Trump Is Hellbent on Crushing Federal Unions, But They’re Still Kicking

Chandler Bursey used to have an office. It was a modest room at the Veterans Affairs campus in Idaho, a set of buildings nestled under one of the mountain ridges reaching into Boise. The office, a meeting place for members of the union chapter Bursey leads, was something the union had negotiated. For many years it relied on VA resources, but after Donald Trump was reelected, Bursey began decoupling. “I made sure to separate all of our computer systems, get our own separate phone line,” he says. “He might kick us out.”

Like other federal labor leaders, Bursey spent the first months of Trump’s second term waiting for the other shoe to drop. The Heritage Foundation’s manifesto had called for the dismantling of public sector unions and privatization of various agencies. Within weeks of the inauguration, federal workers were already experiencing “trauma,” as Project 2025 architect and Office of Management and Budget chief Russell Vought had promised. But the first sweeping assault on the unions arrived in mid-March in an executive order clawing back labor rights across dozens of agencies. Bursey’s chapter was booted from its office—a minor ding next to the loss of hard-won guarantees of good working conditions and paid parental leave, which went out the window along with the workers’ collective bargaining rights.

The VA’s new political appointees issued a dubious statement, claiming taxpayers were losing millions of dollars as agency employees spent work hours on union activities. Bursey did set aside some of his day for union tasks, but given his $52,000 salary, the numbers didn’t add up. “We save the American taxpayer money,” he counters. “We see issues within the VA. We help them become more efficient.”

Not only that, but the administration had, in one fell swoop, squandered the considerable resources that went into creating that collective bargaining pact. “The government spent a lot of money with their attorneys to sit down and negotiate with the union,” Bursey says. “And then the government just says, ‘Yeah, it’s not real. I don’t believe in it anymore.’”

Across town, at Boise Airport, local Transportation Security Administration workers were staring into a similarly uncertain future. A few weeks before Trump issued his order, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had announced she was canceling TSA’s collective bargaining agreement. “That’s kind of like my work bible,” says Cameron Cochems, who leads Idaho’s TSA union chapter. “But if the laws of the country are just kind of going away, then what’s stopping [workers’ rights] from just getting thrown in the trash can, too?”

Cochems’ and Bursey’s chapters both fall under the umbrella of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal union. It’s been a busy year for AFGE’s lawyers who—alongside a handful of other unions—have filed eight lawsuits on their workers’ behalf. In July, a federal judge temporarily reinstated the collective bargaining agreement for TSA workers, pending a final decision. In the meantime, there’s little to do but wait. “A lot of the members, I felt, were kind of despondent about it,” Cochems says, “because they’re just like, ‘Oh, the union is so weak anyway, especially because we can’t strike.’”

Amid DOGE’s assault, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a rant suggesting federal jobs are not “real jobs” and the workers “do not deserve their paychecks.”

Unless you’ve worked for the government (as I did until February of this year), you might be surprised to learn that striking is a felony for federal workers. The government had always cracked down on public sector strikes, but they were officially outlawed in 1947, made punishable by fines, jail time, and a lifetime ban from government work. Even asserting a right to strike—or belonging to an organization that does—can bring about those consequences.

Civil servants have staged illegal strikes in the past, but for decades, no one has dared run afoul of the laws, tranquilizing a once-militant workforce. “A lot of people think that since we don’t have the right to strike,” Cochems says, “we’re kind of like a paper tiger.”

Lately though, federal unions have been showing they are still relevant. Take Adam Larson, who a few years ago was “voluntold” into a leadership post with the National Federation for Federal Employees (NFFE) chapter for Idaho’s Forest Service workers. As Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began bulldozing agencies with zero transparency, Larson’s nascent presidency shifted into high gear, his chapter becoming a key source of information and support. “No one knew anything. The [Forest Service] wasn’t sharing any information with us,” Larson recalls. “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a tough situation. Here’s what we know. We’ll share more when we find it.’”

The workers were grateful to hear from someone. The chapter organized dinners for targeted employees and helped people share their stories with news outlets. Bursey and Cochems conducted their own triage operations, orchestrating pickets against the mass firings and, more recently, mounting food drives for essential workers unpaid during the shutdown.

This mutual aid has been a lifeline for many, even if it doesn’t solve the bigger problems. Under the anti-strike laws, big-ticket negotiations became the purview of national union leaders, not local chapters. The result is “a quieting of on-the-ground work, because I think a lot of members are just like, ‘Oh yeah, they’ll take care of that at the higher levels,’” Larson says. “Decades of that have kind of declawed us.”

The public sector has a much larger share of unionized workers than the private sector, but the rights of the civil servants have lagged far behind. Since the 1930s, federal laws have allowed private sector employees to unionize and strike, but it would be decades before federal workers could even bargain as a unit.

A few piecemeal laws and executive orders were solidified into the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which lays out federal workers’ limited rights. Their unions cannot bargain over pay and benefits, for example, because those pertain to federal spending—congressional turf, even though Congress has all but ceded its spending authority to Trump. Unions may negotiate how employees are classified within the rubric that determines salaries, but other restrictions are spelled out clearly, including the criminalization of strikes. (Most states also prohibit state and local government employees from striking, and about a third forbid public sector collective bargaining.)

The rationale for these restrictive laws is that allowing civil servants to strike would give them—relative to other citizens—unfair influence over government. By threatening work stoppages, they could sway policies and influence how tax dollars are spent. And because their services are often essential—think air traffic controllers—the ability to strike would make unions “so strong politically, the mayor of the town will always cave to the striking union,” explains Joseph Slater, a professor of law at the University of Toledo and an expert on public sector labor. That’s the theory, anyway. Slater is unconvinced.

“I think that concern is largely misplaced,” concurs Kate Andrias, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in labor and constitutional issues. In countries and states where civil servants are allowed to strike, “there really hasn’t been a history of or a demonstration of circumstances where workers routinely abused that power.”

“I could make more in the outside community doing what I do, but I believe in the mission of the VA.”

That’s partly because striking demands sacrifice. “The difficulty of actually going on strike and losing a paycheck is a very significant check on the ability of workers to go on strike,” Andrias says. Government workers, by and large, are not highly paid, so a strike is a big ask that most workers won’t agree to unless the outcome is vital.

The public benefits, too, when federal workers are well-treated. The ability to negotiate fair pay and benefits results in lower turnover and a more experienced workforce, which in turn delivers better services—although that perspective contrasts sharply with Republican rhetoric depicting civil servants as acting against the public interest.

Amid DOGE’s assault, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a nonsensical tirade suggesting that federal jobs are not “real jobs” and federal workers “do not deserve their paychecks.” Such sentiments were pervasive long before Trump’s minions started kneecapping the federal workforce. In a May 2024 proposal to reduce federal employee benefits, House Republicans asserted, “The biggest losers in this system are hardworking taxpayers who are forced to subsidize the bloated salaries of unqualified and unelected bureaucrats working to force a liberal agenda on a country that does not want it.”

Pay stubs tell a different story. According to an analysis of 2022 data from the Congressional Budget Office, federal workers without a college degree tend to make a bit more than they would in similar private sector roles—perhaps because less-educated workers are more likely to be shortchanged by private employers—but people with advanced and professional degrees earn significantly less than their private sector counterparts. “I could make more in the outside community doing what I do, but I believe in the mission of the VA,” Bursey says. “When they’re saying we’re taking millions of dollars away from the American taxpayer, that’s not true.”

Historically, civil servants have leveraged their collective bargaining power and risked strikes to, at least in part, actively improve government services. “The piece that people don’t appreciate is that they are purpose driven. They’re there to serve the public,” Max Stier, CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, told one of my Mother Jones colleagues. “They are not clock watchers. They’re not lazy,” he adds. “If they’re in NASA, it’s because they want to explore the universe. If they’re at the VA, it’s because they want to serve veterans.”

Trump’s attempt to destroy the much-maligned “administrative state” have already succeeded in making government less effective and less responsive to people’s needs. The onslaught has, among other things, harmed the ability of already strapped federal agencies to collect weather data; compile key agricultural, economic, and housing statistics; conduct scientific research; and respond to climate disasters. Former IRS chief John Koskinen predicted that the gutting and demoralization of that agency’s staff will likely result in a disastrous upcoming tax season—with significant revenue losses thanks to the summary firing of sophisticated auditors and enforcement personnel.

“People think that we’re just focusing on ourselves. That’s not the case at all,” Cochems told me. “We’re focusing on making the country a better place for all of us.”

I heard this sentiment from every labor scholar and leader I spoke with, but it’s a message that demands a receptive audience. Notes law professor Slater: “It is not at all clear that anybody in the Trump administration believes that argument or even cares tremendously about certain agencies functioning well.”

Many legal experts see a strong First Amendment case for the right of public sector workers to strike, because what is a federal strike if not people exercising their rights to speak, assemble peacefully, and petition the government for grievances?

The Supreme Court has broadly protected the right of workers to unionize, but it has yet to extend First Amendment protections to union activities. One one hand, “there’s never been a Supreme Court case squarely saying you don’t have a right to strike,” Slater offers, but “given our current Supreme Court, I doubt that’s going to change.”

A legal precedent exists for stripping union protections from certain agencies, but Trump has stretched it to the extreme. The Civil Service Reform Act states that a president can revoke collective bargaining rights from workers handling serious national security matters. In the past, the stipulation has been applied only to agencies like the CIA, but now, “Trump is basically saying most of the federal government does that,” Slater says. “That’s an extremely aggressive interpretation.”

When air traffic controllers launched their illegal strike in 1981, “everything unfolded fast…The government really brought down a sledgehammer.”

The administration claims the national security provision pertains to everything from the Department of Justice to obscure agencies like the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Unions are fighting back in the courts, but that’s a path available for only the most paramount of grievances. For other labor disputes on Trump’s watch, workers are out of luck.

Barred from striking, federal unions are left with arbitration, the highest level of which goes through the 10-member Federal Services Impasses Panel. This is where civil servants are supposed to turn when negotiations are gridlocked—the point at which nongovernment workers might walk off the job. FSIP is staffed by presidential appointees, typically labor rights experts like Slater, who served on the panel under President Biden. A shuffling of panelists is normal when a new administration comes in, but early in his second term, Trump basically nuked the panel—every seat has been vacant since February.

Government bodies tasked with resolving lower-level disputes—such as the Merit Systems Protection Board—have been similarly and “intentionally” disabled, Slater says. And those mechanisms are especially important now, given the deteriorating relationships between federal workers and their bosses.

When Trump’s people came in, “I saw a massive shift in the tone in which upper management was speaking to the union and started treating [VA] employees,” Bursey says. “That’s been really hard to watch.” He’s heard managers assert that union posters in agency hallways constitute propaganda. In such an environment, it’s hard to imagine resolving any clashes amicably.

And now there’s nowhere to turn.

There’s a union slogan that was common in the 1960s and ’70s, when public sector strikes were tolerated for a time: There are no illegal strikes, just unsuccessful ones. Many of the rights public sector employees have today were the product not of lawsuits and arbitration, but of illegal strikes by teachers, sanitation workers, and federal employees. In response, states began to recognize the labor rights of their own civil servants, which eventually led the federal government to establish union rights for its workforce.

Things were looking up for organized labor. And then came the PATCO fiasco.

On the morning of August 3, 1981, 13,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job. They demanded better pay and shorter hours, as increased air travel was straining the workforce and causing safety concerns. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization had been in a stalemate with the Federal Aviation Administration for years, and union leaders began planning an illegal strike. When the controllers finally stepped off the job, “everything unfolded fast,” says Joseph McCartin, a professor of labor history at Georgetown University and author of Collision Course, a book about the PATCO strike. “The government really brought down a sledgehammer.”

Air traffic controllers picket at a radar station where they worked in Long Island, New York, August 5, 1981.Keystone/Zuma

They were on the picket line only a few hours when President Ronald Reagan, in a televised press conference, gave the controllers 48 hours to return to work or be fired. Reagan’s attorney general announced he would start filing criminal charges as early as that afternoon. No federal employees had ever been charged for striking before, and the workers held strong. But Reagan didn’t cave. He fired 11,000 air traffic controllers, the union was decertified, and PATCO leaders served jail time.

The move sent shockwaves through the federal workforce and ushered in an era of union-busting that has broadly reduced the power of labor. Strike activity waned in the private sector, and there hasn’t been a federal strike since. “You see what happened to the PATCO workers, and one might imagine an even more aggressive stance by the Trump administration,” Slater says.

“Russell Vought said that he wants to make our lives miserable and so knowing that…has really engaged a lot of people.”

McCartin views things differently. “I fear that some of the leaders of the federal unions really almost took the wrong lessons from the PATCO strike,” he says. After all, the controllers had some major factors working against them in 1981. They’d threatened to strike long before it happened, giving the government time to bring in military personnel who were qualified to manage the airspace and willing to cross picket lines.

More importantly, the union didn’t have the public on its side. While some of the controllers’ demands involved public safety, they sought a $10,000 raise (almost $36,000 today)—an off-putting amount when many Americans were feeling the squeeze of an impending recession. What’s more, Reagan, PATCO’s adversary, was a popular president who had just survived an assassination attempt, rocketing his favorability ratings above 70 percent.

If federal workers went on strike today, they might receive a more sympathetic hearing from a public who saw them in line at food banks during the shutdown. Today’s villains are more clear-cut, too: a government that aspires to put its own workers “in trauma,” as Vought phrased it, and is openly corrupt to boot.

“We are not allowed to take anything while we’re on duty in our official capacity, even a candy bar,” Cochems says. “But then we see videos of people in elected offices in the White House basically swimming it up with cryptocurrency kings. All these people are making millions of dollars or getting a $40 billion plane…or whatever the hell—in their official capacity.”

Given all of this, previously disinterested employees are warming up to collective action. As DOGE hacked agencies apart, union sign-ups spiked. In February, AFGE announced the highest number of dues-paying members in its history. More than 14,000 people joined the union in the first five weeks of 2025, about as many as it had gained the entire previous year. “They say that the boss is the best organizer,” Larson explains. “Russell Vought said that he wants to make our lives miserable and so knowing that that’s coming down the pipe has really engaged a lot of people.”

But the mass layoffs put a dent in union membership. Since January, the government has shed an estimated 10 percent of its civilian workforce, with some agencies and union chapters much more heavily gutted. “Most of my department took the deferred resignation program after months of getting illegally fired and then rehired and then treated like hot garbage,” Larson told me, his own Forest Service team having shrunk from 10 workers to three.

Many workers opposed their national unions urging Democrats to end the shutdown: “We were willing to suffer a little bit longer to make sure that the greater good was achieved.”

Trump’s sweeping anti-union order also decimated union membership; federal payroll systems stopped collecting the dues that are normally deducted from members’ paychecks, which many workers only realized upon scrutinizing their pay stubs. Without knowledge or consent, they’d been dropped from the rolls.

“We’re steadily getting them back, and we’re steadily losing people,” Bursey says. “That was hard to take.” He and the other leaders have worked so hard to build up their membership over the past few years, only “to see it just rapidly decline, pretty much overnight.”

Bursey now believes someone in his regional office management has been spreading false rumors that the union is kaput. Members call him up, saying, “I want to drop. You guys don’t exist anymore,” he says. “My first response is, ‘How did you get ahold of me? The union cellphone! We’re still here!’”

The compounding indignities have led more union chapters to seek safety in numbers. Bursey and Cochems have been collaborating with other Idaho-based workers, including Larson’s NFFE chapter. “We’re all in lockstep,” Bursey says.

The Federal Unionists Network, which started out a few years ago as a WhatsApp group chat, has evolved into a government-wide worker collective. They distribute information and resources and mobilize federal employees to turn out for national protests like “No Kings,” as well as local actions.

A picket line of workers who will still clock in isn’t as disruptive as a strike, but it’s more energizing, and visible, than lawsuits and arbitration sessions. Everyone can participate. “Cameron [Cochems] has been coming out to our pickets 100 percent of the time,” along with every registered Democrat in Boise, Bursey jokes. “There’s not many, but they’re feisty, let me tell you.”

In early 2025, union members led a march, sponsored by more than 60 unions and public interest groups, through lower Manhattan to protest mass layoffs and agency budget cuts by the Trump administration.Gina M Randazzo/Zuma

During our video call, Cochems points to a sign on his wall reading Solidarity! Solidarity! Solidarity! This ethos transcends unions, he says. Federal workers are increasingly feeling more in solidarity with the public than with their national union leaders. When Everett Kelley, AFGE’s national president, asked Congress to end the shutdown four weeks in, many workers interpreted it as a call for the Democrats to cave. And when the NFFE applauded the Senate for passing a resolution that failed to extend the Obamacare subsidies, as Democrats had demanded to keep health insurance affordable, a lot of federal workers felt betrayed. “I’m definitely angry about it, because I’ve seen the people that were suffering for it, but like, We’re going to get that to get that health care,” Bursey says. “We were willing to suffer a little bit longer to make sure that the greater good was achieved.”

There are indications that the administration’s union-busting may have gone further than the public is willing to stomach.Last week, 20 House Republicans joined Democrats in passing a bill (the Protect America’s Workforce Act) that would reverse Trump’s anti-union executive order. The GOP showing may be performative—the bill faces greater obstacles in the Senate—but this at least suggests that vulnerable Republicans are getting an earful from constituents.

An illegal strike would be a last resort, of course, and many workers fear Vought et al would use it as an opportunity for further firings. Some civil servants, too, view striking as antithetical to their mission. At the VA, “we’re providing health care, so if we shut down in a strike, where’s that veteran going to go?” Bursey says. “To go on strike would kind of go against our own oath with the VA, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to fight.”

They are, in any case, growing impatient. The legal system moves excruciatingly slowly, and with mixed results. Many workers want to see action before it’s too late. “Every day could be our last day doing this,” Cochems says. “I just feel like I’m living on borrowed time.”

Taking action might just mean more picketing, and workers reaching out to members of Congress directly instead of trusting national union figures to lobby on their behalf. But the biggest goal is to win over the public. “I think everybody will get to a point where the American population is going to get so fed up with this that 7 million people for the No Kings protest is going to look like a trickle,” Bursey says.

“That’s what we’re working toward.”

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Ilhan Omar Says ICE Pulled Over Her Son in Minnesota, Asked for ID

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar said Sunday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled over her son this weekend and asked him to prove his citizenship.

In an interview with WCCO, a CBS affiliate based in Minneapolis, the Somali-born congresswoman said she’s feared for her 20-year-old son since President Donald Trump and ICE began targeting Somali immigrants in the Twin Cities area earlier this month.

“Yesterday, after he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by ICE agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Omar, a refugee from Somalia, told WCCO’s Esme Murphy.

Since descending on Minnesota, home of the largest Somali community in the the country, ICE agents have detained several US citizens, according to local officials and video evidence. The operation, “Metro Surge,” has prompted area residents to begin carrying around their passports and even avoid going outside, according to The New York Times. This includes Omar’s son, who “always carries” his passport with him, the four-term congresswoman told Murphy.

The incident described by Omar occurred one day after she announced that she was launching two formal inquiries into the Trump administration’s “escalating attacks on Somali communities in Minnesota and across the country,” her website reads. In a December 12 letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE acting director Todd Lyons, Omar wrote that “constituents, advocates, and local officials have documented blatant racial profiling, an egregious level of unnecessary force, and activity that appears designed for social media rather than befitting a law enforcement agency.”

“I kept calling to see if he was okay, if he had any run-ins, and he wasn’t answering,” Omar told WCCO.

Among other questions, Omar wants Noem and Lyons to answer: “How many arrests were the result of judicial warrants?” “How can the public report potential violations of constitutional rights, and how will those be investigated?” and “How is ICE ensuring due process protections while a large volume of new officers are on the ground?”

Amid a barrage of xenophobic remarks about Somali people in recent weeks, President Trump has repeatedly targeted Omar, who arrived in the US as a refugee in the 1990s and became a citizen in 2000. These attacks go back to Trump’s first term, when Omar was first elected to Congress.

“She’s garbage,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting December 2. “Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.” In that meeting, the president also said that Somalia “stinks” and that immigrants from the country “come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch.” “We don’t want them in our country,” he said multiple times.

At a Pennsylvania rally this past Tuesday night, Trump called Somalia “about the worst country in the world” and mocked Omar. “I love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is, with the little turban. I love her, she comes in, does nothing but bitch,” he said. “She should get the hell out, throw her the hell out,” Trump continued as his supporters chanted “GET HER OUT!”

In her interview on Sunday, Omar said ICE had previously entered a local mosque where her son prays, before leaving without making any arrests last Friday. Omar said that throughout that day she was watching videos of ICE stops in the same neighborhood as the mosque.

“I kept calling to see if he was okay, if he had any run-ins, and he wasn’t answering,” Omar told WCCO. “Eventually, that night I did get a chance to talk to him and I had to remind him just how worried I am.”

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15 Dead in Hanukkah Terror Attack Amid Wave of Rising Antisemitism in Australia

At least 15 people were killed, and more than three dozen hospitalized, in a shooting at Australia’s famous Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday in what the authorities are calling a terrorist attack at a Jewish holiday celebration.

One gunman has been killed and a second suspect is in custody and in critical condition, police said.

The attack comes amid a surge in antisemitic violence in Australia, home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. It is Australia’s worst mass shooting in three decades, a rare occurrence in a country with one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the developed world.

“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said, adding, “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”

At about 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, police began receiving reports that multiple people had been shot. “The gunmen emerged from a small silver hatchback parked by a footbridge near the beach and began firing into the crowd celebrating Hanukkah,” according to the New York Times.

Emergency workers transport a shooting victim on a stretcher after an attack at Sydney’s popular Bondi Beach.Mark Baker/AP

A video showing a bystander—identified by Australian media reports as Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old Sydney man—tackling and disarming an assailant has gone viral. “That man is a genuine hero,” said Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, “and I’ve got no doubt there are many many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.”

Mal Lanyon, police commissioner for New South Wales, said there were also two improvised explosive devices found at the scene that were “active,” the Times reported. He described them as “rudimentary” and “fairly basic” in construction.

Police departments around the world, from New York to London, said they would increase security presences in their cities following the attack. “We are deploying additional resources to public Hanukkah celebrations and synagogues out of an abundance of caution,” the NYPD said in a statement, adding that they “see no nexus to NYC.”

A rabbi lights a menorah during a vigil outside the Australian High Commission in central London, following the terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia on Sunday.James Manning/PA Wire/AP

The rise in antisemitic attacks in the country began after the October 7, 2023 massacre and Israel’s offensive in Gaza. In May 2024, one of Australia’s largest and oldest Jewish schools in Melbourne was spray-painted with the phrase “Jew die.” In a series of incidents in October 2024, a Jewish‑owned bakery in Sydney was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, two men set fire to a brewery near Bondi Beach, and a kosher deli was deliberately set on fire.

One of the most serious incidents occurred this past July, when about 20 worshipers attending a Shabbat dinner at the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation “were forced to evacuate through a rear exit after a man poured flammable liquid on the front door and set it alight,” as reported by Time.

These incidents, according to Daniel Aghion, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, are at “a level that we’ve never seen in the more than 30 years that we’ve been monitoring and collecting data.”

According to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, the Bondi Beach shooting is the deadliest attack on Jews in the diaspora since the October 27, 2018, attack at the Tree of Life building in that city left 11 people dead. This past October, two people were stabbed to death at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur.

Sunday’s shooting is also the worst in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 23 more. As the New York Times detailed, following that shooting—in which a gunman killed 12 of the victims in just 15 seconds—the country essentially banned assault rifles, many other semiautomatic rifles, and shotguns. Authorities also imposed mandatory gun buybacks, melted down as many as 1 million guns, and imposed new registration requirements and restrictions on gun purchases.

Over the next two decades, there were no mass shootings in Australia.

In an investigation published this past August, the Guardian warned that the gun landscape in Australia was shifting. “Gun numbers are on the rise,” the investigation noted, and, while the number of gun-license holders per capita has gone down, “there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the [Port Arthur] crackdown.”

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, said on X that one of the people killed in the attack, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, had deep ties to the neighborhood of Crown Heights. Mamdani called the attack a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and said it was “merely the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world.” Schlanger organized the Sydney celebration.

The Hanukkah celebrations at Bondi Beach on Sunday were being hosted by a local chapter of Chabad, a global organization based in Brooklyn. An invitation to the event highlighted free donuts, crafts, face-painting, a “Grand Menorah Lighting,” music, games, and ice cream.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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A Dozen Ways You (Yes, You) Can Help Fight Climate Change

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

If you’re reading this, chances are you care a lot about fighting climate change, and that’s great. The climate emergency threatens all of humanity. And although the world has started to make some progress on it, our global response is still extremely lacking.

The trouble is, it can be genuinely hard to figure out how to direct your money wisely if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a glut of environmental organizations out there—but how do you know which are the most impactful?

To help, here’s a list of eight of the most high-impact, cost-effective, and evidence-based organizations. We’re not including bigger-name groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, or the Natural Resources Defense Council, because most big organizations are already relatively well-funded.

The groups we list below seem to be doing something especially promising in the light of criteria that matter for effectiveness: importance, tractability, and neglectedness.

Important targets for change are ones that drive a big portion of global emissions. Tractable problems are ones where we can actually make progress right now. And neglected problems are ones that aren’t already getting a big influx of cash from other sources like the government or philanthropy, and could really use money from smaller donors.

Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities, and Giving Green, a climate charity evaluator, used these criteria to assess climate organizations. Their research informed the list below. As in the Founders Pledge and Giving Green recommendations, we’ve chosen to look at groups focused on mitigation (tackling the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions) rather than adaptation (decreasing the suffering from the impacts of climate change). Both are important, but the focus here is on preventing further catastrophe.

And this work is particularly important right now, in a world where “climate attention has collapsed, political support has evaporated, and policy gains are under sustained assault,” Founders Pledge stressed in its assessment of today’s politically charged atmosphere. Just last month, the prominent environmental group 350.org was forced to “temporarily suspend” its US operations because of severe funding challenges, according to a letter obtained by Politico. They are among the many groups in the climate movement now buckling under existential funding cuts.

At the same time, Founders Pledge argues that the climate community massively underinvested “outside the progressive bubble,” creating a movement that was not resilient to the shakeup that would come under President Donald Trump. “One of the main ways we were underprepared was the fact that climate philanthropy invested overwhelmingly on one side of the political spectrum,” the organization writes. Now, the experts say, it’s particularly important to invest in nonpartisan organizations dedicated to defending and expanding upon all of the progress made so far.

Arguably, the best move is to donate not to an individual charity, but to a fund—like the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund or the Giving Green Fund. Experts at those groups pool together donor money and give it out to the charities they deem most effective, right when extra funding is most needed. That can mean making time-sensitive grants to promote the writing of an important report, or stepping in when a charity becomes acutely funding-constrained.

That said, some of us like to be able to decide exactly which charity our money ends up with—maybe because we have especially high confidence in one or two charities relative to the others—rather than letting experts split the cash over a range of different groups.

With that in mind, we’re listing below a mix of individual organizations where your money is likely to have an exceptionally positive impact.

Clean Air Task Force

What it does: The Clean Air Task Force is a US-based nongovernmental organization that has been working to reduce air pollution since its founding in 1996. It led a successful campaign to reduce the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants in the US, helped limit the US power sector’s CO2 emissions, and helped establish regulations of diesel, shipping, and methane emissions. CATF also advocates for the adoption of neglected low- and zero-carbon technologies, from advanced nuclear power to super-hot rock geothermal energy.

Why you should consider donating: In addition to its seriously impressive record of success and the high quality of its research, CATF does well on the neglectedness criterion: It often concentrates on targeting emissions sources that are neglected by other environmental organizations, and on scaling up deployment of technologies that are crucial for decarbonization, yet passed over by NGOs and governments. For example, it was one of the first major environmental groups to publicly campaign against overlooked superpollutants like methane.

In recent years, CATF has been expanding beyond the US to operate in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. This is crucial: About 35 percent of climate philanthropy goes to the US and about 10 percent to Europe, which together represent only about 15 percent of future emissions, according to Founders Pledge. And this year, CATF has refocused its strategy to zero in on programs with broad nonpartisan political support to ensure those global efforts have staying power. This is part of why Founders Pledge is supporting CATF’s efforts and recommends giving to that organization. CATF is also one of Giving Green’s top picks.

You can donate to CATF here.

Future Cleantech Architects

What it does: This Germany-based organization aims to promote innovation in Europe’s hard-to-decarbonize sectors by running key programs in, for example, zero-carbon fuels, industry, and carbon removal technologies.

Why you should consider donating: You might be wondering if this kind of innovation really meets the “neglectedness” criterion—don’t we already have a lot of innovation? In the US, yes. But in Europe, this kind of organization is much rarer. And according to Founders Pledge, it’s already exceeded expectations at improving the European climate policy response. Most notably, it has helped shape key legislation at the EU level and advised policymakers on how to get the most bang for their buck when supporting research and development for clean energy tech. Giving Green recommends this organization, too.

You can donate to Future Cleantech Architects here.

Good Food Institute

What it does: The Good Food Institute works to make alternative proteins (think plant-based burgers) competitive with conventional proteins like beef, which could help reduce livestock consumption. It engages in scientific research, industry partnerships, and government advocacy that improves the odds of alternative proteins going mainstream.

Why you should consider donating: Raising animals for meat is responsible for more than 10 percent and perhaps as much as 19 percent of global emissions. These animals belch the superpollutant methane. Plus, we humans tend to deforest a lot of land for them to graze on, even though we all know the world needs more trees, not less. Yet there hasn’t been very much government effort to substantially cut agricultural emissions. Giving Green recommends the Good Food Institute because of its potential to help with that, noting that “GFI remains a powerhouse in alternative protein thought leadership and action. It has strong ties to government, industry, and research organizations and continues to achieve impressive wins. We believe donations to GFI can help stimulate systemic change that reduces food system emissions on a global scale.”

You can donate to the Good Food Institute here.

Innovation Initiative at the Clean Economy Project

What it does: When Bill Gates shuttered the policy arm of his climate philanthropy Breakthrough Energy earlier this year, the US lost a unique advocate for innovation at a pivotal moment in the country’s energy transition. Or did it? A group of veteran Breakthrough Energy staff recently launched the Innovation Initiative—part of a new organization called the Clean Economy Project—as part of a push to ensure the US continues on the right path in its energy transition, regardless of which party is in power.

Why you should consider donating: This newly formed project may still be in its infancy, but its work builds upon years of deep experience advocating for clean energy innovation across the political spectrum. Founders Pledge helped seed the new organization with an early grant because “we see the Innovation Initiative as the best bet for donors who want to support federal energy innovation policy advocacy at a moment when this ecosystem needs coordination and strategic leadership,” they said, noting that even small-scale support for such efforts can spur massive payoffs in the space: “Relatively modest advocacy investments can influence billions” in federal spending for research and development “that accelerates breakthrough technologies with global spillover effects.”

You can learn more about the Innovation Initiative here. To donate, send an email to giving@cleanecon.org, with the subject line “Donating to Innovation Initiative.”

DEPLOY/US

What it does: This nonpartisan nonprofit works with American conservatives to enact decarbonization policies, with the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. DEPLOY/US partners with philanthropic, business, military, faith, youth, policy, and grassroots organizations to shape a decarbonization strategy and generate policy change.

Why you should consider donating: In case you haven’t heard of the eco-right, it’s important to know that there are genuine right-of-center climate groups that want to build support for decarbonization based on conservative principles. These groups have a crucial role to play; they can weaken political polarization around climate and increase Republican support for bold decarbonization policies, which are especially important now, with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress. Right now, these right-of-center groups remain “woefully underfunded compared to both the opportunity and necessity of correcting a large ideological blindspot of the climate movement that has come to bite in 2025,” Founders Pledge writes, adding that DEPLOY/US is uniquely positioned to insulate climate policy against the shifting winds of politics.

You can donate to DEPLOY/US here.

Energy for Growth Hub

What it does: Founded by Todd Moss in 2013, Energy for Growth Hub aims to make electricity reliable and affordable for everyone. The organization hopes to end energy poverty through climate-friendly solutions.

Why you should consider donating: While Energy for Growth Hub is not a strictly climate-focused organization—ending energy poverty is its main goal—it’s still a leader in the clean energy space. The organization will use your donation to fund projects that produce insight for companies and policymakers on how to create the energy-rich, climate-friendly future they’re dreaming of. In June, the World Bank announced an end to its ban on funding nuclear power projects after a sustained lobbying effort from Energy for Growth Hub alongside other think tanks and policy wonks. “We all know that Washington is broken. People complain that it’s impossible to get stuff done,” Moss wrote in his Substack in response. “But then, actually quite often, stuff does get done. And sometimes, just sometimes, things happen because people outside government come together to push a new idea inside government.”

You can donate to Energy for Growth Hub here.

Project InnerSpace

What it does: This US-based nonprofit hopes to unlock the power of heat — geothermal energy—lying beneath the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2022, Project InnerSpace seeks to expand global access and drive down the cost of carbon-free heat and electricity, particularly to populations in the Global South. The organization maps geothermal resources and identifies geothermal projects in need of further funding.

Why you should consider donating: Most geothermal power plants are located in places where geothermal energy is close to the Earth’s surface. Project InnerSpace will use your donation to add new data and tools to GeoMap, its signature map of geothermal hot spots, and drive new strategies and projects to fast-track transitions to geothermal energy around the world. The group also began funding community energy projects through its newly launched GeoFund earlier this year, starting with a geothermal-powered food storage facility in Tapri, India, which will offer local farmers more power to preserve their crops.

You can donate to Project InnerSpace here.

Opportunity Green

What it does: Opportunity Green aims to cut aviation and maritime shipping emissions through targeted regulation and policy initiatives. The UK-based nonprofit was founded in 2021, and since then has aimed to encourage private sector adoption of clean energy alternatives.

Why you should consider donating: Aviation and maritime shipping are an enormous source of global emissions, but receive little attention because international coordination is difficult around the issue, and there are few low-carbon fleets and fuels readily available. Even so, in a few short years, Opportunity Green has managed to gain significant influence in EU and international policy discussions around shipping emissions, while also helping to bring the perspective of climate-vulnerable countries into the fray. In 2024, the group launched a major legal filing against the EU to challenge its green finance rules. “We think Opportunity Green is a strategic organization with broad expertise across multiple pathways of influence to reduce emissions from aviation and shipping,” Giving Green notes. “We are especially excited about Opportunity Green’s efforts to elevate climate-vulnerable countries in policy discussions.”

You can donate to Opportunity Green here.

The past several years have seen an explosion of grassroots activism groups focused on climate—from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future to the Sunrise Movement to Extinction Rebellion. Activism is an important piece of the climate puzzle; it can help change public opinion and policy, including by shifting the Overton window, the range of policies that seem possible.

Social change is not an exact science, and the challenges in measuring a social movement’s effectiveness are well documented. While it would be helpful to have more concrete data on the impact of activist groups, it may also be shortsighted to ignore movement-building for that reason.

The environmentalist Bill McKibben told Vox that building the climate movement is crucial because, although we’ve already got some good mitigation solutions, we’re not deploying them fast enough. “That’s the ongoing power of the fossil fuel industry at work. The only way to break that power and change the politics of climate is to build a countervailing power,” he said in 2019. “Our job — and it’s the key job — is to change the zeitgeist, people’s sense of what’s normal and natural and obvious. If we do that, all else will follow.”

Of course, some activist groups are more effective than others. And it’s worth noting that a group that was highly effective at influencing climate policy during the Biden administration, such as the Sunrise Movement, will not necessarily be as effective today.

“Overall, our take on grassroots activism is that it has huge potential to be cost-effective, and we indeed think that grassroots movements like Sunrise have had really meaningful effects in the past,” Dan Stein, the director of Giving Green, told Vox. But, he added, “It takes a unique combination of timing, organization, and connection to policy to have an impactful grassroots movement.”

One umbrella charity that’s more bullish on the ongoing impact of activism is the Climate Emergency Fund. It was founded in 2019 with the goal of quickly regranting money to groups engaged in climate protests around the globe. Its founders believe that street protest is crucially important to climate politics and neglected in environmental philanthropy. Grantees include Just Stop Oil, the group that made international headlines for throwing soup on a protected, glassed-in Van Gogh painting, and Extinction Rebellion, an activist movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience like filling the streets and blocking intersections to demand that governments do more on climate.

If you’re skeptical that street protest can make a difference, consider Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research. She’s found that if you want to achieve systemic social change, you need to mobilize 3.5 percent of the population, a finding that helped inspire Extinction Rebellion. And in 2022, research from the nonprofit Social Change Lab suggested that, in the past, groups like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion may have cost-effectively helped to win policy changes (in the US and UK, respectively) that avert carbon emissions.

But the words “in the past” are doing a lot of work here: While early-stage social movement incubation might be cost-effective, it’s unclear whether it’s as cost-effective to give to an activist group once it’s already achieved national attention. The same research notes that in countries with existing high levels of climate concern, broadly trying to increase that concern may be less effective than in previous years; now, it might be more promising to focus on climate advocacy in countries with much lower baseline support for this issue.

There are plenty of ways to use your skills to tackle the climate emergency. And many don’t cost a cent.

If you’re a writer or artist, you can use your talents to convey a message that will resonate with people. If you’re a religious leader, you can give a sermon about climate and run a collection drive to support one of the groups above. If you’re a teacher, you can discuss this issue with your students, who may influence their parents. If you’re a good talker, you can go out canvassing for a politician you believe will make the right choices on climate.

If you’re, well, any human being, you can consume less. You can reduce your energy use, how much stuff you buy, and how much meat you consume. Individual action alone won’t move the needle that much—real change on the part of governments and corporations is key—but your actions can influence others and ripple out to shift social norms, and keep you feeling motivated rather than resigned to climate despair.

You can, of course, also volunteer with an activist group and put your body in the street to nonviolently disrupt business as usual and demand change.

The point is that activism comes in many forms. It’s worth taking some time to think about which one (or ones) will allow you, with your unique capacities and constraints, to have the biggest positive impact. But at the end of the day, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good: It’s best to pick something that seems doable and get to work.

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Covid Shots May Get FDA’s Strongest Warning

The Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to place a “black-box” warning—a high-danger label only used to flag risk of death, severe harm, or incapacitation—on Covid vaccines, CNN has reported.

According to theFriday CNN report, the initiative to include the warning—part of a range of efforts by Trump administration health officials to limit access to, public support for, and uptake of Covid shots and other vaccinations—is being led by FDA chief medical and scientific officer Vinay Prasad, who is also director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. The plan to implement the warnings is expected to be made public by the end of December.

Prasad has a long history of dismissing the pandemic, claiming in 2021 that Covid was not more harmful to children than the common flu.

Health experts have continued to voice concerns that adding such a warning label may furtherreduce access to Covid vaccines by making clinicians more hesitant to recommend shots to groups who are at risk for severe Covid. Vaccines with black box warnings are particularlyrare because vaccines are only approved after especially extensive safety and efficacy checks.

The news follows reporting earlier this week that the FDA is investigating whether Covid vaccines are linked to deaths in adults, continuing a campaign public health experts have viewed with extreme skepticism. Prasad wrote to FDA staffers in a November letter that “at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” without specific evidence.

A CDC study released Thursday found that the 2024-2025 Covid vaccine was approximately 76 percent effective against emergency and urgent care visits in children aged 9 months to 4 years, and 56 percent effective for children 5-17 years old, compared to those who didn’t get the updated vaccine.

But since June, CDC recommendations have stated that “parents of children ages 6 months to 17 years should discuss the benefits of vaccination with their doctor.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s FDA has already reversed previous federal policy on Covid vaccines, restricting the most recent vaccineto people who are at elevated risk due to age or an underlying health condition. Kennedy said in November that he instructed CDC to retract its long-held public stance that vaccines do not cause autism despite evidence to the contrary. (CDC’s website now claims that the assertion that vaccines do not cause autism is not “evidence-based.”)

Health experts told my colleagues Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan earlier this year that RFK and his allies’ anti-vaccine decisions open the door to taking essential drugs off the market.

“Kennedy’s crusade will create even more doubt over vaccines’ effectiveness, as he uses his position to broadcast and legitimize debunked ideas about their risks,” they wrote. “In the end, experts warn, it will be patients who suffer.”

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TSA Is Forwarding Names, Photos, and Flight Details to ICE

The Transportation Security Administration is forwarding passenger lists to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in order to detain and deport travelers while denying them the chance to challenge the process, according to documents obtained by the New York Times.

A Times report Friday revealed that information furnished by TSA provided the basis of ICE’s high-profile detention of university student Any Lucía López Belloza, who was deported following her arrest at Boston’s Logan airport en route to visit her family for Thanksgiving.

On a near-daily basis since March, the agency has been sending files to ICE that include photographs of the person targeted for deportation, and flight information that ICE employs to detain people before they board.

The TSA’s participation in immigration enforcement is unprecedented, as is that of ICE with domestic travel; the program, kept secret until Friday’s report, represents yet another means of inducing collective fear en masse in travelers and other residents.

It’s a widespread problem—other travelers have been detained at airports.

In the case of many immigrants like López, a student with no criminal record, those attacks defy orders by federal judges not to deport the people targeted—defiance facilitated by ICE’s collaboration with TSA, which prevents timely challenges.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the TSA’s collaboration with ICE and the secrecy around it.

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote earlier this week about the second Trump administration’s immigration policy, “the US government is using its prosecutorial discretion—it is choosing—to normalize casual cruelty and overt racism. And it’s doing so ostensibly in the name of “protecting” the American people.”

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Scientists Find Polar Bear Genes Behave Differently According to Climate

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

Changes in polar bear DNA that could help the animals adapt to warmer climates have been detected by researchers, in a study thought to be the first time a statistically significant link has been found between rising temperatures and changing DNA in a wild mammal species.

Climate breakdown is threatening the survival of polar bears. Two-thirds of them are expected to have disappeared by 2050 as their icy habitat melts and the weather becomes hotter.

Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have found that some genes related to heat stress, ageing, and metabolism are behaving differently in polar bears living in southeast Greenland, suggesting they may be adjusting to warmer conditions.

The researchers analysed blood samples taken from polar bears in two regions of Greenland and compared “jumping genes”: small, mobile pieces of the genome that can influence how other genes work. Scientists looked at the genes in relation to temperatures in the two regions and at the associated changes in gene expression.

“We cannot be complacent, this offers some hope but does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction.”

“DNA is the instruction book inside every cell, guiding how an organism grows and develops,” said the lead researcher, Dr Alice Godden. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the south-east Greenland bears’ DNA.”

As local climates and diets evolve as a result of changes in habitat and prey forced by global heating, the genetics of the bears appear to be adapting, with the group of bears in the warmest part of the country showing more changes than the communities farther north. The authors of the study have said these changes could help us understand how polar bears might survive in a warming world, inform understanding of which populations are most at risk and guide future conservation efforts.

This is because the findings, published on Friday in the journal Mobile DNA, suggest the genes that are changing play a crucial role in how different polar bear populations are evolving.

Godden said: “This finding is important because it shows, for the first time, that a unique group of polar bears in the warmest part of Greenland are using ‘jumping genes’ to rapidly rewrite their own DNA, which might be a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice.”

Temperatures in northeast Greenland are colder and less variable, while in the south-east there is a much warmer and less icy environment, with steep temperature fluctuations.

DNA sequences in animals change over time, but this process can be accelerated by environmental stress such as a rapidly heating climate.

There were some interesting DNA changes, such as in areas linked to fat processing, that could help polar bears survive when food is scarce. Bears in warmer regions had more rough, plant-based diets compared with the fatty, seal-based diets of northern bears, and the DNA of southeastern bears seemed to be adapting to this.

Godden said: “We identified several genetic hotspots where these jumping genes were highly active, with some located in the protein-coding regions of the genome, suggesting that the bears are undergoing rapid, fundamental genetic changes as they adapt to their disappearing sea ice habitat.”

The next step will be to look at other polar bear populations, of which there are 20 around the world, to see if similar changes are happening to their DNA.

This research could help protect the bears from extinction. But the scientists said it was crucial to stop temperature rises accelerating by reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

Godden said: “We cannot be complacent, this offers some hope but does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction. We still need to be doing everything we can to reduce global carbon emissions and slow temperature increases.”

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Lessons From Trump’s “War” on Chicago

Chicago has been one of the latest stops on the Trump administration’s deportation tour. “Operation Midway Blitz” started in September and, for months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents have been roaming the streets and detaining hundreds of people.

This week on Reveal, host Al Letson and producer Ashley Cleek visit Chicago to see “Operation Midway Blitz” in action, and find out what it’s been like for those targeted by it. Letson and Cleek found citizens detained, Chicago police officers pepper-sprayed, and communities terrified. Most Chicagoans arrested by federal agents in the operation had no criminal record, not even a traffic ticket.

Letson and Cleek also see how communities are mobilizing to protect each other, and how some of the tensions over immigration raids stretch back to decisions made by the city back in 2022. They also learn from 404 Media’s Joseph Cox about face-scanning apps used by federal agents in Chicago—and how the use of this kind of surveillance points to a broader shift in how the US government deploys its technologies against people inside the country.

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Scoop: New Justice Department Voting Rights Chief Had Prior Job Suspension for Ties to Election Deniers

A former Los Angeles County district attorney who was put on administrative leave in 2022 after he based a prosecution around tips from a right-wing group that has promoted election fraud conspiracy theories is now the top voting rights official at the Department of Justice, according to a legal filing reviewed by Mother Jones.

Recently, Eric Neff’s name began showing up in emails to state election officials and on DOJ legal filings, which referred to him as a “trial attorney.” But a new lawsuit filed against Fulton County, Georgia, on Thursday showed Neff got an apparent promotion. The legal complaint, which seeks 2020 ballot and signature envelopes to search for irregularities, refers to Neff as “Acting Chief, Voting Section.”

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

Working as a California prosecutor in October 2022, Neff led efforts to accuse Eugene Yu, the CEO of Michigan-based election management company Konnech, of storing sensitive data about California poll workers on Chinese servers—an alleged violation of his contract with Los Angeles County. The county charged Yu with embezzlement and conspiracy.

Neff’s boss at the time, District Attorney George Gascón, emphasized there was no evidence Yu’s alleged misconduct affected the legitimacy of the 2020 election results, but the charges nonetheless fed into right-wing conspiracies that China was somehow involved in stealing Donald Trump’s reelection. Both Trump and the late Charlie Kirk celebrated Yu’s arrest at the time.

Less than two months later, Gascón dropped the charges because there was “potential bias” in the “presentation” of evidence. According to the Los Angeles Times, Neff’s investigation into Yu was apparently spurred by a tip from one of the co-founders of True the Vote, a right-wing group that has promoted baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen. Neff was placed on administrative leave, and the county subsequently paid Yu $5 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit.

True the Vote is most notable for its false claims about people committing mass fraud in 2020 through ballot drop boxes; Dinesh D’Souza based his now-debunked 2022 film, 2000 Mules, around the group’s work.

Neff’s career advancement comes as the DOJ voting section attempts to compile a national voter roll in a purported effort to uncover examples of voter fraud. As my colleague Ari Berman and I reported last week, Trump and his allies could use this voter registration information to challenge election outcomes, or even to illegally cull voters from voter rolls.

“This administration is abandoning the congressional mandate that the division has to stamp out discrimination and protect vulnerable populations,” Chiraag Bains, a former high-ranking official in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told us. “They’re not just abandoning it. They’re actually weaponizing the power of the federal government to try to cut off access to the ballot.”

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Inside the Last Minute Fight on Legislation for Victims of Coerced Debt In New York

When Gina got a call that she owed money to a car financing company, it didn’t make sense. At the time, she did not have a driver’s license. In fact, she did not even know how to drive. But, the debt collector explained, her name was on the document.

Gina came to New York City from Haiti almost two decades ago. A few years after she arrived, she met a man, and they began a romantic relationship that quickly turned physically abusive. Within a month, he was sitting her down at a car dealership and telling her to sign her name. Gina didn’t understand that she’d be on the hook for his missed payments.

“When I found out about this debt issue, I couldn’t sleep. I was crying all the time. I lost a lot of hair. I was stressing,” Gina, who asked to use a different name due to safety concerns, told me through a translator. “It was the most terrible and horrible experience I’ve ever gone through in my life.”

Gina is a victim of coerced debt, a kind of financial abuse where bad actors either take out lines of credit in another person’s name without them knowing or pressure someone into accruing debt under threat. It’s an especially challenging legal hurdle when those experiencing financial abuse have to prove that the debt in their name wasn’t amassed consensually.

Across the country, forty-three percent of survivors report being pressured to take out credit in their own name when they did not want to, and 52 percent reported that an abusive partner put debt in their name through a fraudulent or forced transaction.

Related

She Escaped Her Abuser. But Not Before He Buried Her in Debt.

Right now, there’s a bill on New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk to provide a remedy for victims of coerced debt. The bill, which passed back in June, has been in the works for several years and would allow victims of coerced debt to petition creditors to have the debt in their name removed and transferred to their abuser—who debt collectors would then, in turn, be able to hold civilly liable for whatever money is still owed.

Hochul has until December 19, one more week, to sign the bill. But advocates worry it won’t get done, and fear the financial industry is stalling to alter the bill in the meantime. (In an email, Hochul’s office said, “The Governor will review the legislation.”)

“The debt collectors have exceptionally deep pockets. They are well connected in ways that our survivors simply are not,” Lauren Schuster, vice president of government affairs at Urban Resource Institute, the largest provider of domestic violence shelter services in the country, told me.

Months after the assembly passed Rosenthal’s bill in June, the American Financial Services Association wrote a letter to Hochul’s office, detailing their “grave concerns” about the legislation. While the association’s members are “highly sympathetic” to victims’ “extremely difficult” situations, Christian O’Connor, the AFSA’s State Legislative and Regulatory Counsel, wrote that the bill as it was passed is “open to exploitation by bad actors.”

In another document shared with the legislature showing notes on a 2024 version of the coerced debt bill, an industry trade group was more direct in a comment: “It is important to remember that there are two victims in a coerced debt scenario – first and foremost the consumer. But the creditor is also a victim who was taken advantage of by the abuser who caused the coerced debt.”

As the New York bill is currently written, in order to receive this relief, victims would need to acquire and submit official documentation that helps to prove the debt was coerced—like a police report, a Federal Trade Commission report, or a sworn certification from a qualified third party professional who has helped them, like a domestic violence counselor, a lawyer, or a social worker. The survivor would also need to submit a statement, sworn to be true, that the debts in their name were accrued through abuse or without their knowledge.

While coercing someone into debt is not currently illegal in New York, falsifying the kind of information survivors would need to submit is illegal—lying about this debt could amount to fraud or result in legal action, a reality that advocates say provides protection to creditors.

Currently, the executive office and both houses of the state legislature are going back and forth with negotiations to finalize the law over various proposed amendments. Some members of the credit industry, which did not make much noise during the voting process, are now petitioning Hochul’s office to change the legislation and introduce several provisions that advocates say would increase hurdles for victims of coerced debt.

“I understand the Governor has many, many bills,” Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, who sponsored the legislation, said. “But I believe the way the bill was drafted, receiving input from all sides—from banks, from creditors, debt collectors, and of course from survivors of domestic violence and advocate groups—that the way we crafted it is the way it should be signed into law.”

Still, she continued, “well-heeled interests with deep pockets figure, ‘I don’t have to talk to the legislators, I will just go to the governor’s office.’” Rosenthal told me of the campaign to change the law. “I’ve gotten word to some of them, ‘You’re not skipping my office and my cosponsor in the senate’s office.’ So then they have to come back and say, ‘Oh we thought we called you, blah blah blah, we sent you an email,’ I’m like, ‘No you didn’t, but let’s talk now.’”

If Hochul signs the bill, New York will join a growing number of states that are introducing and passing coerced debt legislation. Texas, Maine, California, Minnesota, and Connecticut have all passed bills adding protections for victims of coerced debt—all to varying degrees. One thing that both the creditors and the advocates agree on is that this New York bill is more comprehensive than some of the other pieces of similar legislation that have been passed across the country. (Movement on the federal level to address this form of financial abuse has stalled in President Donald Trump’s administration.)

The advocates I spoke to called on Hochul’s past support and personal connection to those experiencing domestic violence and remained optimistic that she would sign the bill—and do so without introducing potentially burdensome concessions from debt collectors.

“I’m hoping that the voices of the survivors that we worked with, and all of the advocates and professionals who’ve been working on this, I hope that those voices matter in Albany,” Naomi Mo Chee Young, another lawyer who helps survivors, said.

The AFSA outlined several edits to the bill that they urged Governor Hochul to consider, including increasing penalties for false claims of coerced debt, removing physicians, religious leaders, attorneys, employee of a court of the state, and law enforcement officers from who is considered a “qualified third party” that can submit documentation for the victim, and excluding “secured debt” from monies that survivors can seek relief for, amongst other provisions.

The latter point on secured debt, if included, would make it so vehicle debts would be unavailable for relief. So victims like Gina would still be out of luck.

After several years and repeated threats from her abuser, Gina’s lawyers were able to get the creditors to dismiss the case based on a technicality, but not all victims are able to escape this kind of financial abuse. “She got lucky,” Divya Subrahmanyam, a lawyer with the Brooklyn-based nonprofit CAMBA who helped Gina, told me. “Most survivors are not getting lucky.”

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Trump’s HUD Accuses Boston of Engaging In “Redlining” Against White People

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced Thursday that it is opening an investigation into Boston’s housing policies, accusing the city of discriminating against white people.

“No person or entity—the City of Boston included—is permitted to violate civil rights protections in the name of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’” Craig Trainor, the assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, wrote in a letter to Mayor Michelle Wu. The department is alleging that the city government had prioritized people of color in its affordable housing strategy and encouraged industry leaders to work with those communities.

Trainer cited the Fourteenth Amendment, said the city was engaging in a “racialist theory of housing justice,” and claimed that the city, “in a shameful echo of a darker period in our country’s history,” is attempting to “revive government-sponsored redlining.”

Wu’s office, in a statement to Boston 25 News, said, “Boston will never abandon our commitment to fair and affordable housing, and we will defend our progress to keep Bostonians in their homes against these unhinged attacks from Washington.”

In HUD’s letter, Trainer repeatedly mentions sections from a 2022 report from the city. That document, “City of Boston Assessment of Fair Housing,” details efforts to combat gentrification and outlines specific programs targeting Black and Latino residents, who the report says face increased risks of eviction and housing discrimination.

It’s the first investigation of racial discrimination in a city’s housing practices under the Civil Rights Act launched by President Donald Trump’s administration. In September, according to a New York Times investigation based on internal communications, memos, and other documents, there have been “efforts by the Trump administration to limit enforcement of the Fair Housing Act.” That act was hard fought in the Senate and was passed by the House in the days after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.

Per the Times reporting, “half a dozen current and former employees of HUD’s fair housing office said that the Trump political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.”

Earlier this month, Wu announced that the City of Boston would join 11 other jurisdictions and nonprofit organizations in filing a lawsuit to “stop the Trump administration from creating unlawful and unreasonable restrictions on funding for proven solutions to homelessness, threatening to push hundreds of thousands of families and individuals onto the street as cold winter months arrive.”

Back in May, Boston joined another housing lawsuit to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to cancel $3.6 billion in housing and homelessness prevention grants if communities didn’t fall in line with the president’s executive orders.

On the city’s website, a report from February says that “more than 17,000 housing units have been built or started construction, including a third income-restricted, and another 12,000 units were added to the pipeline” in the first three years of Wu’s tenure.

Over fifty years ago, in 1973, the Justice Department was investigating the Trump family for discriminating against Black people in their real estate business. Donald Trump was named as one of the defendants. He was quoted at the time calling the allegations “absolutely ridiculous.” The Trumps went on the offensive, filing a contempt-of-court charge against one of the prosecutors and fervently denying the claims.

Eventually, the Trumps settled and signed a consent decree— which did not include an admission of guilt, but did set out ways to make sure the family desegregated their properties.

But it didn’t seem to stick.

In 1978, the government accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. In a notice to the Trumps’ lawyer, Roy Cohn, a DOJ lawyer wrote, “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization.”

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Trump Is “Basically Shutting Down the Legal Immigration System”

Not long after the shooting of two members of the National Guard in Washington D.C., Elora Mukherjee found herself contacting her clients with bad news. Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, needed to tell several asylum seekers that their applications had been put on hold—indefinitely.

“These policies don’t just disrupt paperwork. They derail lives.”

Many of them had been “eagerly waiting for years to have an interview” in their cases, Mukherjee said. They hoped to finally be allowed to stay in the United States and freed from the fear of deportation, she said. But this pause “shattered” their “sense of safety and hope.”

In response to the attack—in which an Afghan immigrant has been charged with killing US Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and wounding Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe—the Trump administration moved fast, stopping the issuance of visas and asylum for nationals of Afghanistan. Then, it went a step further: indefinitely halting all asylum decisions, regardless of nationality, “pending a comprehensive review.” The Trump administration also paused the processing of immigration benefits for people from 19 countries targeted by the June travel ban.

The sweeping change in policy, legal experts and advocates say, is disproportionate. It punishes the collective for the wrongdoings of one troubled individual. The blanket restrictions are also likely to have a far broader impact beyond the groups and countries singled out by the White House. “These actions are basically shutting down the legal immigration system,” Shev Dalal-Dheini, government relations director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said during a briefing with reporters.

“These are not narrow, targeted shifts,” AILA’s executive director Ben Johnson said, adding that the “ripple effects” of these actions would be felt by millions of people and entire communities across the country. “These policies don’t just disrupt paperwork,” he said, “they derail lives.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, immigration lawyers have reported naturalization ceremonies and green card interviews getting canceled. Cases in which the applicant had already been interviewed, and sometimes approved, have also been paused.

Even immigrants who hold a passport from a non-banned nation—say a dual citizen of Iran and Canada—are impacted if their country of birth is one of the 19 placed on the travel ban. The list at the moment includes Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has also indicated it might grow to more than 30 nations.

The abrupt changes have sewn fear and put families in limbo. They have also increased the odds that people who were pursuing legal status—and had been previously vetted—might now end up in the crosshairs of immigration enforcement.

“This is about throwing sand in the gears of the entire immigration system in order to end immigration.”

Mukherjee said she has urged her clients to take every possible precaution. But it’s a Catch-22. Complying with immigration enforcement requirements risks arrest at check-in; not complying could make you a target for not following the rules.

Last week, one of her clients, an Afghan asylum seeker, showed up to immigration court in New York City for a required routine appointment only to be separated from his lawyer, taken into custody, and sent to a detention center in New Jersey.

“It’s shocking that he was arrested and detained when he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do,” Mukherjee said, explaining that the man had been paroled into the United States and had no criminal history. Writing in a recent New York Times op-ed, Mukherjee described how asylum seekers she works with and who fear persecution in their countries of origin are “gripped with terror,” unsure of whether they’ll be allowed to stay in the United States.

“Unfortunately, if you’re from Iran, Venezuela, or Afghanistan and you’ve gone through the process, now you’re put on hold, your citizenship interview is canceled…because some guy decided to do something illegal and unconscionable—shooting other people,” said Minneapolis-based attorney Paschal Nwokocha. “A big segment of our immigrant population is now having to pay because of the sin of one person.”

Prior to the shooting, the Trump administration had already ordered a review of Biden-era grants of refugee status. Now, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of visas and other immigration benefits, has announced it will conduct a “full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.”

Immigration lawyers warn that revisiting hundreds of thousands of approved cases will burden the agency and slow down the processing of all applications, leading to even bigger backlogs, longer wait times, and potential gaps in benefits that could jeopardize people’s employment. (In many instances these are people who have been thoroughly vetted multiple times over the years.)

It also means that already-limited resources are being moved away from the adjudication and investigation of cases of actual fraud or that pose potential threat.

“There’s a larger plan at work here,” Johnson said. “This is about throwing sand in the gears of the entire immigration system in order to end immigration.”

The day after the D.C. shooting, USCIS also announced “additional national security measures,” including a new guidance that instructs officers to consider “country-specific factors as significant negative factors” when considering cases of people from the 19 countries on the travel ban. These arbitrary assessments on the basis of nationality, immigration experts say, could lead to more denials and leave little room for judicial review because the courts have given the government large deference when it comes to discretionary decisions by an immigration agency.

Another unintended consequence of the changes might be a chilling effect that discourages immigrants from coming forward to engage with the legal system, pushing them into the shadows.

“All of my clients deeply believe in the promise of America and fled to this country after suffering severe harm and fearing for their lives and the lives of their children,” Mukherjee said. “America should not close its doors and turn its back to bona fide asylum seekers who should be protected under both domestic and international law.”

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Indiana Republicans Just Defied Trump’s Pressure Campaign to Rig Their Congressional Maps

In an extraordinary rebuke to Donald Trump on Thursday, the Indiana state Senate rejected a gerrymandered congressional map relentlessly pushed by the president and his allies that would have given Republicans a lopsided 9-0 advantage in the state’s House delegation by eliminating the seats of two Democratic members of Congress. The final vote was 31-19 in the state Senate, where Republicans have a supermajority: Twenty-one Republicans joined 10 Democrats to defeat the legislation.

Republican state senators who opposed the gerrymandered map sharply criticized the months-long pressure campaign by Trump and his allies, which led to threats of violence and intimidation against at least 11 state lawmakers.

“I fear for this institution,” Republican state Sen. Greg Walker, chair of the Senate Committee on Elections, said during an emotional speech this week. “I fear for the state of Indiana and I fear for all states if we allow intimidation and threats to become the norm.”

Ultimately, the heavy-handed tactics employed by Trump backfired on the president and his allies.

Republican state Sen. Greg Goode, a key swing vote whom Trump called out by name and who was a victim of a swatting attack, cited the climate of fear and intimidation as a reason why he was opposing the bill.

“Misinformation. Cruel social media posts. Over the top pressure from inside and outside the statehouse. Threats of primaries. Threats of violence. Acts of violence,” Goode said on the Indiana Senate floor on Thursday. “Friends, we’re better than this, are we not?”

Trump reprised the playbook he used to attempt to overturn the 2020 election, attacking, bullying, and harassing Republican state officials in Indiana who would not automatically bend to his will.

The president summoned Republican state legislators to the White House and sent Vice President JD Vance to Indiana twice to lobby the state legislature. He vowed to support primary campaigns against Republicans who opposed the redistricting plan, calling out individual state legislators by name, and attacking the leader of the state Senate, Rodric Bray, as a “weak and pathetic RINO” after Bray said the senate didn’t have the votes to pass the measure.

Trump posted another rant on Truth Social against Bray on the eve of the state Senate vote, calling the Senate leader “either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!” and once again threatening “a MAGA Primary” against “anybody that votes against Redistricting.” That same night, a Republican member of the state House who voted against the redistricting bill was the victim of a bomb threat at his home.

Another GOP state senator opposed to gerrymandering who received a pipe bomb threat at her home posted on X that it was the “result of the D.C. political pundits for redistricting.”

Trump’s allies, including Turning Point USA and another dark money group led by former Trump campaign officials, escalated the pressure campaign by vowing to spend seven figures supporting primary challengers to Republican opponents of the map. Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Braun, who eventually fell in line, suggested the state could lose resources if it didn’t comply with Trump’s dictates.

“If we try to drag our feet as a state on it, probably, we’ll have consequences of not working with the Trump administration as tightly as we should,” Braun said.

Heritage Action, the dark money arm of the Heritage Foundation, claimed that Trump threatened to strip all federal funding from the state if redistricting failed, a new low in his authoritarian playbook if true.

“President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state,” the group wrote on X. “Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”

Other top Republicans went so far as to invoke the death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as a reason why the legislature should pass the new gerrymandered map. “They killed Charlie Kirk—the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map,” US Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) said a few days after Kirk’s murder.

Mid-decade gerrymandering is bad enough on its own. It’s even worse when accompanied by economic and political terrorism. The intimidation against Indiana state legislators, which included warnings of a pipe bomb and fake threats against lawmakers designed to produce a law enforcement response, called to mind the ire Trump and his supporters directed at former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence when insurrectionists broke into the Capitol on January 6 and said they wanted to “hang” the vice president because he refused to go along with the president’s unconstitutional plan to overturn the 2020 election.

But now, instead of overturning an election, Trump is trying to rig and predetermine the next one so that his party doesn’t lose power next November.

The 9-0 map was designed to eliminate all traces of Democratic representation at the congressional level in the state, giving Republicans 100 percent of seats in a state where Trump won 58 percent of the vote in 2024. Under the proposal, Trump would have carried every one of the new districts by at least 12 points. Indiana’s current map received an A from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. The new one got an F.

To oust Democratic Rep. André Carson, the city of Indianapolis, which he largely represents, would be split four ways, creating districts that border three different states in the process. Carson’s new district would have shifted from favoring Kamala Harris by 40 points to Trump by nearly 20 points, one of the most outlandish examples of gerrymandering anywhere in the country. It would go from a compact urban district that is roughly 50 percent non-white to a sprawling rural district that is 80 percent white, dramatically diluting the power of minority voters in Indianapolis.

“Splicing our state’s largest city—and its biggest economic driver—into four parts is ridiculous,” Carson said in a statement. “It’s clear these orders are coming from Washington, and they clearly don’t know the first thing about our community.” (Republicans confirmed the map was drawn by a DC-based group, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, that has drawn pro-Republican gerrymanderers in other states, including Texas, this year.)

The targeting of Carson, who is Black, continued the trend of Republicans drawing new maps in 2025 that seek to dismantle districts held by Black Democrats, which has also occurred in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina.

The Trump-backed map also attempted to oust Democratic Rep. Frank Mrvan, who represents a district in northwest Indiana alongside Lake Michigan that Trump narrowly lost. Mrvan’s district would sprawl from two counties to eight, with the Democratic cities of East Chicago and Gary outnumbered by the red countryside, in another example of how the map disenfranchises Black and urban voters.

The egregious nature of this gerrymander was too much for even the Republican supermajority in the Indiana state Senate to ignore. The map’s defeat is further evidence of how, despite the Supreme Court reinstating Texas’ gerrymander last week, Trump’s gerrymandering arms race hasn’t become the lopsided victory he initially envisioned. The parties may break mostly even in the end.

Voting rights supporters in Missouri submitted more than 300,000 signatures this week to hold a ballot referendum that could ultimately block the gerrymandered map passed by Republicans in September, although Missouri’s Republican Secretary of State is now absurdly claiming he can unilaterally declare the new referendum unconstitutional, which is sure to provoke another court battle. New Democratic districts in California, Utah, and potentially Virginia could also minimize Trump’s advantage heading into the midterms.

Trump is doing everything he can to break American democracy. For one day, at least, he failed.

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We’d Never Deport Veterans, Noem Says in Earshot of Deported Veteran

In a contentious hearing that featured Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem telling Democratic committee members they should “all be fired,” House representatives repeatedly attempted to call attention to federal agents detaining non-criminal immigrants and US citizens. The secretary held the party line: she, and the Trump administration, were simply keeping Americans safe from threats.

The hearing to discuss “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland” came as President Donald Trump and Noem’s immigration enforcement continues to expand into cities across the US, often resulting in violent detainments and fostering an environment of fear for immigrants—documented or not—and, by design, people of color in general.

During the House Committee on Homeland Security’s hearing, Secretary Noem was repeatedly confronted with instances of her agency going after people who were neither violent nor criminal.

“How many United States military veterans have you deported?” Rep.Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) asked Noem.

“Sir,” she responded, “we have not deported US citizens or military veterans.”

A staffer then held up a tablet behind Magaziner’s desk.

“Madam Secretary, we are joined on Zoom by a gentleman named Sae Joon Park. He is a United States Army combat veteran who was shot twice while serving our country in Panama in 1989.” Park was taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection agents at an airport in Honolulu and placed on a one-way flight to South Korea in June. Park, a green-card holder and a Purple Heart recipient, self-deported after he was placed on a deportation list.

The Trump administration isn’t the first to deport veterans. Officials across the administration, though, have repeatedly and falsely denied detaining or deporting US citizens or those in the country with other legal protections.

MAGAZINER: How many veterans have you deported?NOEM: We haven't deported veteransMAGAZINER: We are now joined on Zoom by a combat veteran you deported to Korea

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-12-11T16:22:42.190Z

Magaziner details that Park “struggled with PTSD and substance abuse after his service,” adding that he was “arrested in the 1990s for some minor drug offenses, nothing serious, he never hurt anyone besides himself and he’s been clean and sober for 14 years.”

“Will you join me,” Magaziner continued, “in thanking Mr. Park for his service to our country?”

Noem said: “Sir, I’m grateful for every single person that has served our country and followed our laws.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), one of the representatives who called on Noem to resign—along with Michigan Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar, a Democrat from Michigan, who told Noem he was “sick” of her “lies”—sparred with Noem on several points during the hearing.

“At your direction,” Thompson said, “DHS has illegally detained and deported US citizens, including US citizen children with cancer.” His staffer held up a photo of a 10-year-old girl who was recovering from brain cancer when she was removed with her undocumented parents in February.

Right before Rep. Julie Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, had her time to speak, Secretary Noem left the hearing early for what she said was a meeting on FEMA. That meeting had been cancelled, which Noem’s office says shelearned after the secretary had left the security hearing.

“This notion that we’re only going to pursue serious threats, it’s just not true,” Johnson said shortly after Noem left the room. “I visited an ICE facility outside of Dallas and over 70 percent of them were classified as the lowest threat level—as never having a criminal record at all.”

During her remarks, a staffer held up a poster board featuring American citizens who were arrested by ICE.

“The rule of law is founded on two fundamental principles,” Johnson said. “That if you are going to be subject to a criminal arrest in this country, that there is probable cause to do so. You can’t just snatch somebody walking into a coffee shop because of the color of their skin. There’s no probable cause for that. And also, that you will get due process, and that is not happening.”

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Senate Republicans Blocked Yet Another Chance to Save Obamacare Subsidies

On Thursday, in a 51-48 vote, the Senate rejected a Democratic plan to extend Affordable Care Act enhanced tax credits, as well as a Republican alternative that boosted a health savings account model. It is now all but certain that the credits, which began under the Biden administration, will expire at the end of the year.

As I previously reported, that expiration will lead, for millions of Americans, to the greatest single rise in health care premiums ever.

In a video recorded after the votes, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) expressed her anger towards Republican colleagues.

“They voted to increase health care costs across the board, and now millions of Americans are left with the impossible decision of choosing between paying for health insurance or paying their rent,” Warren said. “They’ve all fallen in line behind Donald Trump and left American families in the dirt.”

On New Year’s Day, the Urban Institute estimates, at least four million ACA marketplace users will become uninsured. People seeking ACA insurance will have until Monday to select a plan in order to be covered on January 1.

Some of those people may now choose plans that are less comprehensive because it’s what they can afford, said University of Pittsburgh assistant professor Miranda Yaver, who focuses on health policy. That would leave an even greater number of Americans underinsured.

“The average American cannot accommodate an unexpected $1,000 emergency medical expense,” Yaver said. “It is not exactly hard to run up a thousand-dollar tab in the American health care system, and having a good health insurance plan can insulate us from that cost.”

American Public Health Association executive director Georges C. Benjamin said in a press release that Congress had failed its duty to safeguard the health of Americans.

“Rather than addressing a serious issue that has been on our radar for years, Congress, earlier this year, rejected the opportunity to extend the enhanced tax credits,” Benjamin said, “and instead passed legislation to gut the Medicaid program and make additional changes to the ACA that will result in 16 million Americans losing their health coverage.”

“We’re probably going to see more and more people forgoing coverage and care, which is only going to exacerbate existing health conditions,” said Marilyn Cabrera, the nonprofit Young Invincibles‘ health care policy and advocacy manager.

Yaver is also skeptical of the health savings account model being pushed by Republicans as an alternative. They are not practical, she says, for the low and middle-income people that the Affordable Care Act is supposed to help.

“You have to have the means to put a lot of money into your health savings account, and if you’re barely scraping by and living paycheck to paycheck, it’s just not going to happen,” Yaver said.

Among some people whose health insurance is now in jeopardy, there is anger at Congress on both sides of the aisle. Some Democrats, Yaver said, are willing to “sort of allow a certain amount of harm in the next plan year, not wanting to bail Republicans out from their unwillingness to extend the marketplace subsidies,” ahead of elections.

And for Republican politicians, Yaver said, “there is a real lack of connection to everyday Americans’ struggles with accessing health care, which is not a luxury item. It is basic survival for a lot of people.”

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Trump’s Education Dept. Just Axed Biden’s Student Loan Plan

The Department of Education announced Tuesday that it reached a settlement agreement with the state of Missouri to end former President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program bases monthly payments on an individual’s income and family size. The plan protected more borrowers’ incomes, increasing monthly payment exemptions from 150 percent to 225 percent of the federal poverty level—equating to roughly $48,000 per year for a family of two.

In April 2024, Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s then-Attorney General, filed a lawsuit with the attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma to stop the SAVE plan. His argument was that it made student loans function more like grants, as many borrowers were paying as little as $0 per month, and that Biden had overstepped his authority by circumventing congressional approval with an executive action.

In February, a court ruled in favor of the states, and following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the plan was dead in the water with borrowers beginning to accrue interest at rates that for some exceeded 9 percent per year.

The Tuesday settlement, if approved in court, moves this deadline forward, although the Department of Education did not specify a timeline for the changes. The agreement states that the Education Department would no longer enroll new individuals in SAVE, deny all pending applications, and transfer all approximately seven million borrowers into different plans—either fixed payment or payments based on income.

Changing millions of payment plans is complicated. There’s already a backlog of applications on the three other federal income-based plans. All but one of those plans will be gone after July 1, 2028 because of the Big Beautiful Bill.

“For four years, the Biden Administration sought to unlawfully shift student loan debt onto American taxpayers, many of whom either never took out a loan to finance their post-secondary education or never even went to college themselves,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said. “The law is clear: if you take out a loan, you must pay it back.”

According to a report from the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress, nearly 43 million people—or one in six adults in the country—have federal student loan debt, all of which totals more than $1.6 trillion. This increases the burden of rising living costs: a survey of federal student loan borrowers conducted by Data for Progress in September found that 20 percent of borrowers are currently in delinquency or default and 42 percent said their debt payments made affording essentials like food or housing difficult.

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ICE Tackled a US Citizen in the Snow. He Says He Was Targeted For Being Somali.

A US citizen, who is Somali, was detained by immigration agents in Minneapolis on Tuesday after he repeatedly offered to hand over his identification, according to the man, a local elected official, and legal advocates. Mubashir, 20, who has chosen to go by his first name only, said at a news conference that he “felt targeted.”

A video of the incident published by the Sahan Journal shows a federal agent putting Mubashir in a headlock while handcuffed, bringing him to his knees in the snow, and forcefully placing him in the back of a vehicle before driving off. Multiple people chased after the vehicle, with one witness to the detainment standing in front of the car. Prior to the recording, Mubashir said that the immigration agents chased him on foot in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis.

“I deserve to be here like anyone else. I’m a U.S. citizen,” Mubashir said. “I can’t even step outside without being tackled—no question—because I’m Somali.”

Before grabbing Mubashir, according to Sahan Journal, the agents were walking into nearby businesses in the Somali-heavy neighborhood, questioning people and asking them to show their passports.

Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement descended upon the twin cities last week in what federal officials are calling “Operation Metro Surge.” The operation is primarily targeting the Somali immigrants in the area, spurring locals to carry around their passports or even fear going outside at all, according to the New York Times. This week, Trump repeatedly referred to people from Somalia as “garbage.” The president said Somalia “stinks” and that immigrants from the country “come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch.” “We don’t want them in our country,” he said multiple times.

According to Mubashir, while en route to the immigration offices, which were about twenty minutes away, he repeatedly asked the agents to show his identification. But, he said, they refused.

Once they arrived at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Mubashir said that the agents took his fingerprints, asked to take his photo, which he refused, and then eventually allowed him to show ID proving his US citizenship. Then, Mubashir, who has lived in Minneapolis since he was a year old, was allowed to leave.

“I asked them, ‘can you take me back to where you picked me up from?’ They said ‘no, you have to walk in the snow,'” Mubashir said. His parents then came to get him.

“I apologize that this happened to you in my city, with people wearing vests that say ‘police.’ That’s embarrassing,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during the press conference.

“This young man is a bright, hardworking member of our community,” Minneapolis City Council Member Jamal Osman said in a statement “and his experience is a stark reminder of the overreach and lack of accountability in ICE operations.”

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which organized the press conference where Mubashir shared his story, said they have received many calls from local Somali residents who are US citizens reporting that they were either arrested or questioned by immigration agents. “We believe this is a violation of our constitution,” Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR-MN, said. Hussein said that at least two other US citizens were picked up by immigration officials and then released on Tuesday.

In a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem following these arrests, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz urged her to review all recent arrests in Minnesota. “The forcefulness, lack of communication and unlawful practices displayed by your agents will not be tolerated in Minnesota,” Walz told Noem in his letter.

According to a ProPublica investigation published in October, more than 170 US citizens were detained and held against their will—whether during immigration raids or protests—in the first nine months of Trump’s second term.

A representative from the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment on whether its immigration agents detain people without checking identification that is actively being offered.

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The New CDC Leader’s Whooping Cough Scandal

Already this year, anti-vaccine activists have downplayed the risks of measles and polio. Now, they’re adding whooping cough to the list, even as cases of the disease surge, killing at least ten babies over the past two years. Two of those babies died in Louisiana, where a crusading state surgeon general, Dr. Ralph Abraham, waited months to warn the public about the outbreak and banned mass vaccination campaigns.

Given Abraham’s vaccine skepticism, it is unsurprising that he has earned a leadership position under RFK Jr.

Instead of discipline, Abraham has been rewarded: Last month, he was appointed to the second-highest leadership role at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Abraham will now be the highest-ranking scientist at the agency. His background is unusual for the role. He practiced veterinary medicine at first, and only later was a family physician. Abraham also served as a representative for Louisiana in Congress from 2015 to 2021. (During the pandemic, Abraham promoted the anti-parasite drug ivermectin as a Covid cure, despite evidence showing it didn’t work.)

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, is caused by bacteria that produce toxins that damage the respiratory lining, resulting in prolonged bouts of coughing. Such episodes are especially dangerous for infants, in whom they can lead to life-threatening respiratory distress. Pertussis has been on the rise since the pandemic—according to the CDC, last year, there were more than 35,000 cases, compared to fewer than 8,000 the year before.

One factor that may be contributing to the soaring pertussis case counts is declining rates of vaccination: Last year, the CDC reported that just over 92 percent of US kindergarteners were vaccinated against the disease, down from 95 percent in 2017. The dip occurred against a backdrop of increasing anti-vaccine activism, embraced by the US Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In Kentucky, three babies have died this year of the disease—none of them were vaccinated, nor were their mothers, according to Kentucky’s Center for Health and Family Services.

Since 2024, the pertussis surge has been especially acute in Abraham’s home state of Louisiana. But this didn’t prompt swift movement from him or other officials. Despite high case counts, it wasn’t until May of this year, by which time two babies in the state had died of the disease, that Louisiana finally issued a health alert. Physicians criticized Abraham for failing to warn residents of the disease’s dangers—and the critical importance of maternal vaccination during pregnancy, since babies can’t be vaccinated until they are two months old.

Abraham has a history of anti-vaccine rhetoric. In February, Louisiana’s Department of Health officially banned vaccine promotion events in the state. That same month, Abraham and his deputy surgeon general, Wyche Coleman, published a letter on the health department’s website decrying what they saw as an overbearing public health system. “For the past couple of decades, public health agencies at the state and federal level have viewed it as a primary role to push pharmaceutical products, particularly vaccines,” they wrote. “Government should admit the limitations of its role in people’s lives and pull back its tentacles from the practice of medicine.” (The Louisiana Department of Health didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

“They are minimizing the seriousness of whooping cough and also spreading false information about the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

Given Abraham’s vaccine skepticism, it is perhaps unsurprising that he has earned a leadership position under Kennedy. In his new role, Abraham will work on high-level agency strategy, as well as coordinate between divisions, and oversee both internal and external communication.

Against the backdrop of the whooping cough surge, anti-vaccine activists have been mounting a campaign against the immunization that protects people from the worst effects of the disease. Last week, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, devoted an episode of its TV show to whooping cough, inaccurately claiming that the vaccine actually caused more cases. In September, another anti-vaccine group, Physicians for Informed Consent, falsely claimed to its 117,000 followers on X that pertussis vaccines “have big gaps—surveillance, trials, even population data fall short.”

Dr. Fiona Havers, a respiratory disease and vaccine expert who led the pertussis work for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices before the pandemic, said the anti-vaccine groups’ claims about whooping cough weren’t supported by evidence. While protection from the version of the vaccine that children receive can wane and require a booster, large, high-quality studies consistently show that the vaccines are indeed effective. Likewise, community immunization is critical for protecting babies who are too young to be vaccinated.

The anti-vaccine groups’ claims were “very consistent with the false information that the anti-vaccine movement, including RFK Jr, has been spreading about vaccines for years,” said Havers, who is also an adjunct associate professor at the Emory School of Medicine. “They are minimizing the seriousness of whooping cough and also spreading false information about the effectiveness of the vaccines, which are very effective in preventing disease in children.”

In its TV show episode, Children’s Health Defense suggested that a home remedy of Vitamin C could treat whooping cough. Social media wellness influencers offer similar treatments—one with the Instagram handle of the_detoxmama tells her 811,000 followers that a natural treatment works by “clearing out the barrier and allowing the immune system to get in and deal with the bacteria.”

Pediatric immunologist and social media health communicator Dr. Zachary Rubin said the only proven treatment for whooping cough is antibiotics, which are most effective when given early on in the illness. “Vitamin C does not neutralize the toxin, clear the infection, or shorten the course of illness,” he wrote in an email to Mother Jones. “Relying on vitamin C alone can delay appropriate treatment and increases the risk of complications, especially for babies.”

As of late November, there have been more than 25,000 pertussis cases this year, including three deaths of infants, two in Louisiana and one in Kentucky. Though this year’s total number of cases will likely be lower than last year’s, it will surpass counts in the few years before the pandemic; in 2019, there were fewer than 19,000 cases.

In recent weeks, pertussis has continued its rampage, especially in western states, including Washington, Oregon, and California. The CDC hasn’t yet issued any specific alerts about whooping cough, and the agency did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, except to confirm Abraham’s new role.

Havers sees Abraham’s appointment as part of a pattern of dubious public health leadership decisions—evidenced by his failure to warn Louisiana residents about the dangers of whooping cough. “Obviously, getting information out to the public and to clinicians that professors is circulating in a community is critical for protecting vulnerable infants and for stopping an outbreak,” she said. “It continues to be appalling, the type of people RFK Jr. is putting into high-level positions in CDC.”

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Maybe Donald Trump Isn’t Immune to Political Gravity After All

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

For over a decade—!!!—Donald Trump has defied political gravity. After descending that Trump Tower elevator surrounded by fake supporters who had been paid to attend his campaign announcement, Trump pulled one disqualifying move after another. He insulted war hero John McCain. He mocked a reporter with a physical disability. He made crass and crude comments. He lied relentlessly. He celebrated fringe players like conspiracy theory–monger Alex Jones. And with each of these misdeeds and missteps, the pundits declared he was kaput. But he wasn’t. Not even after the grab-’em-by-the-pussy videotape.

Trump was able to survive gaffes, controversies, and scandals that would blow away any other politician. In part that was because, as one of his early advisers told me, being an asshole was part of his appeal. It was baked into the cake. How many times since he was first elected president has a commentator said—or you thought—in response to some Trump outrage, no other politicians could get away with this? That includes bear-hugging Vladimir Putin, mismanaging the Covid epidemic (which led to avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans), his first impeachment, his effort to overturn a legitimate election to retain power, his incitement of political violence that aimed to destroy American democracy, and the countless instances of grift and graft he and his clan have perpetrated.

It seemed that the rules of politics and public life did not apply to Trump. Yes, he lost the 2020 election, but he resurrected himself—yet again defying the conventional wisdom following the January 6 riot that he was finished politically.

Trump still survives revelations and scandals that would destroy past presidencies—swiping classified documents, paying off a porn star. But the good news is that this does not mean that the political universe has been permanently upended. In recent weeks, there have been signs that political gravity does still exist and that we are not adrift in a cosmos free of all rules.

There’s no open rebellion—except for Marjorie Taylor Greene—but the 100 percent obeisance of the GOP has dropped a point or two.

The most obvious indicator was the off-year elections. History suggested that Democrats would fare well, given Trump’s falling approval numbers and still-too-high prices. And they did, even better than expected in many places. (See Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Eileen Higgins, who this week became the first Democrat to be elected Miami mayor in three decades.) Beyond those electoral returns, we are seeing other normal political occurrences.

Trump is technically a lame duck president. Given his hold on the GOP, which he has turned into a cult of personality, it might be expected that he could escape this diminished status and still dominate. And, mostly, that’s so. But there have been a few whiffs of Republican restiveness. His illegal military attacks on suspected drug boats prompted a few Hill Republicans to ask questions and even suggest the need for an investigation. That might not lead to a full-fledged inquiry. But it’s the most pushback we’ve seen from the GOP. And a handful of congressional Republicans have hinted that they are concerned by the dramatic hike in health insurance premiums that’s about to hit because Trump and the GOP killed the extended subsidies for Obamacare policies. Again, there’s no open rebellion—except for Marjorie Taylor Greene—but the 100 percent obeisance of the GOP has dropped a point or two.

Then there’s MAGA. As historians of political movements will note, none of them live forever. The tea party, BLM, Occupy, the nuclear freeze—eventually they lose steam and develop fractures; leadership fights and disagreements cause fissures and sometimes cannibalistic internal conflicts. We’re witnessing that with MAGA now. There have been numerous splits and disagreements these past few months, with almost a civil war over the release of the Epstein files (and that may still transpire, depending on what the Trump administration does in response to the new law that compels the release of these documents).

MAGA world had a major brawl over Tucker Carlson’s friendly and supportive interview with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist and Hitler fanboy. On the right, there’s been a pitched battle regarding support for Israel. The aforementioned Greene, once a MAGA favorite, has cast herself out of Trump’s circle of trust after tussling with him over the Epstein records and calling Israel’s war on Gaza “genocide” and voicing worry over rising health insurance premiums. The manosphere—Joe Rogan and the army of Rogan-wannabes—have groused about the ICE raids going too far, especially when they round up day laborers outside Home Depot who are simply looking for work. Steve Bannon, the grand strategist of MAGA, is not happy Trump is handing Big Tech a blank check.

To get a sense of the insane vitriol and vituperation within MAGA land these days, check out this recent tweet from Laura Loomer, the avenging angel of Trumptown:

I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to dissect and process this particular feud—for you or for me. But the point is clear: These people are nuts, and the internecine bloodlust is high.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some of the other fractures that have arisen recently. But MAGA is behaving in a familiar manner, with grifters and ideologues vying for attention, money, and turf. Trump won’t be around forever, and there’s scrambling for positioning in the post-Trump era. That’s true within the GOP for those who yearn to run in 2028, presuming there will be an election, and it’s also true for those who want to claim the MAGA mantle next. These may be separate power struggles.

Trump’s approval rating, according to the latest Gallup poll, has plummeted to 36 percent, with disapproval hitting 60 percent.

Here’s another sign of the reassertion of political gravity. After Trump won the election a year ago, there was much blathering about a strategic realignment in politics. He had increased his share of votes among Latinos, Blacks, and young people, especially men in these categories. Republicans were giddy, believing Trump had cracked a code that would bring these traditionally Democratic voters into the GOP coalition permanently. That was then. In the elections last month, these voters switched back to the Ds, even and especially young men. No, Trump did not deliver a history-defying permanent shift in electoral politics. It now looks like there’s a regression to the mean.

That brings us to Trump’s poll numbers. Cheap analysis focuses on this standard marker. But it shows us that Trump is not a supernatural politician. In recent decades, all presidents decline in popularity after they enter office. Trump is following that pattern—and more so. His approval rating, according to the latest Gallup poll, has plummeted to 36 percent, with disapproval hitting 60 percent. Some surveys have Trump a few points higher on approval. Yet it’s evident he’s getting close to hitting his floor.

My unscientific guesstimate is that about 30 to 35 percent of the nation fully buys Trump’s bunk. They believe his bullshit—America’s about to be destroyed by migrants; radical lunatics, commies, antifa, Democrats, and the media are scheming to annihilate the nation; the Deep State is out to sabotage Trump; and only Trump, the smartest, strongest, and most noble man in human history, can save the US of A. No matter what happens, they will stand by their man.

Yet the rest of the nation is not cottoning to his mass deportation crusade, his economic policies, his razing of the East Wing, his revenge-infused implementation of authoritarianism, his brazen corruption, his plutocratic policies, and his never-ending nastiness. It’s not wearing well. If you do a lot of crap that’s unpopular, you won’t be popular. That’s a rather basic rule of politics, and Trump is not escaping that. And Republicans, naturally, are wigged out that one of the major historical trends of American politics will likely hold next year: The president’s party gets socked in midterm elections.

It’s far too early to make any predictions. External circumstances can always change any political equation. What happens if there’s a war in Venezuela? Or if the White House can find a trans migrant who commits a heinous crime? And we all ought to worry about Trump and his crew concocting ways to screw with next year’s elections.

Don’t put on any rose-colored glasses. Trump has done so much harm and damage. According to Impactcounter.com, the ending of US foreign assistance and the demolition of USAID has led to nearly 700,000 deaths, including the deaths of 451,000 children. There’s still much harm and damage to come, here and abroad. But it is reassuring that the laws of politics remain partially intact. Trump, the GOP, and MAGA are not immune. But their opponents need to keep in mind that these vulnerabilities do not predetermine a downfall; they only provide an opportunity for a fight.

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New Orleans Is Watching You

This column originally appeared on author Hamilton Nolan’s site How Things Work, which you can subscribe or donate to here.

Even stipulating that America is a nation of immigrants, and that the persecution of immigrants is an insult to our history wherever it occurs in this land, it must still be said that launching a violent government purge of immigrants is even more ludicrously monstrous when it happens in New Orleans. In New Orleans! A city that for centuries has collected drifters from Europe and dreamers from the Caribbean and schemers from Central America and prisoners from Africa, and has molded all of their descendants into a culture unmatched anywhere else in this plastic country. A city with its own city-sized Vietnamese population. A city that built a statue in Crescent Park to honor the Latino workers who rebuilt it after Hurricane Katrina. You want to bring a bunch of white racist clods in clownish tactical gear to run the immigrants out of New Orleans? The city of gumbo metaphors?

You villains. You dirty dogs.

The entire concept makes the skin prickle in reprehension. Yet here we are. ICE and CBP goons, balaclavas emphasizing the penis-like nature of their heads, have descended on New Orleans. Led by unapologetic Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino, whose fascist high top haircut and affinity for black double-breasted trenchcoats cross the line from “unintentionally Nazi-esque” into “Nazi on purpose,” they are all over the streets of America’s Friendliest City, vowing to deport five thousand(!) people in the name of Purifying America’s Blood or some more publicly acceptable synonym of that purpose. This is Operation “Catahoula Crunch,” which sounds like an AI-generated name for a Louisiana breakfast cereal. In the first three days of raids, they arrested 38 people, fewer than a third of which had criminal records. Clearly, the motherfuckers are going to be here for a while.

I went to take a look.

You could park your car outside the entrance of the Naval Station in Belle Chasse that the agents are using as their headquarters and try to track them when they emerge each morning. But they can be hard to identify, and even harder to follow. They have the assistance of local and state police as well—one Ojos activist was pulled over twice in one day by a Louisiana State Police officer demanding that he stop driving in the vicinity of a convoy of CBP vehicles.

Alternately, you could make an educated guess about where la migra might show up and go there in advance and drive around hoping to catch them, becoming a fun house mirror version of a cop patrolling a high crime area. I tried this myself one day. I spent hours driving around Kenner, a working class New Orleans suburb out by the airport that has so far been the target of more immigration raids than anywhere else. For hours on a rainy Saturday, I circled down Veterans Boulevard and up Williams, stopping at the obvious places where ICE tends to pop up. I went to all three Walmarts in the Kenner area. I went to Lowe’s. I went to Home Depot. I did not see any immigration officers, but I did see Spanish-speaking families out shopping in stores that had translated their signs into Spanish, but had conspicuously not taken any actions to indicate that they disapproved of their customers being kidnapped on their property. Contrast this with small businesses across New Orleans that have posted fliers on their doors declaring that ICE is not welcome there. It makes you think about corporate responsibility, and cowardice, and things of that nature.

Without two-person teams—one to drive and one to navigate and monitor the chat and alerts and social media in real time—constantly on patrol in each neighborhood hot spot, it takes luck to catch officers in the act. Nor is it easy to know if you are parked right next to one. They tend to roll around in big American-made SUVs. Now go look at a Home Depot parking lot. See any big SUVs there, maybe with a burly guy wearing a baseball cap inside? Yeah. Everywhere!

I found myself peering hard at anyone who fit the profile. I hovered, camera ready, by an oversized white SUV with tinted windows and crash bars parked in front of Walmart, until the doors opened and an elderly Latino couple emerged. In downtown New Orleans, I crept up on a group of a half-dozen brawny white guys with beards, until it became clear that it was a group of gay tourists. Add to this the flood of well-intentioned people sharing rumors online—my friend saw a suspicious car parked outside this hotel, I wonder if they’re staying there?—and it becomes clear that ICE watching is a long game, and an imperfect science. It will require grace from all of us. As a white guy who looks a little bit like I could be a cop, I accept any future sideways looks I get as my tiny sacrifice for the cause.

Considering the challenges, Union Migranted and Ojos are shockingly effective. Every day they blast out multiple sightings, photos, and videos, all verified and confirmed. Over time, it is likely that this kind of community intelligence will save lives and prevent some families from being torn apart. And, on a much shallower level, it is just satisfying to watch a video of an activist filming agents desperately trying to be inconspicuous in a parked SUV, walking by them and drawling, “I’m with Neighborhood Watch. You guys good? You guys need any help?”

The people of New Orleans are also registering their pissed-off-ness by holding protests against the immigration action on a near-daily basis. I went to one on Saturday night, on the steps of Hale Boggs federal courthouse on Poydras Street. There were many “CBP OUT OF NEW ORLEANS!” signs and fliers for a teach-in about general strikes and constant honks of support from passing cars. A billboard for Zatarains loomed picturesquely across the street. A couple of right wing Youtube trolls also attended, prancing around in front of speakers and shouting pro-deportation slogans and aggressively shoving cameras in unwilling people’s faces and generally acting like dickheads. One of these people, a weak-chinned MAGA darling named Nick Sortor, harassed a woman so insistently that a scuffle broke out. In any other setting, he would have gotten his ass kicked, but the security volunteers went out of their way not to do so, just trying to steer him away from people over and over as he cried about being assaulted. All of this while people who were immigrants and who faced very real risks of life-changing government oppression were giving brave and heartfelt speeches just steps away. It really drove home how rude Nazis are. Their own repulsive, racist glee indicts them more effectively than any outside critics ever could.

Before the spotlight descended on New Orleans this month, many had been toiling quietly for years trying to insulate immigrants from the predations of America’s deportation system. One of those people is Angela Davis, an attorney who has spent the past decade running Project Ishmael, a nonprofit that gives legal support to immigrant children. In an office above a church off Canal Street, Davis told me that today’s outrages are different only in degree from what has come before.

She has done this work during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Though the work has changed, she said, “Under every single one of those presidents, many, many families are being separated, torn apart, and detained. That has not changed. The immense cruelty of the US immigration system has been consistent.”

Under Biden, at least, her clients with Special Immigrant Juvenile status were able to get “deferred action,” a temporary protection that made it easier for them to work and live here while their applications for lawful permanent residency were processed. In April, the Trump administration ended deferred action and began arresting people, including some of Davis’s clients. Though Project Ishmael’s services are in high demand, it is harder for them to take on new cases now, because every single case requires so much more work than it did when the government was somewhat less hostile.

To have militarized raids layered on top of the bureaucratic hurdles adds an almost surreal level of hardship to New Orleans immigrants’ lives. “People are scared to leave their home,” she says. “We’ve all read Anne Frank, and have very clear images of what it looks like to be in an attic afraid of forces of terror out in your streets. And that is what it is like. Something not too dissimilar.”

Davis carries on with her work, though she admits that she has doubts about how faithfully the government will adhere to the rule of law. “There are still wins in courts, and some of them are still enforceable. There are also many things the government just doesn’t follow.”

On my way out, she gave me a copy of the organization’s summer newsletter. In it was a story that a client from Honduras had written in her own words about her experience as an immigrant. She entered the country in 2018, and was imprisoned and separated from her five-year-old daughter for a month and a half. After being released and reunited, her son joined them here, and she has been dutifully going to all of her immigration appointments for the past seven years. Then, in May of this year, ICE put an ankle monitor on her to track her movements, and began demanding she go to more appointments, making it hard for her to earn enough money to survive. She began living in fear that ICE would track her down and arrest her on the street if she went out.

“If they did that, they could send you away without your children, so it was better for me to leave the United States. I feared for my life returning to Honduras, but I feared being separated from my children again more. I know the United States is about opportunity and I am grateful for my time here, but life is also too stressful and exhausting,” she wrote. She made the decision to risk her life and leave America, rather than risking losing her family. “On our flight back to Honduras, there were five families with me who had deported themselves.”

This, from our current government’s perspective, is a success story. To harass and persecute and terrorize a mother so fiercely that she chooses to bring her children back to an impoverished country where they may be killed is the best possible outcome that Stephen Miller and Gregory Bovino and their nationwide army of masked raiders could hope for. This is what they are about. This is what they accomplish. This is what their legacy will be. This is what they will have to declare at the gates of heaven, or hell.

The most memorable video from the New Orleans immigration sweeps is one taken last week in a residential neighborhood in Kenner, that instantly became famous. It shows federal agents with rifles surrounding a house where men are repairing a roof. As the cops hop out of their cars and approach, one of the roofers snatches the ladder and yanks it up, setting up an hours-long standoff between the agents on the ground and the men working above, unwilling to come down. The men on the roof reportedly got away in the end.

The symbolism in that clip is almost too perfect: Hardworking immigrants escaping deportation by pulling up the ladder behind themselves. But I’m pretty sure that the ICE and CBP agents, all children of people who were immigrants at one time or another, are too dumb to see it.

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Trump’s Energy Secretary Wants to Bigfoot Tribes’ Stewardship of Their Land

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

Early last year, the hydropower company Nature and People First set its sights on Black Mesa, a mountainous region on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. The mesa’s steep drop offered ideal terrain for gravity-based energy storage, and the company was interested in building pumped-storage projects that leveraged the elevation difference. Environmental groups and tribal community organizations, however, largely opposed the plan. Pumped-storage operations involve moving water in and out of reservoirs, which could affect the habitats of endangered fish and require massive groundwater withdrawals from an already-depleted aquifer.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has authority over non-federal hydropower projects on the Colorado River and its tributaries, ultimately denied the project’s permit. The decision was among the first under a new policy: FERC would not approve projects on tribal land without the support of the affected tribe. Since the project was on Navajo land and the Navajo Nation opposed the project, FERC denied the permits. The Commission also denied similar permit requests from Rye Development, a Florida-based company, that also proposed pumped-water projects.

Now, Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright wants to reverse this policy. In October, Wright wrote to FERC, requesting that the commission return to its previous policy and that giving tribes veto power was hindering the development of hydropower projects. The commission’s policy has created an “untenable regime,” he noted, and “For America to continue dominating global energy markets, we must remove unnecessary burdens to the development of critical infrastructure, including hydropower projects.”

Wright also invoked a rarely used authority under the Federal Powers Act to request that the commission make a final decision no later than December 18. And instead of the 30 to 60 days generally reserved for proposed rule changes, the FERC comment period was open for only two weeks last month. If his effort proves successful, hydropower projects like the ones proposed by Nature and People First could make a return to the Navajo Nation regardless of tribal support.

More than 20 tribes and tribal associations largely in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest, environmental groups, and elected officials, including Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey, sent letters urging FERC to continue its current policy.

“He wasn’t understanding that our region has a history of extraction, and that is coal mining and its impact on our groundwater.”

“Tribes are stewards of the land and associated resources, and understand best how to manage and preserve those resources, as they have done for centuries,” wrote Chairman William Iyall of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe in Washington in a letter submitted to the commission.

Tó Nizhóní Ání, or TNA, a Diné-led water rights organization based in Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation, also submitted comments opposing the proposed hydropower project. In the 1960s, after Peabody Coal broke up sections of the resource-rich region between the Hopi and Navajo tribes for mining, the company was accused of misrepresenting the conditions of its operations and the status of mineral rights to local communities. Environmental problems soon followed, as the company’s groundwater pumping exceeded legal limits, compromising the aquifer and access to drinking water. According to Nicole Horseherder, Diné, and TNA’s executive director, this led residents of Black Mesa to use community wells.

“They were now starting to have to haul all their water needs in this way,” she said. “That really changed the lifestyle of the people on Black Mesa.”

After the coal mines closed 20 years later, Black Mesa communities have focused on protecting their water resources while building a sustainable economy. But when Nature and People First’s founder Denis Payre presented the company’s plans, he seemed unaware of the tribes’ history in the region. During these presentations, Payre also made promises that if the company’s hydropower project went forward, it would benefit residents. The project would generate 1,000 jobs during construction and 100 jobs permanently, he claimed, and would help locals readily access portable drinking water.

“He wasn’t understanding that our region has a history of extraction, and that is coal mining and its impact on our groundwater,” said Adrian Herder, Diné, TNA’s media organizer. “It seemed like this individual was tugging at people’s heartstrings, [saying] things that people wanted to hear.”

If the commission decides to retract tribes’ ability to veto hydropower projects, it will mark a shift in the relationship between Indigenous nations and the federal government. Horseherder described such a move as the “first step in eroding whatever’s left between [these] relationships.” She is pessimistic about the commission’s decision and expects it will retract the current policy.

“The only thing I’m optimistic about is that Indigenous people know that they need to continue to fight,” she said. “I don’t see this administration waking up to their own mistakes at all.”

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The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Repeats a Familiar Problem: We Still Don’t Believe Women

Season three of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives debuted on November 13, and among the routine infighting, there’s a heavier topic that has consumed the season’s conversations: the incremental revelations that most of the women in the cast have been sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. (Hulu didn’t include any trigger warnings in front of these episodes.) This isn’t surprising, given the self-reported rates of sexual violence. Similarly disturbing and unsurprising, though, is the fact that for one of those women, the cast and the audience have decided that she’s lying.

Demi Engemann shared this season that Marciano Brunette groped her without her consent while she visited the Vanderpump Villa, a different Hulu original reality show. Brunette, the lead server at the Villa, claims they shared a consensual kiss and denies assaulting Engemann. Vanderpump Villa producers released a statement that they had reviewed their footage and found her claims to be “unsubstantiated.” In early December, Brunette filed a lawsuit against Engemann, claiming she defamed him by lying that she had been assaulted.

For those who haven’t watched SLOMW, it follows a group of young women who grew up in the Mormon church, have large social media followings, and started their own “MomTok” group, infamous for a swinging scandal years ago. The group often discusses how they want to modernize the Mormon church and change its stance on traditional gender roles and LGBTQ+ acceptance.

I found that many of the police investigations hinged on the victim’s behavior instead of hard evidence: were they sad enough, did they try to fight back, were they flirting beforehand, and had their story been consistent through and through?

However, their treatment of Engemann’s allegation looks all too familiar to me, as a reporter who has read through dozens of police reports that labeled sexual assault claims as false. My reporting was featured in the Netflix documentary Victim/Suspect, which shows police interrogation videos and first-hand interviews with alleged victims who were accused of lying and charged with crimes.

I found that many of the police investigations hinged on the victim’s behavior instead of hard evidence: were they sad enough, did they try to fight back, were they flirting beforehand, and had their story been consistent through and through?

Now, for Engemann’s part, and separate from her allegation of sexual assault, she has been incredibly insensitive to others’ pain and discomfort. She chastised and mocked another wife, Jessi Draper, for having a consensual affair with Brunette (yes, the same Brunette). She orchestrated a very awkward and public Chippendales-like dance with a different cast member, Jen Affleck, who said she was uncomfortable and didn’t give consent.

As happens with a reality TV scandal, Engemann’s accusations turned the audience into pseudo-detectives. On camera at least, she is friendly with Brunette, hugs him, and doesn’t say outright that she’s uncomfortable with anything. Perhaps most suspicious to the online detectives and cast is that she kept in touch with her alleged assailant, sending him messages that included some sexual innuendos. But to be clear, none of these publicized messages mentions anything physical happening between the two of them, consensually otherwise.

This vigorous analysis of Engemann’s behavior hasn’t been applied to Brunette, whose character isn’t spotless. In a previous season of Vanderpump Villa, Brunette bragged that he had slept with an “extraordinary” number of his coworkers at an old job. In the Vanderpump Villa episode when Brunette meets the wives, he comments on their looks soon after meeting them, calling them “so f*cking hot”. And after he asks Engemann for a“therapy session”, she is the one who ends the conversation, and Brunette pulls her in for a hug, kissing the side of her head.

Instead, all the shame bore down on the two women involved with Brunette. Draper was excoriated by her husband, who said his own bad behavior toward her was excused because she cheated on him. And Engemann has been called a liar and a master manipulator who made up sexual assault allegations to cover up a consensual affair.

Reporting a sexual assault has always been fraught because these crimes usually have no witnesses, leave no physical injuries, and worst of all, credibility can be made or broken by a victim’s behavior before and after the alleged assault.

I want to be very clear that I don’t know if Engemann was actually assaulted — and neither do you.

Claire Fallon and her co-host summed up my feelings pretty perfectly on a podcast episode of Rich Text: “We both feel very uncomfortable about the fact that this is a half-season of a reality show about whether a group of women believe another woman’s claim that she was sexually assaulted.”

The way that the group of wives has characterized their doubt has been in service of other “real” victims. In a hotel room, Draper, Mickaela Matthews, and Miranda Hope discuss their feelings about the accusation. Miranda says while pinching her fingers together:

“You’re taking a situation that’s this big, and using your position as a woman to make it this big, which is actually so much worse for actual assault victims.”

Draper: “Yes, and it makes women not be believed when other women do shit like this.”

Reporting a sexual assault has always been fraught because these crimes usually have no witnesses, leave no physical injuries, and worst of all, credibility can be made or broken by a victim’s behavior before and after the alleged assault.

My reporting found that family, friends, and police all come up with remarkable excuses for why they think someone made up an allegation of assault. For a 12-year-old, police said she lied about her adoptive dad abusing her to get back at him for taking her phone away. For a college student, it was so she could get help with her grades. For a restaurant server, it was so she could extort money from her boss. All three of these people – even the child – were charged with crimes for lying. And all three saw their charges later dropped or were fully exonerated.

The season’s reunion aired last week, and during it, Engemann again said and did things to others which have no excuse — while pointing to her head, she asked Affleck what was wrong with her brain (after Affleck came out publicly that she recovered from prenatal depression and suicidal ideations). She assumed Affleck wasn’t a victim of sexual assault, which was quickly corrected, and to which Engemann responded, “OK, that’s great.”

But something else struck me while watching the reunion that was true for so many of the young women I’ve interviewed. While crying during a break, Engemann said, “It’s more painful to not be believed […] or to have to go over it over and over and over and feel the pain of past things than to just say ‘F*ck yeah, we kissed.’”

For so many victims, it is easier to dismiss the truth, push down their memories, and say that they weren’t assaulted – especially when there is a culture so ready to accept their admission of fault.

I have no idea where Brunette was that night during the reunion, but for certain, he wasn’t on national TV in front of narrowing and skeptical eyes, facing intense and repetitive questions.

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Rubio Ends State Department Use of Calibri, Calling Font “Wasteful” DEI Move

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has identified a new enemy: Calibri. According to multiple reports, Rubio has ordered diplomats to stop using the font—a “wasteful DEIA program” from the Biden era, he called it— and return to Times New Roman in official communications.

The change follows a memo seen by Reuters and the New York Times entitled “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,” which called Calibri “informal.” Returning to Times New Roman, the memo wrote, would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” The State Department had been using Times New Roman since 2004.

In January 2023, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken adopted Calibri after the typeface was recommended by his diversity and inclusion office to improve accessibility for staff, including those with disabilities like dyslexia or low vision, or people who use assistive technology like screen readers.

When asked about why the State Department was spending time changing fonts amid languishing peace talks in Ukraine and Israel’s continue ceasefire violations in Gaza, aspokesperson told Mother Jones that the switch was necessary to align with “the same dignity, consistency, and formality” of the standard fonts used “in courts, legislatures, and across federal agencies where the permanence and authority of the written record are paramount.” The spokesperson also noted that, starting Wednesday, all papers submitted to the Executive Secretariat, which is responsible for coordinating internal communications in the Department of State, must use Times New Roman, 14-point font.

Rubio has since removed the department’s diversity and inclusion office as part of a broader move by the Trump administration to eliminate diversity policies in the federal government and universities.

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US Wants 5 Years of Some Tourists’ Social Media to Enter the Country

The United States Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection is planning to require visitors from countries on the Visa Waiver Program to provide up to five years of their social media history, along with other personal data, according to a CBP proposal posted to the Federal Register. The move could significantly increase the barrier to entry into the country and risks stifling potential tourism.

Countries a part of the waiver program include Australia, Chile, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, and the United Kingdom, amongst many others. The program allows visitors to travel to the United States for tourism or business stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa, if they meet certain requirements.

Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney for the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation told the New York Times that, should this proposal be enacted, it would “exacerbate civil liberties harms.”

“It has not proven effective at finding terrorists and other bad guys,” Cope said, adding that these kinds of policies have “chilled the free speech and invaded the privacy of innocent travelers, along with that of their American family, friends and colleagues.”

The CBP stated that it is introducing these changes to comply with President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order, entitled “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.”

This new proposal from CBP suggests adding social media as a “mandatory data element” for an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) application, which all visitors to this program must submit. Also, “when feasible,” it hopes to require other sensitive data from travelers, like personal and business phone numbers used in the last five years, personal and business email addresses from the last ten years, IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos, biometrics data like face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris scans, and the names, phone numbers, dates of birth, places of birth, and residencies of parents, spouse, siblings, and children.

These “High Value Data Elements” would be required in addition to what is already expected under the current system. Right now, applicants from visa waiver countries must enroll in the ESTA program, pay $40, and submit an email address, home address, phone number and emergency contact information. Then, the authorization is good for two years.

Just last week, the State Department instructed its staff “to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities” the administration considers “censorship” of Americans’ speech, per reporting from NPR. The department also announced that H-1B visa applicants and their dependents would be required to set their social media profiles to “public” so they can be reviewed by US officials.

That move, Trump’s January order, and the CBP’s latest ask allow the US government to have an immense amount of power in deciding what online speech supports, as the president puts it in his order, “the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.” They also grant leeway to deny entrance to those who support groups the administration has deemed dangerous—like pro-Palestinian student activists, who Trump and his administration have repeatedly sought to deport.

According to CBP, the proposal is open for a 60-day public comment period.

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RFK Jr.’s Airport Pull-Ups Are a Lie

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s affinity for public exercise was once again on display this week, with the 71-year-old health secretary and his transportation counterpart, the former reality star Sean Duffy, staging a pull-up contest inside Ronald Reagan National Airport to promote Make Travel Family Friendly Again, an offshoot of the department’s larger push to bring “civility” back to American travel.

“Yes, sir!” spectators cheered on, impressed by the performance of brawn before them.

“He’s coming for you!”

“Woot!”

RFK Jr. just did 20 pull ups at Reagan National Airport.

He’s 71-years-old.

This is insanely impressive. pic.twitter.com/VXMLqx8G5o

— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) December 8, 2025

Yet amid the delight of Kennedy’s onlookers, I registered a rising discomfort. This felt especially strange considering that I should have been relieved to see Kennedy with a shirt on. That, for once, we did not have to bear witness to the sight of this man’s pectoral muscles. But no, instead, a creeping instinct that what I had witnessed was not in fact real began to overwhelm me. Something about the jerking motions and the form with which Kennedy managed to “beat” Duffy in this contest struck me as profoundly wrong.

Were these actual pull-ups? Was the government lying to me?

I was in no position to sound the alarm. So I reached out to Casey Johnston of the newsletter, She’s a Beast.

“The correct way to do a pull-up is from a dead hang at the bottom (arms fully extended), then pulling oneself all the way up to the point that the chin passes the upper side of the pull-up bar, all the way back down, repeat,” Johnston wrote in an email. “We can see that all of RFK’s pull-ups are about 1/4 of this range in the middle, neither fully extending all the way down, nor pulling himself up above the bar.”

My heart stopped. My theory that something was off was starting to prove correct. That’s when Johnston reflected my horror back to me:

Crucially, this also must be done without any thrashing of the body or kicking of the legs, as this extra momentum takes a lot of the work out of actually pulling oneself up with one’s upper body. Around count 15, Kennedy starts to kick his legs. At no point does RFK do an actual pull-up. They count 20, but the number of actual pull-ups done here is zero.

There we have it: another conspiracy unrivaled; the government appears to have falsified information in its efforts to promote a $1 billion program that does not address far more systemic issues facing American travel. But through investigation, I have uncovered a small truth: RFK Jr. did not perform a single pull-up at Reagan National Airport.

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A Year of Hell for Immigrants

The image was grotesque.

In March, a camera-ready Kristi Noem posed in front of a group of shirtless, shaved, tattooed men crammed inside a metal holding cell in a foreign prison. The photo-op (and video message) was taken during the Homeland Security secretary’s tour of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, where the Trump administration had sent more than 230 Venezuelan migrants on flimsy evidence. Noem’s performance at CECOT was a triumphant show of ruthlessness as well as a warning: If you’re an immigrant unlawfully present in the United States, you too could end up shipped off to another country and held in one of the world’s worst prisons—perhaps indefinitely.

The message is clear: No immigrant living in the United States is to feel safe or welcome. No one will be spared.

The administration’s apparent satisfaction in arranging the CECOT ordeal has been emblematic of the second Trump term’s ever-increasing callousness toward immigrants and willingness to treat the constraints of the law as mere suggestions. Last month, Human Rights Watch and the watchdog organization Cristosal documented evidence that the Venezuelans removed to El Salvador endured “torture” and “enforced disappearance.” (As we reported after their release, and confirmed by the report, men said that following Noem’s visit, they received more beatings and had their food taken away by the prison guards.)

That image of Noem and the saga of the Venezuelans the US government exiled to a notorious gulag—without a semblance of due process—should be seared into America’s collective memory. But in the months since it happened, and as those men are made to live with the trauma inflicted on them, I’ve wondered whether it will.

Displays of inhumanity were a normalized phenomenon in 2025. A peril of having punitive theater as a central tenet of governance is that, eventually, the shock factor and public outrage risk wearing out. The horror may never fully register. When there’s a barrage of previously-unbelievably-unconscionably-legally dubious acts and brutal policies, how does one begin to wrap their head around each uniquely reprehensible episode, let alone a year’s worth of anti-immigration cruelty?

Think of all you’ve seen this year. The same month as Noem’s video, a Tufts University student was descended on by masked men and sent to detention for the grand offense of co-writing an op-ed critical of Israel. An unknown number of people have been dragged out of cars, chased down streets, and forced to the ground during immigration raids. We’ve all watched the videos. But there are simply too many examples to keep track of; the recordings start blending into each other. The impact of individual stories starts to dilute in an overwhelming news cycle where everything is “unprecedented” and too horrific to contend with. We look away.

But the sheer volume does not stop Trump’s war on immigrants from raging on in full force.And it is vital to look at just how wide and encompassing this assault has been: This year, the White House routinely made the lives of immigrants—all immigrants—and their families in the United States hell.

This is an imperfect attempt to take stock of it.

As previously mentioned, the Trump administration disappeared hundreds of Venezuelan men to CECOT—a gulag that has elicited comparisons to a concentration camp—in brazen defiance of court orders. Noem admitted in a declaration filed last week in response to an ongoing inquiry by a federal judge in Washington, D.C. into possible criminal contempt that she made the decision to continue to fly the men to El Salvador despite a ruling blocking their transfer. (The Justice Department all but dared the judge to pursue a referral for prosecution.)

Then there is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The administration enabled ICE—now the most well-funded police force in the country—to snatch people up with little accountability and authorized the agency to make arrests at and near hospitals, churches, and courthouses. Masked agents began to show up at hearings and routine check-ins. The agency started recruiting so-called “Homeland Defenders” to go after immigrants for a $50,000 signing bonus. (The FBI recently issued a warning about instances of criminals impersonating ICE agents.) “Collateral arrests” of people who have lived in the United States for decades became common occurrences.

At the same time, Trump stripped immigrants of legal protections, making them newly deportable. The administration has taken away protected status from hundreds of thousands of people in what amounts to the largest de-legalization push in recent US history. They arrested, detained, and deported Dreamers—immigrants brought to the United States as children—despite valid protection from said deportation.

It goes on: Trump further gutted refugee resettlement, with the notable exception of South Africa’s white Afrikaners; banished immigrants to third countries and nations where they face potential harm (in flagrant violation of the international law principle of non-refoulement); purged the immigration courts and weaponized them as a deportation-first tool; tried to take away the citizenship of American-born children; dispatched a militarized border patrol and other federal agencies with camera crews to terrorize Democrat-led cities; and instituted a policy of mandatory detention designed to break people’s will to fight their cases. (One lawyer I talked to recently recounted a client telling him he would rather spend 10 years in prison in Venezuela than another 10 days in US immigration detention.)

Many of those measures made headlines and elicited outcry. (I’ve failed to list other events of note, I am sure.) But there are countless other ways immigrants across the United States are quietly bearing the brunt of an administration that—fighting a self-perceived battle for the survival and presevation of a blood-and-soil idea of America as a nation—demonizes entire communities and casts foreign-born people as an existential threat. (An exception? If you have $1 million lying around to purchase a “Gold Card” fast-track visa and path to residency to “unlock life in America.”)

Looking at the immigration system as a whole, virtually every part of it has been made harder and riskier, as if repurposed only to punish people for one of the most universal experiences there is: migration.

Every day, immigrants are being penalized for interacting with the legal immigration system. The Trump administration has gotten out of its way to make the citizenship civics test harder to pass while also increasing scrutiny through the expansion of a values-based “moral character” standard. They have eliminated the automatic extension of employment authorization for people renewing their work permits. Under the guise of restoring “integrity” to the system and making the country safer, they expanded the enforcement authorities of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of visas and other immigration benefits, empowering special agents to make arrests.

The State Department has revoked thousands of student visas and is tightening vetting for fact-checkers and workers in the disinformation field. Following the shooting of two National Guard members in D.C. by an Afghan immigrant, the administration halted all asylum decisions, shortened the duration of work permits for various groups from five years to 18 months, ordered the review of approved green cards for immigrants from “every country of concern,” and began canceling naturalization ceremonies. Unsurprisingly, a growing share of immigrants with legal status, and even naturalized US citizens, report worries about immigration enforcement.

The message is clear: No immigrant living in the United States is to feel safe or welcome. No one will be spared. Not a college freshman visiting family on Thanksgiving. Not even the mother of the White House press secretary’s nephew. “The distinction between legal and illegal immigration becomes meaningless when both can destroy a country at its foundation,” a spokesperson for USCIS said in a press release email that landed in my inbox in November.

Much of the current immigration policymaking—if this rampant clampdown and unleashing of brutalizing force can be called that—seems to be now distilled to a simple modus operandi: we do it because we can. Little does it matter if families are separated again or if US children with cancer end up being removed from the country. Any means fit for this end: to get as many people out as possible and stop others from coming.

Every disturbing news report about a wrongful deportation or military-style raid of an apartment building should come as a reminder that the US government is using its prosecutorial discretion—it is choosing—to normalize casual cruelty and overt racism. And it’s doing so ostensibly in the name of “protecting” the American people.

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This Green Queen Raised a Million Bucks for Charity by Hiking 100 Miles in Drag

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

Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmentalist, arrived in San Francisco on Friday afternoon and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with $1 million more than when she set out on her journey last week.

The diversity and inclusion advocate completed the 100-mile trek from Point Reyes national seashore to San Francisco in full drag with her voluminous red wig and smokey eye. The effort was part of a campaign she launched to raise $1 million for eight nonprofits that aim to expand access and make the outdoors a more “equitable place.”

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“Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t make a difference,” she wrote on social media after completing the journey. “When I started being Pattie, everyone told me I was crazy. When I told people I wanted to do this fundraiser, [they] laughed in my face.

“Seven years later and I hope I can be a little bit of proof to you that combining who you are and what you’re good at to fight for the change you want to see in the world works.”

Pattie Gonia has become one of the most visible drag queens in the US in recent years. In 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign used footage of her with Kamala Harris as part of an attack ad against the then vice-president. Earlier this year she helped organize a demonstration at Yosemite, where LGBTQ+ climbers hung a trans pride flag on El Capitan.

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“We flew the Trans pride flag in Yosemite to make a statement: Trans people are natural and Trans people are loved,” she said in a statement at the time. “We are done being polite about Trans people’s existence. Call it a protest, call it a celebration—either way, it’s giving elevation to liberation.”

Recently, she playfully challenged the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to a pull-up competition in a video that contrasted footage of her lifting herself with ease with video of Hegseth appearing to struggle through the exercise.

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For the last week, she was on a solo trek on the California coast, getting in drag daily and setting up camp each night, while filming videos documenting the journey. She is set to perform her final show of the year in San Francisco on Saturday, “That is, if I can make it in time,” she said. Video posted to social media on Friday evening showed her strutting across the Golden Gate Bridge and ending her journey with cake.

By Friday, a GoFundMe for the project had raised more than $1 million from almost 35,000 individual donations.

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Downballot Democrats Are Gearing Up for “2010 in Reverse”

Democrats’ resounding victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races got most of the headlines, but the most dramatic results in last month’s elections were downballot. In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big.

How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power.”

By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.”

That year, powered by fallout from the Great Recession and the tea party wave, and assisted by tens of millions of dollars in spending down the stretch, Republicans picked up nearly 700 seats and flipped 22 state legislative chambers. Because those legislatures would go on to control the decennial redistricting process, Republicans were able to not just seize power, but hold onto it for a decade—or longer. The stakes for redistricting this time around are not as clear-cut, but still very much real. For the time being, thanks to Texas’ decision to redraw its maps at President Donald Trump’s request, and California’s own retaliatory effort, every legislative session is a potential redistricting session. In response to Republican efforts earlier this year, the DLCC pushed for Democrats to “go on offense” on redistricting in states they control.

“At the end of the day, it is state legislators who are drawing these maps,” Williams says. “This mid-cycle process has both put a spotlight on that, but it’s also sort of clarified the fact that the way that you prevent this from happening in the future—or the way that you get Democrats in this room to have this conversation—is you elect them first.”

When I last spoke with Williams, in 2024, the DLCC’s map looked quite a bit different. That year, facing the same headwinds that doomed Democrats at all levels, the organization went into the fall hoping to flip five legislative chambers but ultimately picked up none and—with the exception of an unsuccessful effort to break a Republican supermajority in Kansas—largely confined its efforts to presidential battleground states.

This time around, it’s aiming to compete in 41 chambers in 27 states. That includes efforts to break Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida and Missouri legislatures; the Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, and South Carolina houses; and the North Carolina senate (where Republicans have been able to override some of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes). In November, Democrats already succeeded in breaking Republicans’ supermajority in the Mississippi Senate, after a court struck down the existing legislative maps for violating the Voting Rights Act. The goal, Williams says, is to get more state parties out of the “superminority” status and “into a place where you are at least in the negotiating room.”

“Democrats in the states lost a lot of ground in 2010 and in the couple of elections after that, and in that rebuild process, the map changed a lot,” Williams says. “What we are saying in this update to the target map—and frankly, our broader strategy—is that we must show up in these red states. When you think about the long term trajectory of Democrats and our success as a party, we need to recognize these moments of power, and these states where Republicans have been competing, and we need to show up for voters.”

But there are also a lot of chambers up for grabs. Part of what makes the map so encouraging for Democrats, Williams argues, is how thin the line currently is between conservative governance and Democratic rule.

“Flipping just 19 seats on this map could establish four new Democratic trifectas and six new Democratic majorities,” she said. “The path there is not complicated—it’s really crystal clear.”

The DLCC has its eyes on potential governing trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. And the group sees potential for new Democratic supermajorities in 10 chambers across eight states—both chambers of the legislature in Colorado and Vermont; the lower levels of the legislature in Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington; and the senate in New York; Oregon; and Washington.

In at least one way, though, this will be nothing like the tea party wave. This year, the DLCC is aiming to spend $50 million on its national effort in 2026—which the group is billing as the its largest-ever single-year sum. When Republicans swept the table in 2010, the DLCC spent just $10 million.

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Trump’s Gilded White House Makeover Is All About Power

The second Trump administration has made tearing down parts of the federal government a priority. And some of those efforts have been literal. In October, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for the construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom. He’s also given the White House a gilded makeover, bulldozed the famed Rose Garden, and even has plans for a so-called “Arc de Trump” that mirrors France’s Arc de Triomphe.

So what’s behind all of this? Art historian Erin Thompson—author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments_—_says that whether it’s Romans repurposing idols of leaders who had fallen out of favor or the glorification of Civil War officers in the American South, monuments and public aesthetics aren’t just about the past. They’re about symbolizing power today.

“The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present,” Thompson says. “It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”On this week’s More To The Story, Thompson sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why Trump has decked out the White House in gold (so much gold), the rise and recent fall of Confederate monuments, and whether she thinks the Arc de Trump will ever get built.

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

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: What is an art crime professor?

Erin Thompson: Well, someone who’s gone to way too much school. I have a PhD in art history, and was finishing that up and thought, “Oh, I’m never going to get a job as an art historian. I should go to law school,” which I did, and ended up back in academia studying all of the intersections between art and crime. So I studied museum security, forgery, fraud, repatriations of stolen artwork. I could teach you how to steal a masterpiece, but then I would have to catch you.

So is it fair to say that The Thomas Crown Affair is one of your favorite movies?

No. Least favorite, opposite-

Really?

… because they make it seem like it’s a big deal to steal things from a museum, but it’s really, really easy to steal things from museums, as the Louvre heist just proved.

I was just about to say, I think the thieves at the Louvre would agree with you.

It’s hard to get away with stealing things from museums, which is why they got arrested immediately.

So how did you move from studying museum pieces and art crime into monuments?

Well, so my PhD is in ancient Greek and Roman arts, and when monuments began being protested in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, people were commenting online, “Civilized people don’t take down monuments. This is horrible.” And I was thinking, “Well, studying the ancient world, everything that I study has been at one point torn down and thrown into a pit and then buried for thousands of years.” Actually, as humans, this is what we do. We make monuments and then we tear them down as soon as we decide we want to honor somebody else. So I thought I could maybe add some perspective. And then having my skills in researching fraud, I started to realize that so many of the most controversial monuments in the U.S. were essentially fundraising scams where a bunch of money was embezzled from people who wanted to support racism, essentially, by putting up giant monuments to white supremacy. So I thought, maybe that’s some interesting information for our current debates.

They got got, as they should.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

As somebody who grew up in the South, I would just say as a young Black man growing up in the shadow of these monuments, watching them go down felt like finally, finally this country was recognizing me in some small way. And I was completely unsurprised at the uproar from a lot of people who wanted to keep these monuments up. But when you dig into why these monuments were placed down, a lot of them were done just … Especially when we’re talking about Civil War monuments in the South and in other places, they were primarily put there to silence or to intimidate the Black population in a said area.

Yeah, I call them victory monuments. They’re not about the defeat of the Confederates, they’re about the victory of Jim Crow and other means of reclaiming political and economic power for the white population of the South.

Yeah. And so talk to me a little bit about the monuments themselves and how a lot of those were scams. I had never heard of that before.

So for example, just outside of Atlanta in Stone Mountain, Georgia is the world’s largest Confederate monument, a gigantic carving into the side of a cliff of Lee and Jackson and Jefferson Davis. And that was launched in 1914 by a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, working with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Klan enthusiastically embraced the project. They stacked the board. They took a bunch of the donations. Essentially, no progress was made for years and years and years until the 1950s when as a sign of resistance to Brown v. Board, the state of Georgia took over the monument and finally finished it. So it wasn’t finished until the 1970s. And to me, the makers said it should be a shrine to the South. It’s more like a shrine to a scam.

The Klan leaders who led the project even fired Borglum at a certain point because they thought he was taking too much money. But he landed on his feet because he persuaded some Dakota businessmen to sponsor him to carve what turned into Mount Rushmore. So he defected from glorifying the Confederacy to carve a monument to the Union. So he didn’t really care about the glory of the Confederacy, he just wanted to make some money.

So in the United States, how have monuments historically been funded?

Well, the American government, both state and federal has always been a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to putting up public art. So most monuments that we see were actually privately fundraised, planned, and then donated to local governments. So they’re not really public art. They were put up by small groups for reasons. If you look, for example, at the Confederate monument that used to be in Birmingham, Alabama, this is a little weird that Birmingham had a Confederate monument in the first place because they were founded as a city well after the close of the Civil War. And the monument went up in two parts, both of which were in response to interracial unionization efforts. So the leaders, the owners and managers of the mines, when the miners were threatening to strike said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We need to remind our white workers that they have to keep maintaining the segregation that their fathers or grandfathers fought for, so let’s put up this Civil War Monument.”

So monuments don’t tell you very detailed versions of history, but also even thinking about history is kind of leading you on the wrong track when you look at, well, who is actually paying for these monuments top people put up and what did they actually want from them?

So tell me, just pulling back a little bit, what’s the relationship between monuments and society?

Monuments are our visions of the future. We put up a monument when we want people to aspire to that condition. We put up monuments to honor people to inspire people to follow their examples. So that sounds good and cheerful, right? It’s nothing wrong with having models and aspirations, but you have to think about, well, monuments are expensive. So who has the money to pay for them? Who has the political power to put them in place permanently? And you’ll often see that monuments are used to try and shape a community into a different form than it currently has. I live in New York City, for example, and almost all of the monuments put up until the last few decades are of white men. And what kind of message does that send to this incredibly diverse community of who deserves honor?

And you said earlier that throughout time we have erected monuments and taken them down. Can you talk that cycle through with me?

Yeah. Well, take the Romans, for example. Roman emperors would win a victory at war and put up a big victory monument, a triumphal arch or portraits of themselves. And then after the emperor died, the Senate would vote and decide, was this a good one or a bad one? Do we want to decide officially that they have become a deity and are to be honored forever, or do we want to forget their memory? And it was about a third, a third, a third. A third was no vote, a third were deities, a third were their memories were subjected to what we call damnatio memoriae. And if that happened to you, they would chisel the face off your statues and carve on your successor. The Romans were thrifty that way. They reused sculptures-

Wow. So they recycled.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Or they would break things up or melt it down and make it into a new statue. So this was a pretty common strategy of, just like we do it in a much more peaceable form, when a new president is elected, you take down the photo of the current president from the post office and put up the successor, etc, etc. So in the ancient world they had a more intense version of this, but you can think about the tearing down of statues of Saddam after his fall or the removal of statues of Lenin across the Soviet satellite states. This is something that we do when there are changes in power, and usually we don’t notice it because it’s more peaceful. There’s an official removal of the signs of the previous regime and a substitution with the others.
So what was special and different about the summer of 2020 was the change came from below. It was unofficial. We mostly saw people not tearing down monuments with their bare hands, that’s obviously hard to do, but modifying monuments by adding paints, signage, projections, etc.

And that’s exactly like what you looked at in Smashing Statues is the shift that, to me, in a lot of ways had been a long time coming. There had been movements here and there that were kind of under the radar for most people. But then after George Floyd, it’s like it got an injection of adrenaline, and suddenly all over the country you start seeing this stuff happening.

Yeah, and I think people lost patience. What wasn’t obvious to a lot of observers was that changing a monument or even questioning a monument is illegal in most of the U.S., or there’s just no process to do so. So I interviewed for the book Mike Forcia, an indigenous activist in Minnesota, and he had been trying for his entire adult life to get the state legislator to ask why is there a statue of Columbus in one of the cities with the largest concentrations of an urban indigenous population in the world? And all of his petitions were just thrown away. So he eventually had to commit civil disobedience, I would describe it, by pulling down the statue. There’s no other way to have that conversation.

Let me ask you, just to go back a little bit, how do these monuments shape and perceive history? Because you saying that this is what we’ve always done and the Romans would switch out faces and statues, that’s totally new to me. And so as somebody who grew up with Confederate statues around or Confederate names always around, I think it’s shaped the way I view the world. And also as they were coming down, not knowing that in the long arc of history that this is what we always do, it challenged the perceptions, I think of a lot of people.

Monuments are inherently simple. You can’t tell a full historical story in a couple figures in bronze. So I think they communicate very simple messages of this is the type of person that we honor. And they speak directly to our lizard brain, the part of us that sees something, “Oh, something big and shiny and higher than me is something worthy of respect.” So you can’t tell them a nuanced story in a monument, and that is used as a strength. I also think it’s a strength that they become boring. They fade into the background of our lived landscape, and then we don’t question their messages if we just think of the monument as something, oh, we’re going to tell each other, “Meet at the foot of this guy for our ultimate Frisbee game,” or something. So it is these moments of disruption that let us think, “This is supposed to stand for who we are as a people. Do we really want that guy up on the horse telling us who we are?”

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and these statues and monuments are coming down or they’re being defaced, my little sister lives in Richmond, Virginia and I went to visit her. And I’ve been to Richmond several times. And I think I’d seen pictures of the monuments in Richmond being graffiti on them, but I had not seen them in real life up close. And it was kind of stunning to me. Also, what was stunning about it, because in Richmond, if you’ve never been to Richmond, Richmond has like this … I don’t know what street it is, but this long row-

Monument Avenue.

Monument Avenue, thank you. Has Monument Avenue with all of these different monuments. After George Floyd, they were spray painted, and people were gathering around these monuments in a way that I’d never seen before.

I think those monuments went up to create a certain type of community. Monument Avenue was designed as a wealthy neighborhood, and how do you prevent the quote, unquote, “wrong type of people” from moving into your nice neighborhood? Well, put up some nice monuments celebrating Civil War generals. So it’s not-

You tell them they’re not welcome.

Yeah, exactly. So it’s a community created by exclusion, is what these monuments were put up for. And we actually see that again and again. In Charlottesville as well, the sculpture of Robert E. Lee that was recently melted down was put up to mark the exclusion of people from a neighborhood that had formerly been a neighborhood of Black housing and businesses, which they were condemned by eminent domain and turned into a cultural and park space that was intended to be whites only in the 1920s. So monuments are a powerful course for creating community. But you’re absolutely right that the removal can be a powerful force for creating community as well. And what saddens me is if you go to Richmond today, some of the bases of those monuments are still there. The Civil War monuments have been removed from Monument Avenue, but all of the graffiti has been scrubbed off. There’s no more people gathering there. It looks just like a traffic median again. And that’s true of almost everywhere in the U.S. The authorities are always a bit nervous about this type of spontaneous use of public space, I would say.

Yeah. Listeners to this podcast have heard me say this 101 times because it’s my thing, but I just believe that America is a pendulum, that it swings hard one way and then it comes right back and swings the other way. Which means that in the long-term, America sees progress in inches, but the swings are where you can see exactly where the country is right now. And so I think if we look at what happened after George Floyd died, that was a hard swing the other way. I’m curious if what we see right now coming from the Trump administration, and not just like in military, he’s reverting the names or changing the names of military bases back to people whose names have been taken off these military bases, all of that type of stuff, but also he’s planning to put an Arc de Trump in D.C., the East Wing Ballroom, all of that stuff, do you feel like that is the opposite swing of what we saw during George Floyd’s death?

Oh, yeah. And even literally, recently the Trump administration said that they were going to reverse removal of statues. So they re-erected a Confederate general statute in D.C., and they’ve said that they’re going to put up the Arlington Confederate Monument, which would cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to put up. So we will see if that actually happens. But just declaring that you’re going to do it is enough of a propaganda victory, I think, in this situation.

Right.

It might seem silly or not worthy of attention to look into the Trump administration’s aesthetic decisions, all of the gold ornamentations smeared all over the Oval Office and ballrooms and Arc de Trumps, and etc, but the aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to rally people’s energies. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not. I think he hasn’t really changed Washington in the way that he’s told his base he’s going to change. The elite are still in control of political power and wealth, but he is literally changing the White House by tearing part of it down. And you can channel people’s attention into rooting for that type of change instead of actual change.

And the style choices that he’s making are very congruent with his political message, in that he’s appealing to a vision of the past, which is greater than the present. But in both his political message and his aesthetic style, this vision of the past, you can’t pinpoint it. It’s not an actual time. It’s a fuzzy, hand-wavy, things were prettier and nicer than. And so you can’t fact-check that type of vision. You can’t see if we’ve actually gotten closer to it. And so putting up a gilded tchotchke counts as progress towards that, and he can claim the credit, which he’s happy to do.

Yeah. And I think that’s intentional, because if you can’t land on the specific time period, you can’t be held accountable for how that time period played out for the disenfranchised.

Or for the powerful of that time period.

Right. Right, exactly.

Appealing to making the White House look like Versailles. We all know what happened to the French kings, but apparently we’re not paying much attention. And there’s another current right tendency to appeal to the glory of Caesar. Everybody wants to be like Julius Caesar when that’s really not a good life choice, if you want to end up like him.

I think the other thing when I think about Trump’s aesthetic, so I grew up in the South but I am originally from New Jersey, and I remember Trump when I was really young, primarily because my dad was from Pleasantville, New Jersey, which is right outside of Atlantic City. And so there were conversations that I didn’t understand as a kid, and Trump was a part of those because he had his casinos and all of that type of stuff. And I just remember being a little kid and seeing a commercial for, I guess either it was Trump’s properties or it was a casino or whatever. And I just remember looking at it on the TV and seeing gold everywhere. That was his thing, gold. And the older I get, the more I realize that the way Trump sees gold and all the fittings that he has around, really is like him surrounding himself what he perceives of as wealth, and what people who don’t have wealth perceive of as wealth.

But the actual uber-rich, usually from what I’ve seen, do not decorate their houses in all gold, do not flaunt. Their wealth is present but quiet, whereas Trump’s wealth is present but loud. And that speaks to a lot of people who do not have the wealth. And in a sense, him putting gold around the White House is a secret, in my opinion, aspirational message to poor folks who do not have that, “One day you can have.” I don’t know, it’s just like a theory that I’ve been cooking in my head since I was a little kid.

I think absolutely. We have the proverb, “All that glitters is not gold” because people keep needing to be reminded. And yeah, again, in our primitive lizard brains, we think shiny equals good and I want that, and we don’t look below the surface. And I think that Trump’s focus on glitzing up the White House, on making these new constructions now in his second term is not accidental, because you often see populist leaders focusing on aesthetic projects towards the end of their political life. In Hitler’s last days in the bunker, he was still pouring over models for a museum that he was building in his hometown of Linz, in which he was planning to put all of the masterpieces seized from victims of the Holocaust from other museums across Europe. It was going to have 22 miles of galleries, all stuffed full of the artistic wealth of the world.

And I think there’s a comfort in this idea. Like, if I make something spectacular and beautiful enough, all of the cruelty that went into making it will be justified. I will be forgiven. So when I’m feeling depressed about the world, I think maybe this focus on the gold now is such an obsession because he recognizes that he’s on his way out.

What does it mean to a society that some of the tech leaders are now turning their attention towards building statues? You were just talking about how leaders when they’re beginning their twilight are … I guess they’re thinking about their legacy, and so they’re putting up these monuments and doing other things. But what does it mean for us when we have these tech bros that are doing it now?

Well, we’ve always seen this. Think about the Pantheon in Rome, that big circular temple. Across the front of it, you can still see the shapes of the letters that it used to have that was erected not by an emperor, but by a wealthy Roman who was doing so in service of the imperial cause. So big donors making big, splashy public projects have always been realizing that this is a good way to get in with the regime to shape things, to get loyalty from the public to their point of view as well. So today you look at people’s reactions to Elon Musk is very similar, I think to what you were talking about, the idea of, “I can also have this splashy level of wealth maybe someday, so I will follow somebody who I could see as a model of getting wealth, rather than someone who is actually going to do anything that’s actually good for me.”

Do you think that the Arc de Trump will ever be built?

That’s the thing about these Trumpian aesthetic actions, you can just put out the promise, you can release a picture of the renderings and claim victory, even though you haven’t actually done anything. I very much doubt that this arch is going to go up for a huge variety of reasons, but if it would go up, I don’t understand how it can be justified to spend that much money. When on the one hand you’re saying we are trying to cut government expenditure, there’s no justification for having tens of millions probably going on an arch to yourself.

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Disabled Voters Are Challenging South Carolina’s Draconian Ballot Laws

Three South Carolina voters with disabilities, represented by the NAACP, filed a lawsuit on Friday against the state’s election commission and Republican attorney general Alan Wilson to challenge rules that limit how disabled voters can receive voting assistance, and who is eligible.

South Carolina only allows voters “who are unable to read or write or who are physically unable or incapacitated from preparing a ballot” to receive ballot assistance, limiting that assistance to an immediate family member or “authorized representative”—and imposes felony penalties on any individual who helps more than five voters by either requesting or returning an absentee ballot.

The three voters challenging the law currently live in nursing homes, where many residents rely on staff members they trust to help them vote.

They contend that South Carolina’s draconian voting restrictions violate Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which commits to protecting the right for “any voter who requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to read or write” to receive such assistance from a person they choose.

The Voting Rights Act has come under consistent attack by GOP-governed states, particularly in the wake of Republican upset losses and near-losses; those attacks have largely been upheld by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, which has gutted some of the act’s crucial provisions and opened the door for an unprecedented wave of anti-voter state statutes.

The new suit calls for the court to permanently block South Carolina from enforcing these limits and order the state’s election commission to oversee the revision of voter guidance to comply with the VRA.

The South Carolina attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment; the state’s election commission said that it does not comment “on active legal matters.”

As my colleague Julia Métraux wrote last year, polling stations are failing disabled and chronically ill voters in both Democratic- and Republican-leaning areas: “What may be accessible to some disabled people may not be for others. That’s why it’s crucial to move towards more accessible options.”

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