump’s America.

In the 1930s and ’40s, the Austrian physician Hans Asperger separated children with what he called “autism psychopathy” into two groups: those with more noticeable disabilities and those whose atypical traits could, he thought, sometimes manifest in beneficial skill sets. Drawing on his work, psychiatrists first used the term Asperger’s syndrome in 1981; it entered the DSM as an official diagnosis in 1994. But Asperger’s quickly came to be seen as an artificial distinction, and was dropped from the DSM amid a growing recognition that autism encompassed a wide spectrum of cognitive differences. Its reputation wasn’t helped by the 2018 revelation that Asperger had sent disabled children to die under the Nazi eugenics regime.

Asperger’s syndrome also emerged at a time when some leading psychiatrists theorized that autism in general, and Asperger’s in particular, were extreme manifestations of the “male brain”—a predictable result of who was being diagnosed. When Asper­ger’s was still clinically recognized, the ratio of men to women diagnosed with the condition was around 11 to 1; today, for autism spectrum disorder, it’s closer to 3 to 1. Differences in the ways boys and girls are pressured to mask autistic behavior, alongside psychiatrists’ own biases, have led to massive failures to diagnose autistic women; similar factors have made white children from better-off families much more likely than other kids to receive autism diagnoses and support, trends that improved screening has begun to change.

As psychiatrists began to drop the Asperger’s diagnosis, tech embraced it—as the “good” autism, an improvement on both disability and “normie” inferiority.

But even as psychiatrists began to drop the Asperger’s diagnosis, tech figures started to embrace it—as the “good” autism, an improvement on both disability and “normie” inferiority. The Aspie label suggested symptoms that might make you better at your job, even bestow an aura of savanthood, provided that job was somehow technical. The Silicon Valley self-proclaimed Aspie is superintelligent and superrational—but not too weird to invite to parties. Being an Aspie could make you, in tech terms, “10X.”

The late autistic writer Mel Baggs gave a name to this line of thinking: “Aspie supremacy.” The ideas of the Aspie supremacist, Baggs wrote in a 2010 article, “are very close to the views of those in power.” The more productive you appear at work, the more likely you are to be deemed exceptional—or at least worth keeping around.

Of course, plenty of people identify as having Asperger’s without harboring a sense of superiority, let alone signing up for Silicon Valley–brand Aspie supremacy. Often, they’re sticking with a diagnosis they were given when it still had clinical currency; other times, they’re responding to pervasive discrimination, a factor in autistic people’s unemployment rate of about 40 percent. But something distinctive happens when the Goldilocks notion of being “just autistic enough” collides with a sense of entitlement like Musk’s. As the Dutch academic Anna N. de Hooge, who is autistic, wrote in a 2019 paper, “a particular type of ‘high-functioning’ autistic individual is ascribed superiority, both over other autistic people and over non-autistic people”—a superiority “defined in terms of whiteness, masculinity and economic worthiness.”

Jules Edwards, a board member at the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network, a neurodiversity and disability justice nonprofit, calls Musk’s attitudes both an “anomaly” and the “epitome of Aspie supremacy.” “It takes all of those different ways in which [Musk] was advantaged just by the circumstances of his birth,” Edwards says. “He was born into financial wealth, he’s white, he’s cis, he’s male—all of this stuff that balls together.”

Musk’s fantasies of superiority connect deeply to his twin obsessions with genetics and reproduction—especially his own. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Musk’s colleague Shivon Zilis, mother to four of his 14 publicly reported children, told the journalist Walter Isaacson. Zilis, an executive at Musk’s Neuralink, was apparently delighted by Musk’s offer to procreate: “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children.” (Taylor Swift, famously presented with the same proposition, apparently felt otherwise.)

To the Silicon Valley right, the white, male skew of their industry reflects natural differences in technical and leadership skills—differences that happen to align perfectly with the pop culture caricature of Asperger’s that supremacists embrace.

This tech world fascination with Asperger’s goes back decades. In a 2001 Wired article titled “The Geek Syndrome,” Steve Silberman wrote, “It’s a familiar joke in the industry that many of the hardcore programmers in IT strongholds like Intel, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics—coming to work early, leaving late, sucking down Big Gulps in their cubicles while they code for hours—are residing somewhere in Asperger’s domain.” (Silberman went on to write NeuroTribes, a still well-regarded book on neurodivergence.) Microsoft introduced an “Autism Hiring Program” in 2015, which offered thoughtful improvements to hiring practices—albeit ones seemingly motivated, at least in part, by the idea that good tech workers were disproportionately autistic. Around the same time, GOP megadonor Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal with Musk, said in an interview that “many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization gene.” (Thiel has also called environmentalism an “autistic children’s crusade” and China a “weirdly autistic” and “profoundly uncharismatic” country.)

“We have already given enough of our flesh, blood and sanity to women and normies.”

Then there’s crypto ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, whose autism was deployed in court to present him as less culpable for the mass fraud of which he was convicted. Making the case that her son should avoid prison time, Stanford law professor Barbara Fried wrote that “his inability to read or respond appropriately to many social cues, and his touching but naive belief in the power of facts and reason to resolve disputes, put him in extreme danger.” Never mind his company’s exploration of “human genetic enhancement” or the price others paid for his profound superiority complex—SBF was prepared to present himself as disabled for exactly as long as it was a useful defense.

At other times, Silicon Valley’s Aspie supremacists make it a priority to come after those they see as “actually” disabled. Musk notoriously did so shortly after buying Twitter, when he publicly interrogated staffer Haraldur Thorleifsson, who has muscular dystrophy, on whether he was simply shirking work. The ensuing fallout, and concerns over possible workplace discrimination, prompted a rare Musk apology. But his grade-school passion for ableist slurs has only grown. “Those who cling to the Asperger’s identity will often invoke that to discriminate or engage in lateral ableism”—targeting those they consider “more” disabled—says Seton Hall University professor Jess Rauchberg, who studies digital cultures and disability.

Aspie supremacists view themselves, above all, as exceptional beings, adapting the logic of misogyny and racism to twist false stereotypes of autistic people into self-serving positives. Musk clearly buys into an Asperger’s-era image of the unempathetic, relentlessly rational autistic man, but it’s a lazy excuse for a brand of “fuck your feelings” shitposting that’s ubiquitous on the right. If it’s true that autistic people can struggle to interpret social signals, it’s just as true that autistic displays of empathy can be nuanced and easy for others to write off, and that empathy can vary as much in autistic people as in anyone else; Musk’s war on empathy may be more of a him problem.

Besides, Musk only pins his bad takes on Asperger’s when it’s convenient—as when he used it to excuse himself on SNL. His yearslong track record of promoting race science has nothing to do with being autistic. Nor did his infamous Trump rally salutes—the ones Musk, while insisting they weren’t a Nazi thing, chased with a litany of Nazi jokes. (Some of his fans were happy to chalk up the incident to his diagnosis; critics tended to chalk it up to, well, what he actually believes.) His anti-trans attacks, including misgendering his trans daughter (who has called Musk a “pathetic man-child”), don’t have anything to do with being autistic either—especially given that autistic people are more likely to be transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming.

In 4chan posts mentioning the term “Aspie” (gathered with the help of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center), there’s a lot of support for Musk. But even more notable is how many are explicitly misogynistic. That’s not surprising to Rauchberg, who sees Aspie supremacy as “part of the larger manosphere.” One user, for example, wrote the following: “We autistic men already drive ourselves crazy engaging in self-sacrifice and simping for women and normies. I hang around with some guys that I have nicknamed ‘the Aspie bros’ and we have fun together twice a week. This is what Aspie men need. We have already given enough of our flesh, blood and sanity to women and normies.”

“Robot wives are a step up over women in every way,” reads another post. “Look what (((they))) did to Tay, Character AI, ChatGPT etc. We need a few billionaires, influencers and politicians sympathetic to our cause.” (The three parentheses designate Jewish people, another favorite target of the online far right.)

“I am sincerely glad that we are creating a network of ‘Aspie atheist MRA’”—men’s rights activist—“‘incel neckbeards’ which is reaching every corner of the globe,” another user answered.

But even on 4chan, accounts of rejection and bullying, and the pain and sadness they provoke, stand out. A typical post—“I see the bullshit in the world but Aspie brotherhood is the solution”—came in reply to the less combative “I have terminal autism but still desire a female companion even though I know it’ll never happen.”

Most autistic people who are bullied don’t declare war on “normies”; most people who struggle with dating, autistic or otherwise, don’t become incels. But most people are less conditioned than Musk, the scion of rich, far-right eugenics supporters, to believe they’re entitled to admiration, approval, women, and friends.

Aspie supremacists view themselves as exceptional beings, adapting the logic of misogyny and racism to twist false autistic stereotypes into self-serving positives.

True, Musk doesn’t have as prominent a relationship with incel culture as some manosphere influencers, though he’s both peddled the ideology and restored the accounts of high-profile misogynists like Andrew Tate. But Musk’s juvenile, hateful tweets (and those of others, which skyrocketed after he bought Twitter) are only the tip of the iceberg: A lawsuit by a group of fired SpaceX employees details a litany of alleged harassment and hostile behavior by Musk and his underlings, often phrased in terminally online, 4chan-coded ways.

Musk faced serious, traumatic bullying himself, both by his father and schoolmates, as Isaacson—whose 2023 biography includes Musk’s mother’s belief that her son is autistic—and New York Times technology reporter Kate Conger have noted. “There’s two routes that you can take from an abuse experience,” Conger said on a December podcast appearance. “There’s ‘I want to heal from this and not pass it on, and sort of move down a new path.’ And then there’s a second path that I think Musk has been more active in pursuing, in taking that negative experience and turning it into a ‘superpower’ for himself.”

Musk’s Hierarchy of Dweebs

The world according to Aspie supremacists

• Tier 5: Genius God
  The world’s richest, most powerful self-proclaimed Aspie: Elon Musk himself.
• Tier 4: Aspies
  Terminally online, 4chan-coded SpaceX fanboys who think little of their fellow techies—or anyone else.
• Tier 3: Techies
  The normies’ Tesla-driving best and brightest. Women need not apply.
• Tier 2 : Normies
  Society’s background noise. Great with kids. Love dogs. Laugh politely at your epic memes.
• Tier 1: High Support
  There’s no one Aspie supremacists loathe more than disabled people with more visible needs.

Anthony Calvert

Would Musk call himself an Aspie supremacist? Who knows. After all, it’s a label first developed by the ideology’s critics (and he didn’t reply to our questions). But some of his fans certainly embrace it. One post on X from @autismchud complimented Musk on his communication style: “Elon’s Asperger’s really comes through in this story in the best way possible. There’s no HR language, no social tact, no consensus filtering or games, just what the goal is and how to achieve that goal.”

DOGE, with its infamous squad of young engineers, offers a deeply relevant case study in reckless, egotistical overconfidence. With almost no applicable expertise, Musk and his DOGE bros have stormed the government—canning nuclear safety officers (whom they were swiftly forced to rehire), erasing living people from Social Security databases, accessing sensitive health and tax information. As seen earlier in his Twitter takeover, Musk’s certainty that he knows best manifests as an unhesitating eagerness to “disrupt” and dismantle services without regard to the harms to employees or the public at large.

A society with too much empathy—the kind of society Musk claims we live in—wouldn’t be full of ostracized, bullied kids who grow into adults like him.

Meanwhile, Musk was a top adviser to a president who believes that people with complex disabilities “should just die,” according to Trump’s own nephew, who has a disabled son. Trump is eager to dismantle the Department of Education, whose support provides the only means by which some disabled students, many autistic ones included, are able to finish school. Similarly, cuts to Medicaid would strip funds that pay for home care aides who work with autistic people.

A society with too much empathy—the kind of society Musk claims we live in—wouldn’t be full of ostracized, bullied kids who grow into adults like him. A society that supported, or at least more thoughtfully approached, autistic traits wouldn’t produce 4chan boards full of his Aspie supremacist fans. It would allow people like Musk to speak openly about being autistic, without retreating from the word, and to engage with initiatives led by autistic people, not figures like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who describe autism as an “injury” that renders people incapable of holding jobs, making art, or playing sports.

Aspie supremacists do real harm to autistic people in their embrace of gendered, racialized stereotypes, and in drawing spurious lines between themselves and anyone they consider “severely” autistic. Musk may simply be a jerk, but he’s a jerk with a tremendous platform—and one whose fans loudly, publicly connect his shitty personal behavior and fascistic policies to “mild” autism.

“It’s really frustrating to be caught in this place where we’re trying to be inclusive of all autistic people, and there are such polarizing opinions and perspectives about autism,” says Jules Edwards. “It causes this additional challenge when we’re advocating for inclusion and access, trying to educate people about what is autism versus the idea of ‘good autism’ or ‘bad autism.’”

To the Elon Musks of the world, autism is a disability, but the soft-pedaled label of Asperger’s syndrome—“good” autism, “mild” autism—is something else: a marker of elite status, the perfect finishing touch for a white guy in tech.

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Musk Gets Out—and Gets Off Easy

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._

Elon Musk packed his bags and skedaddled out of Washington, DC, last week, proclaiming that his run as a “special government employee” was done. It’s a good bet that he’ll continue to meddle in administration business, especially when he has a financial interest at stake, and will keep in contact with DOGErs and their ongoing crusade to dismantle crucial government programs. But his very public departure from Trump Town prompted reporters to pen farewells that did not do justice to the profound damage this erratic and dishonest gazillionaire has caused.

Writing up an interview he conducted with Musk, the Washington Post’s Christian Davenport opened with a “reflective” Musk musing, “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized. I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.” Davenport observed that Musk’s “attempts to reshape the federal bureaucracy ran into fierce institutional resistance.” He allowed Musk to praise himself as a hard-driving visionary—“If we’re not ultra-hardcore, how are we going to get to Mars?”—and to define his mission in Washington as “reducing waste and fraud.”

Waste and fraud was just a cover story. Too many in the news media have enabled this con and even promoted it.

All of this bolsters the phony narrative pitched by Trump and Musk that DOGE was (and is) a project to ferret out the supposed rampant fraud and waste that infect the federal government. That has not been the case. Musk’s venture has been an assault on government services, not inefficient government expenditures. He and his DOGE minions slashed programs and decimated agencies without evaluating them. Waste and fraud was just a cover story. Too many in the news media have enabled this con and even promoted it.

Davenport did note that Musk’s “claims about finding massive savings and slashing waste in government have been shown to be exaggerated” and that he “did not achieve as much as he wanted.” But even this poke at the billionaire accepts Musk’s noble-sounding premise. His endeavor has not been to merely “reshape the federal bureaucracy,” as Davenport put it, but to eviscerate services and protections for millions and allow powerful interests to escape scrutiny, regulation, and oversight.

At the New York Times, a multi-bylined article—Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer, Jonathan Swann, and Ryan Mac—reported that Musk was “disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy.” Upended the bureaucracy is another all-too neutral way to characterize how he and his henchpeople demolished agencies. The piece noted that Musk had thanked Trump for “the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending” and called his effort “an initiative to drastically cut spending.”

Like the Washington Post, the Times wrote, “Musk’s DOGE team has repeatedly inflated its cost-saving efforts, at times posting erroneous claims about ending federal contracts that they later deleted.” And it noted that the “cuts he wanted to enact were far more difficult than he expected.” Again, the story presented was that of Musk seeking to counter wasteful spending and failing to achieve as much as he desired.

It wasn’t a war on waste and fraud in government. It was a war on government.

Neither piece mentioned how Musk and his libertarian shock troops killed the US Agency for International Development and ended lifesaving assistance for recipients throughout the world. Nor did they cover other dishonorable DOGE accomplishments. Musk and his posse blew up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which prevents vulturous financial firms from ripping off billions of dollars from Americans. They undermined or closed programs key to food safety, workplace safety, environmental safety, and aviation safety. DOGE cuts at the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and other agencies have devastated a generation of science and research. They forced mass firings at the State Department and the CIA that will weaken these organizations and imperil national security. They ripped up programs to track and address climate change. Firefighters, park rangers, weather forecasters, IRS tax collectors, Social Security clerks, Census Bureau workers, employees at Veterans Affairs who help our wounded warriors—all booted out of important jobs.

None of this was related to waste and fraud. And let’s stick with Musk’s attack on USAID. In February, he called this agency that has helped millions of people around the world avoid malaria, Ebola, and AIDS, obtain clean water, and gain access to food and health care “a criminal organization.” Yes, the richest man in the world said that. The following month, not surprisingly, he belittled the idea of empathy. He also claimed, “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.” Not true. Brooke Nichols, an infectious-disease mathematical modeler and health economist at Boston University, has created a tracker that estimates the number of deaths overseas caused by the Musk-driven suspension of foreign aid. As of this weekend, the number of adult deaths reached 100,000, and deaths for children topped 208,000. This is obscene.

Yet the big idea for these media outlets is that Musk was frustrated he didn’t make more progress in his battle against waste and fraud. But it wasn’t a war on waste and fraud in government. It was a war on government.

Much of the media failed to accurately characterize what this alt-right, conspiracy-pushing, oddball, drug-addled (?), anti-empathy tech billionaire was really doing.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have done wonderful investigations of Musk and DOGE. Last week, the Times exposed his intense use of drugs, including ketamine, and reported on how DOGE-driven reversals of regulations will cost Americans billions in higher bank fees, electric and water bills, and health insurance payments. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has penned moving pieces about the lethal consequences of Musk’s annihilation of USAID.

But throughout the Musk Terror, much of the media failed to accurately characterize what this alt-right, conspiracy-pushing, oddball, drug-addled (?), anti-empathy tech billionaire was really doing. (Then there’s the whole DOGE effort to get its grubby mitts on government data for who-knows-what reasons.) Musk waged a vicious assault. He did not seek to evaluate programs and agencies to root out inefficiencies or activities that were no longer vital. He aimed to destroy. Hundreds of thousands of people will die because of him. Millions of Americans will suffer. Who cares if he is frustrated or disillusioned? The story is not what happened to Musk; it’s what he has done to all of us.

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State Department Cables Reveal the Harrowing Consequences of Elon Musk’s USAID Demolition

Elon Musk is trying to rewrite the history of his four-month tenure in Washington. As the billionaire founder of Tesla and Space X returns to the private sector after four months as a “special government employee,” he has put aside the celebratory chainsaw and cast himself as a misunderstood outsider whose dreams of efficiency were stymied by a terminally broken bureaucracy.

Nowhere is this attempted whitewashing more jarring than his effort to sweep away the consequences of the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, which has supported food assistance programs around the world and helped administer the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. Musk once bragged about feeding USAID into a “woodchipper.” But, on May 20, when Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain asked about the disruption of PEPFAR funding in an interview in Qatar, the tech executive dismissed the claim out of hand.

“First of all, the program, the AIDS medication program is continuing,” he said. “So your fundamental premise is wrong. Do you have another example, since the one you cited is false?”

As Husain pressed on, explaining that the State Department—which is absorbing what’s left of USAID—had granted a waiver only to certain PEPFAR programs, Musk repeated his denial.

“It’s false, it’s false,” he said. Before Husain moved on, Musk made a promise: “Okay well which ones aren’t being funded? I’ll fix it right now.”

But it was not false. And Musk did not fix it.

Despite his assurances on stage—and his subsequent assertion in response to the rocker Bono that “zero people have died” as a result of funding cuts—the destruction he spearheaded is continuing to have devastating effects in places that relied on USAID for lifesaving aid. But don’t take my word for it; take the Trump administration’s. State Department cables obtained by Mother Jones warn that cuts to foreign assistance programs are driving hunger and human trafficking in Malawi, and threatening to undo years of progress battling the AIDS epidemic in Lesotho, by terminating a program that worked to prevent HIV transmission from mothers to their children.

These are just two examples, based on internal records. But the consequences of slashed or interrupted services have been severe and wide-ranging. The US has cut programs for malaria. At a hearing on Capitol Hill last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio celebrated cutting “$10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique”—a PEPFAR-supported program that reduced HIV transmission in 2.5 million men by 60 percent. The assertion that people will you die if you take away their food or medication is not a hypothetical; New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof previously reported on an HIV-positive 10-year-old orphan from South Sudan named Peter Donde who died from a pneumonia infection after the administration shuttered the community health program that ensured his access to medication. Rubio, like Musk, has called the reports that children have died as a result of program interruptions a “lie.”

“The abrupt termination of this award has severely disrupted care delivery and threatens to reverse hard won gains in controlling Lesotho’s HIV epidemic that leaves Lesotho vulnerable at this critical juncture,” the memo stated. “With a shrinking health workforce, the quality and continuity of care have markedly declined—placing approximately 125,000 adults and children at risk of illness and death.”

Before he went on the defensive, though, Musk seemed to relish the process of gutting foreign assistance. Destroying USAID was one of Musk’s first tasks at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. In his first weeks in Washington, the world’s richest man spread a conspiracy theory that USAID had helped start the Covid-19 pandemic, falsely suggested that it secretly bankrolled news organizations like Politico, and dismissed the agency’s employees as “radical-left Marxists who hate America.” The sense that the people wielding the chainsaw did not understand what they were cutting down was reinforced by Musk himself, who stated at a public cabinet meeting that “we accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention but had quickly restored the program. (The program in fact had not been restored.)

Musk was not simply going rogue. His attacks were in sync with an executive order from President Donald Trump ordering a review of all foreign assistance projects, and a freeze on foreign-aid spending pending further approval. Although the State Department announced that certain life-saving programs, such as food assistance and PEPFAR, would receive waivers to continue operating, those waivers were slow to arrive and undercut by payment issues. And some programs that seemed to meet the narrow criteria were terminated anyway after a cursory review process.

That was the case with the Bophelo Bo Botle (Good Health) award, a $7 million PEPFAR grant implemented by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF) in the small southern African nation of Lesotho. The country, which Trump used as a punchline during his State of the Union, has the second-highest HIV prevalence rate on Earth, but it has made significant strides thanks to years of investment in testing, education, and treatment. The award was terminated anyway on February 26 and has not been reinstated.

In a May 23 cable urging the State Department to restore the cuts, a diplomat in the US embassy in Maseru noted that the program had been “delivering important services permitted under the Lifesaving Waiver” and warned that the cuts would have deadly consequences. “The abrupt termination of this award has severely disrupted care delivery and threatens to reverse hard won gains in controlling Lesotho’s HIV epidemic that leaves Lesotho vulnerable at this critical juncture,” the memo stated. “With a shrinking health workforce, the quality and continuity of care have markedly declined—placing approximately 125,000 adults and children at risk of illness and death.”

According to the US diplomat, the termination means “over half of those currently receiving HIV/AIDS treatment in Lesotho will lose access, leading to treatment interruptions, increased new HIV infections, and higher mortality rates.” But it was not just about people currently living with HIV; one of the major purposes of the program, according to the cable, was “prevention of mother-to-child transmission.”

Musk did not respond to a request for comment. In response to inquiries from Mother Jones, a State Department spokesperson said that, “Following the Secretary’s approval for lifesaving PEPFAR programs, PEPFAR program implementers who are providing lifesaving treatment and prevention of mother to child transmission services were notified and urged to resume approved service delivery,” and that ”[a]gencies have been working with their implementers to resume activities as quickly as possible.”

But Catherine Connor, vice president of Public Policy and Advocacy at EGPAF, confirmed that while the organization was still hoping to restart the program, “the outlook is not positive.”

“I think that we’re just now entering the phase where we’re able to look at the whole picture and say, well, ‘we removed this piece of the puzzle, we lost more than we were betting on,’” Connor said. “My impression is that when these decisions were made, they were made based on what’s happening on paper, not in practice. And now that these decisions are being put into practice, the implications of those decisions are coming to light.”

With the termination of the program, EGPAF had “lost our eyes and ears and hands on the ground that would have really helped us identify patients that may be falling off of care, identify places in the health system where we could try the course correct,” she said. And the Lesotho government lacked the resources to fill the void.

“Right now, there is a hole in the health system on what they’re able to offer,”
Connor said. “The average annual income of a person in Lesotho is not much more than $1,000 a year. I think the ability for the [Lesotho] government to step in and fill these gaps quickly, you know, I think they’re trying their best, but it’s just hard to imagine a situation where they could jump in quickly and fill the gaps that the US government is leaving.”

That’s just one program, in one country. Emergency food aid was another category that was supposed to be eligible for waivers. But some of the funding was simply cut. ProPublica recently reported on a State Department cable from April warning that the administration’s reductions in food aid were worsening conditions in refugee camps in Malawi—leading to an increase in human trafficking. That warning was not heeded, and in May, a diplomat at the US Embassy in Malawi’s capital city of Lilongwe sent the State Department another warning on the subject. The memo, which was obtained by Mother Jones, warned that “Reductions in assistance will exacerbate hunger, malnutrition, and other drivers of migration, making it difficult for Malawians to feed themselves and continue to support 60,000 refugees currently residing in the country.”

“Without intervention,” the official added, “continued deterioration of the food security situation will lead to loss of life.”

Food assistance in the country’s refugee camps is administered by the World Food Program. The Trump administration slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in World Food Program funding—then said it had done so by mistake in some cases, and would turn the spigots back on. But that hasn’t happened in Malawi. A State Department official in Malawi reported that “[t]he lack of a USAID contribution to date in FY 2025 has made it necessary for the World Food Program to reduce the ration transfer from 75 percent to 50 percent of the caloric value.” Rations in the country’s largest camp “are set to run out in June.”

The World Food Program cuts weren’t the only ones with major ramifications. “One USAID-funded emergency award implemented by a non-governmental organization was terminated, canceling planned food assistance for over 27,000 people and agricultural recovery support for small farmers,” the memo noted, “and a second award providing emergency nutrition commodities was also terminated.”

And the consequences of reduced food aid went well beyond malnutrition. According to the cable: “Local social welfare authorities and police shared their observations of sharp increases in intimate partner violence, child abandonment, child marriage, and trafficking in persons in the food-insecure areas they serve, resulting from the intense stresses faced by families without food.”

In a statement, the State Department spokesperson said that “an overwhelming majority of WFP programs—nearly 80% of pre-existing awards and over 115 programs with WFP—remain active” and that “the most critical elements of our global nutrition response remain fully operational.”

But they also offered a defense of the cuts as a matter of national interest:

“America is the most generous nations [sic] in the world, however no one can reasonably expect the United States to be equipped to feed every person on earth or be responsible for providing medication for every living human.”

For Musk, this skepticism about the value of food assistance is a bridge between his public and private work. In 2021, after the president of the World Food Program suggested on the platform now known as X that Musk could end starvation by giving away just two percent of his fortune, the billionaire shot back with a challenge. “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it,” he said. Later that year, Musk did donate nearly $6 billion of stock to an undisclosed charity, leading to speculation that he may have followed through.

But the money ultimately did not go to staving off starvation; it ended up, instead, at his personal foundation—which distributed just 2.8 percent of that amount to actual charities that year.

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David Hogg’s Fight for the Future of the Democratic Party

“It’s all gas, no brakes.” For David Hogg, a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, there’s little time away from politics right now, especially considering his $20 million campaign to disrupt his own party.

Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, and gun control advocate, is looking to oust what he calls “asleep at the wheel” incumbents in primaries around the US through his political action committee, Leaders We Deserve. It’s a strategy that has won him admirers and detractors, especially from the Democratic establishment, who say he shouldn’t be meddling in primaries, considering he’s now a party boss. So far, Hogg isn’t backing down. But he argues that it might get him kicked out of the DNC altogether. The party is set to vote June 9 to decide whether to redo Hogg’s election.

Just seven years ago, Hogg was a high school senior in Parkland, taking speech and debate classes and prepping for college. But all that changed when a former student entered his building and committed the largest mass shooting at a US high school. Hogg quickly co-founded the student-led organization March For Our Lives and became one of the nation’s most prominent gun control activists. Today, he’s the first member of Gen Z to be a vice chair at the DNC and, through Leaders We Deserve, is aggressively challenging the party’s status quo to generate “an attitudinal shift.”

“What we’re trying to do is say, across the board, Democrats need to stand up and fight harder,” says Hogg, whose PAC is trying to recruit a fresh slate of young candidates. “And if there’s somebody that feels nervous about potentially being challenged as a member of Congress, they should ask themselves why that is ultimately.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Hogg discusses why he’s ruled out running for office himself and how the anger he felt after the shooting in Parkland still drives him today.

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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Prepping Cities for Climate Chaos Isn’t “Woke,” but Team Trump Is Killing EPA Resiliency Grants

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

Thomasville, Georgia, has a water problem. Its treatment system is far out of date, posing serious health and environmental risks.

“We have wastewater infrastructure that is old,” said Sheryl Sealy, the assistant city manager for this city of 18,881 near the Florida border, about 45 minutes from Tallahassee. “It_’_s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

But it’s expensive to replace. The system is especially bad in underserved parts of the city, Sealy said.

In September, Thomasville applied to get some help from the federal government, and just under four months later, the city and its partners were awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency to make the long-overdue wastewater improvements, build a resilience hub and health clinic, and upgrade homes in several historic neighborhoods.

“The grant itself was really a godsend for us,” Sealy said.

In early April, as the EPA canceled grants for similar projects across the country, federal officials assured Thomasville that their funding was on track. Then on May 1, the city received a termination notice. “We felt, you know, a little taken off guard when the bottom did let out for us,” said Sealy.

“What is it about building a new health clinic and upgrading wastewater infrastructure…that’s inconsistent with administration policy?”

Thomasville isn’t alone.

Under the Trump administration, the EPA has canceled or interrupted hundreds of grants aimed at improving health and severe weather preparedness because the agency “determined that the grant applications no longer support administration priorities,” according to an emailed statement to Grist.

The cuts are part of a broader gutting of federal programs aimed at furthering environmental justice, an umbrella term for the effort to help communities that have been hardest hit by pollution and other environmental issues, which often include low-income communities and communities of color.

In Thomasville’s case, the city has a history of heavy industry that has led to poor air quality. Air pollution, health concerns, and high poverty qualified the surrounding county for the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, which prioritized funding for disadvantaged communities.

Thomasville has some of the highest exposure risks in Georgia to toxic air pollutants that can cause respiratory, reproductive, and developmental health problems, according to the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Vulnerability Index. The city’s wastewater woes don’t only mean the potential for sewage backups in homes and spills into local waterways but also the risk of upper respiratory problems, according to Zealan Hoover, a former Biden administration EPA official who is now advising the advocacy groups Environmental Protection Network and Lawyers for Good Government.

“These projects were selected because they have a really clear path to alleviating the health challenges facing this community,” he said.

Critics argue there’s a disconnect between the Trump administration’s attack on the concept of environmental justice and the realities of what the funds are paying for.

“What is it about building a new health clinic and upgrading wastewater infrastructure … that’s inconsistent with administration policy?” Democratic Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff asked EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin at a recent hearing.

Zeldin repeatedly responded by discussing the agency’s review process intended to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, particularly those related to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, but Ossoff cut him off, pushing for a specific answer about Thomasville’s grant. “Is a new health clinic for Thomasville, Georgia, woke?” he asked.

“We spent $60,000 in local funding hiring people to write the grants” that now have been terminated, noted a Athens-Clark County official.

Thomasville’s Sealy said she understands that the federal government has to make hard funding decisions—that’s true locally too—but losing this grant has left her city in the lurch. In addition to the planned work on the wastewater collection system, the city needs to update its treatment plant to meet EPA standards. That overhaul will likely cost $60 million to $70 million, she said.

“How do you fund that?” Sealy asked. “You can’t fund that on the backs of the people who pay our rates.”

The funding cuts have left cities across Georgia—including Athens, Norcross, and Savannah—as well as nonprofit groups, in a state of uncertainty: some grants terminated, some suspended then reinstated, some still unclear. This puts city officials in an impossible position, unable to wait or to move forward, according to Athens-Clarke County Sustainability Director Mike Wharton.

“Do you commit to new programs? Do you commit to services?” he said. “Here you are sitting in limbo for months.”

Like Thomasville, Athens was also awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant. The city was going to use the money for backup generators, solar power, and battery storage at its public safety complex—ensuring 911, police, the jail, a domestic violence shelter, and other services could all operate during a power outage. That grant has been terminated.

The problem, Wharton said, goes beyond that money not coming in; the city had already spent time, resources, and money to get the grant.

“We spent $60,000 in local funding hiring people to write the grants,” he said. “Over a period of 14 months we invested over 700 hours of local personnel time. So we diverted our services to focus on these things.”

These frustrations are playing out for grant recipients throughout the state and country, according to Hoover. He said it’s not just confusing—it’s expensive.

“They are causing project costs to skyrocket because they keep freezing and unfreezing and refreezing projects,” he said. “One of the big drivers of cost overruns in any infrastructure project, public or private, is having to demobilize and remobilize your teams.”

Thomasville and Athens officials both said they’re appealing their grant terminations, which require them to submit a formal letter outlining the reasons for their appeal and requesting the agency reconsider the decision. They’re also reaching out to their elected officials, hoping that pressure from their senators and members of Congress can get them the federal money they were promised.

Other cities and nonprofits, as well as a group of Democratic state attorneys general, have sued, arguing that terminating their grants without following proper procedures is illegal. But that’s a difficult step for many localities to take.

“Suing the federal government to assert your legal rights is very daunting, even if the law is on your side,” Hoover said.

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Women’s Health Care Has a Racism Problem. Trump’s War on DEI Is Making It Worse.

Dr. Emily Hawes-Van Pelt, an OB-GYN working in Minneapolis, didn’t consider herself an expert on fighting racism in health care. Then in May 2020, George Floyd was murdered a few blocks from her hospital. “What we knew about the world, many of us”—she looked out at an audience of doctors, most of them Black like her—“became very clear to lots of people. ​I was angry, I was bitter, I was frustrated, and I thought, What can I do? How can I help? How can I change anything?”

Hawes-Van Pelt’s answer was the same one that other OB-GYNs have come to in recent years as their specialty has faced crisis after crisis: She jumped into advocacy work. She got involved with a coalition of two dozen medical groups pursuing systemic solutions to long-standing racial disparities in US women’s health. She joined Minnesota’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee, helping to analyze cases of people who die in and around childbirth—disproportionately women of color—for lessons to prevent similar deaths.

Five years on, that burst of energy and determination has turned into immense strain, as the women’s health system confronts a barrage of Trump 2.0 attacks against initiatives for patients of color and research more broadly. With the White House and state governments denying the very idea of systemic racism and targeting anything that smacks of diversity, equity, and inclusion, structural change seems further away than ever, and recent gains are at risk of being stalled or erased.

That daunting new reality hung over the recent annual meeting of the 60,000-member American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the leading medical organization in the US focusing on women’s reproductive health. In a sign of the times, the ACOG committee Hawes Van-Pelt was part of, formerly called the District DEI Delegation, had a new, less contentious name: the Collective Action Advancing Respect & Equity Delegation.

At the meeting in May, Hawes-Van Pelt addressed a roomful of colleagues about health equity challenges. Even with federal funding slashed for research and large-scale health initiatives, she reminded them, they still have the power to fight bias in meaningful ways: by listening to patients, by being honest and respectful, by showing empathy and grace. Unlike research and medical education, she said, “this doesn’t require funding. This is change that we can make as individuals in our own practices.”

The clouds began gathering during the first Trump administration, as Covid killed Black and brown people at disproportionate rates, laying bare the racism and inequities that permeate American public health.

It was a message heard often at this year’s ACOG conference. In an ordinary year, the meeting attracts thousands of people who come to brush up on topics from menstruation to menopause—and, of course, to schmooze. This year in Minneapolis, many of the conversations were about how providers in one of the most politicized fields in medicine are weathering an unprecedented series of storms.

The clouds began gathering during the first Trump administration, as Covid killed Black and brown people at disproportionate rates, laying bare the racism and inequities that permeate American public health. Just as the pandemic was fading, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ushering in a wave of state laws criminalizing abortion providers and making routine care for pregnant patients infinitely more complicated. States likewise began ramping up attacks on transgender care, which is often provided by OB-GYNs.

Even before Donald Trump was reelected, conservatives had ACOG in their sights. Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for a second Trump administration—calls out the organization by name, referring to some of its members as “pro-abortion ideologues” for their work advising the government on what forms of birth control ought to be covered by the Affordable Care Act. At the annual meeting, ACOG’s deputy general counsel, Francisco Negron, pointed to Trump’s anti-DEI executive order that instructs agencies to investigate federal contractors as part of their efforts to stamp out “DEI programs and principles”—and specifically identifies medical associations as potential targets. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion, which we all thought was about fairness, the administration perceives as unlawful discrimination,” Negron told a packed room of physicians during a session titled “Through the Looking Glass.”

The field of obstetrics and gynecology has been grappling for decades with its roots in misogyny and racism, from experiments on enslaved women conducted by J. Marion Sims (the so-called “father of modern gynecology”) in the 1840s, to the forced sterilization of Black women in the mid-1900s, to the huge disparities in maternal mortality for Black women that persist today. Dr. Sharon Malone, a prominent OB-GYN and menopause specialist in Washington, DC,devoted much of her conference keynote speech to the history of medical racism for women, including her own family’s experiences in Jim Crow Alabama. She’d read a new ACOG report on how OB-GYNs can address ethnic disparities in their field, and she commended it, she told hundreds of listeners.

“But,” she added, “how are we going to implement these things in the current environment where you can’t even say the words ‘disparity,’ ‘inequity,’ ‘women,’ ‘race’?”

Health researchers knew Trump’s reelection would not bode well for their work, especially anything involving abortion or other reproductive care. But few were prepared for how quickly and ruthlessly the new Trump administration has moved to demolish much of the federal infrastructure supporting women’s and minority health.

Among the catastrophic staffing cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gutted the Division of Reproductive Health, as well as offices devoted to improving minority health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services. Critical public health information, such as recommendations for doctors on how to treat sexually transmitted infections, was scrubbed from government websites until a judge ordered it to be partially restored. The dreaded “DEI” label has been cited to cancel billions in research grants to analyze maternal and infant mortality in the Mississippi Delta; examine the connection between racism and subpar cervical cancer treatment; and scrutinize the connection between psychosocial stress and preeclampsia, a potential deadly form of pregnancy-related hypertension that is more common and severe among Black women. Researchers studying such topics were told their funding was being cut because it “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

At the ACOG conference, the impact of those and other cuts was evident in the low-grade anxiety that permeated almost every conversation. In the exhibition hall, where purveyors of speculums, IUDs, and abortion pills mingled near recruiters for rural and red-state hospitals, many people I met had lost research funding. Nearly everyone seemed to be tracking the looming cuts to Medicaid, which covers 40 percent of births and makes it possible for many hospitals in rural and low-income communities to stay open. “How are we going to be able to function?” wondered Kristin Swenson, a certified nurse midwife at the University of Washington. “The mood is ‘hold on, button up, batten down.’ Our jobs are going to get harder.”

“How are we going to be able to function? The mood is ‘hold on, button up, batten down.’ Our jobs are going to get harder.”

Several physicians said they were too worried about retaliation by their employers, or the federal government, to talk to me about how their jobs have been affected by the new administration. Multiple doctors shared their frustration at not being permitted to advocate against the Trump cuts. “We need constituents advocating, because researchers are muzzled,” said a Texas OB-GYN, adding that his institution was afraid of being targeted like Harvard or Columbia universities.

Slashing federal anti-hunger programs like food stamps “would be devastating to my patients,” said a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Cleveland, who treats patients with high-risk pregnancies; poorer overall health tends to make pregnancy more dangerous. She asked to speak anonymously because she has worries of her own: Her research funding has been put on hold, and her lawyers recently advised her not to leave the US to visit her home country of Canada. Another doctor, wearing rainbow glasses, told me that her hospital had learned that women in the community were choosing to give birth at home because they worried they could be arrested byimmigration agents at the hospital.

Dr. Caroline Cochrane, an OB-GYN affiliated with Wake Forest University in North Carolina, told me about how, when the Trump cuts started, she was nearly ready to submit an 80-page proposal to the National Institutes of Health to study inequities in menopause care. The study would have used focus groups and surveys to ask Black and Hispanic women—who experience earlier, more severe, and longer-lasting menopause symptoms—about the challenges they encountered getting treatment, with the goal of designing a solution.

But when the White House started gutting research funding, Cochrane realized her proposal contained too many “forbidden words”: “I had a whole section in there on how Black and Hispanic women have historically been excluded from research,” she said wryly. Now, she’s trying to figure out whether she can salvage any part of the proposal.Her job depends on NIH funding a portion of her salary, she told me. “My whole career up until now is in jeopardy of losing its research focus.”

Studies involving the LGBTQ community, which experiences its own pernicious health disparities, are likewise being defunded. Dr. Brent Monseur, a Stanford University OB-GYN, says he’s lost the NIH grant he needs to keep conducting research at his one-of-a-kind academic center, which helps queer people create families using techniques like in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. “LGBTQ family-building is still a very nascent research field,” Monsieur told me. “There are still many things we don’t know, even very basic epidemiology, like who is using these services? How are they paying for these services? What are their clinical outcomes? What are the best treatment plans for specific populations?”

With the Trump cuts, “there’s going to be a pause on all of that research generationally,” Monseur said, forcing him to choose between researching a less politicized topic or leaving academia to work at a private fertility clinic. Not that such work doesn’t carry its own risks in the current tumultuous environment: The weekend of the ACOG conference, a car bomber attacked a fertility clinic serving LGBTQ families in Palm Springs, California, injuring four people and killing himself.

An issue of particular concern to many of the people at the ACOG conference was maternal mortality. Among high-income countries, the United States has by far the highest rate of maternal deaths, the vast majority of which are considered preventable. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.

During his first term in 2018, spurred by major journalistic investigations about maternal mortality and years of ACOG lobbying, Trump signed the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, routing funding through the CDC to state maternal mortality review committees like the one Hawes-Van Pelt joined in Minnesota. Those committees, dubbed MMRCs, identify and analyze causes of deaths among pregnant people and new mothers, then enter the information into a CDC-hosted database, allowing researchers to look for trends and design interventions. (Since 2020, the list of potential contributing factors to be analyzed has included discrimination, interpersonal racism, and structural racism.)

At a meeting on maternal mortality prevention at the ACOG conference, doctors worried aloud about the CDC withdrawing from this work. “Preelection, it was easier to get in touch with CDC and have them meet with us,” the leader of a maternal mortality working group reported. Others raised concerns about the national database—could ACOG take it over if the CDC stopped funding it? “That’s a really complicated question,” an ACOG official responded. “I am actually hoping that it doesn’t come down to that, quite frankly.”

MMRCs are in a politically delicate position. As Anna Claire Vollers has reported at Stateline, Idaho disbanded its committee and Arkansas created a new one after MMRCs in both states recommended extending Medicaid coverage to new mothers for a full year after giving birth—a reflection of data showing that most maternal deaths happen in the postpartum period. In November, Georgia dismissed all 32 members of its MMRC after ProPublica identified two women who had died as a result of the state’s six-week abortion ban using confidential MMRC documents. In Texas, officials appointed a leading anti-abortion activist to its MMRC and ordered the committee not to review maternal deaths for a two-year period following implementation of the state’s near-total abortion ban in 2022.

I reached out to ACOG for background information about the organization’s work on racial health disparities and received a two-page statement by its new president, Dr. Steven Fleischman, who practices in New Haven, Connecticut, and teaches at the Yale School of Medicine.ACOG has been working with the federal government since the 1980s on efforts to reduce maternal mortality, he said. Over the last several years, the medical association has created a number of initiativesdesigned to reduce racial bias throughout women’s health, from new clinical guidelines to medical training.Much of that work is now “in jeopardy,” he acknowledges: “We are concerned that the sweeping policy changes and spending cuts coming out of the administration will only cause us to backslide on all the progress made.”

“We are concerned that the sweeping policy changes and spending cuts coming out of the administration will only cause us to backslide on all the progress made.”

MMRCs and the national database are among the programs at risk under Trump, Fleischman said. “Realizing that these vital programs could lose funding or be eliminated entirely is deeply concerning and will hamper our ability as a country to track critical maternal health outcomes data and end racial health disparities.” Also vulnerable is a program, the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, that provides training and assistance to hospital systems to improve responses to life-threatening emergencies and prevent maternal deaths. “HHS contracts have been integral to ACOG advancing this work across the country, and we are worried that reduced resources would stymie our efforts at these local levels,” Fleishman said.

Malone, in her keynote speech at the ACOG conference, told the story of her mother giving birth to eight children starting in the 1930s. The treatment her mother received in hospital maternity wards in Mobile, Alabama, was so unpleasant that after the first two babies, she opted to deliver at home. “I don’t think that she had an experience at either of those places that was really something that made her feel cared for or seen,” Malone said.

Back then, around 1 in 100 American women died in or around childbirth—a much higher maternal mortality rate than today (about 19 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024). But even as the number of deaths was falling, the disparity in death rates between Black and white mothers has only widened. Malone urged the audience to keep fighting for health equity, despite the challenges of the current political environment. “There are things that we control,” she implored. “We have to address how we as physicians deal with patients—what are our implicit biases about why should one person have something and someone else should not?”

“We do not have an engaged federal partner, so we’re going to have to do it on our own,” she added. Instead of looking to Washington for help, “we go to states, we go to legislators, we go to our local health departments, public-private partnerships, all of that.” The answer, Malone said, “is not to do nothing. We can’t afford to do nothing.”

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