The Funder

Three years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority enabled states to severely restrict abortion or ban it outright. Since then, 17 states have enacted such limits; infant and maternal mortality have risen in many of them. But the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade extends far beyond medical catastrophes. It also appears in the quieter struggles—a myriad of small, compounding barriers that stand between individuals and their access to health care. Here are some of the stories of people who have stepped up to do what they can to provide care, and some of the women who found themselves trapped in a system increasingly difficult to navigate.

So much of the barrier to care is an information gap. We have funds, and there are three all-trimester abortion clinics in our region. If more people knew that, I think it would make navigating care easier.

Once they have an abortion scheduled, we can provide financial help for the procedure. If their gap in funding is less than $500, we can generally say, “We’ve got you!” If it’s a much larger gap, we may have to start a “solidarity thread,” which is when we start fundraising with other abortion funds to try to close that gap. Solidarity threads tend to be for cases that are 20 weeks and up because they’re more expensive.

From 20 to 28 weeks, you’re looking at gaps of $5,000 to $6,000. After 28 weeks, you’re looking at $10,000 and up. We have six or seven foundations that give us in the $10,000 to $80,000 range, but most of the rest comes from individuals. In 2023, their contributions allowed us to help almost 4,000 abortion seekers.

On a good week, we can fund 75 to 80 people. If we run out, we try to refer them elsewhere or suggest they call us back next week when our budget resets. Telling someone they might have to reschedule their appointment is not easy. But there’s just such limited funding, and so many people who need it.

After Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect in May 2024, we saw a big uptick—about 225 percent. [Floridians] now make up the fourth-highest volume of people we fund.

Some people are confused about why they’re having to travel for an abortion when their pregnancy isn’t even viable. Someone told them, “You could die if you continue this pregnancy.” Those are some of the more emotionally complex cases. They’re people who had a wanted pregnancy, and they’ve been told they must travel to a place they’ve possibly never been before to have a potentially multiday procedure.

It should be as easy for everyone as it is in DC, where you can get on the metro system, go a couple of stops, and get to a clinic. Access should not be defined by your zip code.

—Alisha Dingus, executive director, DC Abortion Fund

Read more Abortion Diaries here.

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The Good Listener

Three years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority enabled states to severely restrict abortion or ban it outright. Since then, 17 states have enacted such limits; infant and maternal mortality have risen in many of them. But the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade extends far beyond medical catastrophes. It also appears in the quieter struggles—a myriad of small, compounding barriers that stand between individuals and their access to health care. Here are some of the stories of people who have stepped up to do what they can to provide care, and some of the women who found themselves trapped in a system increasingly difficult to navigate.

I am in my 70s and I had an abortion before Roe v. Wade. I was living in Massachusetts. You had to go to the doctor to take a pregnancy test then. When it was positive, and the receptionist asked if I wanted to schedule prenatal care, I said, “No, I’ll go to New York,” because New York was one of the few places that had legalized abortion. The receptionist told me I didn’t have to, I could get an abortion in Massachusetts if I talked to a psychiatrist first, and they made getting an appointment easy. I was in my early 20s, about to start grad school, had just broken up with my boyfriend, and my father was dying. I never really considered carrying the pregnancy to term. These people at my medical practice did not judge me, but instead supported my decision and helped me implement it.

Later, after I married, my husband and I struggled with fertility. We adopted a baby, and then I found out I was pregnant. At 24 weeks, we learned that the baby I was carrying had a condition “incompatible with life.” In great sorrow, we chose termination, mostly because I had a 14-month-old and I couldn’t imagine going through the next three months pregnant and then losing a child. But again, I had so much support from my medical team.

Now I volunteer to provide housing, transportation, and emotional support to people who need abortions in the DC area.

One young girl stayed with me. She was 16, and her mother and younger sister came with her. But more often, I help people who are traveling alone—some don’t want their partners to know, and they feel really isolated.

One young woman told me she was overpowered by her boss at a work party. She felt like she couldn’t let her husband know that it wasn’t his baby. Another young woman was more like me: She discovered her baby would have had a severe birth defect.

A few people have kept in touch. One sends me holiday greetings every year. She has another baby now. Like me, she was able to finish school and choose her own path in life.

Because of my abortion, I finished law school and had a rewarding career. People have asked me why I do this, and whether I get paid. I tell them, “I do this because I’ve been where you are.”

—Anny, volunteer at an abortion Practical Support Network

Read more Abortion Diaries here.

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These Los Angeles Tenants Are Saying No to Rent Hikes

In 2018, Monica Ruiz and her neighbors found letters from their landlord taped to their doors. They were notifications of rent hikes—in some cases, increases of over 200 percent.

Ruiz had lived at Hillside Villa, a large apartment complex overlooking Los Angeles’ gentrifying Chinatown, for more than 20 years. She had raised five children there. Her youngest daughter attended the nearby elementary school, where she had taken Mandarin classes since kindergarten. She didn’t want to give them up or leave her friends.

“I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I just said, ‘No, we aren’t going to move,’” Ruiz recalled.

Ruiz didn’t know if she could find another affordable home anywhere in Los Angeles. And she didn’t want to. She had long tended a community garden in the courtyard of Hillside Villa’s two L-shaped buildings that had become a gathering space for barbecues and quinceañeras, right next to the thriving papaya plants she had nurtured.

“I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I just said, ‘No, we aren’t going to move.'”

The complex had started as a triumph of Reaganomics. President Ronald Reagan demonized public housing as a budgetary blight. Through a series of reforms, his administration instead floated tax credits to incentivize private developers to build low-income housing where rents would be capped, typically for three decades or more. The policy essentially created a network of affordable housing with an expiration date, one that would kick the low-­income housing can down the road to a future generation of politicians.

Lawrence Chan, the son of a billionaire Hong Kong developer, began construction on Hillside Villa in 1986 using a combination of those federal tax credits and municipal loans to fund the project. In exchange for the support, when the apartment complex opened in 1989, he agreed to a 30-year covenant with the city of Los Angeles committing to keep rents low.

Chan sold Hillside Villa in 2000. When the covenant expired in 2018, the new landlord, Tom Botz, was left with no obligation to provide affordable housing. That’s when Ruiz found the letter on her door.

Americans of most income levels and in almost every community are all too familiar with the housing crisis, pushed on by a lack of inventory and rising rents and mortgage costs. But the crisis is particularly acute among low-­income people, who face a shortage of around 7.1 million affordable units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The tenants of Hillside Villa had been part of a sprawling network of over 2.6 million units whose rents are kept affordable by the federal low-income housing tax credit program, according to the National Housing Preservation Database. Over the next decade, 800,000-plus homes are slated to lose the rental restrictions set in place during Reagan’s pivot away from government-run housing.

The women of the Hillside Villa Tenants Association before the start of a community meeting.Zaydee Sanchez/Mother Jones

Hillside Villa’s residents had been drawn by its low rents and quiet neighborhood. They were immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and Vietnam who worked as street vendors, cleaners, and construction workers. Ruiz originally wound up in the complex after being forced out of her home downtown, which was razed to make way for a convention center expansion. Adela Cortez and Rosario Hernandez had similar stories of being displaced by development. They, along with Ruiz and several other Latina women, would prove their mettle as mainstays of the tenant organizers.

“I feel completely overwhelmed by the scale of housing insecurity that we’re facing in Los Angeles.”

The residents pushed the city and their landlord to enact a 10-year covenant extension that could keep more than 100 low-income tenants housed. One morning, they even showed up outside Botz’s home in Malibu, urging him to sign. But Botz, who declined interview requests, refused, underlining a fundamental problem: When private landlords are called upon to deliver affordable housing, affordability can live and die by a landlord’s whim.

Feeling they had no other options, the tenants staged a rent strike. They called Spanish-language television stations. They held sit-ins outside local officials’ offices. They knocked on neighbors’ doors and met regularly with the LA Tenants Union and the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development.

With their back rent accumulating, the tenants pushed an unconventional solution: The city could loan itself money to buy Hillside Villa, force a sale through eminent domain, and then transfer ownership to a land trust or nonprofit that would run the complex, keep rents low, and pay the city back.

Monica Ruiz and her youngest daughter, Jamie Ruiz, embrace. Zaydee Sanchez

Eminent domain—the power of government to seize and redevelop property—has a bad rap, particularly in Los Angeles, where it’s been used to build freeways and stadiums and destroy working-class communities. But, the tenants reasoned, because it is a power the government can exercise in almost any situation, it could be used to save Hillside Villa from Botz and his rent increases.

The city’s Housing Department began looking into the proposal and told the city council that eminent domain would be too costly. It instead recommended a deal: The city would give Botz almost $15 million to extend the terms of the covenant for 10 more years. The tenants would pay the five years of back rent they owed, plus up to 3 percent interest, or face eviction. After the tenants said they couldn’t afford to do so, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, Hillside Villa’s local representative, negotiated a six-month repayment grace period and pledged to help fundraise to fill any gap, committing $250,000 from her council office.

But the tenants denounced the deal as a giveaway, leaving the standoff in place. Nithya Raman, an LA councilmember who heads its Housing and Homelessness Committee, acknowledges the extension plan is more kicking the can. “I feel completely overwhelmed by the scale of housing insecurity that we’re facing in Los Angeles,” said Raman, who was elected in 2020 after campaigning on tenant rights and the housing crisis. The deal “is only a 10-year extension,” she explains, “leaving them potentially in this exact same situation a decade later.”

Preserving existing affordable housing is just one part of the solution, according to Shane Phillips, a housing expert at UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. “It’s certainly a big problem that a lot of covenants are expiring,” he said. “It is a much bigger problem because our city, this region, has not built nearly enough housing over the past 30 or so years—relative to job growth, relative to demand, relative to just people being born.”

Last year, California’s powerful landlord lobby spent over $150 million to shut down a state proposition that would have expanded local governments’ ability to enact rent control. While LA was exploring expanding investments into housing via an existing voter-approved mansion tax last year, Mayor Karen Bass’ latest proposed budget will cut affordable housing funds to help close a $1 billion deficit.

“Our city, this region, has not built nearly enough housing over the past 30 or so years—relative to job growth, relative to demand, relative to just people being born.”

The National Low Income Housing Coalition notes that the shortage cannot be filled by states alone and that “Congress must significantly increase federal investments in programs that both preserve and expand the supply of deeply affordable units and bridge the gaps between incomes and rent.” While Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill in 2024 with Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) that would have created a federal agency to acquire and maintain apartment buildings for low-income Americans, since then, at least a billion dollars in federal funding for affordable housing has been axed by the Trump administration.

Los Angeles’ Chinatown still provides affordable housing options, making it a critical area for low-income residents.Zaydee Sanchez

Ruiz, who does not drive, is determined to remain in the home where she raised four children in part because of its access to public transportation.Zaydee Sanchez

Last September, a Hillside Villa tenant prevailed in court against Botz, who was trying to evict him and other tenants for their ongoing rent strike; Botz dropped his related eviction cases. None of what the Hillside Villa tenants have accomplished—through the city council or in court—would’ve been possible if they hadn’t organized collectively. Now in the seventh year of their fight, they’re part of a nationally resurgent tenant movement. Last year, New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom went to Kentucky to profile the Louisville Tenants Union, which is organizing to protect tenants in a historically segregated city where politicians and developers have targeted historically Black neighborhoods for redevelopment and gentrification. This past spring, a group of Bronx tenants successfully fought their landlord over uninhabitable conditions, prompting New York City to strip his ownership of the building—a first in seven years.

Tenants unions have even started to band together. Louisville’s helped launch the Tenant Union Federation, a coalition working to win national protections. Another founder of the federation, KC Tenants of Kansas City, Missouri, began a rent strike in October. When participating members got attention on X for burning late fee notices, the Hillside Villa tenants’ account replied with a similar photo, taken in their leafy courtyard. It showed their own action, with residents wearing their signature red shirts and cheering as an eviction notice was engulfed in flame. “WE LOVE TO SEE IT,” they wrote.

This story was produced in partnership with Los Angeles Public Press. Translation and additional reporting by Martín Macías Jr.

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Utah’s High-Stakes PR Campaign to Wrest Control of Public Lands

This story was originally published by High Country News and Public Domain and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last year, as Utah prepared to file a federal lawsuit aiming to take control of millions of acres of federal public land within its borders, state officials sought help swaying public opinion in their favor. So they turned to a group of public relations professionals at Penna Powers, a media and branding firm based in Salt Lake City.

Backed with a commitment of more than two million in taxpayer funds, the firm sprang into action. One of the early orders of business was studying the opposition. In June 2024, an assistant attorney general sent an email to numerous state government colleagues and Penna Powers staffers that contained a video from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) in which the well-known hunter and media personality Randy Newberg described the dangers of transferring federal land to state control. “It doesn’t matter how many promises are made,” warned Newberg, “the financial realities would force states to sell off our public lands.”

Noting that organizations like TRCP are good at connecting with “traditionally conservative” audiences, the Utah official told his colleagues that “our PR efforts will largely depend on how well we can anticipate and effectively respond to these expected criticisms.”

“That definitely helps us know what we need to counter the opposition,” added Redge Johnson, director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy and Coordinating Office, or PLPCO, which has played a central role in organizing the state’s campaign to seize federal land.

Throughout 2024, Penna Powers put together an elaborate PR and media campaign to do just that—counter the opposition and build support for Utah’s efforts. They churned out videos, newspaper ads, social media spots, and more. They hired actors, ran focus groups, and helped prominent Utah politicians write talking points. In at least one instance, Penna Powers relied on AI to help create voice-overs in videos. In another instance, PLPCO staffers warned Penna Powers not to use too much scenic imagery in the campaign for fear it might undermine their efforts. They called the campaign “Stand for Our Land,” and those who worked on it were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. “The Office of the Attorney General is taking this NDA extremely seriously,” wrote one government official.

Hundreds of records reviewed by Public Domain shed light on the key players involved in this campaign and the strategies they used to persuade the public in their favor. Among other themes, their campaign relentlessly portrays the federal government as an absentee landlord that mismanages land and cuts off access to the public domain. Utah, on the other hand, is painted as a benevolent force working to ensure public land access. The campaign—like the lawsuit it was meant to support—seeks one principal outcome: federal land disposal. Utah has identified some 18.5 million acres of federal land within the state’s boundaries that are currently administered by the Bureau of Land Management on behalf of all Americans—and it wants those lands for itself.

In response to queries, PLPCO in a written statement said, “Utah believes in protecting access to public lands for all users of all ages and abilities, and we are committed to actively managing these lands for generations to come. Utah is home to five national parks, several national monuments, and many other natural wonders. The state has always welcomed, and will continue to welcome visitors from around the world to visit and enjoy all that this great state has to offer.” Penna Powers did not respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, critics of the Utah PR effort called it a “propaganda” campaign meant to mislead Utahns and the general public.

“Penna Powers worked hand-in-hand with the state of Utah to craft a misleading message about the state’s land grab lawsuit,” said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group. “They made it seem like forcibly taking ownership of public lands would help recreationists and ranchers, when the real goal of this lawsuit was to increase extraction and privatize national public lands in Utah. This campaign is the very definition of propaganda—misleading political messaging paid for by taxpayers.”

Utah’s effort to take control of federal lands kicked off in earnest in 2012, when Utah’s then-Governor Gary Herbert signed into law the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act, demanding state control of the majority of federal public land in Utah. “This is only the first step in a long process,” Herbert said at the time, “but it is a step we must take.” In 2018, Senator Mike Lee, a leading proponent of the land transfer movement, shared similar sentiments during a speech to the conservative Sutherland Institute in Salt Lake City. The campaign for land transfer, he said, “will take years, and the fight will be brutal.” Indeed, just last week, Lee put forward a proposal in the GOP’s massive reconciliation bill that would force the selloff of millions of acres of federal land in the Western US.

Utah’s actions to seize control of federal land have only grown more aggressive as the years have progressed. In August last year, it filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to strip federal ownership over some 18.5 million acres of BLM land within Utah. It claims these lands are “unappropriated,” a novel argument meant to create a legal distinction between national parks, forests and monuments, and large swaths of BLM land across the West. If successful, Utah’s lawsuit would deprive the vast majority of Americans of their ownership stake in such BLM lands. Tribal nations, meanwhile, have been staunch opponents of Utah’s lawsuit, which the Ute Indian Tribe described as an “existential threat” to the tribe and its reservation lands.

In January this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear Utah’s case. It remains unclear whether Utah will refile its lawsuit in lower court, but its efforts to seize federal land are a generational project.

Regardless, Utah faces a major public opinion hurdle. A large majority of Western voters are opposed to the idea of state control over federal public lands, according to Colorado College’s annual polling. Even in Utah, some 57 percent of voters oppose public land transfers. That is where Penna Powers comes in. The firm worked to reshape public opinion in the state’s favor, with a focus on building support among Utah residents as well as key decision-makers at the national level.

“The Stand for Our Land public education campaign is informing Utahns about the management of public lands, and how federal agencies are restricting access to public lands and ignoring local concerns,” wrote PLPCO in a statement. “The Bureau of Land Management closed over 2,000 miles of Utah roads on public lands in the past two years.”

A centerpiece of Penna Powers’ effort has been glossy videos that portray federal land agencies as an exclusionary force bent on keeping people off the public domain. In one video, Penna Powers and PLPCO hired a voice actor to portray a “disabled camper” in a wheelchair on a camping trip with her family. “Because of my disability I need to reach campsites in a motorized vehicle,” the actor said. “If I lose road access, I lose the ability to do something I love with my family. That’s why I think Utah should be managing Utah land.” The actor who was selected to voice the video does not appear to use a wheelchair or mobility aid in social media posts and other records reviewed by Public Domain. PLPCO appears to have had many of those involved in its video shoots also sign NDAs. A talent agent for the actor in question did not provide comment at the time of publication.

Redge Johnson, the executive director of PLPCO, was particularly keen on the “disabled camper” storyline, among others. He asked about a video that combined the “disabled camper” story with one about an off-highway vehicles business. “I really want that video in the folder, it tells a great story,” he wrote to Penna Powers staffer Allyse Christensen, who worked on the Stand for Our Land campaign.

Others, like disability community advocate Syren Nagakyrie, said Utah’s use of a “disabled camper” storyline to promote its political agenda is “disingenuous.”

“This video the first time I watched it I just said out loud: ‘That is fake,’” said Nagakyrie, the founder and executive director of Disabled Hikers, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for the disability community in the outdoors. “Looking at some of these legislators’ past voting records, it is obvious they do not actually care about the disability community. They just want to get these roads open.”

In another video produced for the campaign, a family is driving in their RV to go camping on federal land, only to find a giant “No Entry” sign that has been strung across the road by the federal government. “You are losing access to Utah roads and trails,” the video declared. “Let Utah manage Utah lands.”

This video may have required some stagecraft too. According to internal PLPCO emails, a state official advised Penna Powers and its producer to create their own “exaggerated” version of road closure signage to feature in the campaign’s messaging.

“Do we need the closures to look exactly like this?” wrote Penna Powers staffer Spencer Lawson, referencing the bland brown signs that the Bureau of Land Management typically uses to keep motorized vehicles off certain parcels of land. “Or are we able to exaggerate it a bit more?”

“Spencer, we can exaggerate it,” replied Dillon Hoyt, a PLPCO staffer and Utah state official. “I’ll leave those details up to your group and the producer,” he added. In the end, the Stand for Our Land video about camping closures featured a large fictional road closure sign strung across heavy metal chains.

There were other instances in which Penna Powers and PLPCO massaged reality to better fit their message. In at least one case, Penna Powers used artificial intelligence to recreate the voice of an interview subject who had failed to say specific talking points for a video. The video in this case featured Utah state legislator Carl Albrecht, critiquing the sluggish timeline for building a transmission line on federal lands and arguing for state control.

“Redge, you’ll remember Carl had a hard time with ‘that’s why I think Utah should manage Utah lands…,’ and we didn’t capture him saying it,” wrote Penna Powers staffer Jenny Snyder to Redge Johnson in an August 2024 email. As a result, they used AI. “We should let Carl know that we did that for him as well,” wrote Snyder.

In a later email, Snyder told Albrecht that “we did have to adjust your voiceover using AI to get the last line, please let us know if you have any issues with that.”

PLPCO officials were also wary of featuring too many scenic vistas in their ad campaign. Commenting on a batch of photos and b-roll that Penna Powers compiled for the campaign, PLPCO official Dillon Hoyt wrote, “I’m held up thinking ‘how scenic is too scenic.’ Those are some great scenery shots, but I think they are what Redge wants us to avoid.”

In another instance, Hoyt was even more explicit. “I would like to use a video clip that is a little more desert and sagebrush than redrock. If the footage is too pretty and scenic people will start to agree that we should ‘conserve’ (meaning protect) these landscapes with PLR,” a reference to the BLM’s Public Lands Rule, which sought to put conservation on par with other public land uses. “We view ‘conserve’ as active land management,” he added.

Groetzinger at the Center for Western Priorities criticized PLPCO and Penna Powers for “using underhanded tactics like artificial intelligence when their interview subjects didn’t say exactly what they wanted them to say, and they knowingly misled Utahns about the scenic value of the lands in question. The entire ‘Stand for Our Land’ campaign is a slap in the face to Utahns.”

In a written statement, PLPCO said that it “followed the state of Utah’s rigorous and competitive procurement process to select the right firm to partner with on the public education campaign. Throughout the production of campaign materials and content, we have acted in accordance with best industry practices and highest ethical standards.”

“We are proud to educate Utahns about public land management and entirely stand behind our efforts to increase access to public lands,” the agency added.

The target audience of Utah’s ad campaign spanned the nation. According to a copy of the campaign’s media plan for 2024, it included ads in major Utah newspapers, on highway billboards, and on local TV stations and social media. It also targeted influential audiences at the national level, including the use of “geo-fencing of government buildings” in Washington, DC, to send targeted ads aimed at government officials. The campaign also ran ads in national publications like the Washington Post and the National Review, pitched stories to a wide range of outlets, bought airtime on the journalist Bari Weiss’ popular podcast, and purchased Facebook, Instagram, and X ads.

Meanwhile, Penna Powers staff had access to some of the highest officials in the Utah government. Apart from the PLPCO officials who helped shape the PR campaign, Penna Powers staff had numerous meetings with top state leaders, including the Utah Attorney General’s office. And, it helped craft talking points and op-eds on the land seizure campaign for a variety of state officials, including talking points for Utah Governor Spencer Cox to deliver a press event.

On the day Utah announced its land transfer lawsuit, Penna Powers joined PLPCO officials and other state decision-makers at the state Capitol building.

“Let’s do this thing!” wrote Penna Powers operative Allyse Christensen in an email to her colleagues and Utah officials as she prepared to print out press kits the evening before the announcement.

Dillon Hoyt of PLPCO replied, “Go team!”

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Mahmoud Khalil, Finally Free, Speaks Out

On Sunday, Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student jailed by immigration authorities for more than three months for his role in protests against the war in Gaza, gave his most extensive public comments to date about hisdetention and the Trump administration’s case against him.

After a federal judge ordered his release on bail from an ICE facility in Jena, Louisiana, Khalil returned Saturday to New York City, where he lives with his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, and their son, who was born while he was detained. On Sunday, Khalil, a Palestinian born in a Syrian refugee camp who was studying for his master’s degree at the time of his arrest, spoke to a crowd of supporters from the steps of Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an historic Episcopal church a block from the Columbia campus.

Khalil cast himself as the reluctant face of a wider movement of students fighting for Palestinian rights, some of whom have also been jailed by the Trump administration for their activism. But Khalil was also eager to define himself after months of news coverage and baseless allegations from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that he is a national security threat.

“The Columbia administration has tried its best to portray me as someone who’s violent,” Khalil told the crowd. Describing himself in the third person, Khalil called himself “a human rights defender,” “a freedom fighter,” “a refugee,” “a father and husband,” and “above all… a Palestinian.”

Mahmoud Khalil and his wife, Noor Abdalla, greeted supporters at a rally on Sunday.Cristina Matuozzi/Sipa/AP

Khalil, a legal permanent US resident and green card holder, was detained on March 8 by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents in the lobby of the building where he lives, near the Columbia campus, as his wife, who was eight months pregnant, watched the whole thing unfold. “It felt like I was literally being kidnapped, where you have plainclothes agents literally snatching you out of your apartment building, without introducing themselves, without introducing an arrest warrant,” Khalil told the crowd. He said he could not communicate with Abdalla, a dentist and US citizen, for the first 30 hours of his detention, which he called “the most difficult time” of the ordeal. “They wouldn’t tell me what I’m being accused of,” he said.

A DHS spokesperson claimedat the time that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” but the Trump administration never produced any evidence supporting those allegations. In fact, as my former colleague Sophie Hurwitz reported, Khalil was known as a level-headed spokesperson for last year’s protest encampments at the university and as a mediator in demonstrators’ negotiations with faculty. Khalil’s immigration case is proceeding while he remains out on bail; the Trump administration is trying to deport him, alleging that he lied about his employment history on his green card application. Khalil denies those claims.

At Sunday’s rally, Khalil—who has not been charged with a crime—again maintained that “there isn’t any shred of evidence that what I did or said is wrong.” He lambasted Columbia’s Board of Trusteesfor expelling and suspending other student protesters, calling its actions “shameful.”

Khalil calls Columbia Board of Trustees “shameful” and leads a chant of “free Palestine” after saying Columbia will do “everything and anything” to prevent it.

— Julianne McShane (@juliannemcshane.bsky.social) 2025-06-23T00:02:48.924Z

University administrators, he claimed, “in private tell me there is anti-Palestinian racism at Columbia; there is manufactured hysteria about antisemitism at Columbia University because of the protests, but they don’t dare to talk about that in public.” (Spokespeople for the university, the White House, and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

“Columbia University will do everything and anything to ensure that the words ‘free Palestine’ are not uttered anywhere near it,” Khalil said. “But while we are here—free, free Palestine,” he added, leading the crowd in a chant.

Khalil calls Columbia “anti-Palestinian.”

— Julianne McShane (@juliannemcshane.bsky.social) 2025-06-23T00:11:52.775Z

Abdalla introduced her husband at the rally, and said that while Khalil missed their son’s birth in April, “he will raise [him] with pride, strength, and purpose. And one day our son will know that his father did not bow to fear. He will know that his father stood up when it was hardest and that the world stood with him.”

Khalil said he was jailed with 70 other men in a dorm with no privacy. While he spent his days “listening to one tragic story after another” of men who had been detained due to their immigration status, he took solace in carving the phrase “we will win” in his bunk bed, looking at it before he went to sleep and when he woke up.

Khalil said he sees his release as proof that “we are winning.”

“This is just the beginning of the end—the beginning of the end of the US complicity and the genocide in Gaza, the US unconditional support to the genocidal state of Israel and to Colombia’s complicity in Israel’s crimes,” he said. He also praised student protesters as “our moral compass,” and thanked them for their courage.

“I did not hope to be in this position, and I absolutely don’t want to be the face of the student movement, because there are much more students who are much braver than than me,” Khalil said. “But here I am. I will definitely take that with pride. I would continue to advocate for Palestinian rights no matter the cost.”

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Democrats in Congress Decry Trump’s Iran Strikes as Unconstitutional

On Saturday night, President Donald Trump announced to the world that the US carried out what he called “massive precision strikes” on three nuclear facilities in Iran. The announcement put an end to over a week of speculation about whether Trump would join Israel’soffensive; just Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

Trump’s attack came as a boon for Israel, which launched its Iran campaign on June 13 and has been lobbying the US to get involved ever since. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Trump’s decision to strike the nuclear facilities “will change history,” adding, “the forces of civilization thank you.”

But Democraticmembers of Congress—and a few Republicans—quickly decried Trump’s decision, saying he flouted the obligation, imposed by the 1973 War Powers Act, to notify Congress before undertaking such an action. They also argued that the available intelligence did not support the theory that Iran possessed a nuclear bomb.

Indeed, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard previously told Congress in March that Iran had not built a nuclear weapon; this week, Trump said, “she’s wrong” when asked about her previous testimony. Polling has also shown weak support around the US forstrikes on Iran: A Washington Post poll conducted this week showed 45 percent of Americans opposed the idea, compared to only 25 percent who said they supported it and 30 percent who said they were unsure. (A much higher percentage of Democrats, 67 percent, opposed strikes, compared to only 24 percent of Republicans.)

“President Trump misled the country about his intentions, failed to seek congressional authorization for the use of military force and risks American entanglement in a potentially disastrous war in the Middle East,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a statement after Trump announced the strikes.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said that Trump’s decision to drop the bombs in Iran “is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”

“He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations,” she added.

On ABC’s This Week, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said it is “way, way too early to tell” whether or not the strikes had, in fact, “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, as Trump claimed. (Indeed, on Sunday, top Pentagon officials agreed that it was “too early” to say whether Iran may retain any nuclear capability.)

“The president has taken a massive, massive gamble here,” Himes added. “I’m, as a member of Congress, disturbed that this was undertaken without congressional approval. There’s not much ambiguity in the in the Constitution about who gets to approve these things.” (Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war; Article II gives the president the power to command the military when war has been declared.)

Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told @JonKarl that it is "way too early" to know the status of the Iranian nuclear program after U.S. strikes.

“The president has taken a massive, massive gamble here."https://t.co/Tu9QJdMF61 pic.twitter.com/pSqwApCXLz

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) June 22, 2025

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) also said the strikes were “not constitutional,” adding that intelligence did not support the theory that Iran had a nuclear bomb. “The administration should have come to Congress…there’s a reason to bring this to Congress, and it is, you want the Congress bought in, you want the American people bought in on an action this substantial that could lead to a major outbreak of war,” Schiff said.

.@SenAdamSchiff: Iran strikes were "not constitutional" pic.twitter.com/CwwEMGV4iE

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) June 22, 2025

While most Republicans who have spoken out voiced their support for Trump’s move, a handful also weighed in to oppose the strikes. “This is not constitutional,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said in a post on X, in response to Trump’s announcement. “I’m amazed at the mental gymnastics being undertaken by neocons in DC (and their social media bots) to say we aren’t at war… so they can make war,” he wrote in another post. Trump quickly attacked Massie on Truth Social, calling him a “loser.”

Massie and Rep. Ro Khana (D-Calif.) introduced a resolution this week that would block US military action against Iran “unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran” passed by Congress. That measure, offered before the attack, appeared to be picking up support on Sunday, as various Democrats said they were signing on.

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) said, “it’s hard to conceive a rationale that’s Constitutional,” in response to Trump’s announcement. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger also said on CNN that he does not agree with the decision.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Trump “did what he needed to do,” claiming that the president “evaluated that the imminent danger outweighed the time it would take for Congress to act.” He went on to add that Trump “fully respects the Article I power of Congress, and tonight’s necessary, limited, and targeted strike follows the history and tradition of similar military actions under presidents of both parties.”

Other presidents have, indeed, been faced accusations of unilaterally proceeding with military action: Former President Barack Obama was accused of doing so in a military operation in Libya in 2011, former President Bill Clinton when he launched a military operation in Kosovo in 1999. More recently, some members of Congress accused former President Joe Biden of overstepping his power when he launched strikes on Houthi-controlled sites in Yemen last year. But for Trump, the latest move exists as one of many, many ways he hasflouted the Constitution and the the rule of law during only five months back in office—including potentially violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by accepting a free jet from Qatar; trying to abolish birthright citizenship; and unconstitutionally detaining people for protesting.

On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance dismissed the allegations that the strikes were unconstitutional. “The president has clear authority to act to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the worst weapon of mass destruction of them all is nuclear,” he said. “The idea that this was outside of presidential authority, I think any real serious legal person would tell you that’s not true.”

Responding to the allegation that Trump was launching the US into a new war in the Middle East, Vance claimed: “This is not going to be some long, drawn out thing. We’ve got in; we’ve done the job of setting their nuclear program back.”

But that remains to be seen. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called the US strikes an “outrageous, grave and unprecedented violation” of international law, adding that Iran “reserves all options to defend its security interests and people.” Trump, meanwhile, threatened “tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the past eight days” on Saturday night if the nation refuses to make peace.

Dan Friedman contributed reporting.

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ICE Detention Numbers Have Reached a Record High

The number of immigrants detained in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the country has reached a record high of more than 56,000, according to the agency’s most recent data release. The whopping figure marks the largest total detainee population in ICE custody since at least August 2019, when there were 55,654 immigrants detained. (ICE started releasing semi-monthly detention statistics during Trump’s first term per a mandate from Congress.)

As Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration enforcement, notes, this could possibly be the highest number of detained immigrants on record. “It is certainly the largest detained population since ICE began reporting detention data during the first Trump administration,” Kocher wrote in a Substack post about the most recent data.

56,397 People Now Detained by ICE, Possibly Highest in HistoryLargest growth comes from people with no criminal histories, who now make up a third of ICE detention amid dangerous overcrowding and lucrative contracts for private contractors.austinkocher.substack.com/p/55654-peop…

— Austin Kocher, PhD (@austinkocher.com) 2025-06-21T13:01:28.250Z

The spike in detention numbers comes as the Trump administration is doubling down on efforts to ramp up immigration enforcement with sweeping worksite raids and courthouse arrests. For several months, administration officials, under pressure to deliver on the president’s mass deportation agenda, have expressed frustration with ICE’s numbers.

During a May meeting at the agency’s headquarters, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller reportedly chastised top immigration enforcement officers, demanding a minimum of 3,000 arrests per day—more than triple the average number of this current term. “All that matters is numbers, pure numbers,” a source with ICE told the New York Post. “Quantity over quality.”

Miller, people familiar with the meeting told the Wall Street Journal, instructed the officers to cast a wide net and target places like Home Depot and 7-Eleven stores. In the aftermath of the aggressive marching orders, ICE conducted sweeping operations across Los Angeles, sparking protests and the administration’s deployment of National Guard troops.

This past week, Trump walked back on a short-lived order for ICE agents to halt immigration enforcement operations targeting the agriculture and hospitality industries. “We’re going to continue to do worksite enforcement operations, even on farms and hotels, but based on a prioritized basis,” border czar Tom Homan said on Thursday. “But based on a prioritized basis. Criminals come first.”

But the numbers tell a different story. What is driving the growth in the number of immigrants detained by ICE, Kocher noted, is people with no criminal convictions, only immigration violations. A recent Guardian data analysis also found that the agency’s figures are boosted by an increase in detention of immigrants without criminal history. Between January and June, its reporting shows, there was an 807 percent spike in arrests of people without a record.

To increase the number of detention beds available, the administration is expanding lucrative contracts with private prison companies and reopening previously closed detention centers, including ones that failed to meet minimum standard requirements.

The record high detention numbers also raise concerns about overcrowding, especially since the Department of Homeland Security is imposing new rules restricting access by members of Congress to ICE facilities. The policy change followed incidents in recent days when Democratic lawmakers in Illinois, California, and New York were denied entry to processing centers and detention facilities. “If ICE has nothing to hide,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement, “DHS must make its facilities available.”

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They Came to Addiction Treatment Centers Seeking Help. Instead, They Were Harassed and Assaulted.

Across the country, women seeking addiction treatment are being harassed and assaulted by men in positions of power. The problem is so pervasive that it has a name among those in the industry: the 13th Step.

“I fell right into it, right into it. You know, it’s like, it’s just, you’re so vulnerable,” says a victim named Andrea. “The 13-stepper is like, um, when you take advantage of a newcomer. Like, they, they joke like, ‘Don’t be a 13th-stepper.’”

This week on Reveal, we join Lauren Chooljian from New Hampshire Public Radio, who started her investigation by looking at that state’s largest addiction treatment network, founded by Eric Spofford. After exposing allegations that he was harassing patients, Chooljian, her sources, and staff at New Hampshire Public Radio became the targets of intimidation and vandalism. In recent weeks, Spofford was indicted on charges that he orchestrated those attacks.

Chooljian then follows another case, this time in California, where the owner of a group of treatment centers was sexually assaulting clients and carrying out massive insurance fraud. The owner, Chris Bathum, was brought to justice after two women teamed up to gather evidence and take it to law enforcement.

This is an update of an episode that first aired in February 2024.

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As ICE Raids Continue, Parts of a Vibrant City Go Empty

On a normal day, the lines at Angel’s Tijuana Tacos’ many locations can easily stretch down a long block, as a team of workers make tortillas by hand, shave fresh meat in front of a roaring fire, and turn out some of the city’s best food at lightning speed. For several days this month, though, the local Los Angeles-area chain’s taco stands and trucks were abruptly closed, with only one brick-and-mortar location in neighboring Orange County remaining open. Amid ongoing ICE raids in LA, Angels has been one of the many businesses who have closed, adjusted their hours, or otherwise tried to defend their staff and clientele from being taken by federal immigration authorities. Los Angeles, a city full of immigrants, has gone into a defensive crouch.

There’s widespread terror against immigrants. There’s also astonishing solidarity.

Near where I live on the city’s east side, many of the street vendors who typically sell clothes, food, and jewelry are absent. Many elementary schools appear to be bringing students inside earlier; school playgrounds that are usually full of kids getting their early morning energy out have been empty. The streets, too, are far emptier—and noticeably whiter—than they would ever usually be. A grocery store worker who I see regularly has been coming to work in sunglasses and a hat, with a neck gaiter pulled up to just under their nose. An especially hot week would usually mean neighborhoods full of barbecues and music; instead, Father’s Day weekend was somber and entirely too quiet. I haven’t heard the clang of the elotero’sbell in weeks, announcing his wares as he pushes his cart down the street.

The story is the same across Los Angeles county, home to countless communities that are heavily Latino and full of immigrant families or families with mixed status. Local news site L.A. Taco reports that many taco stands are temporarily closing, a staple food for workers across the city.(Their concerns are entirely reasonable: as L.A. Taco reported, an ICE raid on Jason’s Tacos in East Los Angeles last week targeted both the taqueros, all of whom were abducted, and their customers.) MacArthur Park, an area known for a huge number of vendors selling clothes, food and household wares to immigrant families, is also much quieter than usual. The enormous produce market in downtown Los Angeles—which supplies individuals as well as restaurants‚—is empty and full of rotting food, ABC 7 reported this week, with immigrant customers too afraid to show up to shop. Domestic violence shelters, too, are seeing a chilling effect, several providers told Mother Jones’ Julianne McShane, with clients too afraid to seek services.

Attempts to keep community members safe have been met with mixed success: High schools and colleges across the city adjusted their graduation protocols and set up safety perimeters to make sure families could see their students graduate, an effort which seems to have been successful; there were no reports of ICE raiding a graduation. On Saturday, though, an ICE raid targeted the Santa Fe Springs Swap meet, a popular weekly local attraction that draws mostly Latino families for music and shopping. It was expected to be especially crowded this weekend due to a Father’s Day concert.

Noemi Gongora, 64, from El Salvador, worries an immigration raid could target the sidewalks of Los Angeles’ Pico-Union district, where she works selling goods. “I’m afraid to go get my medicine. I haven’t gone because of the immigration raids,” she said.Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty

But where there’s widespread terror against immigrants and non-white communities more generally, there’s also astonishing solidarity. As occurred during January’s devastating fires, Los Angeles has been full of people and organizations trying to help.

World Harvest Charities and Family Services “Cart with a Heart” program allows people to grocery shop for families who might be too afraid to leave their houses. The YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles has been delivering food and other essentials to families sheltering in place, and several of their locations have also been set up as collection sites for people to drop off donations, assemble care packages, and write “notes of support,” the Y wrote on Instagram.

And a multitude of organizations are providing legal consultations for community members, including Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project. The longstanding Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights set up a rapid response hotline for residents to report ICE sightings. Numerous restaurants have held fundraisers to support immigrant families. And the nonprofit KTown For All has taken a particularly ingenious approach, buying out everything that local food vendors are selling in order to allow them to get home to their families more quickly. On Thursday the organization said it had raised $50,000 so far to benefit 42 vendors and their families, covering their rent and bills and keeping them “safely off the street and out of sight.”

And to widespread celebration, Angel’s Tijuana Tacos cautiously reopened several of its locations in Los Angeles and the Inland Empire earlier this week. “Thank you,” they told their Instagram followers, “for your support and sticking by us during these difficult and uncertain times.”

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Future Climate Means No More Breakfast

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

Globally, humanity is producing more food than ever, but that harvest is concentrated in just a handful of bread baskets.

More than one-third of the world’s wheat and barley exports come from Ukraine and Russia, for example. Some of these highly productive farmlands, including major crop-growing regions in the United States, are on track to see the sharpest drops in harvests due to climate change.

That’s bad news not just for farmers, but also for everyone who eats—especially as it becomes harder and more expensive to feed a more crowded, hungrier world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

Under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario, six key staple crops will see an 11.2 percent decline by the end of the century compared to a world without warming, even as farmers try to adapt. And the largest drops aren’t occurring in the poorer, more marginal farmlands, but in places that are already major food producers. These are regions like the US Midwest that have been blessed with good soil and ideal weather for raising staples like maize and soy.

But when that weather is less than ideal, it can drastically reduce agricultural productivity. Extreme weather has already begun to eat into harvests this year: Flooding has destroyed rice in Tajikistan, cucumbers in Spain, and bananas in Australia. Severe storms in the US this spring caused millions of dollars in damages to crops. In past years, severe heat has led to big declines in blueberries, olives, and grapes. And, as the climate changes, rising average temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are poised to diminish yields, while weather events like droughts and floods reaching greater extremes could wipe out harvests more often.

“That’s like everyone giving up breakfast … about 360 calories for each person, for each day.”

“It’s not a mystery that climate change will affect our food production,” said Andrew Hultgren, an agriculture researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “That’s the most weather-exposed sector in the economy.”

Farmers are doing what they can—testing different crop varieties that can better withstand changes in the climate, shifting the timing of when they sow, tweaking their use of fertilizers and water, and investing in infrastructure like water reservoirs.

The question is whether these adaptations can continue to keep pace with warming. To figure this out, Hultgren and his team looked at crop and weather data from 54 countries around the world dating back to the 1940s. They specifically looked at how farmers have adapted to changes in the climate that have already occurred, focusing on maize, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum, and soybean. Combined, these crops provide two-thirds of humanity’s calories.

In the Nature paper, Hultgren and his team reported that in general, adaptation can slow some crop losses due to climate change, but not all of them.

And, the decrease in our food production could be devastating: For every degree Celsius of warming, global food production is likely to decline by 120 calories per person per day. That’s even taking into account how climate change can make growing seasons longer and how more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can encourage plant growth. In the moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario— leading to between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100—rising incomes and adaptations would only offset one-third of crop losses around the world.

“Looking at that 3 degrees centigrade warmer [than the year 2000] future corresponds to about a 13 percent loss in daily recommended per capita caloric consumption,” Hultgren said. “That’s like everyone giving up breakfast … about 360 calories for each person, for each day.”

The researchers also mapped out where the biggest crop declines—and increases—are likely to occur as the climate warms. As the world’s most productive farmlands get hit hard, cooler countries like Russia and Canada are on track for larger harvests. The map below shows in red where crop yields are poised to shrink and in blue where they may expand:

![Figure 2 Climate change's impact on crop yields by 2100

Six map's showing the percent change in yields for maize, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava, and sorghum. Most decrease in yield.](https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Figure2.webp)

Some of the biggest crop-growing regions in the world are likely to experience the largest declines in yield as the climate changes.Nature

The results complicate the assumption that poor countries will directly bear the largest losses in food production due to climate change. The wealthy, large-scale food growers may see the biggest dropoffs, according to the study. However, poor countries will still be affected since many crops are internationally traded commodities, and the biggest producers are exporters. A smaller harvest means higher food prices around the world. Less wealthy regions are also facing their own crop declines from disasters and climate change, though at smaller scales. All the while, the global population is rising, albeit much more slowly than in the past. It’s a recipe for more food insecurity for more people.

Rice is an exception to this trend. Its overall yields actually are likely to increase in a warmer world: Rice is a versatile crop and unlike the other staples, it benefits from higher nighttime temperatures. “Rice turns out to be the most flexibly adapted crop and largely through adaptations protected from large losses under even a high warming future,” Hultgren said. That’s a boon for regions like South and Southeast Asia.

Decreasing the available calories isn’t the only way climate change is altering food, however. The nutrition content can change with shifts in rainfall and temperature too, though Hultgren and his colleagues didn’t account for this in their study. Scientists have previously documented how higher levels of carbon dioxide can cause crops like rice to have lower levels of iron, zinc, and B vitamins. So the food we will be eating in the future may be more scarce and less nutritious as well.

And while climate change can impair our food supply, the way we make food in turn harms the climate. About one-third of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions stem from food production, just under half of that from meat and dairy. That’s why food production has to be a major front in how we adapt to climate change, and reduce rising temperatures overall.

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Texas Judge Throws Out Biden Rule Protecting Medical Privacy on Abortion

An ultra-conservative federal judge in Texas has lobbed another hand grenade in his long-running battle to limit access to reproductive healthcare around the country—this time by vacating a privacy rule intended to shield abortion seekers and providers from criminal and civil state investigations.

In a sweeping ruling late Wednesday, US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo held that the Biden administration’s attempt to protect reproductive health information from disclosure to law enforcement and other authorities was unlawful. In doing so, Kacsmaryk has opened the floodgates for states with bans on abortion and gender-affirming care to investigate patients who obtain treatment out of state, as well as their providers, using those patients’ own private health records.

Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, medical providers, health insurance companies, and other covered entities are allowed—but not required—to release protected health information without patient consent to government authorities for the purposes of a criminal, civil, or administrative investigation. In April 2024, the US Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule expanding HIPAA privacy protections to bar disclosure of reproductive health information to authorities if the government’s purpose was to investigate patients who sought, or providers who offered, such care.

The new regulation was a direct response to the US Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. HHS defined reproductive health broadly to include not just abortion, but any care related to a person’s reproductive organs, including contraception, miscarriage management, and gender-affirming care. For the first time, the rule also defined “person” under HIPAA to exclude fetuses.

The Biden rule defined reproductive health to include not just abortion, but any care related to a person’s reproductive organs, including contraception, miscarriage management, and gender-affirming care.

HHS set a December deadline for compliance with the new rule. But in October, an Amarillo-area family doctor sued the agency, claiming that the new privacy rule prevented her from reporting child abuse. Dr. Carmen Purl and her lawyers, from the conservative legal behemoth Alliance Defending Freedom, argued that under HIPAA, the Biden administration could not limit states’ authority to investigate child abuse or public health concerns.

But Purl also made it clear that her opposition to the rule was rooted in her feelings about certain forms of reproductive care. “I believe based on both medicine and conscience that elective abortions harm patients’ health and public health,” Purl wrote in a declaration to the court. “I also believe that medical interventions trying to achieve ‘gender transition’ of children, such as cross-sex hormones, are harmful to the child, are never medically necessary, and are a matter of concern for public health.”

To Purl, fetuses are children, and the 2024 rule presented undue harm to them. Kacsmaryk agreed, saying that states are free to define child abuse and public health in whatever manner they deem fit, including if certain health procedures, like abortion or puberty blockers for trans youth, constitute abuse. The decision expanded on Kacsmaryk’s previous, narrow preliminary injunction blocking the Biden rule as applied to Purl; on Wednesday, he declared the rule permanently void throughout the US.

“States like Texas can have their capacious definitions of their own child abuse or public health laws,” Kacsmaryk wrote. HIPAA, he added, “affords HHS no leeway to ‘invalidate or limit’ the ‘authority, power, or procedures’ of those laws by slicing off its favored procedures from a State’s purview.”

The decision came the same day the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

Kacsmaryk also found that the HHS rule violated federal law and states’ authority when it excluded fetuses from the definition of “person.” “States routinely confer ‘legal status’ on unborn children as it relates to child abuse,” he wrote. The new rule “strips unborn humans of any legal status they had under state laws.”

A longtime opponent of abortion, Kacsmaryk has issued other sweeping decisions targeting access to reproductive health, making his court a favorite venue of anti-abortion groups like Alliance Defending Freedom. In December 2022, he ruled that Title X clinics in Texas cannot offer teens contraceptives or family planning services without parental consent. In 2023, he temporarily nullified the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of the abortion medication mifepristone before the Supreme Court blocked his ruling.

Vacating the rule “will interfere with the ability of healthcare providers and patients to communicate confidentially and openly about a patient’s health needs.”

When Congress enacted HIPAA during the Clinton administration, it included no provisions to protect patient privacy—instead, it directed HHS to create privacy rules if lawmakers failed to act within three years. HHS did so in 2000, laying the foundation for the protection of sensitive health information as the medical field transitioned to electronic records. Abortion and civil rights organizations see HIPAA as an important backstop to protect patients’ health records from being used to criminalize miscarriages, prosecute doctors in s0-called “shield states” who provide abortion medications to patients in states with bans, and investigate people who help teenagers cross state lines to get the procedure.

Purl’s case is one of at least four challenging the Biden HIPAA rule. Missouri filed suit in January, claiming the rule unlawfully limits its ability to investigate public health concerns and health insurance fraud. The same day, 14 other Republican attorneys general sued to block the rule on similar grounds. Nearly all of the states have enacted total or near-total abortion bans

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wants the courts to go one major step further: In a complaint filed in September, he claims that the original privacy rule HHS created in 2000—the rule that protected patient health information under HIPAA—exceeded the agency’s rulemaking authority and should be thrown out in its entirety. The judge in that case is expected to make a ruling in the coming months**.**

A group of Midwest cities and the health advocacy organization Doctors for America, represented by the legal group Democracy Forward, have attempted to intervene in the lawsuits to defend the Biden rule and HIPAA more broadly, but have been challenged by plaintiffs and HHS. In one pleading, Democracy Forward expressed skepticism that Trump’s HHS would sufficiently defend the Biden rule: “The government’s representation of [our] interests is inadequate,” attorneys wrote.

Alliance Defending Freedom celebrated the Kacsmaryk ruling. “As the court rightly found, doctors and states should be able to protect patients from abuse,” ADF attorney Matt Bowman said in a press release. This unequivocally includes protection from “the harms of abortion” and “dangerous and sterilizing procedures” like gender-affirming medical care, he added.

Maddy Gitomer, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, called Kacsmaryk’s ruling “cruel.” “The 2024 HIPAA Privacy Rule has helped protect pregnant people and health care providers from invasive government intrusion into private medical information,” Gitomer told Mother Jones in a written statement. “Vacating this regulation will be detrimental to the privacy rights of pregnant people across the country, and will interfere with the ability of healthcare providers and patients to communicate confidentially and openly about a patient’s health needs.”

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The Sunrise Movement Has Launched a Campaign to “Villainize Big Oil”

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

The youth activists who put the Green New Deal on the political map are launching a new campaign to “villainize big oil” which will push for the industry to pay for climate action so the costs don’t fall on ordinary people.

Seven years ago, the Sunrise Movement captured headlines when its members stormed then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and the creation of good jobs.

The movement helped inspire some of Joe Biden’s green policies. But under Donald Trump, those moves—and other, decades-old environmental regulations—are under siege. A major reason for that, Sunrise says, is the president’s allegiance to oil bosses over ordinary people.

“He takes his orders from big oil billionaires like the ones who funded his campaign,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, co-founder and communications director of the Sunrise Movement.

Now, the Sunrise Movement is calling for polluters to foot the bill for climate action and asking down-ballot candidates to do the same. In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, the organization will be rallying young people around the country under the banner “End the Oligarchy, Save Our Futures”.

The campaign will kick off with a virtual call on Wednesday night, which will be streamed at nationwide watch parties and feature California representative Ro Khanna and TV star Hannah Einbender. It will attempt to reframe climate action, which powerful conservatives have long aimed to write off as a “culture war” issue despite its material repercussions for ordinary people.

“Climate disasters are devastating working people around the country – destroying homes and pushing people into crushing debt. It’s far past time that big oil be held accountable,” said Khanna.

With the new effort, organizers will try to harness the populist outrage that Sunrise believes helped elect Donald Trump, Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s executive director, said.

“What we’re seeing right now around the country is a deep sense that this system isn’t working for us and that it is working for billionaires and rich people,” said Shiney-Ajay. “The polluters pay frame speaks to that idea that some of the richest companies should help clean up the mess they made, while also undermining Trump on something where he polls the lowest, which is on climate issues.”

A focus of the campaign will be passing “climate superfund” bills—which require fossil fuel companies to pay for climate damage—in statehouses across the country. Vermont and New York last year became the first two states to pass such legislation, and California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oregon are considering similar measures.

“We see this as a 50-state campaign,” said O’Hanlon.

To obtain its endorsement, Sunrise has since its founding required political candidates to eschew money from oil donors. Now, it will also ask those they endorse to support such legislation.

Passing “polluters pay” bills may be a long shot in some states, but Sunrise thinks it has a better chance than other kinds of climate measures, potentially even garnering support from conservatives who are concerned about both corruption and their pocketbooks. The two successful Vermont and New York bills passed with co-sponsorship from Republicans, organizers note.

“We’re bringing this message to the people who liked the call for government efficiency that we’ve seen from Doge and Elon Musk and Trump,” said Ramón Pereira Bonilla, a 24-year-old Sunrise organizer in the flood-prone city of Orlando, Florida. “We’re saying: ‘We want to make the government more efficient for taxpayers, save taxpayers money.’”

In Florida, activists hope to see lawmakers introduce a bill in the fall or next spring, Pereira Bonilla said, adding that canvassing in the state has already suggested interest from conservatives.

In California, where historic fires ravaged Los Angeles earlier this year, advocates are looking to pass a climate superfund proposal before the legislative session ends in September, helping the state pay for infrastructure damage, public health programs, and climate resilience measures, said Nicolas Gardner Serna, 26, of Sunrise’s Los Angeles chapter.

“We’ve known that fossil fuel extraction has caused the climate crisis for decades,” he said. “There is a sustained and powerful effort from the community to hold corporations accountable.”

Laws in Vermont and New York are facing legal challenges from oil interests, and Trump in April issued an order to “stop the enforcement” of climate superfund laws. But Sunrise and other activist groups believe they can still succeed.

“When we organize, we can rewrite the rules and build something more fair, more honest, and more prepared for the future we deserve,” Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said.

Sunrise’s new campaign will also aim to re-energize the youth climate protest movement, which advocates say has lost steam in recent years. To do so, it will hold nationwide “school strikes” like the ones popularized by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, and will also explore using more disruptive nonviolent tactics than they have previously employed.

The rallies will aim to build momentum and courage in service of a prospective general strike in 2028, as called for by the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain. Students helped kick off historical general strikes, such as that in May 1968 in France, Sunrise notes.

In the nearer term, the organization will be looking to next year’s midterm elections as a way to fight back against Trump’s attacks on climate action, pushing candidates to pledge to support ordinary people over corporate interests and stand up to Trump, Shiney-Ajay said.

“We’ll be looking for candidates to talk about climate as the populist, working-class issue that it is,” she said.

The campaign could be a wake-up call for Trump, who not only benefits oil bosses but has also placed them in the White House, said GardnerSerna.

“The billionaires and corporations and fascists from the administration are terrified of communities coming together and standing up for themselves,” he said.

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FDA Approves “Breakthrough” HIV Drug

On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a highly effective, injectable drug to help prevent the transmission of HIV, according to its manufacturer, Gilead Sciences. The drug, lenacapavir, will be sold under the name Yeztugo.

“This is a historic day in the decades-long fight against HIV,” Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day said in a press release. “Yeztugo is one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of our time and offers a very real opportunity to help end the HIV epidemic.”

Indeed, in clinical trials, lenacapavir showed stunning efficacy as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, blocking infection in 100 percent of participants who’d received it in one trial and 99.9 percent in another.

But Yeztugo’s approval also comes at an unfortunate time—amid the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to efforts to fight AIDS across the globe.

That includes, as my colleague Sam Van Pykeren and I reported in March, the gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency tasked with fighting diseases like AIDS worldwide; kneecapping PEPFAR, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a program that’s saved an estimated 26 million lives since its founding by President George W. Bush in 2003; and shutting down several high-profile HIV prevention studies. Take, for instance, the MATRIX study, halted in response to a January executive order:

One set of trials known as the MATRIX study,a $125 million endeavor funded by USAID, was designed to evaluate new HIV prevention products for women, including a dissolvable vaginal film, a dissolvable vaginal insert, and a vaginal ring meant to prevent pregnancy and HIV transmission. Dr. Catherine Chappell, an assistant professor and OB-GYN at the University of Pittsburgh who helped lead the trial for the vaginal ring, says Trump’s order meant her phase I clinical trial was abruptly ended mid-data collection. “We had participants in South Africa that still had these [placebo] rings in their vaginas,” she says. Chappell worries that dropping the study midway through could have “irreparably damaged” researchers’ relationship with the community. “It is just completely unethical,” she says.

Researchers at USAID had also planned further clinical trials for lenacapavir. “All of that’s just been cut off,” a former USAID analyst told us in March.

In other words, as we argued, the historic arrival of lenavapavir (aka Yeztugo) as a form of PrEP makes now a uniquely bad time to walk away from HIV research and aid:

In short, after decades of research, science delivered the most effective preventative HIV drugs the world has ever seen—and the US is throwing up its hands and abandoning efforts to share them with those most in need. That isn’t just a moral failing, experts say, but also goes against the country’s self-interest. For decades, officials have seen foreign disease prevention as a form of “soft power”—it engenders trust within the global community while ensuring fewer infections both abroad and, ultimately, at home.

As Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the international HIV prevention organization AVAC, told the New York Times on Wednesday, “We’re on the precipice of now being able to deliver the greatest prevention option we’ve had in 44 years of this epidemic. And it’s as if that opportunity is being snatched out of our hands by the policies of the last five months.”

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Trump’s Medicaid Cuts Will Fund His Failed Border Wall

Tucked into Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” spending bill—which passed in the House last month, and promises major cuts to Medicaid—is a provision to spend $46.5 billion in taxpayer dollars on building his long-promised wall along the US-Mexico border. The White House says that thefunding will provide an additional 701 miles of primary wall and 900 miles of river barriers—but given how the construction of the wall played out in Trump’s first term, those numbers are wildly optimistic.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to build 1000 miles of border wall for $8 to $12 billion—and said Mexico would pay for it. As a first-term president, he asked Congress for $5.7 billion towards the wall; it allocated $1.3 billion in border security funding instead, and Trump ended up invoking emergency powers to transfer funds from elsewhere in government to the project. As reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, costs quickly ballooned: by the end of Trump’s first term, only 47 miles of previously unwalledland received new barriers—at a public cost of about $15 billion. An appeals court ruled in October 2020 that Trump’s use of emergency powers to divert billions in military funds to border wall construction was unlawful. Mexico, of course, did not pay for it.

This time, the bill that includes the massive wall spending narrowly passed the House in a 215-214 vote that saw two Republicans join all Democrats in voting no, with three others voting present or missing the vote altogether. Trump’s bill has faced criticism from Republicans, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) specifically calling for cuts to its border wall spending. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found on Tuesday that the House bill would increase deficits by $2.8 trillion over the next decade.

To balance out the wall funding, other Senate Republicans have called for further cuts to Medicaid—despite the House bill already cutting hundreds of billions in Medicaid funding, which one analysis from the Annals of Internal Medicine found would increase the number of uninsured people by 7.6 million, and the number of annual deaths by more than 16 thousand. The cuts have been condemned by the medical community, including in a recent statement by the American Hospital Association. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blasted the Senate GOP’s version of the bill, saying that its “cuts to Medicaid are deeper and more devastating than even the Republican House’s disaster of a bill.”An AP-NORC poll released Monday found that the vast majority of Americans do not want to see Medicaid cut, with only 18 percent of US adults saying the program has too much funding.

The bill itself is also unpopular among the American people: A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 53 percent of voters opposed it, with just 27 percent in support and 20 percent not offering an opinion. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that 42 percent of Americans were not in favor of the bill, with 23 percent supporting—and that fully 52 percent of Americans are specifically against spending $50 billion to complete the border wall.

But—as with tariffs and attempts to cut agency funding without congressional approval—the administration is evidently willing to put Americans’ concerns aside when spending their money.

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The Trump Administration Is Shutting Down the National Suicide Hotline’s Program for LGBTQ Youth

The Trump administration is shutting down services for LGBTQ youth who call 988, the national suicide hotline.

Since the hotline’s launch in 2022, hotline callers could press 3 to speak with counselors trained to work specifically with LGBTQ youth, who are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. The service received half a million calls and texts last year; in February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.

On Tuesday, the Trevor Project, a LGBTQ suicide prevention nonprofit that contracts with Health and Human Services to respond to the calls, received a stop-work order, effective July 17.

A statement from HHS on Tuesday said the hotline will “focus on serving all help seekers” and “no longer silo LGB+ youth services.” Notably, the statement omitted the markers referring to transgender and queer individuals.

“This is a death sentence potentially to thousands of youth across the United States,” said Paolo del Vecchio, former director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s Office of Recovery. “This is not making America healthy again,” he added. “We’re closing the door on people asking for help who are thinking about taking their lives.”

The closure effectively preempts a similar move proposed in a 2026 budget proposal to eliminate the LGBTQ hotline option, which would have required congressional approval. The proposal prompted outrage among Democratic policymakers.

Adrian Shanker, a senior advisor on LGBTQ policy under the Biden administration, noted that 988’s LGBTQ youth program, which historically had bipartisan support, was created because of the outsized volume of calls the suicide hotline received from such youth. “This is not about politics. It’s not about the political divide on transgender medicine or trans people in the military, or any of the other hot-button political topics,” he said. “This is about suicide prevention and crisis intervention for people living at a higher rate of suicide risk.”

The order came the day before the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Shanker said the timing is likely a coincidence, but still “an insult upon injury” against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s war on transgender rights.

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“Madness”: A Retired Brig. General Slams Trump’s Military Power Grab

Retired Brigadier General Greg Smith spent 35 years in the Army National Guard. He’s seen riots. He’s protected political conventions. He led the military’s joint task force in response to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. But he’s never witnessed the US armed forces being used the way they’ve been deployed recently in Los Angeles. “This is madness,” he says of President Donald Trump’s call-up of both the National Guard and the Marines in response to protests over the administration’s immigration raids.

Normally, federal troops are deployed at the request of a governor, often when a state’s resources are overwhelmed with something like mass protests or a natural disaster. But earlier this month, Trump unilaterally federalized 4,000 soldiers from the California National Guard and called in 700 Marines in response to protests opposing raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement—all without the consent of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Smith says it appears there’s little to no communication between local police and those military groups, which could lead to potential conflicts on the ground. But he also sees a larger issue playing out: the president wielding the armed forces for purely political purposes.

“I’m watching the military becoming co-opted by politicians, and where that leads is some really troubling places,” Smith says. “If that happens, the roots of our democracy are in extreme danger.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Smith talks with host Al Letson about the “madness” of federal troops entering LA in response to recent protests, why the Insurrection Act needs reformed, and what he sees as the military being increasingly tasked with enforcing a political agenda rather than defending the Constitution.

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

This interview was transcribed and edited for length and clarity.

Al Letson: Right now in Los Angeles, people are protesting ICE detentions and they were met with local police, the Marines and the National Guard. Now, the Guard wasn’t called up by Governor Gavin Newsom, but instead by President Trump. Under what authority did Trump have to order the Guard to become involved and why?

Greg Smith: One of the things that’s not well explained in the media is that the California National Guard, as soon as the president calls it to federal duty, stops becoming the State National Guard. So they are no longer answering to the state of California or its governor. They now have the same status as the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne. They are federal troops at that point. That means that there are a whole lot of things that they can’t do because they are no longer under state control. So the president, under the Insurrection Act, can call up federal forces to protect federal facilities or quell an insurrection or protect citizens whose civil rights are being violated.

President Johnson did this in 1965 in Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators. What President Trump is alleging is that looting and property destruction are violating the civil rights of shop owners. So that’s the authority he’s using. But here’s where it gets a little convoluted. He didn’t use the Insurrection Act. He didn’t say, “I’m calling out the Insurrection Act.” He went to an obscure section of Title X, which governs the armed forces. And if your listeners care, it’s Section 12406, which authorizes the president to call up forces to protect federal facilities and federal personnel. However, the order is supposed to be executed through the state governor. That didn’t happen. And that’s the basis of California’s lawsuit.

So as someone who’s been in the Guard and been a commander in the Guard for many years, now retired, what was your thoughts on watching this LA response and how it was organized?

I’ll tell you my thoughts. My thoughts were, this is madness. Let me use the example of the Boston Marathon bombings. Civil support is a tiered response, leveled response. So when something happens, the local authorities respond. When they’re overwhelmed, they say to the state, “We need help.” When the state resources are overwhelmed, they say to the federal government, “We need help.” That didn’t happen here. The reason that it’s a tiered response, Al, is to achieve something called unity of effort. And I’ll say that again, it’s a military term, but unity of effort basically says everybody is singing from the same hymnal. They’re coordinated, they’re moving together.

There’s also a concept called incident command. And what that is, is when madness is occurring, that there is one element that says, “We are in command here,” and the other elements say, “Okay, what do you need us to do?” During the marathon bombings, Boston Police and the FBI did what was called a unified command. So when I’m pushing forces into the city of Boston, I’m in communication with them. “Where do you need us? What do you need us to do? What resources do you need?” That’s not happening in LA. You’ve got the police and the California Highway Patrol dealing with demonstrations. And oh, by the way, now you’ve got this whole other military group, and there appears to be no communication between the two.

Yeah. It seems like a recipe for disaster.

Yeah.

So the courts have gone back and forth over the legality of Trump calling the troops without Newsom. I just want to dive through that legal stuff again. So we already talked about Title X. What’s Title XXXII?

Title XXXII is federal funding for National Guard soldiers under the governor’s command. So that’s typically how you are paid and how resources are provided for an emergency; a flood, a hurricane, a wildfire. But Title XXXII is gubernatorial command and control. So Title XXXII has really nothing to do with what’s going on in LA right now because Governor Newsom has been really kind of shoved aside.

Yeah. And State Active Duty

So State Active Duty is when, and I worked on the State Active Duty a lot, is when the governor says, “Hey, National Guard…” And remember, the governor is the commander in chief of the National Guard. “Hey, I need you to go sandbag that river. It’s not a federal emergency, but I think it’s pretty darn important from a state side.” So the money’s coming out of the state budget. So to be honest, Al, the State Active Duty Title XXXII provisions are really about who pays the bill

Right. Okay.

Both under the governor’s command and control.

Last technical question. What is the Posse Comitatus Act?

I’ll tell you what it is and then I’ll tell you where it comes from because it has a very interesting origin. Posse Comitatus is a long strictly held concept, which basically says you cannot employ federal troops to conduct law enforcement activities against people within the United States. Posse Comitatus says law enforcement has that responsibility, military does not. Not allowed. The only exception is the Insurrection Act. And that really should only be invoked when there is a civil war. But we’ve seen presidents use that act under less provocation.
Posse Comitatus actually comes out of southern states during Reconstruction because they didn’t like union troops stationed in southern states enforcing voting rights. Posse Comitatus comes into the legal framework, I believe, in the 1870s or the 1880s. And it was really a move by the former Confederacy to get union stabilization troops out of the south.

So it was used in the Civil War, but it’s actually a good idea that the government cannot use military against its citizens.

Agreed. It’s a good provision.

So we talked about this a little bit earlier, but can you tell me what is the Insurrection Act? And do you think it should be applied to the protest? I mean, does that act need reform?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. The Insurrection Act needs reform. So the Insurrection Act, I’m not looking at notes, but I’m going to say it’s been used, oh goodness, probably a dozen times. President Eisenhower used it to desegregate schools in the south. President Bush used it in the Rodney King riots response. But that was at the request of the states, and that was a state governor saying, “Hey, I need help. I need federal troops in here to restore order.” So that was, I would say, an appropriate use, is when the governor says to the president, “Send help.”
But what’s an insurrection? The courts have not defined it. And I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you, I sure as heck think that January 6th was an insurrection, but we didn’t have calling out the Insurrection Act then. But the activities, the protests, the level of civil disobedience in Los Angeles, is that an insurrection? I’m not a lawyer, but that doesn’t look like an insurrection to me. The Insurrection Act needs reform, it needs specificity. Congress needs to take that up. And if they won’t, then the Supreme Court needs to rule on what constitutes an insurrection.

So you talked about this a little bit before, but I just want to go a little deeper. While you were in the National Guard, the Boston Marathon bombing happened in 2013. Tell me about that day and the role you played in command.

So the Massachusetts National Guard, probably since the Boston Marathon began, has always secured the route along the 26 miles up to the city of Boston. So I had done that as a young officer. And it’s not tough duty, Al. You are out there very early, but the job consists of, the runners are coming down the route, you are turning to the people behind you in the crowd and saying, “Hey, can you folks step back up on the curb?” And they do. It’s a very simple job. And by two o’clock in the afternoon, life is good.

However, 2013, I’m at the finish line with Staff Sergeant Patrick Smith. I could not call him my driver. He was my guardian angel, my bodyguard, my conscience. So I’m with him. And he’s saying, “Hey, let’s watch more runners.” And I’m saying, “No, no, no, no, no. I got stuff to do. Let’s get back to headquarters.” We were maybe 20 minutes away from the finish line when my Blackberry went off and I remember the voice of Colonel Mark Merlino saying, “Sir, there have been explosions at the finish line. There are multiple fatalities and widespread injuries. What are your orders?” Life changed very quickly.

So that’s why we have training. We were very concerned about something called a Mumbai style attack where the initial explosions are actually a faint to draw responders in, and then the ultimate attack follows afterwards. Some people have criticized me for that. They say, “Well, don’t you feel silly when it turned out to be two people?” No, I don’t feel silly. You always plan for the worst. So that’s how things played out. I will say this, I was unhappy that we were told that we couldn’t be armed, and there were some hard words exchanged about that. We paired National Guard teams with armed Boston policemen because I didn’t like the idea of soldiers being exposed to danger.

Well, fast-forward, when the Tsarnaevs came up out of hiding, we aren’t. We actually didn’t ask at that point. We just said, “If we’re going after armed and dangerous terrorists, we have to arm ourselves.” And so we moved into Watertown and we formed the net around the Tsarnaev apprehension area. I’m very proud of what soldiers did.

In your book, there were times where you talk about Guardsmen being relentlessly taunted for hours on end by protesters. Do you think that a Guard should have weapons at a protest?

So, if I can tell another story.

Yeah, please.

When I was very, very young, I was 24 years old, I was quickly dispatched to a civil disturbance with a force of 40 soldiers, who, by the way, were not the 40 soldiers that I usually commanded. They were the first 40 people to arrive. And somebody said, “Lieutenant Smith, take those 40 people and get over there and secure that state hospital.” The context, which doesn’t really matter, but the legislature had declined to fund the budget. The state workers who manned the hospital had gone on a payless payday and they were angry. And they wanted to shut down the hospital, but there were people in the hospital that were on life support. I’m sure you can understand the crisis now.

Yeah, it’s tense.

So at night, we’re out there trying to hold back these very angry workers who haven’t been paid. Things get worse at night because people have a sense of anonymity. So there was a lot of pushing and shoving. There was a lot of spitting, kicking, those types of things. Soldiers are human, and you can really only take so much of that before you become tense. So at one point, one of the protesters broke through the line and he grabbed me by the shirt and he said, “I want your name. You’re in charge here. I want to know who you are.” I’m 24 years old. I’m an army lieutenant. He’s a drunk, middle-aged guy. I grabbed him by the shoulders and I pushed him back outside the picket line and I said, “I don’t touch you, you don’t touch me.”

What I didn’t realize is that he stumbled and he fell and everybody laughed at him. About 15 minutes later, it’s pitch black. There’s this scuffle. And my guys are taking somebody down to the ground. And the police, we had a couple of policemen with us, are cuffing this guy. And I looked down and I realized it’s the guy who had grabbed my shirt. He had a baseball bat, and he was coming to use my head as a fastball. So let me go five days from there. So the operation goes on. This is in the summer. Five days later, it’s afternoon, and I’m out looking for soldiers on the picket line, because I’m back and forth in the hospital looking at our soldiers who are doing operations like feeding and changing beds. And I can’t find the picket line. It’s gone. There are no protesters, there are no soldiers.
And I look behind this bush and everybody is sitting in the grass with a case of Budweiser in the middle of all. And they’re all drinking their beers, having a great time, soldiers, protesters, all together. I’m a lieutenant. I just can’t be drinking on duty. I took two steps forward and I said, “What’s the mission here?” To keep peace. That’s about as peaceful as anything’s going to get.

Absolutely.

So I shut my mouth and I went back to the hospital. But here’s my point. On night one, we would’ve killed each other. On day five, we were drinking beer together. What I learned is, the first mission in crowd control is to de-escalate the situation. You don’t push people down so that other people laugh at them. To try to diffuse the situation. Took me a while to learn that.

Do you think that kind of training is being given to the Guards now as far as to be able to work with protesters? I think that some of our rhetoric, when we talk about these protests, when we talk about these clashes, is that the people that you are up against are like your sworn enemies and not fellow Americans. And I feel like that’s the missing piece on both sides is that we are not looking at each other like we are fellow Americans, that we all have stake in this thing. And people’s first amendment rights should be respected and the give and pull between how that respect is shown. I’m just curious, is anybody being trained in that fashion?

The answer is yes and no. Remember, Al, that as a citizen soldier who’s only available for training for a relatively short period of time, there’s a lot that has to be done. Weapons qualification, physical fitness, nuclear, biological and chemical training, how to wear a gas mask and protect yourself, first aid. I could go on and on and on and on. Some units get very good crowd control training. When National Guardsmen go into a crowd control situation, they’ve got, I want to say, three priorities. One, to secure whatever it is they’re securing. They’re always either securing a building, protecting a group of people, or there’s an objective to be secured.

Two, they are making sure that no one’s rights are being abused. So they are very aware of free speech rights. People can say what they want to say, do what they want to do. The line becomes fuzzy when punches are thrown, kicks are… Where is the line between assault and acting out? And the third thing is safety, to make sure that no one is hurt or killed. So they’re aware of that. I am confident that they know what they’re doing there. In terms of how to do it and whether they’ve been specifically trained on crowd control, maybe, maybe not, and probably not.

Yeah. Which, does that concern you when watching what’s happening in Los Angeles?

So I certainly don’t want to hold myself up as some guru, but in Massachusetts, when we had to put troops into civil support missions, we generally went to military police organizations or air security police. They have some training around this in terms of their basic job training. They also are likely to also be law enforcement personnel. Remember, when you get a Guardsman, you’re getting a soldier and you’re getting some other profession. So mainly military police and air police units are full of cops. So putting them on the street to do crowd control is a good thing. They know how to do that.

I didn’t see any effort in LA for them to recruit military police, mainly because military police will wear an armband that says MP. I didn’t detect any of that. It would’ve been wiser for California to activate their military police units because there’s a much higher level of expertise. And I will also tell you this, we very rarely, almost never put National Guardsmen on the street with long arms. Pistols are what we put them on the street with, because it looks like law enforcement, it’s less intrusive, and it leaves their hands free to do other things.

Did you see Guardsmen with long arms in California?

Yes.

Or at the protests in LA?

Yeah. That’s all they have.

And you think that’s a mistake?

That I do.

Yeah. So my last question to you is, the National Guard has been such a huge part of your life and career. Seeing what’s happening right now, how concerned are you about the Guard being used for political purposes?

Hugely. I mean, I am a citizen soldier. I believe that what makes the United States military unique is that we don’t give up our citizenship. And so therefore, the military needs to be comprised of people who are progressive, conservative, socialist, I don’t know, vegan, carnivores, all sorts of people. And it needs to be that way because we are a pluralistic, expansive society. And the military needs to be able to be an honest broker, a fair-minded force that protects everybody regardless of what their opinions are.

I’m watching the military becoming co-opted by politicians. And where that leads is some really troubling places. Not only are people starting to doubt whether the United States military would protect them because of their political leanings, but now people are becoming nervous that the military may be used to enforce a political agenda. If that happens, Al, the roots of our democracy are in extreme danger. The United States military has always accepted that we work for civilian leadership. We’ve never challenged that. But we’ve also always maintained that while we work for you, you don’t own us. Your party does not own us. There are questions arising about that nowadays, and that makes me fearful.

Well, it feels like that is specifically what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants, is that he wants a military that is completely loyal to not the Constitution, but to President Trump.

I’m very glad that you mentioned that. Commitment to defend the Constitution is the oath we swear over and over and over again. The President is not part of it. Only respecting the fact that he is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces under the Constitution. But we are devoted to the Constitution. So yes, I have concerns.

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PBS Funding Cuts: A Blow to Children Who Need It Most

This article was co-published with EdSurge, a nonprofit newsroom that covers education through original journalism and research. Sign up for their newsletters.

Near a cardboard cutout of Daniel Tiger, a small stuffed version of Curious George, and plenty of promotional posters in the PBS Kids office, there sits thick stacks of graduation invitations. Most are accompanied by handwritten letters from students extolling the influence children’s television shows had on their journeys to donning the cap and gown—one fresh grad writes that she plans to become an elementary school teacher thanks to PBS.

Sara DeWitt says that while the office has seen its fair share of letters over her two-plus decades with the network—fielding scores of wedding invitations and even more to birthday parties—it has not received so many graduation announcements until this season.

“The outpouring of support is helping remind us why this work is so important and what an amazing impact it has on lives,” DeWitt, the PBS Kids senior vice president and general manager, says. “We see this outpouring as proof of the thoughtfulness and intentionality of the media we’re creating—and that it works.”

The deluge of encouragement comes amid a flurry of actions from the US Department of Education and the White House moving to pull national funding from the Public Broadcasting Service. Justifying the ordered change, the Trump administration argued that spending public money on media groups like PBS through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is “not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” especially considering there are “abundant, diverse, and innovative news options” in today’s media landscape.

The funding cuts would threaten to dismantle public television, long seen as a safe viewing space for children and parents alike.

As PBS leaders fight the loss of funding, they argue that it may not only spell the end of PBS programming like “Arthur,” “Clifford the Big Red Dog” and “The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!”; it could also be detrimental to the foundation of research focused on children’s media.

And when there are more options than ever for children’s entertainment, advocates say that producing research-backed, high-quality, non-commercial options for families—particularly those who live in low-resource areas—has never been so important.

While most parents trust PBS programming—citing it as more trustworthy than any other media source for 22 straight years—many do not know the guardrails put in place to ensure shows are both informative and entertaining, giving the one-two punch necessary for educating children.

“They don’t necessarily understand production, but they sure are appreciative,” says Shelley Pasnik, principal investigator for Ready to Learn programming, a 30-year effort from the federal government that helps to develop educational media. “Once they start to engage and have the space to slow down, they think, ‘There’s a reason I trust the media coming from PBS Kids.’ It’s joyful, and educational, and we’ve heard that in our formal research process.”

Dave Peth, the creator and executive producer of PBS show “Lyla in the Loop,” has worked on other educational media in his 20-plus years in the industry, and he says “no one” deploys the level of rigorous research and testing used in PBS programming.

“Lyla in the Loop,” for example, goes beyond showcasing a family of six living in a Philadelphia-esque city. Peth originally began developing the show in 2015 to focus on computational thinking, which deploys strategic thinking patterns commonly used in engineering and computer science. Nine years later, the show premiered.

“Yes, it does take extra steps to make sure what we’re building is based on solid research on what works in education, but it’s worth it.”

“It’s not uncommon for a PBS broadcast series to take a fairly long time to develop,” he says. “Yes, it does take extra steps to make sure what we’re building is based on solid research on what works in education, but it’s worth it.”

PBS works with advisers—ranging from educational researchers to psychologists—who create a framework of learning goals based on studies and topics that are age-appropriate for children. Producers use those frameworks when creating content for the network—whether it’s a televised show or a game on the PBS Kids app—while ensuring it remains engaging and fun for children. PBS also brings in research evaluators, like Pasnik, who take proposed stories and present them to children, evaluating their comprehension and engagement. Any takeaways and adjustments are made in the final story and applied to future episodes.

There is also a large focus on “child-centered content,” designed specifically for the age of the target audience and how much they can process. For example, most PBS Kids episodes are 11 minutes, accounting for children’s shorter attention spans and how much they can retain in a single sitting.

“PBS allows producers to take the time and do it right; we don’t take shortcuts,” Peth says. “You step back and realize, ‘Yes, we are making a contribution,’ to the media landscape and to kids’ and families’ lives.”

The research is particularly important because, as a public media company, PBS regularly and publicly posts its findings for others to build upon.

Federal funding, like the Ready to Learn grant, accounts for about 15 percent of the PBS total budget, costing each taxpayer roughly $1.40 per year, according to PBS. PBS also receives support from foundations, programming dues—and, as many will recall hearing at the end of each PBS episode, from viewers like you.

The Ready to Learn grant saw its funding from the US Department of Education cut in May, prematurely ending its current five-year run, leaving $23 million untouched and stopping its research work immediately.

If this slashed federal spending leads to programming cuts, proponents of the network say it will be tough to replicate the scale of what PBS produces, along with the decades of research conducted by the corporation and the know-how to deploy it.

“It’s like asking, ‘Don’t you think other universities can do the kind of high-quality research Harvard is doing?’ No, I don’t,” says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a director of Temple University’s Infant and Child Laboratory. “They don’t have the people, the labs, and the sustained support.”

In addition to the research and programming being done at a national level, PBS is also in the unique position of spanning about 330 local stations. Most of those affiliates work directly in their own communities, offering workshops, camps, and other engagement efforts.

“They’re bringing this programming that builds off these characters that children love and relate to, and bringing the learning to them,” says Seeta Pai, vice president of education and children’s media at the PBS Boston-based affiliate GBH. “That’s what these stations are uniquely suited to do; they’re the boots on the ground.”

Those local outreach programs are particularly important in what some call “low-resource” areas, meaning places where children live in lower-income households and have less access to broadband internet or information centers like libraries.

“What’s been found, again and again, is that access to educational content is more predictive for learning, for academic outcomes and social outcomes…the effects are strongest for families that don’t have access to other material resources.”

“I see [PBS programming] as a resource for those that may not have access to other material goods,” says Rachel Barr, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University. “What’s been found, again and again, is that access to educational content is more predictive for learning, for academic outcomes, and social outcomes. And again, the effects are strongest for families that don’t have access to other material resources.”

The studies showcasing the positive effects of PBS on children’s learning seem endless. A 2015 study showed children who watched “Super Why!” had stronger literacy skills. That same year, a study found viewers of “Peg + Cat” had stronger mathematical skills. A 2021 study found “Molly of Denali” had better problem-solving skills. Several researchers that EdSurge interviewed pointed to a study from the University of California, Los Angeles, asking teenagers—the first to have grown up watching “Daniel Tiger”—about the show, with almost all respondents not only remembering it but also specific episodes and lessons learned.

“We hear on social media almost daily about something like that,” Pai says. “There’s the short-term impact with children’s learning but it’s also a benefit to society. Kids who had more early childhood education are likely to do better in school and life; that prevents societal expenses later on down the road, whether it be crime or poverty.”

And with roughly half of U.S. children not attending any formal early childhood education program, the supplement of PBS’ research-backed programming could make a difference for their future academic and social-emotional performance.

For years, PBS supporters have argued that government leaders should consider these stakes before reducing support for public media. Mr. Rogers famously testified to that effect in front of the Senate in 1969.

More recently, in 2023, an appropriations bill proposed eliminating federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Shortly thereafter, the advocacy coalition Protect My Public Media asked local broadcasting stations how they would be affected. Roughly 230 responded, nearly all stating that the loss of federal funding would cause “imminent” cuts to staff and programming. Twenty-six stations confirmed that they would be forced off-air, and 23 more stations would need to reduce their coverage areas.

That threat was eliminated. But now, faced with its current threat, PBS has already started shrinking. GBH, which created PBS standouts like “Arthur” and “Molly in Denali,” laid off some staff earlier this month, while at the national level, PBS furloughed roughly a quarter of its Kids division.

President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for cuts to PBS argues that there is more media than ever to access. Indeed, the YouTube Kids app amassed over 145 million downloads in 2024, and the majority of streaming networks all offer “kids” profiles stuffed with shows like “CoComelon,” “Bluey” and “Ms. Rachel.”

But that embarrassment of riches ironically makes choosing high-quality programs more difficult than ever for families.

“We’re all awash in content possibilities, but much like parents say it’s a full-time job reading emails for children’s schools, it can feel like a job to find content beneficial for kids,” Pasnik says.

Children spend plenty of time on screens regardless of the content, equal to more than two hours of their day on average, according to Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on media and its suitability for children. Screen time only increases when accounting for lower-income versus higher-income homes. According to the most recent census from Common Sense Media, children from lower-income households (those earning less than $50,000 a year annually) spend nearly twice as much time with screens compared to those from higher-income households (which make $100,000 or more a year).

Hirsh-Pasek, of Temple University, compares media consumption to a diet: If you cut out nutritious food, children will either turn toward more unhealthy food, like desserts, or eat less in general, akin to going hungry. She views the funding hit against PBS in the same vein.

“It’s creating a digital desert,” Hirsh-Pasek, who also serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says. “Our high-quality programs are the nutritious stuff. There is so much out there that isn’t good for kids. If you take away the stuff that is [good], you’re leaving kids with digital junk food.”

“Our high-quality programs are the nutritious stuff. There is so much out there that isn’t good for kids. If you take away the stuff that is [good], you’re leaving kids with digital junk food.”

Starting in the 1990s, the Children’s Television Act required broadcast television to air a dedicated amount of educational content and limited advertising during children’s programs. The rise of streaming and online entertainment undermines that guardrail.

“The expansion of the media landscape is a little jarring; we are having kids watch TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube videos that don’t have a foundation of research,” says Amaya Garcia, director of preK–12 research and practice at the think tank New America. “Just because you can access it on YouTube for free doesn’t mean that content is high-quality and appropriate.”

Many entertainment options for children claim to be educational and have good intentions but still lack the research-backed methods employed at PBS. Baby Einstein, for example, was regarded as quality programming in the mid-1990s, eventually selling to Disney. However, several studies found that it created no additional benefits, with one even finding it inhibited babies’ language development.

“Researchers can see what children attend to—and they may attend to a lot of things, but they may not learn from it,” Barr, the researcher from Georgetown University, says. “That’s where the PBS grants look at what children are gaining, versus attending. And that’s the difference between a business model and an educational model.”

Garcia has seen the media landscape change even among her three children. With her oldest, born in 2008, “We watched lots of PBS,” she says. She did less of that with her second child. With her third, born in 2019, there was a pivot toward watching shows via the PBS app.

“It’s definitely changed and gotten harder as the kids have grown up, but I also had the foundational experience of looking at media, of what is good and bad,” Garcia says. “The bottom line: We want high-quality public media that’s accessible to kids. Even in light of the evolving media landscape, we still need something parents can trust and rely upon.”

GBH’s Pai believes younger parents especially those who grew up with screens, have less understanding of what makes for high-quality programming.

“As the tsunami of content has increased, there’s also an increased need for media literacy,” she says. “It’s almost like we’re educators making the curriculum in school: There’s a level of expertise that we bring. And the brand equity is so high in terms of trust … but it’s almost like they’re taking it for granted that it’s there.”

Those working on PBS shows or for the PBS corporation were all hesitant to speak about the organization’s fate as the funding fight continues, instead focusing on highlighting the benefits the network can provide for children in the interim.

“I can’t possibly predict what’s going to happen, but what doesn’t change is people’s need for growth, and kids’ need to expand their minds and gain new skills,” says Peth, of “Lyla in the Loop.” “So as long as that very human need exists—producers like me and others, and PBS, are going to continue to make content to serve that need.”

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Miccosukee Tribe Champions Conservation Effort to Secure Florida’s Wild Lands

Almost two centuries ago, Native American tribe members sought the protection of Florida’s Everglades during the Seminole wars as they hid from government forces seeking to banish them to Indian territories that later became Oklahoma.

Now, as the Trump administration continues its wholesale slashing of federal funding from conservation projects, the Miccosukee Tribe is stepping up to fulfill what it sees as a “moral obligation” to return the favor.

The tribe is looking to buy and protect environmentally significant lands, including some that once provided refuge, in a groundbreaking partnership agreement with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation. The corridor is an ambitious project to connect 18 million acres (7.3 million hectares) of state and privately owned wilderness into a contiguous, safe habitat for scores of imperiled and roaming species, including black bears, Key deer, and Florida panthers.

Tribal officials say they will work with the foundation and other partners to “explore the acquisition and stewardship” of land within the corridor considered important to the tribe and its community.

“We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the lands, and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial,” said Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee Tribe headquartered on a 130-square-mile reservation west of Miami.

“[But] we’ve seen some sort of hesitancy a lot of times to commit to projects because of the erratic nature of how the government is deciding to spend their money or allocate money.”

“We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the lands, and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial.”

The agreement, announced at a summit of corridor stakeholders in Orlando last week, comes as a study by the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) found that 60 percent of federally recognized tribes have lost grants or other federal funds, totaling more than $56 million since Donald Trump took office in January.

“These services are part of what we receive in lieu of all of the years of what we gave up, our land, our resources, and sometimes, unfortunately, our culture and language,” Julie Thorstenson, executive director of the NAFWS, told the Wildlife Society last month.

With government funding drying up, and the future of existing federal land stewardship agreements uncertain because of Trump’s sustained onslaught on the National Parks Service, Cypress said tribe leaders had re-evaluated its work with other partners.

“For good reason, my predecessors had more of a standoffish approach. They went through a lot of the areas where they did deal with conservation groups, federal agencies, state agencies, pretty much not including them in conversations, or going back on their word. They just had a very different approach to this sort of thing,” he said.

“My administration has taken more of a collaborative approach. We’re engaging with different organizations not just to build relationships, but fix relationships that may have gone sour in the past, or were just non-existent.”

Cypress said the tribe, which already has collaborative or direct stewardship of almost 3 million acres in the Everglades and Biscayne national parks, and Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, was working to identify and prioritize land within the corridor of historical significance and to “get those conversations going”.

He said:

Financially, the tribe will invest some money, but we’ll also be instrumental in finding investors, partners interested in the same thing, which is to conserve as much of our natural habitat as possible while making room for growth and development.

We’ve shown we can do it in a sustainable way, and our voice can help in shaping the future of Florida as far as development goes because once a lot of the land gets developed we’re not going to get it back.

We need to do it in a way where we benefit not just ourselves in the present, but for generations in the future as well.

The Florida Wildlife Corridor was established in 2021 by lawmakers who approved an initial $400 million for acquisition against a multi-year $2 billion budget for land conservation. About 10 million acres have been preserved, with another 8m considered “opportunity areas” in need of protection, and environmental groups warning large areas could still be lost to development.

The legislature, which is weighing cuts to corridor funding as it attempts to balance state spending, has encouraged commercial investment and partnerships. At last week’s summit, the Disney Conservation Fund announced a $1 million grant for training conservation teams and expanding public access to trails and natural areas.

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Inside the Scrappy Network of Volunteers Protecting Their Neighbors From ICE

The group chat lit up Jonathan Paz’s phone: Another immigration raid was happening a few blocks away. Paz took off running.

He arrived minutes later to a quiet block of auto body warehouses in Waltham, Massachusetts, where SUVs with tinted windows had surrounded a sedan and apprehended the driver, a man in his late 20s. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in a balaclava and tactical vest stood in the street, talking to a 13-year-old boy who had been in the car. As Paz approached, he realized the agent was going through the boy’s phone and asking about his immigration status.

Paz, 31, is the founder of Fuerza, a volunteer group in Waltham that responds to ongoing ICE arrests. On that gray morning in May, he had been in the middle of a neighborhood patrol walk when he got the text messages. He did as he’d trained dozens of volunteers to do: He pulled out his phone and started recording, stayed a few feet from the officers, and addressed the boy. “I was telling him to relax. I was telling him to breathe,” Paz says. “I was telling him his rights—like, don’t say nothing. You’re here. You’re fine with us.”

Within minutes, the agents had driven away with the man, leaving the child alone on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets.

A handful of other volunteers were already on the scene, including Colleen Bradley-MacArthur, a Waltham city councilor, who recorded video as an agent veered his car toward where she stood on the sidewalk before telling her not to interfere.

The operation dispersed as quickly as it escalated. Within minutes, the agents had driven away with the man, leaving the child alone on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. Volunteers walked the boy home—the man who had been detained was his dad’s friend—and suggested a pro bono lawyer who might be able to help the man, who was detained at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility. They logged the incident into the records they’ve been keeping of ICE arrests. A few days later, the event made the national news, thanks to Bradley-MacArthur’s video.

But before any of that, on the sidewalk at the scene of the arrest, Paz pulled the boy aside for a pep talk. Paz knew what it was like to see ICE detain a loved one: When he was 14, his father was deported to Bolivia and his mother followed soon after, leaving Paz and his brother in the care of an aunt. Paz went on to become a Waltham city councilor and mayoral candidate, and he now works at a tech company while spending his free time on Fuerza.

“None of this stuff is okay. I don’t want you to think this is normal,” Paz remembers saying to the boy, “but that doesn’t mean it defines you.”

Paz talks with a Waltham resident to collect information about an ICE arrest that occurred earlier in the day.Sophie Park

Waltham, a city of 66,000 a half hour from Boston, has historically opened its arms to immigrants. A quarter of the population is foreign-born, and a fifth is Latino. A short stretch of a main drag called Moody Street features restaurants with cuisines from a dozen countries.

But lately, Paz says, it feels like his city is under siege. When I joined him on a neighborhood patrol last month, he kept an eye out for the license plates of ICE agents and flagged recent landmarks. “We had someone arrested today, I think, down the street that way,” he said, pointing down a residential block. We walked by the spot where the 13-year-old was left standing on the sidewalk, and the place where, a few days after that, a high school girl recorded officers smashing a van window to arrest a driver as she waited for the school bus.

He nodded to a sedan parked outside a warehouse. “You start picking up on the fact that there are abandoned vehicles because people had a loved one taken,” he says.

At CPAC in February, border czar Tom Homan promised, “I’m coming to Boston. I’m bringing hell with me.”

Fuerza documented more than 50 arrests in Waltham in May—likely far fewer than the actual number. The dramatic escalation wasn’t surprising. At CPAC in February, border czar Tom Homan promised, “I’m coming to Boston. I’m bringing hell with me.” A month later, on a trip to Massachusetts, Homan stopped by a Mexican restaurant on Moody Street for breakfast. No arrests were made that day, but the visit spooked employees.

It felt “like a mobster,” says Bradley-MacArthur, coming “to survey their territory.”

The sweeps in Waltham typify ICE’s crackdown across the country—one that has swept up immigrants at court houses, schools, traffic stops, and workplaces, from day laborers in Los Angeles to construction workers in Tallahassee to coffee farmers in Hawaii. ICE recently announced that federal agents arrested nearly 1,500 people across Massachusetts as part of an enforcement surge in May dubbed Operation Patriot.

Fuerza is one of countless rapid response groups that have sprung up to document arrests and warn other immigrants to stay away. In Waltham, when someone thinks they see ICE activity, they call a volunteer-staffed hotline run by a statewide immigrant rights group called LUCE. Flyers for the hotline are everywhere in Massachusetts, pinned to bulletin boards, taped to lamp posts, posted in the comments sections of neighborhood Facebook groups. The hotline receives as many as 100 calls a day, says volunteer Jaya Savita.

LUCE then alerts Fuerza volunteers, called “verifiers,” who go to the scene of the alleged enforcement. If the officers are indeed with ICE, Fuerza spreads the word to neighbors. Verifiers are trained to document what’s happening without interfering; they practice stepping back at least seven paces, telling officers that they’re going to record what’s going on, and asking the officers what agency they’re with. They also talk directly to those being arrested, informing them that they have the right to remain silent.

“This administration is telling a story that they’re coming after criminals. They’re not telling you that they’re taking small business owners and left a bunch of kids without their dads.”

LUCE was inspired by Siembra NC, a program in North Carolina that pioneered the volunteer-driven ICE hotline model. Siembra, which started during the first Trump presidency, has trained more than 1,200 volunteers outside of North Carolina this year, helping teach groups in Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix, and California. Each has its own tactics. Some groups arm volunteers with loudspeakers; others do neighborhood patrols with walkie-talkies. Many, like Fuerza, also try to help the families of those who have been detained with referrals to pro bono lawyers, mental health care, and other social services.

“Hundreds and hundreds of people keep showing up to these community watch trainings,” says Marlene Martinez, Siembra’s rapid response manager. The hope, she says, is to change the narrative about ICE arrests. “This administration is telling a story that they’re coming after criminals,” she says. “They’re not telling you that they’re taking small business owners,” she adds, “and left a bunch of kids without their dads.”

Paz writes down information about identifying ICE for an employee at Azteca Market in Waltham.Sophie Park

The recordings serve other purposes, too. Together, they help track trends: In Waltham, the federal agents often drive Dodge Chargers with tinted windows. As is the case elsewhere, many of the arrests are in the early morning or early evening, and the agents wear balaclavas. “That’s the easiest tell,” Paz says. The masked agents are “inside the car just waiting. And it looks really—very creepy.”

The recordings also help cases get media attention. Videos in several immigration arrests that made national headlines—including the arrest of Rosane Ferreira-De Oliveira, a Brazilian mother of three in Worcester, Massachusetts—were taken by local volunteers.

One Fuerza volunteer says she wakes up at five in the morning—“when they do,” referring to ICE officers.

But the ultimate hope is that the recordings help get someone out of detention. At the scene of an arrest, “You’re like, ‘I hope they don’t do anything illegal,’” said one Waltham volunteer, who asked to go by her nickname, Nic. “And part of you is like, ‘Well, I kind of hope they do so that we can use this and get this person out.’”

A white woman who was recently laid off, Nic has turned volunteering with Fuerza into effectively a full-time job in recent weeks, doing dispatch and training other volunteers. She wakes up at five in the morning—“when they do,” she says, referring to ICE officers. Nic had never paid attention to cars, but now, she says, “I’ve learned a whole bunch of car brands.” She was among the many volunteers I spoke to who took pride in the diversity of Fuerza’s more than 120 volunteers, who include retirees, activists, soccer moms, and church groups.

Sometimes, though, the work can feel futile. Siembra co-founder Andrew Willis Garcés says he’s not aware of any recent cases in which someone was released from detention due to footage taken by a volunteer for Siembra or other similar organizations, though such evidence has been used in past cases.

Paz hugs his sister, who happened to drive by, on the street where a 13-year old boy was left after his father’s friend was detained by ICE.Sophie Park

“You get all this information in a video, and it’s like, well, now what?” Nic says. It’s “better than nothing, but like, how much better than nothing?”

Like any mutual aid, the movement is hard to categorize and morphing in real-time. Fuerza recently dispatched volunteers to the local food pantry in case ICE showed up. “Then we realized that the turnout was so low because people are afraid to leave their houses, so we boxed up a bunch of the food and hand-delivered it to their houses,” Bradley-MacArthur says. “We’re building the plane while we’re flying it.”

Three weeks before we spoke, the mother heard from a friend that ICE was looking for her. Ever since, she and the kids had been in hiding.

Just before Memorial Day, I received a call from a Fuerza volunteer who is known for being a connector among Waltham’s Latino community. She asked if she could put me on a three-way-call—a mother Fuerza works with was willing to talk to me. (Both women asked to not be identified.)

The mother, who is undocumented, lives in Waltham with her sons, ages 10 and 14. Years ago, the family immigrated from El Salvador, in part to seek medical care for the 14-year-old, who has a debilitating heart condition. Three weeks before we spoke, the mother heard from a friend that ICE was looking for her. Ever since, she and the kids had been in hiding. They hadn’t left the house, afraid even to take the trash out. The boys had missed weeks of school and doctor’s appointments, living off of food brought by relatives. The mother was trying to pass the time in a way that felt light for the kids, watching Superman and having pajama parties, but she could tell the boys were scared and stir crazy. They longed to go outside, to play in the park.

She prayed that President Trump would soften his heart. No somos criminales, she said in a pleading voice.

When I asked what it was like for her to see videos of ICE arrests on social media, she began to weep. She lives in fear that she’ll be next. Did she have a plan if that happened? I asked. What would happen with the kids? She admitted she didn’t know.

Rosary beads hang from the rearview mirror of a car parked on the street in Waltham. “You start picking up on the fact that there are abandoned vehicles because people had a loved one taken,” Paz said. Sophie Park

At this point, the volunteer apologized to me, saying she needed to stop translating for a moment. In Spanish, she explained to the mother that she works with pro bono attorneys who are helping families plan in case parents are deported. The mother needed an affidavit authorizing another caregiver to take in the kids if she’s detained, and also a form with the kids’ passport information in the event they were sent back to her in El Salvador.

In that moment, the two came up with the plan. If the mother were detained, the kids would go to their grandmother, who lives nearby. The mother relayed the pertinent information—her full name and the names of her kids, their birth dates, their grandmother’s phone number.

“Today’s the first time she’s thinking about this,” the volunteer told me later. “She didn’t have a plan because it’s happened so fast.”

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The Trump Admin. Keeps Detaining and Prosecuting Elected Officials Who Get in His Way

Of the many events marking the country’s slide to authoritarianism since Donald Trump returned to power, one of the most significant is the president’s unbridled enthusiasm for using the federal government to go after his perceived political enemies. This retribution campaign, though long promised, has proven sweeping and egregious, targeting everyone from law firms that cross him to the highest levels of the Democratic Party. But the administration has been particularly aggressive about wielding it against opponents of Trump’s other signature initiative—his mass-deportation policy. The result: a shocking series of Democratic lawmakers and other public officials who have been detained, arrested, and even prosecuted by the feds. Here’s a timeline.

April 25: Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan

The FBI arrested Dugan for allegedly obstructing federal agents who were detaining an undocumented immigrant. According to federal prosecutors, Dugan allegedly helped the man flee from her courtroom, where he had been previously scheduled to appear, after Dugan was informed that ICE agents were present. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorneys have decried Dugan’s arrest as “unprecedented” and “entirely unconstitutional.”

May 9: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka

Baraka, who at the time was also New Jersey Democratic primary for governor, was arrested and detained by federal immigration officers in May during a protest and attempted congressional inspectionof an immigration detention center in Newark. The trespassing charge against him was eventually dropped, and Baraka has since sued Alina Habba, the interim US attorney for New Jersey. We recently spoke to Baraka about his arrest:

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

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

May 19: Rep. LaMonica McIver

The New Jersey Democratic congresswoman was subsequently charged in connection with the May 9 incident in Newark. But unlike Baraka, the allegations against her have not been dropped. She was formally indicted last week on charges of impeding and interfering with law enforcement officials during a congressional oversight visit. As I wrote recently, the charges, which carry a maximum of 17 years in prison, come despite shifting explanations from the Trump administration about what led to McIver’s arrest.

June 12: Sen. Alex Padilla

In a shocking moment that drew intense criticism, the senior US senator from California was detained after attempting to approach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a press conference with questions about the administration’s immigration policies. The Department of Homeland Security accused Padilla, a Democrat, of failing to identify himself. But as I wrote, multiple videos showed Padilla doing exactly that before at least four men are seen forcibly pushing Padilla out of the room before handcuffing him. Padilla has not been charged with any crimes.

June 17: Brad Lander

On Tuesday, Lander—one of the major candidates in New York’s Democratic primary for mayor and the city’s current comptroller—was detained by law enforcement officials while attempting to escort a man out of an immigration court building. “I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant,” Lander told the agents while holding on to the man they were apparently arresting. “Where is it? Where is the warrant?”

The Department of Homeland Security quickly accused Lander of “assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.”

Hi, this is Meg Barnette, Brad's wife.

While escorting a defendant out of immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, Brad was taken by masked agents and detained by ICE.

This is still developing, and our team is monitoring the situation closely. pic.twitter.com/jekaDFjsT1

— Brad Lander (@bradlander) June 17, 2025

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Federal Agents Handcuff and Detain New York City Mayoral Candidate

Law enforcement officials detained New York City comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander at an immigration court on Tuesday as he attempted to escort a man out of the building.

Meg Barnette, Lander’s wife, confirmed the detention in a post shared to her husband’s official account on X. According to Dora Pekec, a Lander campaign spokesperson, Lander is still in custody.

It is one of a number of dramatic moments in which a Democratic official has been detained by federal officers. Five days ago, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) was thrown to the ground and handcuffed after he interrupted Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at a press conference.

Hi, this is Meg Barnette, Brad's wife.

While escorting a defendant out of immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, Brad was taken by masked agents and detained by ICE.

This is still developing, and our team is monitoring the situation closely. pic.twitter.com/jekaDFjsT1

— Brad Lander (@bradlander) June 17, 2025

Video shared on X by Courtney Gross, an investigative reporter at NY1 News, shows Lander and others attempting to escort a man out of the building after his case was reportedly dismissed. The man is then placed into an elevator by officers who appear to be federal agents.

In a second video posted by Gross, Lander attempts to escort a man down the hallway. Lander holds the man that agents appear to be trying to arrest and does not let go.

“I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant,” the comptroller says. “Where is it? Where is the warrant?” About ten seconds later, the agents—some of whom were wearing masks—grab Lander and place him in handcuffs.

.@bradlander just arrested at immigration court pic.twitter.com/nDqEK1Lzcw

— Courtney Gross (@courtneycgross) June 17, 2025

“I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway,” Lander says as he is being detained. “I asked to see the judicial warrant.” He adds, “You don’t have the authority to arrest US citizens asking for a judicial warrant.” The masked agents then refused to answer questions about where they were taking the New York City comptroller.

Shortly before he was detained, a reporter from The City asked Lander why he was spending the last days of the mayoral primary court-watching. “I don’t think there’s any place that’s more important to be right now than bearing witness and trying to stand up for the rule of law,” Lander told the outlet. That reporter also described hearing an agent say to another, “Do you want to arrest the comptroller?”

Mayoral candidate Brad Lander was cuffed and detained by ICE agents after asking to see a warrant for people who were detained after an immigration hearing. Video from the city comptroller’s press secretary @chloecbristow. She says he’s still being held in 26 Federal Plaza. pic.twitter.com/cW9jIsp35b

— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) June 17, 2025

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, wrote on social media that ICE only needed an administrative warrant—not a judicial warrant. “[B]ut ICE refuses even to show him that, which is outrageous,” Reichlin-Melnick added. “If they have a warrant, they should show it. If they don’t, they don’t have arrest authority. But him holding on to the guy… could be trouble.”

The Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts have become a flashpoint in the New York City mayoral race. Lander has trailed in third place in recent polls, behind former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. Early voting in the primary began last Saturday. Earlier this month, Lander observed immigration hearings at a courthouse in Lower Manhattan. The New York Times reported that he had escorted out migrants who seemed to be at risk of detention.

Mamdani, who recently cross-endorsed with Lander, called for the comptroller’s immediate release. “This is fascism and all New Yorkers must speak in one voice,” said Mamdani.

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Trump and the GOP’s Ghoulish Response to the Assassinations in Minnesota

President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday that he does not plan to call Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) in the wake of this weekend’s horrific political violence,in whicha man assassinated a Minnesota lawmaker andher husband and wounded another Democratic state lawmaker and his wife.

“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out,” Trump said, in response to a question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about whether he had called the governor. “I’m not calling. Why would I call him? I could call him, say, ‘Hi. How you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. So, you know, I could be nice and call, but why waste time?”

COLLINS: Have you called Tim Walz yet?

TRUMP: I don't really call him. He appointed this guy to a position. I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I'm not calling him … he's a mess. pic.twitter.com/81o4oSqyR7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2025

In a statement provided to Mother Jones on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for Walz said the governor “wishes that President Trump would be a President for all Americans, but this tragedy isn’t about Trump or Walz. It’s about the Hortman family, the Hoffman family, and the State of Minnesota, and the Governor remains focused on helping all three heal.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Though the remarks were roundly condemned as cruel, for Trump, they were not unusual.As I previously wrote, the president has a long history of making tragedies worse, including by making crude comments and boosting false or disproven conspiracy theories in the aftermath of devastating events. But his latest comments are particularly rich given that, during his Republican National Convention speech last summer, he called for unity:

Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past differences. Any disagreements have to be put aside, and go forward united as one people, one nation, pledging allegiance to one great, beautiful — I think it’s so beautiful — American flag.

Trump’s refusal to call Walz stands in stark contrast to the Democratic response after the two assassinationattempts against Trump last summer, when Democrats condemned the violence. The Biden campaign also pulled political ads against Trump, with leaders on both sides of the aisle calling for unity. (Though that did not stop some Trump acolytes from baselessly blaming the violence on Democrats.)

While Trump did publicly condemn the violence in Minnesota, writing in a Truth Social post on Saturday, in part, that “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,” it is common for presidents to call state leaders following such crises. According to reports, Vice President JD Vance and former President Joe Biden called Walz following the Saturday attacks.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is similarly under fire after posting a series of baseless posts on his personal X account this weekend, blaming the murders on the left. In one Sunday post, he wrote, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” In another, he wrote, “Nightmare on Waltz street,” alongside photos of the alleged shooter. “My guess: He’s not MAGA,” Lee wrote in another post of the suspected shooter, who is a registered Republican, according to public records. (Friends have told reporters the suspected shooter, Vance Boelter, who is now in custody, was, in fact, a supporter of Trump.) But just a few hours later, on his official account, Lee appeared to change his tune: “These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America. Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families.”

But for some of his colleagues, it was too late. Sen. Tina Smith told the Washington Post that she sought out Lee at the Senate on Monday to talk to him about his earlier posts, telling the newspaper, “It was a terrible thing to do, and I wanted him to know how I felt about it—how devastating it was to see.” Lee has said Hortman was a personal friend.

The insults and mockery trickled throughout the GOP. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.) wrote on X, “Good job, stupid,” in response to a post from Walz, and, “You appointed the crazy zealot that murdered her to one of your boards, you clown,” over a post from Walz honoring former state House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was murdered alongside her husband, Mark. The suspected shooter was reportedly appointed to a 41-member state economic board by a prior Democratic governor in 2016, and later reappointed by Walz; Democratic state Senator John Hoffman, who Boelter allegedly shot alongside Hoffman’s wife, Yvette, reportedly served on the board at the same time as Boelter. (In an earlier post, Van Orden wrote that he condemned “all acts of political violence and intimidation.”)

Spokespeople for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether they condemn their members’ comments.

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From Ice to Inferno: Alaska Issues Historic Heat Advisory

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

In the high glare of a summer evening in Fairbanks, Alaska, Ciara Santiago watched the mercury climb. A meteorologist at the National Weather Service office, she had the dubious honor of issuing the state’s first-ever official heat advisory as temperatures were expected to hit the mid-80s.

It’s the kind of bureaucratic alert that rarely makes national headlines. But in a city where permafrost thaw buckles roads, homes lack air conditioning, and the high at this time of year is generally in the low 70s, the warning comes as a sign of rapidly shifting climate. Alaska is warming more than twice as fast as the global average.

“People in [the] Lower 48 might think that’s nothing, but here those temps could feel like 110.”

In Alaska, where hazardous cold is historically more of a concern, weather offices in Fairbanks—just 120 miles south of the Arctic circle as the raven flies—didn’t have the option of issuing heat advisories until the beginning of this month, when it was added to a list of possible public alerts. “It gives us a more direct way of communicating these kinds of hazards when they occur,” Santiago said.

The heat bearing down on Alaska isn’t entirely unprecedented, at least in meteorological terms. On the heels of a cold spring, a dome of high pressure, known as an upper-level ridge, has settled over the Interior, a fairly common pattern that traps warm air. In the state’s central valleys, that can spell high temperatures and dry conditions. Temperatures on Friday reached a high of 82 degrees Fahrenheit. An updated advisory on Sunday warned the hot conditions would last until Tuesday, with “temperatures up to 87F to 89F… Isolated areas up to 90F are possible, especially in the Yukon Flats.”

“People in [the] Lower 48 might think that’s nothing, but here those temps could feel like 110,” Santiago said.

With nearly 22 hours of sunlight approaching the solstice, daytime heat accumulates and lingers—not just outside, but indoors. Unlike the Lower 48, most homes in Alaska weren’t built to keep heat out but to keep it in during months of subzero cold. The thick insulation this requires turns houses into ovens during extended periods of hot temperatures. In Europe, where infrastructure is similarly designed for cold climates, a brutal 2003 heat wave exposed the potential risks: It killed 35,000 people.

That’s part of why the state’s new heat advisory matters. It’s not just a weather bulletin. It’s a warning for a state where most people don’t have the coping mechanisms taken for granted elsewhere—shaded porches, central air, even knowing the signs of heatstroke.

The sudden temperature jump also poses its own challenges. “I’m originally from Texas,” Santiago said. “I’m so used to hot summers that in the 50s, I start putting on a jacket. Now living in Alaska, I’m wearing dresses at that temperature.” But it’s not just a matter of clothing: When your body adapts to higher temperatures, the volume of blood expands, allowing your heart to pump more efficiently and reducing heat stress. You begin sweating earlier and produce more sweat per gland. But it generally takes one to two weeks of exposure to adapt, making sudden swings in temperature riskier.

The office Santiago works for, like many National Weather Service offices, has recently lost staff under Trump administration cuts. More than 560 members were laid off across the country, reducing its capacity by about a third, and leaving many stations critically understaffed. As a result, the Fairbanks office that made the state’s first heat warning must now suspend operations overnight. “We’re working to the best of our ability with what we have,” Santiago said.

The early start to summer heat comes after a winter with low snow levels and early melt, raising concerns about fire season. Layoffs have also affected firefighting staff, where both technical expertise and basic manpower are in question. Concerned about federal capacity, California Gov. Newsom launched a firefighter recruitment effort this week, but in Alaska, much of the wildland firefighting force is federal, raising the question of whether those like Santiago who must prepare for threats ahead will have the resources they need.

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“A Direct Attack on Women”: Lawmakers Demand Labor Secretary Preserve the Women’s Bureau

Democratic lawmakers are demanding Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer preserve the Women’s Bureau following recent reporting from Mother Jones that the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate the 105-year-old, congressionally mandated office charged with supporting women in the workforce.

On Monday afternoon, 34 members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus sent Chavez-DeRemer a letter demanding the labor secretary “immediately restore the Women’s Bureau to its full function and funding, fulfill the terminated grants, and abandon all efforts to eliminate the Bureau.” The letter cites Mother Jones’ story from earlier this month, which was the first to report that both the White House’s and Department of Labor’s (DOL) budget requests to Congress propose eliminating the Women’s Bureau.

It also cites a Mother Jones story from last month that was one of the first to report that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) killed more than two dozen grants administered by the bureau, many of which were congressionally mandated and aimed to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology.

“The proposed elimination of the Women’s Bureau and termination of grants that support women in the workforce is a total betrayal of women across the country,” the letter states. The letter is the second the Democratic Women’s Caucus has sent Chavez-DeRemer expressing concerns over the gutting of the Women’s Bureau: They previously wrote to her in April urging her “to preserve current staffing and strengthen the Bureau’s capacity to fulfill its mandate, as Congress intended”—but she never responded, according to several lawmakers involved. (Spokespeople for the Labor Department did not respond to questions from Mother Jones on Monday.)

The Trump administration has already managed to undermine the bureau’s work without eliminating the office entirely. Nine current and former Labor Department staffers previously told me that the bureau has lost about half of its approximately 50-person staff through a combination of buyouts and resignations, and that their work has essentially been at a standstill since Trump resumed office.

In the past, the bureau’s critical work has included regularly researching women’s workforce participation by county, the gender wage gap by race and occupation, and child care prices nationwide; briefing federal lawmakers to help inform policies to support women workers. The bureau’s work helped pass laws, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The office also hosted in-person training sessions nationwide to help workers learn their rights, and partneredwith other federal agencies to implement programs to support women’s wellbeing and equity at work.

Despite all this, in the budget brief calling for its elimination, the Labor Departmentdismissed the Women’s Bureau as “an ineffective policy office that is a relic of the past.” The current and former DOL staffers previously told me they seethe move as reflective of the Trump administration’s ambitions to drive women out of the workforce and back into their homes to raise children. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), one of the lead authors of the letter, sees the administration’s attack on the bureau as “turning back the clock in ways that are really pretty outrageous,” she told me by phone on Monday. The Women’s Bureau, she added, is “just as important [now] as it ever was.”

Data supports this. The gender wage gap widened for the first time in 20 years following the pandemic, and women’s labor force participation rate has decreased since peaking in the 1990s. Citing these facts, the letter states that the DOL characterization of the bureau as “‘a relic of the past’ is not only incorrect, it is completely ignorant to what the data shows and the struggles of working women everywhere.”

Bonamici, who has advocated for expanding access and affordability to child care, said she has relied on the bureau’s database of prices of childcare by county, which the DOL has said is the most comprehensive database of its kind. “When we have this information, it helps us pass policies,” she said.

Bonamici also pointed to the important work of the Oregon Tradeswomen, a nonprofit organization that has relied on the now-canceled Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants that the bureau administered to enter the trades. “You can see women getting good jobs to turn their lives around,” she said. “That, to me, is a great use of federal resources.”

Both Bonamici and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), another lead author of the letter, said they want to see their Republican colleagues step up to oppose the efforts to eliminate the bureau. “We need our Republican colleagues to be forceful with the constitutional responsibility that we have to be the lawmakers and to be the overseers,” Houlahan said, adding that she is “enormously disappointed” in her GOP colleagues. “They’re allowing the president to run roughshod over the country.”

But asking them to reverse course to defend the Women’s Bureau could be a tall order. House Republicans unsuccessfully tried to eliminate it for the first time in at least a decade back in 2023. Project 2025, which has proven to be aninstruction manual for how the Trump administration is running the government, alleged the bureau “tends towards a politicized research and engagement agenda that puts predetermined conclusions ahead of empirical study” and said it should “rededicate its research budget towards open inquiry, especially to dissentangle the influences on women’s workforce participation and to understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.”

The DOL admits in its budget brief that department officials aim to work with Congress to repeal the statutes mandating the existence of the Women’s Bureau as well as the WANTO grant program that was already canceled. The Democratic lawmakers say that would be their best shot at fighting to preserve the office, and recruiting their GOP colleagues to join in.

“If they bring a bill forward to eliminate the Women’s Bureau,” Bonamici said, “we will fight it with everything we have.”

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Report: New Hampshire Could Ban Funding for Programs for Disabled People

On Monday, the Boston Globe reported that the state Senate version of New Hampshire’s two-year budget bill contains language that “would prohibit public entities from supporting any program designed to improve the lives of people with disabilities.” The reason? An attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion by New Hampshire State House and Senate Republicans.

“The Senate’s anti-DEI provisions would prohibit state and local government entities from supporting any program related to efforts to improve ‘demographic outcomes’ for people with physical or mental disabilities,” Boston Globe reporter Steven Porter wrote.

Disabled people already face challenges in hiring, both due to biases of companies and some people just needing more assistance. DEI-focused hiring programs and trainings—both for disabled people and people of color—help this problem.

The House version of the bill is still very much an anti-DEI attack, though it does not specifically go after disability as heavily as the Senate version of the budget. The House bill goes after race-conscious practices in hiring, which would still hurt disabled people of color. Karen Rosenberg, policy director for the Disability Rights Center, told Porter that the bills are still “mostly the same, and they’re both terrible.”

As Porter wrote, the curtailing of disability programs in the state can also impact disabled children.

Louis Esposito, executive director of ABLE NH, an advocacy group for people impacted by disability, said there have been so many additional pressing concerns—including a disagreement between the House and Senate over a proposed cut to Medicaid provider rates—that the implications of the anti-DEI provisions in the state budget legislation haven’t garnered as much attention as they warrant.

Esposito said the proposals could have far-reaching ramifications in education. If a school offers a training session on neurodiversity, for example, would that be deemed a DEI violation? School leaders who are unsure might avoid such topics, at the expense of equity and inclusion for students with disabilities, he said, especially since the proposals would direct the state’s education commissioner to withhold all public funding from schools deemed non-compliant.

The House and the Senate will have to come to an agreement and pass a two-year budget bill before July 1.

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Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Attended a Bible College Popular Among Christian Nationalists

On Saturday, a gunman impersonating a police officer fatally shot Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home, and wounded state Sen. Mark Hortman and his wife at their home. Police finally apprehended the suspected shooter, Vance Boelter, Sunday night after “the largest manhunt in state history,” Brooklyn Park police Chief Mark Bruley said at a press conference that night.

Among the details about the suspect beginning to emerge is that he reportedly attended a bible college that is a stronghold of the New Apostolic Reformation, the charismatic movement that teaches that Christians are called to take over the US government. Founded in 1970, Christ for the Nations Institute, located in Dallas, Texas, boasts having graduated more than 40,000 students from over 170 nations. It is also the alma mater of several leaders of the NAR movement, including at least one who was involved in the lead-up to the Capitol insurrection on January 6.

One notable alumnus of Christ for the Nations is Dutch Sheets, a South Carolina-based preacher and YouTuber who was instrumental in spreading the narrative that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. As I wrote last year:

Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.”

And then:

Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”

Another “Stop the Steal” leader, Cindy Jacobs, was honored by Christ for the Nations earlier this year. Jacobs, a faith adviser to President Trump, participated in the “Jericho March” of December 2020, when election protesters marched “around the US Capitol, Supreme Court, and Department of Justice seven times praying for the walls of corruption and election fraud to fall down, just as Joshua and the Israelites walked around the walls of corrupt Jericho,” according to a description by the event’s organizers.

Texas pastor and podcaster Joel Webbon, who is part of the Christian nationalist TheoBro movement, has also said he attended Christ for the Nations (though he has since denounced it as “straight up heretical”). Webbon is a particularly outspoken member of the TheoBros movement, as I wrote in another piece last year:

At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Beyond Boelter, 57, having said he attended Christ for the Nations Institute, little is known about his religious faith. The college did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

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“They’re Taking Shirly”: An Army Sergeant Thought His Family Was Safe. Then ICE Deported His Wife.

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

Army Sgt. Ayssac Correa had just started his day at the 103rd Quartermaster Company outside of Houston on the morning of March 13 when he got a phone call from his sister-in-law.

She worked at the same company as Correa’s wife and had just pulled into the parking lot to see three ICE agents handcuffing her.

“They’re taking Shirly away!” she told him.

This month, as protesters clash with law enforcement amid immigration raids in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump has ordered 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 active-duty Marines to respond. The move injected the military into the highly contentious debate over immigration. For the tens of thousands of service members whose spouses or parents are undocumented, the issue was already personal, pitting service against citizenship.

In his first week in office, President Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reshaping the country’s immigration policy, calling border crossings in recent years an “invasion” and arguing that many undocumented migrants have committed “vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans.”

National Guard soldiers deployed this month to Los Angeles guard ICE agents during an immigration enforcement operation.US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

But Correa and his wife weren’t too worried. After they got married in 2022, the couple had filed paperwork to start Shirly Guardado on the path to citizenship, and Correa assumed that, as an active-duty soldier, his family wouldn’t be impacted.

“Me being in the military—I felt bad that it was happening, because I’m also married to somebody who’s going through the [immigration] process. But I was like, ‘Oh, there’s no way this is going to happen to us,’” he said.

That misconception is common, immigration attorneys and advocates told The War Horse. But in reality, there is no guaranteed path to citizenship for undocumented military family members—and no guaranteed protections against deportation.

“I find it unconscionable that someone could step up to serve, voluntarily, in our military and be willing to sacrifice their life for our country only to have their families torn apart.”

There are no reliable statistics on how many service members marry citizens of other countries, but it’s not uncommon, says Margaret Stock, a leading expert on immigration law and the military. The progressive group Fwd.us has estimated that up to 80,000 undocumented spouses or parents of military members are living in the U.S.

“You can imagine what happens when you’re deployed in more than 120 countries around the world,” Stock said.

Service members are often hesitant to speak out about their family members’ immigration status.

“It’s taboo,” says Marino Branes, an immigration attorney and former Marine who first came to the U.S. from Peru without documentation. “It’s not like you’re announcing it to the world.”

But he and other immigration attorneys told The War Horse they are working with active-duty clients who are scrambling to get their spouses or parents paperwork as immigration enforcement actions ramp up, and it becomes clear that military families are not immune.

In April, ICE arrested the Argentinian wife of an active-duty Coast Guardsman after her immigration status was flagged during a routine security screening as the couple moved into Navy base housing in South Florida. Last month, the Australian wife of an Army lieutenant was detained by border officials at an airport in Hawaii during a trip to visit her husband. She was sent back to Australia.

As the debate over illegal immigration roils the country, recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows that about a third of Americans think that all undocumented immigrants living in the country should be deported. Fifty-one percent believe that some undocumented immigrants should be deported, depending on their situation. For instance, nearly all those respondents agree that undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes should be deported. But just 5% think that spouses of American citizens should be.

Lawmakers have reintroduced several bills in Congress that would make it easier for spouses and parents of troops and veterans to get their green card.

“The anxiety of separation during deployment, the uncertainty of potentially serving in a conflict zone—these challenges weren’t just mine. They were my family’s as well,” Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Democrat from California, said at a news conference last month. He came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and served in the Marine Corps.

“I find it unconscionable that someone could step up to serve, voluntarily, in our military and be willing to sacrifice their life for our country only to have their families torn apart.”

‘I Didn’t Hear From Her for Three Days’

The morning that ICE took Shirly Guardado into custody had started like any other. She and Correa had woken early to prepare their 10-month-old son for the day and then taken him to Guardado’s mother to watch him while they worked—Correa as a logistics specialist, handling the training for part-time Army reservists at his unit, and Guardado as a secretary at an air conditioning manufacturing company.

Guardado had gotten a work permit and an order of supervision from ICE, meaning she needed to check in regularly with immigration officials, after she was apprehended crossing the border about 10 years earlier, her lawyer, Martin Reza, told The War Horse. Her last check-in had been in February, just a month before.

“She reported as normal,” Reza said. “Nothing happened.”

Shirly Guardado with her husband, Sgt. Ayssac Correa, along with her mother and son, the winter before she was deported to Honduras.Photo courtesy of Ayssac Correa

But on that morning in March, Guardado got a strange phone call at work. Some sort of public safety officer had dialed her office and wanted her to come outside to talk. In the parking lot, three men in plain clothes identified themselves as Department of Public Safety officers, Correa told The War Horse. As Shirly approached, they said her car had been involved in an accident. But when she got close, they grabbed her and handcuffed her, telling her they were ICE agents.

That’s when Guardado’s sister-in-law called Correa.

He said the ICE agents refused to tell him where they were taking his wife. By the time he got to her office, they were gone.

“I didn’t hear from her for like three days,” he said. When she was finally able to call him, from an ICE facility in Conroe, Texas, he told her there must have been some mistake.

“They’re gonna realize you got your stuff in order, and they’re gonna let you go,” he told her.

“I kept thinking, ‘Oh, she’s gonna get out tomorrow. She’s gonna get out tomorrow.’ And then that turned into almost three months,” he said.

On May 30, ICE deported her to Honduras. It was her 28th birthday.

Protection Through Military Parole in Place

Correa had met Guardado in a coffee shop in Houston in 2020—“the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said. After they got married, Reza helped the couple file paperwork for Correa to sponsor Guardado to get her green card.

“I kept thinking, ‘Oh, she’s gonna get out tomorrow. She’s gonna get out tomorrow.’ And then that turned into almost three months.”

Because Correa was in the military, the couple also put in an application for military parole in place, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services program that can help military and veteran family members temporarily stay in the U.S. legally while they work to get a more permanent status.

The program grew out of the experiences of Yaderlin Hiraldo Jimenez, an undocumented Army wife whose husband, Staff Sgt. Alex Jimenez, went missing in Iraq in 2007 after his unit came under insurgent fire.

Alex Jimenez had petitioned for a green card for his wife before he deployed, but while the Army searched for him, the Department of Homeland Security worked to deport her. After the case gained national attention, the department changed course and allowed her to stay in the U.S. temporarily. She was awarded a green card in July of 2007. Almost a year later, the Army found her husband’s remains.

“After that case, the bureaucracy realized that they could go ahead and do this for everybody,” Stock said. “It would solve a lot of problems for military families, and it would contribute to readiness, and the troops are going to be a lot happier, because there’s a lot of troops that have this problem.”

But not everyone is granted parole, and filing can be complicated. Historically, all of the military branches have offered legal assistance to military family members applying, as long as legal resources were available. But the Coast Guard recently “discontinued” its legal assistance to undocumented Coast Guard family members looking to apply for a military parole in place, a spokesperson said in an email to The War Horse.

In response to follow-up questions, the Coast Guard called it a “pause” that resulted from a “recent review of assistance with immigration services available to dependents.” The War Horse has confirmed multiple examples of Coast Guard families being denied this legal assistance, although USCIS says the program is still active and military families are still eligible to apply. The other military branches say they have not made any changes to the legal immigration assistance they provide military families under the new administration.

But even for families who are able to apply for parole in place, approval isn’t guaranteed. There are certain disqualifying factors, like having a criminal record, and USCIS offices have discretion over granting parole.

“All of these field offices have a captain, a chief there,” says Branes. “They dictate policy there.”

USCIS denied Guardado and Correa’s application for military parole in place. Even though ICE had released her to work in the U.S. with check-ins a decade earlier, and she had no criminal record, she was technically under an expedited deportation order, which USCIS told her was disqualifying. They told her to file her application for military parole in place with ICE instead.

That’s not uncommon, Stock said. “But ICE doesn’t have a program to give parole in place.”

When ICE agents arrested Guardado, Reza said, her request for a military parole in place had been sitting with the agency for over a year with no response.

‘Families Serve Too’

Correa is planning to fly down to Honduras shortly to bring their son, Kylian, to reunite with his mother. He’s put in a request to transfer to Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras in hopes of being stationed closer to them. He said his wife has been bouncing from hotel to hotel since landing in the country. Her brother, who is a legal resident, flew to Honduras to meet her there, since she has no family in the country, having come to the U.S. more than a decade earlier.

He wants to continue serving in the Army, which he joined in 2018. Shortly afterward, he deployed to Syria.

“This is what I want to do,” Correa said. But if his transfer request isn’t approved, he said he won’t renew his enlistment when his contract is up next year. He’s looking at selling all his possessions and moving to Honduras—anything that will make it possible to bring his family together again.

“When my husband was called into active duty and put his life on the line, it didn’t matter if I had documents. I was a military wife. We should be able to get a second chance.”

“You recruit the service member [but] you retain the family,” says Stephanie Torres, who was undocumented when her husband, Sgt. Jorge Torres, who had served in Afghanistan, died in a car crash in 2013. “You retain the family by letting them know, ‘You belong here. You serve too.’”

She and other advocates say that targeting military family members for deportation can harm military readiness by taking away a focus on the mission. Some service members may be scared or unable to enroll their family members for military benefits or support programs.

Today, Torres is working with the group Repatriate Our Patriots, which advocates on behalf of deported veterans, to build up a program to support military and veteran family members who are deported or are facing deportation.

Women being deported board a military flight at Fort Bliss, Texas, in February. Cpl. Adaris Cole/US Army

One of the people she is working with is Alejandra Juarez, who became a face of military family separation during the first Trump administration when she was deported to Mexico as the wife of a decorated combat Marine veteran, leaving behind her husband and two school-age daughters.

In 2021, after multiple lawmakers wrote letters on her behalf, then-President Biden granted her a humanitarian parole to reenter the United States and reunite with her family.

Juarez crossed into the U.S. from Mexico when she was a teenager and said she signed a document she didn’t understand at the time that permanently prevented her from gaining legal status.

Juarez with her family in 2022, following her return to the United States on humanitarian parole. Juarez is second from the right; her husband, Temo Juarez, who served in the Marines, is on the right.Photo courtesy of Alejandra Juarez

“When my husband was called into active duty and put his life on the line, it didn’t matter if I had documents,” she told The War Horse. “I was a military wife.

“We should be able to get a second chance.”

Earlier this month, Juarez’s parole expired, and she has no path to citizenship. She sees the administration ramping up its immigration enforcement and ending many of its parole programs. She doesn’t want to spend money or time on what she assumes will be a dead end.

When her parole expired, she said, her immigration officer extended her a grace period to stay in the United States for one more month, to celebrate her younger daughter’s birthday. She’s turning 16.

Then, on the 4th of July, Juarez must leave the country.

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

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Rand Paul Says He’s “Not a Big Fan” of Donald Trump’s Military Parade

Many Republicans quietly but noticeably skipped Trump’s military-slash-birthday parade on Saturday. According to a survey Politico did earlier this week of 50 congressional Republicans, only seven said they planned to stay in Washington, DC, for the weekend to attend the festivities.

OneRepublican—Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—was more directabout his opposition to the event. “I just never liked the idea of the parade because I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and the only parades I can remember are Soviet parades, for the most part, or North Korean parades,” Paul said on Meet the Press Sunday.

“The parades I remember from our history were different,” Paul continued. “We never glorified weapons so much. And I know [Trump] means well. I don’t think he means for any of this to be depicted in another fashion. But I’m just not a big fan. Then there is the cost. I mean, we’re $2 trillion in the hole and just an additional cost like this, I’m not for it.”

Rand Paul: "I've never liked the idea of the parade. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and the only parades I can remember are Soviet parades for the most part or North Korean parades. The parades I remember from our history were different…we never glorified weapons so… pic.twitter.com/KwhuMlzvuG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2025

Indeed, Army officials have estimated the parade would cost between $25 and $45 million, but the final price tag has not yet been publicly confirmed. Videos from the event show Army tanks rolling through the streets as spectators watch from the sidelines and, in some sections, sparsely populated bleachers.

That the libertarian-ish Paul would vocally oppose the parade is not especially shocking. He has been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s tariff policy as well as the current version of the massive budget reconciliation bill Trump is trying to push through Congress, which led to Trump blasting him in a pair of Truth Social posts earlier this month. “Rand votes NO on everything, but never has any practical or constructive ideas,” Trump wrote in one post. “His ideas are actually crazy (losers!).” On Meet the Press Sunday, Paul said he’s “not an absolute no” on the budget bill.

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

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Minnesota Shooter’s List Reportedly Included Abortion Providers and Advocates

The Minnesota shooter who killed a state lawmaker and her husband and wounded another legislator and his wife reportedly had a list containing dozens of other names, including abortion providers and advocates.

Multiple news outlets, including CNN, ABC, and the Minnesota Star Tribune, have reported that the alleged shooter—57-year-old Vance Luther Boelter, who remains at large—left a list of names behind in his car that included abortion providers and advocates and figures with ties to Planned Parenthood, along with Democratic politicians. Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-Minn.), told the Star Tribune that she was on the shooter’s list and that local law enforcement told her to shelter in place on Saturday; a spokesperson for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told the New York Times the senator was also on the list.

Much is still unknown about the suspect’s motivations. A longtime friend of Boelter told CNN on Saturday that the allegedshooter was a staunch opponent of abortion rights. On Meet the Press Sunday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, “There clearly was some through line with abortion because of the groups that were on the list and other things that I’ve heard were in this manifesto.”

A spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety told Mother Jones on Sunday that the contents of the list, which he said he had not seen, are “investigative information.” The spokesperson said that anyone who was named on the list will be, or already has been, contacted by law enforcement. The National Abortion Federation (NAF), a professional organization of abortion providers and supporters, said in a statement that it is working with its members in Minnesota “to provide additional security support while the suspect is still at large.” Spokespeople for Planned Parenthood and several Minnesota-based reproductive rights groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

While Boelter’s motives remain unclear, the reports that abortion providers and supporters were named on the list come amid a wave of threats and violence since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. “What we’ve seen since the Dobbs decision has been a shift, where some of the states that historically have been more protective of abortion are seeing more incidents of harassment and targeting of providers,” the NAF’s Melissa Fowler told my colleague Laura Morel last month. On top of that, in January, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly two dozen people charged with violating the FACE Act, a federal law that prohibits interfering with access to reproductive health clinics. Trump’s DOJ has also said it will limit enforcement of the law going forward, and just last week, House Republicans advanced a bill that seeks to repeal the law entirely.

The anti-abortion group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life said in a statement posted to X that while the shooter’s motives haven’t yet been established, “his actions are completely antithetical to the mission of MCCL and the pro-life movement.”

The FBI is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to Boelter’s arrest and conviction.

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Trump’s Funding Cuts Leave Alaska Native Village in the Dark, Stalling Clean Energy Dreams

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

For the fewer than a hundred people that make up the entire population of Port Heiden, Alaska, fishing provides both a paycheck and a full dinner plate. Every summer, residents of the Alutiiq village set out on commercial boats to catch salmon swimming upstream in the nearby rivers of Bristol Bay.

John Christensen, Port Heiden’s tribal president, is currently making preparations for the annual trek. In a week’s time, he and his 17-year-old son will charter Queen Ann, the family’s 32-foot boat, eight hours north to brave some of the planet’s highest tides, extreme weather risks, and other treacherous conditions. The two will keep at it until August, hauling in thousands of pounds of fish each day that they later sell to seafood processing companies. It’s grueling work that burns a considerable amount of costly fossil fuel energy, and there are scarcely any other options.

Because of their location, diesel costs almost four times the national average—the Alaska Native community spent $900,000 on fuel in 2024 alone. Even Port Heiden’s diesel storage tanks are posing challenges. Coastal erosion has created a growing threat of leaks in the structures, which are damaging to the environment and expensive to repair, and forced the tribe to relocate them further inland. On top of it all, of course, diesel generators contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are notoriously noisy.

“We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.”

“Everything costs more. Electricity goes up, diesel goes up, every year. And wages don’t,” Christensen said. “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.”

In 2015, the community built a fish processing plant that the tribe collectively owns; they envisioned a scenario in which tribal members would not need to share revenue with processing companies, would bring home considerably more money, and wouldn’t have to spend months at a time away from their families. But the building has remained nonoperational for an entire decade because they simply can’t afford to power it.

Enormous amounts of diesel are needed, says Christensen, to run the filleting and gutting machines, separators and grinders, washing and scaling equipment, and even to store the sheer amount of fish the village catches every summer in freezers and refrigerators. They can already barely scrape together the budget needed to pay for the diesel that powers their boats, institutions, homes, and airport.

The onslaught of energy challenges that Port Heiden is facing, Christensen says, is linked to a corresponding population decline. Their fight for energy independence is a byproduct of colonial policies that have limited the resources and recourse that Alaska Native tribes like theirs have. “Power is 90 percent of the problem,” said Christensen. “Lack of people is the rest. But cheaper power would bring in more people.”

In 2023, Climate United, a national investment fund and coalition, submitted a proposal to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF—a $27 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act administered by the Environmental Protection Agency to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis.” Last April, the EPA announced it had chosen three organizations to disseminate the program’s funding; $6.97 billion was designated to go to Climate United.

Then, in the course of President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal disinvestment campaign, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was singled out as a poster child for what Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed was “criminal.”

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin said in February. He then endeavored on a crusade to get the money back. As the financial manager for GGRF, Citibank, the country’s third-largest financial institution, got caught in the middle.

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over.”

The New York Times reported that investigations into Biden officials’ actions in creating the program and disbursing the funds had not found any “meaningful evidence” of criminal wrongdoing.

On March 4, Zeldin announced that the GGRF funding intended to go to Climate United and seven other organizations had been frozen. The following week, Climate United filed a joint lawsuit against the EPA, which they followed with a motion for a temporary restraining order against Zeldin, the EPA, and Citibank from taking actions to implement the termination of the grants. On March 11, the EPA sent Climate United a letter of funding termination. In April, a federal DC district judge ruled that the EPA had terminated the grants unlawfully and blocked the EPA from clawing them back. The Trump administration then appealed the decision.

Climate United is still awaiting the outcome of that appeal. While they do, the $6.97 billion remains inaccessible.

Climate United’s money was intended to support a range of projects from Hawai’i to the East Coast, everything from utility-scale solar to energy-efficient community centers—and a renewable energy initiative in Port Heiden. The coalition had earmarked $6 million for the first round of a pre-development grant program aimed at nearly two dozen Native communities looking to adopt or expand renewable energy power sources.

“We made investments in those communities, and we don’t have the capital to support those projects,” said Climate United’s Chief Community Officer Krystal Langholz.

In response to an inquiry from Grist, an EPA spokesperson noted that “Unlike the Biden-Haris administration, this EPA is committed to being an exceptional steward of taxpayer dollars.” The spokesperson said that Zeldin had terminated $20 billion in grant agreements because of “substantial concerns regarding the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program integrity, the award process, and programmatic waste and abuse, which collectively undermine the fundamental goals and statutory objectives of the award.”

A representative of Citibank declined to comment. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service did not respond to requests for comment.

Long before most others recognized climate change as an urgent existential crisis, the Alutiiq peoples of what is now known as Port Heiden, but was once called Meshik, were forced to relocate because of rising seawater. With its pumice-rich volcanic soils and exposed location on the peninsula that divides Bristol Bay from the Gulf of Alaska, the area is unusually vulnerable to tidal forces that erode land rapidly during storms. Beginning in 1981, disappearing sea ice engulfed buildings and homes.

The community eventually moved their village about a 10-minute drive further inland. No one lives at the old site anymore, but important structures still remain, including a safe harbor for fishing boats.

In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water.

The seas, of course, are still rising, creeping up to steal the land from right below the community’s feet. In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water. From 2017 to 2018, the old site lost between 35 and 65 feet of shoreline, as reported by the Bristol Bay Times. Even the local school situated on the newer site is affected by the shrinking shoreline—the institution and surrounding Alutiiq village increasingly threatened by the encroaching sea.

Before the Trump administration moved to terminate their funding, Christensen’s dream of transitioning the Port Heiden community to renewable sources of energy, consequential for both maintaining its traditional lifestyle and ensuring its future, had briefly seemed within reach. He also saw it as a way to contribute to global solutions to the climate crisis.

“I don’t think [we are] the biggest contributor to global pollution, but if we could do our part and not pollute, maybe we won’t erode as fast,” he said. “I know we’re not very many people, but to us, that’s our community.”

The tribe planned to use a $300,000 grant from Climate United to pay for the topographic and waterway studies needed to design two run-of-the-river hydropower plants. In theory, the systems, which divert a portion of flowing water through turbines, would generate enough clean energy to power the entirety of Port Heiden, including the idle fish-processing facility. The community also envisioned channeling hydropower to run a local greenhouse, where they could expand what crops they raise and the growing season, further boosting local food access and sovereignty.

In even that short period of whiplash—from being awarded the grant to watching it vanish—the village’s needs have become increasingly urgent. Meeting the skyrocketing cost of diesel, according to Christensen, is no longer feasible. The community’s energy crisis and ensuing cost of living struggle have already started prompting an exodus, with the population declining at a rate of little over 3 percent every year—a noticeable loss when the town’s number rarely exceeds a hundred residents to begin with.

“It’s really expensive to live out here. And I don’t plan on moving anytime soon. And my kids, they don’t want to go either. So I have to make it better, make it easier to live here,” Christensen said.

Janine Bloomfield, grants specialist at 10Power, the organization that Port Heiden partnered with to help write their grant application, said they are currently waiting for a decision to be made in the lawsuit “that may lead to the money being unfrozen.” In the interim, she said, recipients have been asked to work with Climate United on paperwork “to be able to react quickly in the event that the funds are released.”

For its part, Climate United is also now exploring other funding strategies. The coalition is rehauling the structure of the money going to Port Heiden and other Native communities. Rather than awarding it as a grant, where recipients would have to pay the costs upfront and be reimbursed later, Climate United will now issue loans to the communities originally selected for the pre-development grants that don’t require upfront costs and will be forgiven upon completion of the agreed-upon deliverables. Their reason for the transition, according to Langholz, was “to increase security, decrease administrative burden on our partners, and create credit-building opportunities while still providing strong programmatic oversight.”

Still, there are downsides to consider with any loan, including being stuck with debt. In many cases, said Chéri Smith, a Mi’Kmaq descendant who founded and leads the nonprofit Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, replacing a federal grant with a loan, even a forgivable one, “adds complexity and risk for Tribal governments.”

Forgivable loans “become a better option” in later stages of development or for income-generating infrastructure, said Smith, who is on the advisory board of Climate United, but are “rarely suitable for common pre-development needs.” That’s because pre-feasibility work, such as Port Heiden’s hydropower project, “is inherently speculative, and Tribes should not be expected to risk even conditional debt to validate whether their own resources can be developed.” This is especially true in Alaska, she added, where costs and logistical challenges are exponentially higher for the 229 federally recognized tribes than in the lower 48, and outcomes much less predictable.

Raina Thiele, Dena’ina Athabascan and Yup’ik, who formerly served in the Biden administration as senior adviser for Alaska affairs to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and former tribal liaison to President Obama, said the lending situation is particularly unique when it comes to Alaska Native communities, because of how Congress historically wrote legislation relating to a land claim settlement which saw tribes deprived of control over resources and land. Because of that, it’s been incredibly difficult for communities to build capacity, she noted, making even a forgivable loan “a bit of a high-risk endeavor.” The question of trust also shows up—the promise of loan forgiveness, in particular, is understandably difficult for communities who have long faced exploitation and discrimination in public and privatized lending programs. “Grant programs are a lot more familiar,” she said.

Even so, the loan from Climate United would only be possible if the court rules in its favor and compels the EPA to release the money. If the court rules against Climate United, Langholz told Grist, the organization could pursue damage claims in another court and may seek philanthropic fundraising to help Port Heiden come up with the $300,000, in addition to the rest of the $6 million promised to the nearly two dozen Native communities originally selected for the grant program.

“These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes.”

“These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes, essentially,” said Thiele.

While many different stakeholders wait to see how the federal funding crisis will play out, Christensen doesn’t know what to make of the proposed grant-to-loan shift for Port Heiden’s hydropower project. The landscape has changed so quickly and drastically, it has, however, prompted him to lose what little faith he had left in federal funding. He has already begun to brainstorm other ways to ditch diesel.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll find the money if I have to. I’ll win the lottery, and spend the money on cheaper power.”

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