LA’s ICE Raids Are Impacting Domestic Violence Shelters

On Monday, as ICE swept Los Angeles with raids in President Donald Trump’s escalating drive for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, a client of the Survivor Justice Center had an appointment for a court hearing.

The purpose was to secure a permanent, five-year restraining order against her abuser, who had already violated a temporary restraining order, according to Carmen McDonald, executive director of the organization, which supports immigrant survivors of domestic violence. The woman had been dealing with extensive physical abuse, McDonald said, which—coupled with her abuser’s violation of a prior order—made getting stronger protection critical.

But on Tuesday, the day after the hearing was to take place, McDonald learned from a staffer that the survivor had not shown up. Based on the woman’s immigration status, prior concerns she had shared with staff, the fact that ICE has been ramping up arrests at courthouses, and the agency’s ongoing raids across LA, McDonald and her staff believe the woman was likely afraid of being detained. As of Thursday, their client remains missing—“likely back with her abuser,” McDonald says. If so, she could be in serious danger: Advocates say survivors wind up at increased risk just after they file for a restraining order or try to leave an abuser.

“She literally had to choose [between] physical harm or potential [ICE] custody,” said McDonald, who added that the survivor had a pathway to citizenship independently from her abuser. McDonald believes that “it’s the fear and the tearing apart of families that kept her in a dangerous situation.”

“She literally had to choose: physical harm or potential [ICE] custody.”

McDonald is one of a half-dozen domestic violence service providers in the LA area who told Mother Jones that the increased presence of ICE over the past week is creating a chilling effect for their organizations and the undocumented survivors they serve. Despite President Donald Trump’s claims he would “protect women,” advocates contend that intense immigration enforcement in LA and elsewhere is putting women and LGBTQ people, who experience the majority of domestic violence, at increased risk by making them less likely to seek help for fear of being detained.

A recent federal policy change allowing immigration enforcement at domestic violence shelters and similar organizations has also created more barriers for undocumented survivors, who advocates say already deal with abusers threatening to report them to ICE or take their children out of the country as means of control.

“When you send enforcement agents into courthouses and you take such broad immigration actions, you’re actually making it less safe for survivors because of this chilling effect,” said Connie Chung Joe, chief executive officer of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. “Now victims are more scared about getting detained or separated from their children and family, and that becomes scarier than [not] being able to protect themselves against their abusers.”

Local domestic violence advocates say the prospect of ICE appearing at shelters is their worst fear. That has become a more pressing concern since January, when the Trump administration rescinded guidance the Biden administration implemented characterizing domestic violence shelters and victim services centers, among others, as “protected spaces” where immigration enforcement should not take place due to the harm it could inflict on a community. The Trump administration’s updated guidance says ICE officials will make “case-by-case determinations regarding whether, where and when to conduct an immigration enforcement action in or near a protected area.”

According to Cristina Verez, legal and policy director at the immigrants’ rights organization ASISTA, the policy change led to “a flood of concerns and questions about what that meant for [domestic violence] orgs and how they could…protect everyone at those locations.” Several service providers in LA note that many of their staff are also from mixed-status families, making the concerns relevant to both staff and survivors.

“It’s the fear and the tearing apart of families that kept her in a dangerous situation.”

The policy change already appears to be having an impact. On Wednesday, LA city councilor Hugo Soto-Martinez said in a video posted to Instagram that ICE had shown up at a confidential domestic violence shelter, apparently in search of one person who was not present. “How they found out this information, we don’t know,” Soto-Martinez said in the video. (Federal laws protect individual survivors’ confidentiality, and many shelters keep their locations secret.) “These are places where people go and find refuge and try to be safe fleeing violence,” the lawmaker added. (His office did not immediately provide further information on the alleged incident; spokespeople for ICE, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and LA Mayor Karen Bass did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

Chung Joe, McDonald, and two other LA service providers say their organizations have seen increases just this past week in survivors calling and asking for advice on how to navigate ICE. “Our clients are calling and scared, asking, ‘Can I go to my doctor’s appointment? Can I go to this Pride event? Can I take my kids to school?’” McDonald said. She added that of the approximately 1,000 survivors her organization serves per year, 70 percent are immigrants and more than half of those are undocumented. Another LA-area service provider who is not being identified for fear of retaliation added: “Domestic violence programs, rape crisis programs, should be safe sanctuaries, and we can’t even guarantee that anymore.”

LA-area service providers said they have ramped up “know your rights” trainings and implemented pandemic-era precautions to avoid potential raids. One LA organization that supports South Asian survivors said that its staff has been working from home since Monday, leaving their in-person office temporarily closed.

Two other organizations located in areas close to raids also reported closing physical spaces where survivors can typically drop in to get resources; one provider said her organization left a note on its door instructing survivors to call their help line for assistance, and started what she calls “difficult conversations” with clients in shelter about how to prepare for the worst-case scenario: line up emergency contacts, gather their documents, and designate someone safe to take care of their kids if they are detained. “We don’t know if we’re sending a client to sit in a lobby to wait for a service, [if] ICE will come in,”the provider said.

Some providers say their clients have also been afraid to appear in-person for courthearings—as McDonald believes her missing client was—and have instead opted for virtual appointments. In California, state courts do not deport undocumented people, who can access domestic violence restraining orders and other family court services regardless of their status. Immigrant survivors of domestic violence and related crimes can also often access pathways to citizenship through special visas. But these protections can feel meaningless for undocumentedsurvivors in light of Trump’s mass deportation efforts coupled with ICE’s increasing presence in and near courthouses. “They can’t afford to be detained and separated from their children or their families, so they’d rather just stay with their abusers,” said Chung Joe.

“If we keep these individuals from walking through the doors to any of these facilities because of fear, then as society, we have failed them.”

Some lawmakers have floated special protections for domestic violence shelters that they say are newly relevant in light of what’s happening in LA. Susan Rubio, a Democratic state senator in California, has put forth a bill that would prohibit immigration enforcement in private sections of shelters for homelessness, human trafficking, and domestic violence, along with rape crisis centers, without a judicial warrant. “If we keep these individuals from walking through the doors to any of these facilities because of fear, then as society, we have failed them,” said Rubio, who is also a survivor of domestic violence. The legislation has passed the Senate and has been referred for committee hearings in the Assembly. Similar legislation was recently proposed in New York and signed into law in Maryland.

Casey Swegman, director of public policy at Tahirih Justice Center, an organization that serves immigrant survivors, said she is “heartened that states are taking up the mantle,” adding that these bills “empower the staff at those agencies to leverage the law to better implement policies at their shelter.”

At the federal level, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has reintroduced the WISE Act in this session of Congress, a bill that offers a slate of additional protections for immigrant survivors, including prohibiting protections at domestic violence shelters and similarly sensitive locations. “When ICE shows up at domestic violence shelters or arrests survivors seeking help, it only empowers abusers, who too often use immigration status as a threat to keep people in abusive situations. This also impacts public safety overall by making immigrants fearful of local police and less likely to report abuse,” Jayapal said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.

As promising as those bills may be, advocates say they cannot stem the immediate fear facing undocumented survivors, in LA and across the country. “Our clients are already living in fear,” McDonald, from Survivor Justice Center, points out. “Now, they’re afraid at home and they’re afraid in the community.”

If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or visiting thehotline.org. The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors also offers a list of resources, and the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence maintains a directory of organizations across the state.

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Sen. Padilla Pushed to Ground, Handcuffed for Demanding DHS Not Lie

As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem talked about the need to apply constitutional rights to all citizens in a Thursday press conference,Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ostensibly an unannounced guest, approached the podium.

“I’m Sen. Alex Padilla,” he is seen stating. “I have questions for the secretary.”

BREAKING: California Democratic Senator @AlexPadilla4CA just crashed DHS Secretary Noem’s press conference in LA and was forcibly removed. pic.twitter.com/Q2sUWiImAM

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 12, 2025

Despite the disclosure that he was a sitting US senator, at least four security members were seen forcibly pushing and dragging Padilla out of the room as he condemned the false narrative that the immigrants targeted in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda are criminals. Noem did not appear to acknowledge Padilla’s presence or his forced removal, while she continued with her speech defending the president’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles. Another video showed officers handcuffing Padilla.

In a statement, DHS falsely accused Padilla of failing to identify himself. (He can be heard in videos that have circulated on social media doing just that.) “Sen. Padilla chose disrespectful political theatre and interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself or having his Senate security pin on as he lunged toward Secretary Noem,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Mother Jones.

“Mr. Padilla was told repeatedly to back away and did not comply with officers’ repeated commands. US Secret Service thought he was an attacker, and officers acted appropriately. Secretary Noem met with Senator Padilla after and held a 15-minute meeting.”

The altercation comes amid a chilling use of law enforcement to arrest Democrats and elected officials peacefully protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown. Just this week, Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey was indicted on three counts after her protest outside an ICE facility last month. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was also arrested at the same demonstration, but the charges against him were eventually dropped.

The unbridled willingness to punish elected officials, through forceful removal and criminal apprehension, marks a key escalation point in the Trump administration’s embrace of blatantly authoritarian tendencies, as they seek to crush dissent, peaceful or not. And it carries the tacit approval of the president. “If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump said this week in advance of his military-birthday parade in DC this weekend.

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What The Hell?

A day after videos emerged of ICE agents chasing after farmworkers across California, forcing immigrants to hide in fields, President Donald Trump appeared to say, in a Truth Social post, that he would not fully pursue his core policy proposal of mass deportation. He had sympathy, if not for the workers then for the agricultural industry—his fellow bosses—who needed the hunted men for labor power.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote on Truth Social, before issuing a vague declaration, “Changes are coming!”

A quick look at similar remarks should disabuse you of such hope.

What changes? Had a frazzled “Farmer” person “in the Hotel and Leisure business” gotten through to the president? The Department of Homeland Security did not have clear answers. “We will follow the President’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, told Mother Jones.

From one angle, it could seem as though Trump, amid the explosive escalation in his mass deportation agenda that has resulted in more military personnel in the city of Los Angeles than Syria and Iraq combined, sees the terror of his agenda. That a racist plan to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States is now actively ruining industries, including some of our most critical. (He clearly did not heed my colleague Isabela Dias’ many warnings.) That maybe, Trump has gone too far.

But a quick look at similar remarks should disabuse you of such hope.

In April, Trump proposed something comparable, and equally vague. “So a farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people, saying they’re great, they’re working hard,” he rambled in a Cabinet meeting. “We’re going to slow it down a little bit for them, and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out. They’re going to come back as legal workers.”

It wasn’t clear what Trump meant by “slow[ing] it down a little bit” or what visa he was proposing with the prospect of returning as a legal worker. Immigrants across the country have been disappeared and physically terrorized ever since; the country is now seeing the clear hardline approach of Stephen Miller, who has reportedly driven the administration to workplace raids, which set off the protests in LA.

That confusion, both in April and today, is all but certain to be intentional. Because, while Trump’s politics teem with many abhorrent themes, the singular idea that this country has gone to hell because of immigrants, and we must take it back from them, is what animates his entire worldview. Sure, some empathetic, moderating position might emerge on his social media platform. But chaos and confusion are just a piece of this overall plan.

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The Supreme Court is Making an All Powerful President—But the One We Have Isn’t All That Interested in the Job

The Trump administration is investigating whether former President Joe Biden was so enfeebled that his advisers secretly ran the country on his behalf. House Republicans and Trump’s obsequious new pardon attorney are likewise probing whether Biden’s aides issued pardons without his knowledge. “Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, is constitutionally committed to the President,” stated Trump’s executive order initiating the investigation, “there are serious doubts as to the decision making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness of these actions.” If Biden wasn’t aware of them, the order states, the actions may be void.

Trump’s indifference to the job is the modern incarnation of a problem that defenders of a strong presidency have always ignored.

The country is only starting to understand the extent of Biden’s decline, with the truth somewhere between the fully-capable Biden his White House insisted on and the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency Trump has conjured. But the ongoing investigations by Trump and his allies must inevitably reckon with a separate but important question: What exactly is the job of the president, and how much incapacitation or delegation is too much?

It is ironic that these questions are being pressed so forcefully by Trump, who himself is uninterested in much of the work of governing. The irony deepens when you consider that Trump and his administration are seizing power under the theory of the “unitary executive,” the idea that a single person, the president, embodies the entire executive branch and must have the power to hire, fire, and direct executive agencies as he desires. This theory so clearly animates the Trump administration that it is infused in the text of the executive order on the Biden investigation, especially in a section that makes an issue of Biden’s use of an autopen. The president, it states, “as the unitary head of the executive branch, holds tremendous power and responsibility through his signature… The Nation is governed through Presidential signatures.” That is not how American government is supposed to operate, but, as Trump’s own executive order concedes, the fantasy of unchecked presidential power only works if the president is actually in charge.

The Supreme Court, now dominated by proponents of a unitary executive, is seizing on Trump’s illegal power grabs to further etch the theory into Constitutional law. From allowing Trump’s illegal firings of independent commissioners to take effect to greenlighting the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to troves of Social Security data in likely violation of the law, the court’s GOP-appointed majority is a embracing a vision of executive authority that overrides Congress’s laws and grows the powers of the White House. At the very moment that the country is grappling with whether the last president was significantly diminished, followed by a president with a clear disdain for much of the job, the courts continue to hand the office increasingly king-like powers on the theory that the president alone must run the show.

“The overall problem is that the unitary executive theory is a fiction,” says Christine Chabot of Marquette University Law School. “Unitary executive theory seems to think that, at its extreme, the president is in control of all policy decisions made in the executive branch. And that’s just an impossibility. It has been since day one. George Washington could never have controlled all the executive branch decisions that were being made when he was president, and it’s even more true now.”

During Trump’s first term, it was well known that the president didn’t like to read, thus limiting his intake of memos and policy briefs. This time around, Trump’s disengagement may be worse. In May, Politico reported that Trump had only sat for 12 briefings with intelligence officials since his inauguration, a dangerous abdication compounded by the fact that he doesn’t appear to read the intelligence briefs thatare produced for him five days a week.

There are many such signs of Trump’s detachment.In an ABC interview marking the first 100 days of his second term, Trump deferred the question of whether immigrants he has condemned to a notorious El Salvadoran prison were owed due process, saying, “They get whatever my lawyers say.” Of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man his administration mistakenly sent there, Trump appeared to believe his own administration’s false propaganda that Abrego Garcia had tattooed the transnational gang name “M-S-1-3” on his knuckles. The episode raised the question of whether Trump is informed by his aides or deceived by them.

Musk’s role suggests Trump is not fully in charge—not because he is incapable of leading, but because he just doesn’t want to.

Then there is Elon Musk. In the first months of this administration, the president outsourced to the world’s richest man the project of dismantling his own government. He did this, reportedly, without keeping tabs on the operation and possibly misunderstanding its mission. Of Musk’s promise to cut $1 trillion in spending, Trump recently wondered, “Was it all bullshit?”

According to an astonishing Wall Street Journal report, Musk “often surprised senior administration officials with his decisions” and “made dramatic government cuts without consulting others, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.” Trump’s top aides learned second-hand what DOGE was doing, and Musk made “cuts at the Health and Human Services Department that some in the West Wing disagreed with.” There is surely an element of political opportunism in these leaks, distancing Trump from Musk’s most unpopular actions as he slinks away from Washington. But they are also an extraordinary account of a president who is not fully in charge—not because he is incapable of leading, but because he just doesn’t want to.

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The Legal Theory Behind Trump’s Power Grabs

The idea of an incapacitated or uninterested president whose administration is surreptitiously run by his aides gnaws at the logic of the unitary executive theory. The theory rests on the thin reed of two clauses in Article II of the Constitution, which vest executive power in the president and charge the president with ensuring the laws are faithfully executed. To add meat to these bones, Chief Justice John Roberts, whose judicial opinions have given constitutional life to the unitary executive theory, has also adopted a long-running argument that endowing the president with more power over the executive branch leads to more democratic accountability.

This is the constitutionalization of the general idea that,as President Harry Truman put it,the buck stops at the Resolute Desk. If every member of the executive branch operates according to the president’s will and at the president’s pleasure, then voters know who to blame when something goes wrong. The executive power “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote,” Roberts wrote in 2021.

“The functional argument is its democratic responsiveness,” explains New York University law professor Noah Rosenblum. “That requires some amount, at least theoretically, of presidential involvement, engagement, invigilation…that’s supposed to go along with a sense that the president is genuinely seeing what’s going on.”

Roberts himself has flicked at the necessity of an active executive. The founders, he wrote in his 2024 decision granting presidents broad criminal immunity, envisioned a “‘vigorous’ and ‘energetic’ Executive… for a ‘feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.’” While Alexander Hamilton, whom Roberts quotes in that passage, wrote those words to argue for a single president over an executive branch run by multiple people, the need for a sole point of authority—much less an energetic one—is theoretically incompatible with a tired president whose aides run the show. Roberts’ further justified presidential immunity as a critical condition for the president to execute his duties “fearlessly.” The further you get from a vigorous president making all the decisions, the less important immunity theoretically is.

On the other hand, the legal justification for the president’s powers—those all-important lines from Article II—requires neither an energetic president, nor does it frown upon inordinate amounts of delegation. The theory “is about the original meaning of the Constitution,” originalist scholar Michael Rappaport of San Diego University School of Law wrote in an email. “It does not mean that it is good policy,” though he says he believes it is. While “abuses of the presidency by presidential staff and infirm presidents are problematic and in many cases illegal,” he added, “illegal actions by some is not necessarily a reason to depart from the constitutional rule.”

The need for a sole point of authority is theoretically incompatible with a president whose aides run the show.

Because it is impossible for one person to make every decision, “there is a more realistic version of the accountability idea of the unitary executive theory, where the President is in control at least of the larger, more important decisions,” says Chabot. “The problem is the Constitution doesn’t have great accountability mechanisms” after a president’s abdication goes beyond that point and the president is too checked out.

Given their professed belief in democratic accountability, Roberts and fellow backers of the unitary executive theory might argue that the antidote to a president who won’t or can’t keep up with the job is small-d democracy itself; that the people might see an enfeebled president and so elect someone else. This is, in fact, what doomed Biden’s shot at a second term.

But the mechanisms for democratic accountability are inadequate. The president can win with a minority of the popular vote, as happened in 2000 and 2016, while a second-term president will never face voters again. The Supreme Court’s own disdain for voting rights legislation, its approval of widespread gerrymandering, and its gutting of campaign finance regulations, belies the increasingly empty promise of democratic course correction. Thus, Roberts and the Republican legal movement envision an engaged president, but don’t actually provide an off-ramp when we don’t get one.

Jeremy Rabkin, professoremeritus at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, doesn’t believe that Biden’s or Trump’s incompetencies raise fundamental questions about unitary executive theory. Rabkin wonders whether Biden was fit enough for the job even in his earliest months as president based on the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan and its aftermath. “But I don’t see any remedy for this—apart from expecting journalists to highlight the problem and move public opinion to demand some change at the very top,” he wrote in an email. “It wouldn’t be sensible to say, ‘The President should not be in charge of the military, because he might be too gaga to give sound directives to them.'” In other words, the constitutional grant of ultimate responsibility in the president should not be turned off just because some presidents rely too heavily on their staff.

Unitary executive theory is built around the platonic ideal of a president—active and engaged at every level: responsive to the people, and naturally lawful. But presidents are not always vigorous, and they cannot possibly be on top of everything happening in the executive branch. Nor are they immune from the allure of criminal conduct—it’s no accident that the modern unitary executive theory was first cooked up by President Richard Nixon’s lawyers to shut down the Watergate investigation.

“These guys profess to worship the founders of the Constitution, and yet the very premise of that document was that we have to design something for fallible people who are not perfect, and who get old and die and lose their energy,” says Rosenblum. “If men were angels, none of this would be necessary.”

The Republican legal movement envisions an engaged president, but doesn’t provide an off-ramp when we don’t get one.

While the unitary executive theory operates under the presumption of an ideal president, it incentivizes a far worse, even criminal, version. It assigns the president powers that Congress cannot touch, transforming our system of government from a power-sharing arrangement between all three branches to one in which the president will usually win out over the other two. In doing so, it promises democratic accountability in theory, but removes the Constitution’s central accountability mechanisms.

By reinventing the presidency as an Oval Office king, the theory also recreates one ofmonarchy’s patheticincarnations: a hapless king whose close ministers rule the realm. It’s not hard to imagine this situation. Againtake Musk, whose hatchet job across the federal government breached authorities reserved for the cabinet secretaries. The Supreme Court is blessing Musk’s actions, even as reporting makes clear Trump wasn’t even aware of some of what he was doing. This is, of course, the exact situation Republicans contend occurred under Biden.

“This is a larger topic, one we all need to reckon with when it comes to the American presidency today,” Jake Tapper, who co-wrote a recent book that reported on how Biden’s aides concealed his decline, told the New Yorker last month, “and the degree to which one person is bestowed with so much power, and surrounded by individuals whose own power depends on that person maintaining power, regardless of whether or not it’s good for the White House, the party, or the country.”

That a president might become senile, incapacitated, or simply uninterested in the job is not an unforeseeable problem for the unitary executive theory. In fact, it is baked into its history from the very beginning. The unitary executive theory claims its legal roots and historical tradition from a 1926 Supreme Court decision called Myers v. United States. The case arose when Frank Myers, a postmaster in Oregon, sued for back pay after he was illegally removed from his post during President Woodrow Wilson’s administration. But Chief Justice William Taft, a former president himself, wrote a decision that blessed the firing, seizing on the case to create a more powerful executive. Republican lawyers resurrected the case in the 1980s when they invented the unitary executive theory. It’s endorsement of the president’s broad removal power continues to lay the theory’s legal foundations, from Justice Anonin Scalia to Roberts. But this case undergirding the idea of an all-powerful president most likely came about because of an incapacitated one.

The origins of the Myers case, and exactlywhy Myers was removed in an illegal manner, are mysterious. At the time, by law, presidents could only remove postmasters by having the Senate confirm a new one. But Myers was fired without Wilson nominating any replacement. As Rosenblum and Andrea Katz, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, detailed in a 2023 law review article, the likeliest explanation is that Myers was fired by Wilson’s underlings while the president was convalescing.

Wilson suffered a severe stroke in October 1919, and in the months that followed his wife, Edith, took charge of the White House. While Wilson’s doctor, a close friend, fended off inquiries about the absent president’s health, Edith and his closest advisers functionally ran the country. “In the period surrounding the Myers affair, Wilson was rarely lucid and was prone to impulsive action and erratic, unmoored thinking,” Katz and Rosenblum write. It was the first lady who decided what was brought to the president’s attention, screening out all but the most pressing issues. At the time of Myers’ firing, Wilson’s limited faculties were focused on the League of Nations. It seems unlikely that the question of who should take a new patronage job in the Postal Service would have reached his bedside.

As Reagan lawyers, Justices Roberts and Alito helped increase his powers just as he was shrinking from the job.

“This would explain why Wilson did not seek to remove Myers by nominating a replacement: He was in no position to nominate one,” Katz and Rosenblum write, theorizing that “Myers’s removal may have been the accidental improvisation of a group of presidential advisers acting without a plan.” So with the Meyers decision, the Supreme Court authorized the presidential removal of an officer that Wilson himself may never have actually removed.

But on a deeper level, the irony of the case is that it provided the basis for a fundamental shift toward a president-controlled government based on the possibly falsified actions of an incapacitated president’s aides. The question of Biden’s ability to run the government and Trump’s apparent indifference to the job do not reflect a new challenge to the unitary executive theory—they are simply the modern incarnations of a problem that defenders of a strong presidency have conveniently ignored from the beginning.

The historical ironies don’t end there. Some sixty years after Wilson’s incapacitation, it was lawyers for President Ronald Reagan who first used Myers to push the bounds of presidential power and piece together the legal skeleton of the unitary executive theory. Scalia, a Reagan appointee, joined the Supreme Court in 1986 and, just two years later, penned a landmarkdissent that conservative law professors used as the backbone of their new unitary executive theory. All this was happening at a time when Reagan, the oldest president until Trump and Biden, may have been suffering from early symptoms of Alzheimer’s. At the very least, perhaps like Biden, age was taking its toll while on the job.

President Ronald Reagan at the 1986 briefing announcing the Supreme Court nomination of Antonin Scalia (left).Ron Edmonds/AP

There is an unsettled debate about when Reagan’s Alzheimer’s symptoms began, and whether it diminished his ability as president. Journalist Lesley Stahl has written about an Oval Office meeting she had with Reagan in 1986, where she found a frail and silent man with a vacant stare. She was mentally preparing a broadcast to tell the country that the president was senile when Reagan seemed to “recover,” leaving her to decide she “couldn’t report on my observations.” Stahl later came to the conclusion that Reagan’s wife and aides were covering up his decline.

Columnist Max Boot, who published an authoritative Reagan biography last year, said he had not encountered evidence of Alzheimer’s symptoms while he was president, but that his advanced age—Reagan left office at 77—meant that aides were running the show. “A lot of the administration decisions were being made by [National Security Adviser] Colin Powell, [Defense Secretary] Frank Carlucci, and [Secretary of State] George Schultz,” Boot told the Washington Post, “who were just meeting among themselves and presenting the president with fait accomplis.”

The Iran-Contra Affair, in which the Reagan White House’s National Security Council smuggled arms to Iran and used the proceeds to illegally fund the Contra uprising in Nicaragua, provides more evidence of the problematic combination of a declining president and an empowered executive. Reagan’s aides essentially turned the NSC, a presidential advisory council, into an extra-legal arms dealing operation, professing that executive power exempted them from Congress’ dictates—yet they did so in the name of a president who wasn’t fully aware of the scheme. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who started out as young Reagan administration lawyers, helped to increase Reagan’s powers just as the president himself was shrinking from the job. Today, they are implementing unitary executive theory on the court.

The question of how to square an all-powerful president with the reality of an absent one is particularly salient as the two oldest presidents ever collide with the Supreme Court’s still-unfoldingdecision to turn this theory of expansive presidential powers into our new system of government. The justices themselves could conceivably be asked to reconcile the mess they’ve made.

As Trump-backed investigations into Biden and his inner circle unfold, it’s possible that the Trump administration might declare certain of his actions or pardons void, or even seek to prosecute former Biden aides, on the theory that they criminally usurped the power of the president—whether the evidence warrants it or not. Such actions would inevitably end up in federal court, possibly the highest court. But at the end of the day, in any review of Biden-era decisions, it would be unlikely that the justices would pull back on the unitary executive theory. The theory might envision a perfect president, but come what may, it entrusts the nation to imperfect ones.

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SCOTUS’ Conservative Majority Rules in Favor of Disability Rights

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Ava Tharpe, the plaintiff in A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, a notable education and disability rights case on the Court’s current docket. The ruling ensures that families will not have to meet the notoriously difficult standard of proving “bad faith and gross misjudgment” when suing schools for disability discrimination under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A.J.T. centers around Tharpe, a Minnesota teenager with epilepsy that is more severe in the morning. I covered the case for Mother Jones in February.

Tharpe and her family had requested that she receive more instructional hours later in the day, a proposal rejected by the school district. The family sued the district under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 and the ADA. Tharpe and her family won the case under the IDEA, but the Eighth Circuit court ruled in favor of the school district under Section 504 and the ADA, holding that the case did not meet the “bad faith and gross misjudgment” standard.

As I wrote previously:

In five of the 13 federal circuit courts, including the Eighth Circuit, which covers Minnesota, families suing schools under Section 504 and the ADA have to prove “bad faith or gross misjudgment,” a standard the Eighth Circuit said Ava’s case did not meet—despite acknowledging that the family “may have established a genuine dispute about whether the district was negligent or even deliberately indifferent”…

A ruling against Ava and her family could be a major setback for student disability rights enforcement and an equally major boon for the Trump administration’s plan to gut the Department of Education at the expense of disabled kids.

While diversity and equity protections are under attack by both the conservative Supreme Court majority and the Trump administration, A.J.T. illustrates the ways disability rights law is sometimes less politically polarized. Even the Trump administration, in an amicus brief, said there is “no sound basis for that idiosyncratic heightened standard” around only schools.

“We hold today that ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the unanimous decision. “Nothing in the text of Title II of the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act suggests that such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis.”

Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates legal director Selene Almazan previously said that the bad-faith test runs counter to another item of federal legislation, the Handicapped Children’s Protection Act of 1986.

The case received some extra attention due to a “surprisingly aggressive” back-and-forth between Justice Neil Gorsuch and a lawyer representing the Osseo school district, Lisa Blatt, who accused Tharpe’s lawyers of “lying” about the district’s argument and whom Gorsuch admonished to be “careful with [her] words.” The district’s lawyers also argued that bad faith and gross misjudgment should be the standard for all ADA and Section 504 lawsuits—not just those pertaining to schools.

A ruling that in any way supported that argument would have made it much more difficult to enforce the ADA and Section 504—but the new ruling against the Minnesota district, by contrast, makes it easier.

“That our decision is narrow does not diminish its import for A. J. T. and ‘a great many children with disabilities and their parents,'” Roberts wrote in the conclusion. “Together they face daunting challenges on a daily basis.”

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How Voting Groups Are Preparing for All Eyes on Virginia

Within days of Donald Trump’s return to office, a chilling message for voting rights arrived. The Justice Department was seeking to dismiss a lawsuit, originally brought forth by the Biden administration, challenging Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to purge voter rolls.

It wasn’t exactly a surprising move; the new Trump administration would soon back similar voter suppression efforts around the country. But for Virginia in 2025, the stakes couldn’t be higher. This November, the offices of governor, attorney general, lieutenant governor, and every seat in the state’s House of Delegates are up for grabs, setting up an off-year election season—and, critically, a bellwether for Trump—to be one of the most closely watched in recent memory.

As Dr. Fergie Reid Jr., a prominent political activist in the state, told the Virginia Mercury last month: “Virginia is the first opportunity for really any state in the United States to answer back to what’s going on in Washington right now. It’s going to send a big, loud message to the rest of the country and to the world that not everybody in America is with Trump.”

So with all eyes on Virginia this year, how are voting rights groups preparing? I caught up with Joan Porte, president of the League of Women Voters of Virginia, one of the initial groups to back a similar lawsuit that had challenged Youngkin’s voter removals, to hear about the group’s work ahead of November.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are organizations like the league doing to make voters feel empowered this election cycle?

We’re ramping up what we normally do. Even headed into our biennial convention this month, I’m planning to somehow get 1,516 boxes of election material, including yard signs, into my car to distribute to our local leagues. We will be distributing our usual massive amount of voting information, getting it translated into six languages, and making it available to our partners so they can download and distribute it to their groups. We will be doing candidate forums. Our Richmond league always has a call-in show on a news program and a local station so that the candidates can answer questions. We have social media posts with voting reminders.

Only four states, including Virginia, have off-year elections. What have you heard about voter burnout?

We’re always worried about the voter lag in Virginia, because our state, along with my home state of New Jersey, pretty much has an election every year, which can lead to fatigue. But experts say that off-year elections are often a reflection of the new administration. We saw this in 2012 during [President Barack] Obama’s term with the rise of the Tea Party.

Trump’s mass deportation scheme, a looming abortion ban, the DOGE layoffs that hit Virginia’s military bases and federal workers especially hard. Can you talk about how these issues will affect Virginians at the polls this year?

It all comes down to this: Are they going to vote? We saw it last year with about 36 percent of people who were eligible to vote who just didn’t. If you’re asking me for a crystal ball, I would say that those things will affect voters, but will it affect them enough to say, “Yes, I’m going to go vote this way or that way,” or will they say, “Meh, what’s even the use? They’re all the same. Nothing is going to change.” That’s what we always fear at the league. We want to see 100 percent voting. We want to see every eligible person have their voice heard. All these things could motivate one party over another. But it could also keep people away out of a sense of despair, which is the worst thing that can happen.

Let’s talk about Gov. Youngkin’s voter purge. Do you think it lessened people’s faith in Virginia’s voting system?

That lawsuit is still ongoing. We are waiting for the judge to reconvene. There were two purges, including one last year, where 7,000 people, based on very faulty information from the Department of Motor Vehicles, were removed from the rolls.

“You might ask, ‘Well, what’s wrong with having uniformed police at the polling booth?’ Well, probably nothing, if you look like me, a white woman of a certain age. But if you are a member of a cultural group that has been targeted by police, seeing uniformed officers at the polls is not comforting.”

We won in every court except the Supreme Court. Fortunately, in Virginia, we have same-day voter registration, so we were able to encourage those people to vote. But I think anytime that something like that happens, it lessens people’s faith in the voting system. Some people will vote no matter what, but some are prone not to vote. Youngkin’s efforts also have a chilling effect on people who may be naturalized citizens but are fearful about government intervention.

Tell me about voter intimidation in Virginia.

We always anticipate voter intimidation, and we’ve seen some very creative ones in Virginia. Someone had a gun shop that happened to be near a polling place, so they were shooting off guns the day of the election. We have seen people trying to stir up trouble so that there’s a police presence at the polling booth. Now you might ask, “Well, what’s wrong with having uniformed police at the polling booth?” Well, probably nothing, if you look like me, a white woman of a certain age. But if you are a member of a cultural group that has been targeted by police, seeing uniformed officers at the polls is not comforting, especially now with the ongoing intimidation of immigrant populations.

What are some ways that voters can protect themselves and their rights when casting their ballot?

The election protection hotline is a great resource, and there are several in various languages, including Spanish, Arabic. If you know you’re a citizen and you’re registered, you can call that number. It is staffed by nonpartisan attorneys, and they have a very good track record of getting this stuff cleared up so that a person can vote. Getting on the permanent absentee ballot list is also a great move, and it has been shown to increase voter turnout. Fortunately, the league was instrumental in getting rid of that ridiculous “you need somebody to sign it” rule,which was a voter suppression tactic.

Gov. Youngkin recently announced that a special election will take place September 9 to fill the seat of the late Rep. Gerry Connolly, adding one more critical race in an already high-stakes election year. Could the addition of one more surprise election exacerbate this sense of voter fatigue and ennui we talked about amongst voters?

Yes, it could.

Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears [the GOP candidate for governor] recently landed in some hot water for failing to disclose several free international trips, including one to Israel. Tell me a bit about the history of Virginia’s campaign finance laws and how they could affect the governor’s race this year.

Basically, we don’t have any. We only barely passed a law during the last session requiring [candidates] to not use campaign funds for personal events like child care or care of an elderly parent. But before this law came into effect, I could say I’m running for this office, and if you love me dearly, you could give me $3 million, I could buy a new house with it, and there’d be no law against that.

I am exaggerating a little bit. But generally, we have terrible campaign finance laws in the state of Virginia.

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Is Your Hummingbird Feeder a Lifeline or a Death Trap?

Hummingbirds run on sugar.

Sweet nectar powers their tiny, furious bodies and super-fast wings, which beat as many as 80 to 90 times per second. And luckily for them, they don’t seem to get diabetes, even though they have extremely high blood glucose levels.

In the wild, hummingbirds, the smallest birds in the world, get their sugar from wildflowers, such as honeysuckle, lilies, and bee balm. But following the sweeping destruction of native prairies, forests, and wetlands over the last century, these fluttering jewels have had a more difficult time finding their glucose fix. Warming linked to climate change is also making flowers bloom earlier and changing the range of some hummingbird species, making it even harder for the birds to feed.

While humans are, of course, responsible for these impacts, some wildlife lovers are also trying to help—by installing feeders. Often red and plastic and filled with sugar water, hummingbird feeders provide a supplementary source of nectar for hummingbirds, especially during fall and spring migration when the birds are traveling long distances. Research shows that feeders may increase the number of hummingbirds locally, and birds tend to visit them more when there are fewer flowers in bloom.

So on the whole, feeders are good. They also provide an easy way for people to connect with wildlife.

But there’s one big, big, caveat here: If your feeder is dirty, it could be harming, or even killing, the hummers that visit it, turning the feeder from a lifeline into a trap. Unless you’re prepared to regularly clean your feeder, you may be better off not having one.

The problem is simple: If sugar water is left out too long, it will spoil, meaning it will attract and grow microbes. Some of those microbes are bad and can cause infections, including candida—a type of yeast that causes yeast infections in humans and, apparently, in hummingbirds.

When hummers contract fungal infections, their tongues swell and become difficult to retract. That can put them at risk of starvation. Infected birds also sometimes appear with lesions on their beak or more generally lethargic, said Melanie Furr, a licensed wildlife rehabber who works with Wild Nest Bird Rehab in Georgia.

One study published in 2019 found that most microbes in feeders are not dangerous to hummingbirds. And it’s unlikely that dirty feeders are causing population-wide declines of birds, said Don Powers, a professor emeritus at George Fox University who’s studied hummingbirds for decades.

But it’s still “fairly common” for individual birds to be sickened by them, Furr told me.

“I think it boils down to the fact that most people are not cleaning their feeders or refreshing their nectar as often as they should.”

“I think it boils down to the fact that most people are not cleaning their feeders or refreshing their nectar as often as they should,” she said.

Other wildlife rehabbers have similarly indicated that many adult and baby hummingbirds are in need of rescue because of feeder-related infections. Furr says antifungal medication can clear up the infection and make them healthy enough for release.

Just as the problem is simple, the solution is thankfully simple, too.

There are two key components to a healthy hummingbird feeder: the right recipe and regular cleaning. Both are incredibly straightforward. Recipe:

Mix 1 part refined white sugar with 4 parts drinking water, such as ¼ cup sugar with 1 cup water. Dissolve over heat and cool.

Important notes:

• Don’t use other kinds of sugar or sweetener.
• Avoid red food coloring, including store-bought nectar with artificial color.
• Purified water is better. Avoid distilled water, Furr said, because it lacks trace minerals that birds need.
• You can refrigerate unused nectar for up to two weeks.

In spring and fall, you should clean your feeder every two to three days. In the summer—or whenever it’s hot—you should clean the feeder daily or every other day, Furr said.

“If you wouldn’t leave your drink sitting out in the sun for three days and then drink it, don’t do it for hummingbirds,” Furr said. “Why should a little, 3-gram hummingbird be expected to survive whatever germs are growing there?”

If you’re changing out the nectar every few days, you can simply clean the feeder with hot water, she said. But if it’s been a while, or you see or smell mold, scrub it down with a mixture of vinegar and water or use hydrogen peroxide. You should also make sure the feeder is completely dry before refilling it to prevent bacteria from growing, said Chad Witko, a specialist in avian biology at the National Audubon Society.

“If you’re going to commit to keeping it clean, it’s a great idea,” Furr said of feeders. “Hummingbirds, like birds across every biome, are in decline. Habitat loss and lack of native plants present challenges to them. Having a clean feeder can provide an additional food resource that can be important.”

Don’t want to bother with cleaning? Or want to do more for your local hummers?

Consider planting native hummingbird-friendly wildflowers. The National Audubon Society has a tool that tells you what to plant in your region to attract hummingbirds.

And lastly, if you do come across an injured hummingbird, contact a local wildlife rehabber. This website is a good place to start.

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Newsom Lays Bare Trump’s Authoritarian Threat

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday warned Americans in a televised address that the country is witnessing the initial phases of American democracy’s slide toward authoritarianism with the president’s deployment of the military to respond to peaceful protests in Los Angeles.

“California may be first, but it clearly will not end here,” Newsom said. “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”

“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes,” he continued. “The moment we’ve feared has arrived. “

The speech, which many remarked resembled that of a wartime president, further appeared to cement Newsom’s role as the Democratic Party’s primary voice of opposition, after repeatedly blasting Trump’s actions in LA.

Trump’s deployment of the military came in response to Los Angeles residents protesting ICE’s workplace raids in the region, a key point in the president’s plot to increase mass deportations across the country. The demonstrations, which started Friday, were overwhelmingly peaceful—until Trump’s call to send in the National Guard. Trump has since deployed more National Guard members, as well as the Marines, to the city.

Despite the heavy condemnation, Trump is showing no signs of descalation. As he explicitly warned on Tuesday, anyone protesting his military parade this weekend—even peacefully—would be met with “very heavy force.”

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What SCOTUS Actually Said About Workplace Fairness in This Year’s Big “Reverse Discrimination” Case

In 2020, Marlean Ames alleged that she was denied a job promotion and subsequently demoted by the Ohio Department of Youth Services because she is heterosexual. Her supervisor at the time was gay.

Ames sued her employer for discrimination, but lower courts initially dismissed her case. She hadn’t met a legal bar called the “background circumstances” rule, in which members of majority groups have to show additional evidence of discrimination for their cases to proceed.

But last week, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the “background circumstances” rule is inconsistent with anti-discrimination laws. In the decision written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court said that majority groups shouldn’t have to meet a higher legal bar than minority groups.

As the Trump administration wages a battle against the concept of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—removing references to slavery abolitionists on government websites and charging Harvard with discriminating against white male job applicants—some conservative groups are celebrating the ruling as a clear victory towards ending diversity-friendly policies.

But Xiao Wang, the University of Virginia law professor whose legal clinic won the case, has a much more nuanced take.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where you were when the opinion was announced? What were you doing?

You never know when your opinion gets released, but it’s generally at 10 a.m. on Thursdays. So around 9:45 or so, I usually have the Supreme Court’s website on automatic refresh on my computer. It’s like watching the ball drop on New Year’s—only for legal nerds. I was at home drinking coffee, wearing a raggedy t-shirt, and hadn’t brushed my teeth or anything yet. I had to get ready really quickly and come to the law school to try to take some interview requests.

How did you get involved in this case?

The Sixth Circuit is the lower court that decided this case. I used to be a clerk there, so I try to keep up with their opinions. The opinion in this case didn’t seem quite right. Even the lower court suggested that maybe the Supreme Court should look at it. I reached out to the local trial counsel, Ed Gilbert, on this and talked about how we—as a law clinic—could help. I think Ed was reassured by how I approached the case. I said, “Look, I think this is a pretty narrow legal issue. I think it’s something that hopefully we can find some common ground on and bring it up to the Supreme Court in a respectful and nuanced manner.”

Colloquially, people are describing this case as being a win for the fight against “reverse discrimination.” But what narrow legal question was the court really addressing?

I guess I have an issue with the colloquial term. The Supreme Court never uses that term, and and a lot of the lower courts don’t use that term. And so to me, what this case was about is just discrimination.

The simplified question was, “How do [anti-discrimination laws] apply across different situations? And I think our answer to that was to apply the same legal standards and legal framework [in any discrimination case]. The outcome might come out differently in different situations based on the facts on the ground. But judges should have the same law in front of them and apply it in the same even-handed manner.

How would you explain to a ninth grader what the court ultimately decided in this case?

I think what it comes down to is the idea that anyone can be subject to discrimination. And if they are subject to discrimination—at least in the workplace—and they want to bring a lawsuit, then the judge should apply the same law, the same standards to them.

Also, the underlying premise behind this case was “majority group” versus “minority group” discrimination. But it can be hard to make that distinction, because we can be part of a majority group in some ways, but not others… I think it’s just easier for courts to say, “Well, the best way to figure out whether discrimination happened is based on the same legal framework and legal standards.”

You won your case, but Miss Ames’s legal fight is ongoing. The Supreme Court “vacated and remanded” it. Can you explain what that means?

What we were asking from the justices was really just to let her have her day in court. We removed the legal obstacle blocking her case from proceeding, but the next big step after that is usually to present your factual story to a jury. Let’s have 12 people in Ohio see whether they believe that this is what happened—whether it was driven by discrimination. And if it was, what sort of remedy you should get? We won’t be involved in that part of her legal fight.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately—including by the President of the United States—about efforts to end DEI initiatives. There’s an insinuation here that any sort of efforts aimed towards achieving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion have the effect of discriminating against majority classes—such as white people. Is there a place for nuanced, carefully built DEI policies?

I think a lot of us want diverse workplaces and diverse educational institutions, and for these places to reflect all different types of people and all different types of views. One of the reasons that I wanted work with law students was to be able to reach out to students that might not come from the traditional backgrounds. And I give so much credit to my students for producing the great work that leads to unanimous decisions like this.

On a micro scale, I definitely think [DEI policies are] important. Maybe these individual policies will be tested in the courts—I don’t know how they’ll rule on them. My sense from Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in the [Students for Fair Admissions] affirmative action case is that, at the end of the day, he thinks it’s laudable to have this goal of greater diversity. It’s really just a question of how you carefully frame it within the confines of the Equal Protection Clause and other legal constraints. And I don’t know, there might be some more stops and starts before we figure out the right recipe, but certainly I think it’s something we shouldn’t stop trying to do.

Are you concerned that people who lead the anti-DEI fight may misconstrue the merits of this specific, narrow Supreme Court decision to gain advantages for majority classes at the expense of marginalized ones?

That’s a really tough question. I’ve learned—especially in this case—that interest groups may take whatever they want from the case and run with it. But that’s different than what the law actually says, and how it actually gets applied in courts.

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Trump’s Washington Is a Technofascist Fantasy—With or Without Musk

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency was many things in the first months of the second Trump administration. It was a chain saw, a wood chipper, and “a way of life, like Buddhism,” according to Elon Musk, its fearless leader according to everyone but the president’s lawyers. It was a funnel of disinfo, a conflict of interest, a bureaucratic mystery, and a tired meme. But above all, it was the realization of a dream.

For all the talk of changing demographics and new coalitions, the most important development in US politics last fall involved money and power: The billionaires who believe their technology will save civilization found common cause with authoritarians who hoped that same technology could help them control it. They realized that, in the end, the things they wanted were mostly the same. The problem was democracy; the solution was technofascism.

The idea that a post-liberal, “merit-based” ruling class should use new technologies to govern the rest of us has been building on the right for years. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and former Musk business partner whose condemnation of vacuous startup culture nudged Vice President JD Vance toward Catholicism, once questioned whether “freedom and democracy are compatible.” (This skepticism of the democratic process did not stop him from spending tens of millions of dollars to influence it.) He was neither the first nor the last to suggest that our current political system had set a trap that only a few skilled visionaries could free us from.

Among the earlier proponents was Musk’s own apartheid-­supporting grandfather, who believed in replacing the electoral system with a “technocracy” of benevolent scientists. One of the more prominent thinkers on the new right these days is Curtis Yarvin, whose pitch for a monarchical “Dark Enlightenment” reached an audience that included Vance, Thiel, and VC billionaire Marc Andreessen. Andreessen, who has mocked the use of the term “technofascist” to describe the administration, describes himself as a “techno-optimist,” who believes artificial intelligence breakthroughs will usher civilization onto a new plane of existence and the sooner we get there, the better. This faith in the destiny of accelerating technological progress has become Silicon Valley’s version of end-times theology and is affecting our politics in much the same way—anything that can be done, must, to hasten the coming of the Borg.

DOGE offered a glimpse of the technofascist future. It formed the beachhead for a targeted hit on public institutions and their employees in the service of a new, radical, and cash-soaked post-democratic order. The fact that a few were imposing this on the many was the point.

If this bureaucratic smash-and-grab had a technical mission, it was to break down existing silos of the data the government collects on you to enable a sort of God’s-eye view of the American populace.

Musk and his allies relished demolishing firewalls online and off, forcing their way into buildings and firing or threatening to arrest civil servants who refused to comply. Federal employees feared that DOGE was monitoring what they typed and using AI to eavesdrop on what they said. At one point during Musk’s successful attempt to “delete” the United States Agency for International Development, employees thought they had restored funding for a few lifesaving programs for children, only for two Musk lieutenants to simply uncheck those boxes in the agency’s computer system; “pronatalism” for me, DOGE for thee. A manifesto shared by Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the surveillance behemoth Palantir with Thiel, implored the administration to “fire people who can’t be fired…Mass deport people who can’t be deported.” Musk, for his part, urged the administration to “go after” Tesla critics and suggested the administration could ignore court orders—which, of course, Donald Trump did.

If this bureaucratic smash-and-grab had a technical mission, it was to break down existing silos of the data the government collects on you to enable a sort of God’s-eye view of the American populace. Big Tech and the government have hoovered up and exploited your data for decades, but never so openly and so panoptically. Musk was trying to riffle through your Social Security, Medicare, and tax data. The goal was to use these pots of information—long legally separated to avoid exactly this kind of thing—to purge the undesired and justify the mass reduction of government the right has long pined for.

As usual, immigrants bore the brunt. The government used AI to trawl through the personal data of thousands of students to find thought crimes. Palantir used its vast data collection apparatus to help the government locate and track undocumented residents. To ensure those immigrants could never collect benefits, the Social Security Administration simply reclassified thousands of people as dead. At the Border Security Expo in Phoenix in April, acting ice Director Todd Lyons expressed his wish that the government could streamline the logistics of mass deportation. What was needed, he said, according to the Arizona Mirror, was “like Prime, but with human beings.”

The first few months of the administration were filled with moments like that. It was not just that the new people in charge sounded like the sort of people who hunt service workers for sport, but that they didn’t really seem to care who knew.

The key to the administration’s technofascist turn was that you could start from either direction and end up in the same place. Tech was a means to impose fascism; fascism was a means to unfettered tech. The rise of cryptocurrency and AI helped the MAGA movement and Silicon Valley moguls meet in the middle. Eager to have a president who would let them do as they pleased, some of the biggest names in the business showered Trump with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash. To them, these kinds of civilization-shaking creations demanded an accommodation from everyone else. They would require massive new infusions of energy and render the existing economy obsolete. (With one notable exception: Andreessen predicted recently that venture capital investing could be “one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing” after AI takes over, because it is more an art than a science.)

And then there’s Trump 2.0’s preferred aesthetic, a sort of machine-learning mashup of Thomas Kinkade, Leni Riefenstahl, and Starship Troopers that renders the harshest fever dreams in soft-focused and cruel ways. In February, the president posted an AI-generated video of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, with Musk eating flatbread on a beach. The Department of Defense recently offered up its own vision of Secretary Pete Hegseth holding up an inexplicably four-fingered hand next to the border wall. Slop like this is everywhere now, in White House statements and in the depths of Musk’s Grok-powered feedback loop.

This grand alliance is a bit fraught, though, as the recent falling out between the president and his richest ally underscored. Trump wants to unshackle particular kinds of technology to help particular groups, but it’s not exactly “technocracy.” For one thing, he fired all the technocrats—and gutted the nation’s capacity for research. Andreessen’s “Techno-­Optimist Manifesto” includes the immortal line: “We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.” How’s that going?

Immigrants were just the initial target. Musk’s legion—which is also, according to the Wall Street Journal, how he describes his kids—launched a broader attack on the mostly liberal white-collar professionals he and his fellow oligarchs blamed for debasing society. They were “the professional managerial class” or “childless cat ladies”—denizens of what the court philosopher Balaji Srinivasan refers to as the “Paper Belt.” The professional class who staff not just the government, but higher education, media, law firms, and NGOs were the enemy, and the solve, in industry terms, was to blow up those sectors. “You probably deserved it,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told a recently axed Department of Health and Human Services employee who confronted him on Capitol Hill in April. Why? Because, Banks later explained, the man had a “woke job.”

All of the most malicious forces in government are now integrated with a Silicon Valley powered by an existential sense of urgency and illusions of its own supremacy. For all the flashy tech and futurist manifestos, this new politics is a throwback. Offering medals to women who have a certain number of children—an actual proposal that two of Musk’s fellow pronatalists sent to the White House —feels a bit midcentury German. Musk’s obsession with IQs and large brains is a sequel many times over, indicative of a growing sense that the people in power believe they are innately superior. To them, the world is divided between protagonists and NPCs—automated background video-game characters, in other words, not so unlike “the unthinking demos” Thiel once lamented controlled “so-called ‘social democracy.’” For a long time, as investors threw money at robotaxis and never-realized Hyperloops, the joke was that the San Francisco Bay Area’s best and brightest were hard at work trying to reinvent the bus. But it turns out if you get enough VCs in a Signal chat together, you’ll eventually reinvent feudalism, too.

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I’m a Farmer Who Voted for Trump. His Tariffs Are Stressing Me Out.

Few have felt the whiplash of President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs with China more than American farmers. The US is the world’s largest exporter of agricultural products, from corn to soybeans, wheat, and cotton. And the largest importer of America’s farm products? China. The two countries have engaged in a back-and-forth series of escalating levies since Trump imposed tariffs on the country in April. Those tariffs were then deemed illegal the following month by a US trade court, and the administration is currently appealing that decision.

One of the many farmers caught in limbo is Bryant Kagay, who raises cattle and grows soybeans, corn, and wheat. Kagay says he voted for Trump last year even though Trump promised that as president, he would place tariffs on the very products Kagay sells to China. But now, Kagay questions whether the president has a long-term trade strategy and is increasingly concerned about what the market will look like come harvest time this fall.

“I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s,” Kagay says. When a farmer from a country with low or no tariffs can sell corn cheaper than Kagay’s on the global market, he adds, that farmer will win out.

As the US and China continue negotiating, Kagay talks with host Al Letson about how tariffs from Trump’s first term affected his farm, why he voted for Trump in 2024 knowing tariffs could jeopardize his business, and why farmers are often hesitant to take government subsidies—yet often accept them anyway.

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This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Al Letson: So tell me about your farm. From what I understand, you weren’t living in this area, you weren’t living in Missouri for a while, and then you and your family came back.

Bryant Kagay: Yeah, well, I’m the fourth generation on our family farm. I guess my great-grandfather, he started a very small operation and then my grandfather has grown it, really, mostly in the 60s and 70s and 80s. But yeah, following college, I had a corporate job, lived in several different states, but in 2018 my wife and I decided to come back and work into the farm, more in a management-type role, management trainee, if you will, type role. And I’ve continued to take more responsibility since coming back.

How many employees do you have on the farm?

Yeah, so it’s myself, my dad, my 87-year-old grandfather is still involved as much as he can be. And then we have two full-time employees and currently one part-time employee. So we’re a fairly small operation as far as manpower goes.

What do you produce?

So our main products, corn, soybeans, wheat, and then we also have a cattle operation. Many will refer to it as a cow-calf, so we have cows, produce calves from them, but then we also have, often referred to as a beef feedlot or a finishing operation that we feed cattle to get them right up to the point of them going to the meat processor for them to become the finished product.

So you’re running a family business that depends on international trade. We’ve been following President Trump’s trade war with China. What would really steep tariffs mean for your farm?

I think that what they mean for our farm is, it’s not that different from what they would mean to everybody. We live in a very global economy, a global market. So many of the products that we purchase, both on the farm and within our households and within any business you run, often come from overseas. Those trade networks and industries have been set up, many of them have been in place for decades. Chinese manufacturing, we’ve been making things in China for years and years, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. They’ve got pretty good systems to get them shipped here. I think steep tariffs will, at least for the foreseeable future, will mostly raise the prices that everyday Americans and farmers spend on the things that they buy. So I think that’s how it affects all Americans.

Now, how does it affect me differently? Well, many of the products I sell that get shipped into overseas markets or international markets, now they are looking to buy that commodity from somewhere else. And what I’m selling is a commodity. I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s. So if mine is now 20% higher or 120% higher, whatever these tariffs are, I’ll buy it somewhere else, because it’s the same stuff.

Are you scared that if these tariffs continue that it will basically put you out of business? If China can buy soybeans from Central America at a much cheaper price than what they would buy them from you, how is that going to affect your farm in the long term, especially if these tariffs stay up?

For our farm, personally, we try to manage things very financially conservative. So do I feel that a trade war would put us out of business? No, probably not, because if a trade war puts us out of business, it’s going to put a whole lot of other people out of business first, and there are business owners that have probably taken on more risk. And at the end of the day though, if there are, let’s just put it in simple terms, a hundred units of soybeans produced globally and China uses 50 of them, whether they get 50 from the United States or 50 from everywhere else, all the soybeans are probably going to go somewhere and get used. It’s that friction that gets added in the system for tariffs that, well, now instead of sending multiple large container ships to China with soybeans, I’ve got to send a hundred smaller container ships to multiple other countries to make that same sale. So you lose that economic efficiency the more hurdles you put in this trade deal.

So what do you think of Trump’s reasons for imposing these tariffs?

Well, it depends what day you get. So someday, one day, it may be, “I’m going to impose these tariffs because I want to bring American manufacturing back.” And you think, “Well, I could get behind parts of that in some industries.” But for that to happen, we’ve got to have consistent tariffs for a long time because I’m not going to come build a factory tomorrow, it’s going to take years. There’s whole supply chains that have to be built up around it, and if I’m an investor or a business owner, I don’t want to build a factory when tomorrow he may say, “Well, tariffs are off. We worked out a deal.” On one side, this long-term play that, “I want to get manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.” Which yeah, I think, I don’t know too many of us that would argue with that, but there’s a lot of hurdles to doing that and that’s a long-term play.

And then the other side is, “Well, I’m just using it as a bargaining chip. I’m going to get him to the table and get better deals.” And he’s maybe done some of that. I don’t know. I’m not a hundred percent confident that he has a really clear vision for exactly how this plays out. I think, I don’t know, it’s been so uncertain whether, are these short-term, we’re going to try to get short-term deals, or is this a long-term strategic, we’re going to rebuild American manufacturing? And I don’t know where it is because it changes every week.

And when we talk about, is it a long-term goal, I’ve done a lot of reporting on manufacturing in the past, and the thing that keeps coming to me is that it may be a long-term goal that is really unrealistic in the sense that I can’t imagine Americans going to work in manufacturing plants where the pay is not going to be the type of pay that… The reason why all the manufacturing is in different parts of the world is because their economies are different and people will go in there and work for a couple dollars an hour, whereas, here in America, people would need government aid to survive off of working in a factory if we were paying the same amount to workers that they do in China. So it doesn’t feel like a realistic goal to me, it feels like manufacturing at that scale is in our past and not really in our future.

Yeah, I completely agree. I just think, yeah, if you want to talk automobile manufacturing or some of those higher level, more advanced type manufacturing. Yeah, and maybe there’s a national defense reason we need more computer chip manufacturing in the country, but if you think we’re going to have a Nike sneaker factory in the country, come on. These other countries have been doing this for decades. They’re good at it. They’ve got systems set up, they’ve got the people to work there. I don’t know any of my neighbors who want to go sit at a sewing machine and make t-shirts all day. That’s not what this country’s going to do. It’s probably not realistic.

Yeah. So all that being said, in 2024 you voted for Trump knowing that this may be what he would do. How did you come to the decision to vote for him?

That is a very good question, and it was something that I struggled with, to be a hundred percent honest, I was not thrilled with either candidate. I’m a little bit embarrassed that on the global stage, these are the best two candidates that we could come up with out of this great country. I was very uncomfortable with the Harris campaign on some social issues, some other things. I was very uncomfortable with the Trump campaign on a lot of, I guess, his personal character issues that I am very uncomfortable with. I don’t think it represents our country very well, what we stand for very well. Ultimately, because you look at what a president can do, I felt like his policies long-term were probably more in line with what I wanted, but this was not something that I was really sold on either way. So I did know that these trade wars were possibly coming. I also felt that his business experience, I guess I felt, much like he says, some of the time that he would use these type of things as a bargaining token, but at the end of the day, I do feel he’s got a decent business acumen and would recognize that, yeah, we’re not going to bring a bunch of manufacturing back to this country. Maybe we should use our power on the global stage to get some better trade deals. I was hopeful that amidst all the rhetoric and all the talk that he would use them maybe more wisely than I feel he has to this point.

Let me run down some numbers for you here to… Because I want to focus up that you said that he’s got a good business acumen. In 1991, his casino, the Taj Mahal, bankrupt. In 1992, Trump Plaza Hotel, bankrupt. Castle Hotel Casino, ’92, bankrupt. Trump Hotels, Casino and Resorts in 2004, bankrupt. Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009, bankrupt. I could go on, there’s more. I would say that the way we have talked about Trump, both in the media… Because I believe that the reality show that he was on where he’s got that great saying, “You’re fired.” It’s myth building. It makes this idea that he is a really great business man, but the truth of the matter is that when you look into his business deals, I mean he had a college that the government had to sanction and shut down because it was ultimately deemed, and I may be putting it in colloquial terms, but it was ultimately deemed a scam. So I mean, how do you feel about that when you think about it, looking at it from this vantage point?

Yeah, maybe I should have rephrased my previous statement as he has given us this idea that he has a lot of business acumen. I’ve always questioned whether he really does or not, because I see those things that you’ve mentioned. Apparently he’s been pretty good at running failed businesses and enriching himself, which that is what pointed to a lot of the character issue that I had voting for him to begin with. I mean, that’s one of the character issues. I still think it’s no secret. I live in a very red area and the people I talk to, I think there’s still some that they still are very confident that he has this really good plan that this is all going to work out for the better. And I guess I don’t necessarily… I don’t have that much confidence. I think he’s doing a lot of running his mouth without much of a plan, and maybe it’ll end up okay in the end if he throws his power around enough. But I’m a little more skeptical.

So Bryant, your farm has been in your family for a very long time. How have you seen farming change over the years?

There have been a lot of changes in agriculture over the long term. When I think about my great-grandfather, he would’ve started with some horse-drawn equipment, likely moved into tractors pretty quickly thereafter, but nothing on the scale of what we use today. There’s a lot of technology that we use to try to make sure every product we use gets put in the right place at the right time, and we are just better at conserving land and water resources as well.

I’ve done a lot of reporting with farmers in the past, and the one thing that I think our listeners may not understand or know, is really like the economics of farming. So I’m just curious if you can break down for my listeners, what’s your income like and how do you get that income? Do you get a big check from delivering cows to market? How does all that work?

I think from the outside people see, we deliver a lot of high value products, whether it’s right now cattle are at record highs. The checks we receive from selling cattle are very high. The checks we receive from selling grain can be very big. To the average American, that’s a lot of money. The issue is that we have so many expenses tied to producing that crop that really very little of it is profit. As far as the money, when I had a corporate job, I had a paycheck every two weeks. I had so much money that went into my bank account and that was very reliable and consistent. With this, it’s a lot more inconsistent and you find the business can pay for a lot of our living expenses. So my out-of-pocket expenses are less, but I don’t take just regular paychecks. Mostly what we do is we take our profits and invest those back into the business through land and equipment that it’s like this business has it’s built in 401(K) that you’re investing in assets all the time and eventually you hope to get a pretty big asset base, but you don’t do it through collecting a lot of cash in your bank account. It goes elsewhere.

When it comes to competition, it seems to me that you are dealing with different factors than your dad had, than your grandfather, than your grandfather had. And I’m thinking of specifically with the rise of big agriculture and these big company farms that I would imagine make it hard to compete because of the resources that they have.

Yeah, I think what’s often referred to as corporate farms probably get a lot of bad press. I think there can be some confusion in just because you’re a really large farming operation doesn’t mean it’s not still family owned and operated, but it may not still have that same family feel that I feel our operation does. As you get bigger, you do have to put some corporate structure, mid-level managers, a lot more process and procedure in place. We have seen over the past 10 years, especially some of the very biggest producers have continued to grow, and I think the economics have worked out for them to do that. And they’ve really built systems and as equipment gets bigger, they’re just able to cover a lot more acres. I think for our operation, we decided that our way to improve and build for the future was not necessarily to try to achieve scale at all costs, but to try to focus more on a more diverse operation and also just to produce, let’s say, higher quality over quantity, let’s put it that way.

Yeah. So take me back to 2018 when President Trump imposed tariffs on China. This is right around the time when you are starting to come back to the farm. How’d that affect you and your family?

Yeah, so that was an interesting year. We had a pretty severe drought that first summer I came back and then trade war with China on top of that. So it was a pretty rough year that first year, but I guess I was still getting my feet under me. So maybe I didn’t fully grasp, I just thought that was normal, but that first trade war, it did severely affect the price of soybeans, primarily because China is such a huge buyer of US soybeans. We produce a lot of soybeans, and when your largest customer, the harder you make that to do trade with them, that directly affects our bottom line. And then on top of that, they come through with these direct payments from the government that I think are a touchy subject amongst farmers. I’m not going to tell you we turned ours away. You feel like it’s a competitive market. You can’t reject it on principle, but at the same time, I don’t think any of us feel like that’s how we want markets to operate. We try to be self-sufficient and run our business in a way that can be profitable and let me do that. I don’t need the government to come in and write me a check to make sure I stay in business.

Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you is why do you think it’s a touchy subject?

Well, I think if you ask many people, in the parts of the country I live, about welfare programs, SNAP, they might look at those with a negative light. This idea that, “Hey, I work really hard to support myself. I don’t need the federal government coming in and doing that for me.” And then all of a sudden I’m a farmer and I’m taking this check from the government because government-induced tariffs reduce the value of my product. At the same time, I don’t know any farmer who turned theirs away who said, “Well, I don’t believe in it, so I’m not going to accept it.” We all took it, but I ultimately think it’s really those programs aren’t administered very well on who actually needs them the worst. And also if you give all a certain number of farmers in the same area, a whole bunch of money, it’s no different than the COVID payments that drove a lot of inflation. You can’t just hand out a bunch of money and not have other effects in the economy. And I think we saw that as well through that.

So there’s a lot of debate about whether those payments actually helped or hurt, and I’ll let economists argue over that. The thing that stands out for me when I think about those payments is that when Trump did it, the left complained. And when Biden did it, the right complained. To me, what it tells me is that America has turned politics into sports. Maybe neither party is functioning or serving Americans particularly well, but because of team loyalty, people just go with it and sometimes they vote not for their interests, but for the team that they represent, their home team, the thing that they feel strongly about.

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons that our political system has drifted this way. I live in a congressional, like a house district that there’s virtually zero chance that it would ever flip to blue. So I think our incumbent, as long as he continues to say and do right-leaning things, he’s never going to be challenged. And he’s never going to be held to account for how much he actually accomplishes because, “Hey, he’s on my team, so I’m not going to go against something that my team wants.” But it’s something that American politics really has to figure out. I think we continue to go through these cycles where really nothing really happens. And I just think with this many smart people, we have to be able to come together and come up with solutions that maybe the edges of both sides are not thrilled with, but ultimately move our country forward.

And I don’t know what it’s going to take to get there, but I too am very frustrated with this polarized, “I pick my team. The other team can do nothing right and my team can do nothing wrong.” Because we just know that’s just not how it works, and it’s just not true. I’m not confident enough in my own abilities, knowledge, biases, to think that I have all the solutions to make all this better. I know we need both sides to be able to come together, but our political system, our primaries, there’s so many reasons why that doesn’t happen. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to break, but you just see these presidential elections that are so evenly split, so much urban rules, so much class-based voting, and it’s not good for our country, and we do need some leaders who can really bridge that and try to bring people together for a greater good.

You just gave a great campaign speech. I’m just saying. You are looking for an answer and I think you might be it. I’m just saying. Bryant Kagay, thank you so much for talking to me, and thank you for being open, man. You just have a good conversation. I am going to be thinking about this conversation for days to come. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. I enjoy it. I try to be open and honest and I appreciate those kind words. I try to be a reasonable voice amidst all the polarization, so thank you.

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Trump’s “Big Beautiful” Energy Plan Will Burn Your Wallet

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

Energy policy analysts are in broad agreement about one consequence of major legislation that Republicans are currently pushing through Congress: It will raise energy prices for the average American household by hundreds of dollars, once all is said and done.

That’s because the legislation, which President Donald Trump has dubbed the One Big, Beautiful Bill, will repeal the vast majority of clean energy provisions contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which a Democrat-controlled Congress passed in 2022. That earlier law provided a wide array of financial incentives for the deployment of electricity sources like solar, wind, battery storage, and nuclear power, as well as support for consumers looking to buy zero- and low-emissions products like electric vehicles. Choking off support for those measures not only hobbles U.S. efforts to fight climate change—the IRA, if left intact, could single-handedly reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 40 percent—but it also means there are fewer new sources of energy for a country that has started to need more and more of it. And reduced supply coupled with increased demand means higher prices.

That’s the virtually unanimous conclusion of the academics and policy experts who have been trying to understand the likely effects of the rollback for the past few months, though each group of experts used different assumptions about the full extent of IRA repeal, given that the legislation is still being revised by the Senate. Part of the reason for this unanimity is that once constructed, many newer energy sources like wind and solar don’t have substantial operating costs compared to traditional power plants that must be continuously supplied with fuel.

“Clean electricity has zero generation cost,” said Robbie Orvis, a senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “One of the dynamics is that less clean electricity gets built, and that makes power generation more expensive because we’re relying more frequently on fossil fuels with higher generation costs.”

“You’re really increasing the reliance on gas and therefore gas demand and gas prices.”

Orvis’ group calculated that those higher power generation costs from using coal or natural gas, along with other price increases stemming from IRA repeal, would result in household energy costs rising by more than $33 billion annually by 2035, compared to a scenario in which the IRA was left intact. That works out to roughly $250 more per year per household. Other analysts came to similar conclusions: The Rhodium Group, an independent policy analysis firm, estimates that average household costs could be as much as $290 higher per year by the same date. Princeton University’s ZERO Lab projects that energy costs could grow even higher: Their estimates show that, in a decade, annual household prices will be $270 to $415 higher under the GOP plan.

Energy Innovation’s analysis calculated the effects of repealing the IRA on energy bills and transportation costs across the nation. They found that if the tax credits for clean energy are taken away, utilities will increasingly rely on natural gas and coal, which have higher generation costs. These costs would then be passed on to customers. Additionally, as electric utilities’ demand for natural gas increases, the cost of fossil fuel in the market will also rise, further raising household energy bills.

“Gas suppliers can’t respond immediately to large changes in the demand for gas,” said Orvis. “The change in gas demand is pretty large without the tax credits. So you’re really increasing the reliance on gas and therefore gas demand and gas prices.”

On the transportation front, the legislation passed by the House of Representatives eliminates IRA tax credits for electric vehicles and undoes the nation’s latest tailpipe standards, which limit the amount of pollution that new vehicles are allowed to emit. The result is a greater reliance on gasoline than would happen under the status quo—and more demand for gasoline means higher prices at the pump, per Orvis’ modeling.

These price spikes—and the electricity spikes in particular—won’t be felt uniformly across the nation. One key factor is how utilities in a state are regulated. Many states have just one utility that both generates power and provides it to electricity customers. But in so-called deregulated markets such as Texas and Pennsylvania, electricity providers compete on an open market to sell their power.

The rules around how utilities calculate and pass on the costs of generating electricity vary significantly between these two models. In regulated markets with just one provider, the cost of generating electricity and getting it to homes is averaged out and passed on to customers. But, the competitive nature of deregulated markets means that customers can see wild fluctuations in price. During peak winter and summer, when demand for power is high, prices can be double or triple normal rates. As a result, customers in deregulated markets see more variation in their bills—because those bills closely track changes in the marginal cost of electricity. If those costs rise in dramatic and systematic ways because IRA repeal leads to fewer sources of energy, customers in deregulated markets will feel the full force of it. Customers in regulated markets like much of the Southeast, on the other hand, will be somewhat cushioned from the increase, because their costs reflect the average of all generation and transmission costs incurred by their utility.

“That helps minimize the impact of repealing IRA tax credits—though it also runs the opposite way and helps reduce savings when market prices go down,” said Jesse Jenkins, an associate professor at Princeton University who led the modeling conducted by the ZERO Lab, in an email.

These rising costs will come on top of U.S. energy bills that are already ticking upward. Electricity prices have been steadily rising since 2020, and the federal Energy Information Administration recently forecasted that that trend is likely to continue through 2026. Prices have increased for a variety of reasons, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupting global oil and gas supply chains, extreme heat and other weather shocks, costly maintenance needed to protect the grid from wildfires, and the buildout of additional capacity to meet growing demand. U.S. electricity demand is beginning to rise for the first time in decades, thanks to the construction of new manufacturing facilities and data centers, which support operations like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, as well as the growing adoption of electric vehicles.

Orvis said that the IRA has been helping meet that demand and maintain the country’s competitive advantage with China, one of the Trump administration’s stated goals. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill would undermine that progress by reducing the amount of energy available for new manufacturing and AI development—and making the electricity that’s left more expensive for everyone.

“The ironic thing is that what’s in the bill, the net results of it will be completely contradictory to what the [Trump] administration’s stated policy priorities are and will cede a lot of the AI development and the manufacturing to China specifically,” said Orvis. “That’s the important macro context for everything that’s happening now—and some of the un-modelable implications in the long run.”

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Rep. Sarah McBride on GOP Attacks: “They’re Employing the Strategies of Reality TV.”

My red carpet interview with Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) at the Saturday premiere of a new documentary on her history-making election as the first openly transgender member of Congress was interrupted by an adoring passerby.

“Sarah, I love you!” the man shouted. “I’m a donor and I don’t even live in the district!” (“Thank you for all you do!” the congresswoman replied.)

The fact that the 34-year-old first-term Delaware congresswoman has a national fan base, and is the subject of a documentary, State of Firsts, that premiered the Tribeca Film Festival less than six months after her inauguration, is only surprising if you are unfamiliar with McBride’s role as a trailblazer in American politics.

Last November, she became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, outperforming Vice President Kamala Harris among voters in the nation’s second-smallest (and first) state. Before that, she was the nation’s first openly trans state senator when she served in the Delaware General Assembly. Her congressional election brought not only a national spotlight, but also anti-trans attacks from GOP lawmakers once she took office. There were also critiques from some trans people who wanted McBride to fight harder on their behalf as Republicans mount a full-scale assault on trans rights.

State of Firsts portrays McBride grappling with both the highs and the lows of what it meant to step into her role. It resists an easy narrative about life as a “first” being an upward trajectory of progress and celebration. For McBride, it has also been heavy with impossible expectations, conflicting allegiances, and flattening portrayals. As McBride sums up early on in the film: “It is an unbelievable challenge to figure out how I am seen as a full human being rather than just as a walking trans flag.”

Part of that challenge came from her GOP colleagues. In one scene, McBride watches Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attack her with insults on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “She’s just going to act like that every day,” McBride says to a campaign staffer as they watch the clip while sitting on a couch, “and my job will be to not respond.”

That self-imposed challenge was put to the test just weeks after her election, when Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) introduced a resolution seeking to bar McBride from using the women’s restroom. That move led to a swarm of media coverage. Democrats and LGBTQ advocates rushed to McBride’s defense. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) eventually announced that he would back a bathroom ban in the Capitol and impliedthat McBride would have to use the private bathroom in her office or one of the building’s unisex bathrooms. Greene even reportedly threatened to fight a transgender woman if she tried to use a women’s bathroom in the House part of the Capitol.

McBride refused to take the bait. She issued a statement that did not mention Mace by name but called the chaos sowed by the bathroom ban an effort to distract from the real issues plaguing the majority of Americans. “We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.” After Johnson announced he would move to enforce the bathroom ban (on Transgender Day of Remembrance, no less), McBride put out another, lengthier statement saying she would follow the rules “even if I disagree with them.” But for some trans advocates who wanted McBride to fight back, her response came as a “betrayal.”

The documentary features McBride’s most extensive and personal commentary on the debacle to date.

“The disobedience isn’t taking a toilet seat; the disobedience is taking this congressional seat,” McBride says in a scene while driving her car after an orientation in DC for freshman lawmakers. “It’s not just that they don’t want me in bathrooms; they don’t want me in Congress.”

“A win for them is me fighting back and then turning me into a caricature,” she continues. “There would be a bounty on my head if I said I refused to comply. I refuse to be martyred. I want to be a member of Congress.” And in what is perhaps her most blunt assessment of the risks she faces, McBride says: “It’s hard to play the long game when your short-term life is at risk.”

McBride manages to display an unwavering faith that she will be able to shift the culture in Congress, even if her strategy for doing so is not the one some advocates wanted. “The power of proximity, the power of our presence—it doesn’t change everything, but it has an impact,” McBride says in the car scene. “There are people who think representation doesn’t matter at all and there are people who think it will solve everything, and it’s somewhere in the middle.”

The film also shows the ways McBride’s family, Democratic allies, andan ongoing supply of Wawa coffee supported her during the campaign and her early days in office. In a sit-down with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the pioneering lawmakers discuss the harder parts of making history. “What people don’t see and what they don’t really experience is that being the first means being the only,” Ocasio-Cortez tells McBride. “What they go after is your essential dignity as a human being. And, to be frank, that’s what really pisses me off about this,” she adds, referring to the bathroom ban.

“I want to respect your autonomy and I want to respect your story and how you want to handle this for yourself, but I also want to clock these motherfuckers,” Ocasio-Cortez adds.

McBride’s strategy, though, seems to have paid off: Mace and Greene have since directed their attention elsewhere, and McBride has managed to work with colleagues across the aisle to introduce and co-sponsor several pieces of bipartisan legislation.

“You have to remove the incentives for these people, because at the end of the day the incentive is attention,” McBride said at a panel discussion after the New York City premiere. “They’re employing the strategies of reality TV.”

McBride, on the other hand, describes herself as “fairly disciplined” in how she conducts herself in office. But she makes room for humor: After the credits roll, there’s a short video of McBride giving a tour of her office in Congress—including the bathroom.

“It’s amazing,” she says, when she steps inside, “that I didn’t just burst into flames.”

State of Firsts will next show at the DC/DOX film festival in Washington, DC on June 15.

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Trump’s EPA Plans to Claim US Power Sector Emissions Are Insignificant. It’s absurd.

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

Donald Trump’s administration is set to claim planet-heating pollution spewing from US power plants is so globally insignificant it should be spared any sort of climate regulation.

But, in fact, the volume of these emissions is stark—if the US power sector were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reportedly drafted a plan to delete all restrictions on greenhouse gases coming from coal and gas-fired power plants in the US because they “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” and are a tiny and shrinking share of the overall global emissions that are driving the climate crisis.

However, a new analysis shows that the emissions from American fossil-fuel plants are prominent on a global scale, having contributed 5 percent of all planet-heating pollution since 1990. If it were a country, the US power sector would be the sixth largest emitter in the world, eclipsing the annual emissions from all sources in Japan, Brazil, the UK, and Canada, among other nations.

“That seems rather significant to me,” said Jason Schwartz, co-author of the report from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “If this administration wants to argue only China has significant emissions they can try to do that, but a court will review that, and under any reasonable interpretation will find that US power plant emissions are significant too.”

Fossil fuel-derived electricity is responsible for the second largest source of emissions in the US, behind transportation. No country in history has caused more carbon pollution than the US, and while its power sector’s emissions have declined somewhat in recent years, largely through a market-based decline in heavily polluting coal, it remains a major driver of the climate crisis.

The cocktail of toxins emitted by power plants have a range of impacts, the NYU analysis points out. A single year of emissions in 2022 will cause 5,300 deaths in the US from air pollution over many decades, along with climate impacts that will result in global damages of $370 billion, including $225 billion in global health damages and $75 billion in lost labor productivity.

“It’s a completely illogical argument: There’s not a lot of emissions so don’t worry, but yet we have to block every attempt to control them.”

“We were surprised when we ran the numbers just how quickly these deaths start tallying up,” said Schwartz. “All of these harms stack up on top of each other. Climate change will be the most important public health issue this century and we can’t just ignore the US power sector’s contribution to that public health crisis.”

The Trump administration, though, is looking to dismantle a plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The move comes as part of a wider deregulatory blitz upon a wide range of rules aimed at protecting clean air and water; on Thursday, the EPA also confirmed a plan to delay the implementation of Clean Air Act protections against methane and other harmful pollutants from fossil fuel production.

Removing these protections will prove not only dangerous, but also costly, said Christopher Frey, who was a science advisor to Joe Biden and led a clean air EPA committee under Barack Obama.

“A ‘do nothing’ policy to rollback greenhouse gas emission standards is not really a policy to do nothing,” said Frey, now an associate dean at North Carolina State University’s college of engineering. “It is a policy to force us to have to do more later to compensate for not taking preventive action sooner. It is a policy to knowingly cause more damage for folks in the not so distant future to contend with.”

The power plant plan has endured a tortuous history, having been first put forward by the Obama administration, only to be halted by the first Trump administration and also the Supreme Court. The Biden administration last year rolled out a more limited version of the plan aimed at satisfying the Supreme Court’s ruling.

This version is now targeted for repeal by the Trump administration, expected in the coming weeks ahead of a public comment period and further expected legal challenges. Despite pointing to declining power plant emissions in its justification, the Trump administration has simultaneously attempted to increase these emissions by demanding a revival of the coal industry, boosting oil and gas drilling and axing incentives for cleaner energy.

“President Trump promised to kill the clean power plan in his first term, and we continue to build on that progress now,” said Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA. “In reconsidering the Biden-Harris rule that ran afoul of Supreme Court case law, we are seeking to ensure that the agency follows the rule of law while providing all Americans with access to reliable and affordable energy.”

Trump has long claimed that the US should not engage in international climate talks because its emissions footprint is negligible, noted Judith Enck, who served as an EPA regional administrator under Obama. Meanwhile, his administration has cracked down on states’ ability to regulate emissions, she said.

“Apparently there is no level of governance where we can have these regulations,” Enck said. “It’s a completely illogical argument: There’s not a lot of emissions so don’t worry, but yet we have to block every attempt to control them at the state, federal [and] international levels?”

Experts have questioned whether pollution needs to be deemed “significant” in order to be subjected to the Clean Air Act, which has been used to regulate even proportionally small levels of environmental toxins.

“There is absolutely no legal basis for them to propose a pollutant like CO2 has to meet some sort of significance, they are making this up, this is make-believe law,” said Joseph Goffman, who led theEPA’s office of air and radiation during Biden’s term. “This is a sort of cheat code to try to neutralize any tool they fear might be used to reduce greenhouse gases.”

The climate crisis is a global problem of the shared commons that experts say requires all countries, particularly the largest emitters, to remedy. Goffman said the Trump administration is attempting to reject this basic tenet. “They are trying to write one of the biggest historical emitters in the world a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said.

Correction, June 10: This post has been updated to credit its original publisher.

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Trump Makes It Clear: His Military Response in Los Angeles Is Just the Start

President Donald Trump’s war on dissent is ramping up.

As protests continue to unfold in Los Angeles over workplace raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the president on Tuesday threatened any protesters planning to attend Saturday’s military parade in Washington, DC with “very big force.” (Saturday is also Trump’s 79th birthday.)

“We’re celebrating big on Saturday, and if there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. He claimed to be unaware of any planned demonstrations, but characterized would-be protesters as “people that hate our country.” (Nationwide “No Kings” protests are slated to unfold on Saturday, to protest Trump’s constitutional overreach and corruption.)

Trump also said the National Guard will remain in California “until there’s no danger”—or, in other words, indefinitely, even though local leaders and civil rights groups have overwhelmingly condemned the military presence as an abuse of power. Trump proceeded to baselessly describe the protesters as “paid,” claiming that if he had not sent in federal reinforcements, “that the city right now would be on fire.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) and Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a federal lawsuit on Monday contesting the deployment of the troops as “unlawful [and] unprecedented.”

Also on Tuesday, Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, special assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, told a House subcommittee that the deployment of troops to LA will cost at least $134 million—mostly for travel, housing, and food—and last for at least 60 days. “We stated very publicly that it’s 60 days because we want to ensure that those rioters, looters, and thugs on the other side assaulting our police officers know that we’re not going anywhere,” Hegseth told the subcommittee.

Newsom responded with a social media post saying that the $134 million “should be going to LA’s fire recovery” and is “shameful,” while Bass called it “despicable” and “an absolutely shameful use of taxpayer dollars that could be used to actually HELP people.” On top of that cost, an Army spokesperson previously said the Saturday military parade could cost an estimated $25 to $45 million.

Trump and his Republican allies have a long record of seeking to criminalize protest. As I reported during last year’s presidential race, for example, Trump promised to deport protesters against the war in Gaza if he returned to office. Several Republican lawmakers filed bills seeking to make it happen. So far, the administration has not been successful in deporting student protesters, despite its best efforts. But if the last few days are any indication, they are hoping for a different outcome in LA; indeed, they have already been successful, given that four people arrested by ICE on Friday have been deported, according to officials in Mexico.

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Will Trump Force America to Break Up?

I live in Vermont, 268 miles from Canada’s capital of Ottawa and 487 miles from Washington, DC, so an interesting thought experiment is: Why do I identify with the United States? I’m legally an American, of course, and Canada doesn’t need me—but those are practicalities. What I’m asking is, at least at first, a philosophical question: What does it mean in 2025 to be an American?

And it’s a question that acquired new urgency in the last week when—obscured somewhat by the Trump–Musk imbroglio—something quite fascinating happened. The president threatened to cut off much of the federal aid to California, in response to what a White House spokesman called “lunatic” state policies, most recently the fact that a transgender girl was allowed to compete in a high school track meet. In response, Gavin Newsom, governor of the most populous state in the union (and fourth-largest economy on the planet), threatened to withhold the state’s tax payments to DC. “We pay over $80 BILLION more in taxes than we get back,” he tweeted at the president. “Maybe it’s time to cut that off, @realdonaldtrump.” As one California congressman said in a letter to the president, “this targeted political vengeance is a threat to our democracy and an offense to California and every American.” Several of the contenders in last week’s New York mayoral debate made the same point. And the stakes were raised over the weekend, as an increasingly imperial president federalized the California National Guard and threatened to mobilize the Marines to quell what was essentially peaceful protest against his signature policy of mass deportation.

Until a few months ago, the question of America’s cohesion—whether it would stick together—was rarely raised. Yes, there are always simmering secession movements (there’s a Texit, and an NHExit, and the Alaskan Independence Party, which helped Sarah Palin win the mayoralty of Wasilla back in the day), but they’re always deeply fringe (and usually deeply cringe). That’s because most people could answer my initial question fairly easily, though with different emphasis. Here’s what I would say: I am an American because, beyond my citizenship, I identify with the outlines of the American idea: America was born as a radical experiment in democracy, denying the right of kings and empires to rule at a distance or without the consent of the governed, a place with full religious liberty but where no single creed ruled save the secular one of progress undergirded by science and reason.

America was not always true to those ideals—indeed, it often fell disastrously short. But that democratic process allowed for improvement and that democratic ideal guided that improvement: toward more democracy, defined as more involvement by more types of people. America, haltingly, was on a path toward becoming the first big truly multiethnic democracy the world had ever seen. As a player in that world, America had done great damage, but when the chips were furthest down—above all in the world wars of the last century—it had sided with democracy against authoritarianism. And it had—more than most places—opened its arms to those seeking what we had to offer and fleeing the tyranny we had defined ourselves against. If we had a job as citizens, it was to keep America on those tracks, indeed to accelerate its progress down those tracks.

America was born as a radical experiment in democracy, denying the right of kings and empires to rule without the consent of the governed.

I am loath to give those ideals up, and I am fighting for them as hard as I know how (eager for No Kings day on Saturday!)—but in the past few months the new Trump administration has done its best to shred those notions. (Put them through a wood chipper, to use Elon Musk’s phrase.) We now have a king, or a president attempting to be one—not just posting pictures of himself in a crown, but ruling by fiat as best he can. He and his colleagues are doing their best to restrict the number of people who can participate in that democracy, and to restrict the control that democracy can exercise; they have done their best to remove even the evidence that our society once worked to expand participation and opportunity (the Navy has decided against naming boats for Harriet Tubman and Harvey Milk on the grounds they weren’t fierce-enough warriors); they have downgraded science and reason, insisting that the widely understood principles of climate change and vaccine science are hoaxes. Around the world they are abandoning defining commitments; the US is considering stepping back from its formal leadership of NATO, a post first held by Eisenhower in the aftermath of D-Day. We now routinely side with the big and autocratic against the small and democratic.

So—assuming as a thought experiment that we are unable to derail this new regime, and that it manages to impose its values on our government for the foreseeable future—what is it going to mean to be an American?

It’s pretty simple to figure out what it means to Trump: It’s to be a winner. We’re meant to have more. More money, more territory. A 51st state to the north, a giant frozen island protectorate to the east, a global shipping canal to the south. His urges are always the urges of toddlers; if he has a larger vision, it’s that this will yield more money for the rest of us too, but toddlers are not great at sharing. And I’d say Elon Musk and many of the Project 2025 zealots are responding to the urges of adolescent males—for “liberty” narrowly conceived, the right to do what one wants to do, unrestricted by any larger interest, the triumph of Ayn Rand in place of Ben Franklin. (Musk is clearly not a patriot—he’s got close friends in the corridors of Russian and Chinese power, and if his allegiance is to any territory, it’s probably Mars.) And of course there are Christian nationalists, responding to the high-pitched sounds of a weird hymn the rest of us (including old-school Christians) can’t really hear.

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What the History of American Expansion Can Tell Us About Trump’s Threats

All of these are minority ideas. Powerful minorities, yes. Libertarian ideology combined with corporate money and power, especially in our age of grotesque inequity, can be overwhelming. But they aren’t ideas capable of explaining a diverse nation to itself—unlike the story I outlined above, which has more or less sustained us since the Revolution, and especially since the Depression. Trump’s and Musk’s are highly individualized stories, about personal wealth and personal salvation.

The closest I can come to making out an actual argument for what America means to MAGA comes from erstwhile (and quite good) author JD Vance, who laid it out most explicitly in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. In it, he paid passing lip service to the idea that there were “brilliant ideas” like “the rule of law and religious liberty” that got written into our Constitution, but what he really wanted to stress was:

America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” When I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot…. in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home. And like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. They’re very hardworking people, and they’re very good people. They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat. And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them. But they love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness.

Aside from the slightly comical roll call of swing states (apparently greatness mostly resides in states whose electors you most need), this is a kind of classic blood and soil appeal. Indeed, Vance kept returning to that graveyard:

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country.

As it happens, my people have been here longer still, back to when we lived in a colony. They too came from those Appalachian hills, and they too fought in war after war—the frontier Pennsylvania home of John McKibben hosted the first Presbyterian worship service west of the Alleghenies and then became a stockade fort in the Revolution; my ancestors were fully implicated in the glories, and the Indian-fighting atrocities, of frontier America.

We now have a king, or a president attempting to be one.

But over the centuries my people moved around. America is a vast country, continental in width and almost all of it temperate, a place that made for easy mobility. My grandfather was born in China to missionaries, and he settled out West where he was the only doctor in a small shipbuilding town. His kids ended up scattered far and wide, and his grandkids even more so; I’ve made my life at the northern end of the Appalachians, in the mountains on either side of Lake Champlain. We’ve remained committed Americans, but not because we’re tied to some ancestral piece of soil; instead because we were tied to the story of our national experiment. Grandpa McKibben won a Silver Star in World War I for dragging the wounded off battlefields under intense bombardment; he’s no longer around to ask, but I don’t think it was Volkisch attachment to a piece of land that animated him. (And, since he also volunteered for World War II, I don’t need to ask what he would have thought of Vance’s friends throwing Nazi salutes.)

Vance tried a variation of his argument again a little later, when he tried to explain that he was a big believer in the Catholic concept of ordo amoris.

“[Y]ou love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” he explained, calling it an “old-fashioned Christian concept.” One gets why he’d like to ground his lack of ideals in an ideal—and how freeing it would be for a ruler to operate outside a philosophical framework that could constrain or shame them. That’s what clannishness amounts to; if it’s good for your people then it’s good.

But the first and most obvious problem is moral. A few days after Vance’s attempt at exegesis, Pope Francis wrote a letter to the US bishops explaining that Vance had gotten his theology backward. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” he explained. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Never fun to be corrected by the pope, but the other problem with Vance’s reasoning is simply practical. Namely, given the size and diversity of this country, is an appeal to place really sufficient to hold it together?

That is to say, as Vance is attached to the mountains of Ohio and Kentucky, so I am entirely at home in the Adirondacks and Vermont. I understand their geography, their history, their political currents, and the people who inhabit them. I feel deep connection to their flora and fauna and the way their seasons progress. I feel a certain kind of affection for the West Virginia where my mother grew up, but it’s not the same tight connection; I feel no great attachment to the black soil of the Mississippi Delta, though I honor the brave civil rights movement it helped spawn.

My link to these places is through that shared story, with which I began, but if we’re going to throw that story overboard, then Arkansas or Indiana become as Peru or the Cotswolds are to me; perfectly fine places that I’m perfectly happy to respect and admire, but not of particular deep connection. And I’m sure that Hoosiers and Arkansans feel much the same about Vermont or New York (their remove is sometimes exploited by some politicians of the heartland who disdain New Yorkers as criminals, and Californians, as we have seen, as “lunatics”).

Our vastness and complexity have always been at tension with unity. Even when America was much smaller, people’s affection for their particular place was often greater than their love for the whole, which is why the Articles of Confederation didn’t work and had to be quickly replaced by the Constitution. But if it was difficult when the country comprised the eastern seaboard, it’s much harder now. Vance and Trump can’t deport enough people to make our diversity go away; either it’s going to be something we celebrate as part of the story that makes us a whole, or it’s going to be a strain.

I’d much prefer the former. I love our vast country precisely for its geographical and cultural diversity. But if that’s not going to be our story, I’m also content to live a New England life. We’d make a perfectly sensible country, 16 million people with enough colleges and commerce and resources to get by just fine: We have the wind off the Atlantic to provide our energy, and we’ve always been skilled traders. Boston would make a fine capital, and Fenway Park is a spiritual ground zero. We’ve got Emerson and Longfellow, Thoreau and Alcott; W.E.B. Du Bois and Ethan Allen, Bernie Sanders and Big Papi, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. We could cobble together our own story; it obviously wouldn’t be a perfect story, since this is where the oppression of indigenous North Americans had its start, and since New Englanders played their role in the slave trade—but it can boast quite rightly of everyone from William Lloyd Garrison to Susan B. Anthony to William Sloane Coffin. It has its own foodstuffs (the lobster roll, the maple sap boiling in the evaporator) and its own musicians: from James Taylor to the Dropkick Murphys. And Phish!

Our vastness and complexity have always been at tension with unity.

You could do the same exercise for, say, California, where history has been abusive to both land and people and where a breed of tech overlord currently holds too much sway, but also where they’ve built a kind of dynamism that turned the Golden State (with the help of that local industry Hollywood) into an idyll for the rest of the world. The best public college system in the history of the planet, an ever-more-successful merging of cultures from both sides of the border and both sides of the Pacific, the great parks of Big Sur and Yosemite. (And yet, with 40 million people, rewarded with the same two senators as Vermont or North Dakota.) And for that matter you could build a story for Texas, or for Florida, or the Upper Midwest, or the Plains states, or the Deep South.

It would be impoverishing to let our national links wither—I love the idea that the great national parks and wildernesses of the West are supported in some part by the ecological impulses of the crowded East, and that the civil liberties of new arrivals to the Southwest draw in some measure from the principles of early Pennsylvanians; those immigrants enrich in turn even the lives of those of us at some remove. Reflexively liberal New England is made stronger by grappling with conservative ideas from the Lone Star State, and vice versa. And Americans still speak common languages—baseball, basketball, barbecue, Beyoncé—that make life better. But those may not be enough to sustain this national project in the face of the ideological nihilism unleashed by Trump and Musk and Vance. They are taking our national tale, which is about democracy, and turning it into a tale about power, and there’s a lot of us who don’t want to live in that story.

I wrote a book about a Vermont secession once. It was a mostly comic novel, but I was impressed with the number of neighbors who resonated with the idea. That was in the first Trump years, and I said when I was interviewed about it: “I don’t think we should secede. But ask me again if there’s a second Trump administration.” And now there is a second Trump reign, far more militant than the first, whose main task seems to be disposing of the story that knit this vast country tenuously together. Trump’s been increasingly clear that he wants to kill off FEMA, the system that lets (temporarily) intact parts of the nation bail out those parts in distress: “I say you don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government,” he declared recently. There are still some practical things that link us—above all Social Security, which people have spent lifetimes paying into and can’t afford to walk away from. But it’s now unclear how long MAGA will let Social Security survive—and in a congenial breakup there’s no reason it shouldn’t be part of the settlement.

I still think our national story is worth fighting for. And I can imagine ways we come together to write new chapters. For instance, in the rapid heating of the planet we face an external threat as great as any war, and a national project to move to clean energy could be as exhilarating as the moonshot of the 1960s. It takes advantage of our scientific prowess, and it works into both liberal and conservative ideas of the good life: If your red-state home is your well-defended castle, why wouldn’t you want a bunch of solar panels on the roof? But fossil fuel money has corrupted this administration, and it feels far more likely that a clean energy Apollo project is going to be China’s story, not ours.

Maybe we’ll figure out something else to bring us back together. The American idea is worth fighting for. But not indefinitely. It’s possible we may honor it best by remembering that its early chapters were written by relatively small numbers of people in a relatively small place, and that just maybe we’ve outgrown each other.

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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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