This Programmer Wants to Use Your Phone to Fight ICE

The first thing you notice when you enter Sherman Austin’s Long Beach, California, apartment is the sounds. His cellphone buzzes constantly, mostly notifications requiring his attention from StopICE.net, a crowdsourced nationwide alert system he developed to let users know when federal immigration officers are nearby. Then there are the beeps. Follow them and they’ll lead you to Austin’s cramped bedroom, where two large computer screens sit inches from his bed. On one, columns of characters scroll continuously, Matrix-style, tracking traffic and potential attacks on a server he uses for StopICE. The beeps come from the other, which displays security camera feeds outside his apartment. Every time a camera spots a potential intruder, it issues a series of loud beeps. It beeps a lot.

Threats come in two main varieties. The first are promises to hurt or kill Austin himself. “You’re [sic] last days are coming close,” read one February email. A recent commenter on Austin’s Facebook wrote, “You’re just lucky I am out of the US at the moment and it would take me 10+ hours to get there, or I would have already slit your throat in front of your loved ones.”

Austin, who has a long history in activism for which he spent nearly a year in federal prison in the 2000s, isn’t particularly rattled by these messages. “Most are just talk,” he says. But the other type of threat feels far less nebulous. Austin believes it’s only a matter of time before he looks at his security monitors and sees federal agents crouching outside his door.

“I’m not doing anything illegal, but we all know how these things go,” he says. “They look for people to make an example of.”

Austin, 43, is slim and lithe, with a patchy beard covering his angular face. Today, a cold rainy one in February, he’s wearing a gray-checked flannel and has his long dreadlocks partially tucked under a black baseball cap bearing a picture of a black panther. Despite his radical pedigree and a sideline as a competitive boxer—he turned pro in his mid-30s for six featherweight bouts—he’s an unassuming presence.

A set designer could not improve on his apartment’s vibe. The walls are adorned with an electric guitar, boxing gloves, a Malcolm X photo, and a map of tribal lands in the American Southwest. Much of the furniture is handmade. On one shelf are drills he uses doing contract electrical work. On another is a Rubik’s Cube, a xylophone, and three dozen books, including W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, and the SAS Ultimate Guide to Combat.

Despite death threats and legal scrutiny, Austin’s site provides real-time information to over half a million subscribers.
Gabriella Angotti-Jones

Austin launched StopICE in February 2025, one of a constellation of digital tools that emerged in response to federal agents terrorizing communities. Users can text in sightings of ICE, which are then blasted out to other nearby users. This is legal: “Reporting on the activities of law enforcement is fully protected by the Constitution,” says Eric Goldman, who co-directs the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “If the government is doing something in a public space, we’re allowed to report it, monitor it, catalog it, complain about it, protest it.”

Nevertheless, the Trump administration has declared war on ICE-spotting apps. In June, the agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons, accused one app, ICEBlock, of painting “a target on federal law enforcement officers’ backs” and contributing to a “500% increase in assaults” against them. Pressure from the administration prompted Apple and Google to remove the app and others like it, including Red Dot and Deicer, from their app stores in October. That same month, Facebook suspended an ICE watch group in Chicago.

Austin saw this crackdown coming. It’s why he designed StopICE as a text-based web service, not a downloadable app, which meant it survived this purge. “I built it this way for a reason,” he says. “I knew DOJ and DHS was going to pressure service providers to remove the apps.”

But StopICE’s survival means that Austin is under more scrutiny than ever. In September, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed Meta to turn over account information related to StopICE’s Instagram page. Austin challenged the subpoena, and it was ultimately withdrawn. But Austin sees traffic daily on StopICE from DHS-owned IP addresses. He suspects Customs and Border Protection agents were behind an attempted attack on StopICE’s main server in January. He believes one of them sent an ominous DM recently—“We’re coming for you. Tracking your every move”—which he traced to an agent whose Instagram bio included “1488 SS,” clear neo-Nazi symbology; CBP did not respond to a request for comment.

“Things have gotten to where people have wanted me not to stay here because there’s so many threats coming in,” Austin says. “But they’re not running me out of my own block.”

As StopICE expands—it now has more than half a million subscribers—Austin is dealing with the kind of growing pains many tech platforms face. He’s constantly adding features and fending off hackers, but doing it almost entirely himself, for no money, in this tiny apartment. Whereas many doing such work closely guard their identity, Austin is adamant that, in contrast with the masked agents he’s alerting people about, he has nothing to hide.

“The government’s narrative is, ‘We’ve got to track these people down who are building these apps, interfering with federal agents, trying not to be caught,’” he says. “My response is: ‘I’m right here. You have my name. You know where I live. If you want to do something, come do it.’”

“You have my name. You know where I live. If you want to do something, come do it,” says Austin.Gabriella Angotti-Jones

Heavily armed federal agents have shown up on his doorstep before. On January 24, 2002, when he was 18 and still living in his mother’s house in Sherman Oaks, his twin sister woke him from a nap to tell him there were suspicious-looking vehicles outside. When he went to the door, two FBI agents pulled him through as more agents emerged from the bushes. He wasn’t surprised.

Austin was already a gifted programmer and a committed anarchist. At 16, he’d launched RaisetheFist.com, which ran stories about Mexico’s Zapatista uprising and anti-capitalist protests in the Pacific Northwest. The site became an organizing hub that also hosted other similarly minded websites on its platform.

“It promoted the idea of taking direct action, whether through nonviolent protests, civil disobedience, or promoting self-defense,” Austin says. RaisetheFist.com became popular enough to draw attention from federal agents. “I’d log connections that would come in from the FBI, the Defense Department, and other government agencies.”

The day the FBI stormed his mom’s home was not his first tangle with the law. Austin hoists his right pant leg to show me several scars on his calf, remnants of an encounter with Long Beach police during a chaotic 2001 May Day protest. “I got shot in the leg,” he says. “It was a rubber shell packed into a shotgun.” He runs his finger over the largest mark. “They couldn’t take this one out in the hospital. It was too close to the bone.”

After 9/11, law enforcement’s interest in RaisetheFist.com intensified. The FBI began intercepting all data crossing his DSL line, gaining access to his AOL Instant Messenger account. Unmarked cars parked outside his house, then quickly drove away when he got home, Austin says. When the FBI eventually raided his home, special agents confiscated Austin’s computers and questioned him for hours but didn’t arrest him. The following week, he drove to New York to protest the World Economic Forum. There, he was arrested by the NYPD, interrogated, released, then immediately rearrested by the FBI, which held him in solitary confinement for more than a week.

“They put me on a cellblock with two people supposedly involved in al-Qaeda,” he says. “One was convicted of the USS Cole bombing and one of bombing the US Embassy in Kenya. I was an 18-year-old kid who had a website.”

Austin was asked repeatedly about crude bombmaking instructions that appeared on a site RaisetheFist.com hosted. Austin hadn’t written them, and such material had previously been considered constitutionally protected speech. He was released and returned to California.

Austin’s case attracted attention from high-profile academic and activist figures like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha. But after federal prosecutors threatened a “terrorism enhancement” that could have added 20 years to any sentence, he pleaded guilty to distributing the bombmaking information. (Notably, the author of the material was never charged.) Prosecutors sought a four-month prison term, but the judge imposed a year. Austin served 11 months and later three years of probation, which barred him from using computers. Once his probation ended, he launched CopWatchLA.org, which collected civilian-submitted police complaints in a searchable database.

When Austin’s kids were born, he stepped back a bit from organizing, but President Donald Trump’s brutal immigration agenda drew him in again. “When I see people kidnapped by ICE, that affects me, because I know what it’s like to be kidnapped by federal agents,” he says. “It affects me physically, like a burning feeling in my stomach.” He worries about the potential impact on his family, but the price of inaction feels steeper. “My kids are teenagers now. I want to be that example to them that despite threats of retaliation and violence, you’ve still got to stand up and fight back.”

When I first spoke with Austin in early April 2025, StopICE had about 9,000 subscribers. After the LA crackdown, it had nearly 300,000. After Minneapolis, 500,000. Because StopICE is a crowdsourced platform, each new user makes it more useful, but there’s a catch. Every alert StopICE sends costs a fraction of a penny, but when alerts go to thousands of subscribers, those fractions add up. So far, it’s cost up to $8,000 or so a month, but as StopICE grows, expenses could rise exponentially.

Austin has raised about $48,000 via GoFundMe, but the budget is tight enough that he has to triage alerts. When one comes in that is vague, it will initially be pushed to only 30 percent of users in that area. If more information emerges, it is sent to more. This metering means some subscribers might not get a needed alert in a timely fashion, Austin acknowledges. “My goal is to continue to increase the capacity of alerts, but a lot of that comes down to resources,” he says.

Austin is the only full-time moderator checking submissions, and for the site’s first several months, no alerts went out until he’d personally reviewed them. He’s since automated some of the process and is working to onboard more human moderators. But StopICE is practically a full-time unpaid job. “He falls asleep on the computer,” says Coyotl Tezcatlipoca, who knows Austin through organizing and from playing in a band together since the two were teenagers. “Sometimes, he doesn’t eat. He’s consumed by it.”

When you subscribe to StopICE, the system asks only the area where you want alerts and the phone number to which to send them. You don’t have to provide any other identifying information. StopICE doesn’t track user locations either. This is intentional: If the government or anyone else accesses StopICE’s data, there’d be little to find.

Austin spent almost a year in federal prison in relation to his work hosting an anarchist website.Gabriella Angotti-Jones

Austin’s commitment to user privacy is another reason he doesn’t shield his own. He wants everyone to know the person behind StopICE is the same one who’s been challenging the federal government for most of his life. “We really can’t trust the information that comes from the apps. But I know Sherman personally, so I trust him,” says Ron Gochez, leader of Unión del Barrio, which runs patrols monitoring immigration agents in Southern California. “I’m glad people like him, trusted members of the community, are doing that work.”

Recently, Austin has added several new functions, including a database of vehicle license plates used for immigration enforcement and a way for users to get alerts via Signal. But because StopICE doesn’t collect user data, measuring effectiveness is tricky. There are no real metrics for deportations averted or immigrants able to go to work without fear.

“People keep telling me it’s an important tool they rely on, whether it’s rapid response groups or just to know what’s going on in the neighborhood,” he says. “Sometimes behind the computer, you’re disconnected from the fact people are using this to help keep each other safe.”

Sitting in his apartment, he told me he sometimes imagines the pretext the FBI might one day use to justify kicking in his door. It goes something like this: A StopICE user sends an alert containing an exhortation to do something illegal, like damage ICE vehicles or attack agents, which slips by the auto moderators and goes to subscribers. According to Lauren Regan, founder and senior staff attorney at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which represents Austin, whether StopICE would be liable for distributing this kind of information isn’t clear. Social media companies typically aren’t. But Austin isn’t a billionaire with a fleet of lawyers.

“The current test for where the line is drawn between free speech and true threats is whether an individual is named so they’d reasonably be in fear,” she says. “There’s a line between spicy rhetoric and true threat. So there are protections available for rich guys like Mark Zuckerberg. We’d certainly attempt to apply those to Sherman.”

Does Austin find it ironic that the scenarios he worries about so closely mirror what already sent him to federal prison? “Yeah, it brings back a lot of memories,” he says. “When I see them saying, ‘If you track or criticize ICE agents, you’re a domestic terrorist,’ that was the same sentiment when they came after me with RaisetheFist.”

“I’m not looking to get arrested,” he says, nodding toward his front door. “I’m not looking for conflict, but I know conflict is inevitable. To me, what’s more important is being in a fight and using my skill set to contribute something to that fight. Then whatever is going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

Continue Reading…

Democrats Vow to Investigate “Web of Corruption” at DHS

Democrats on Wednesday denounced a massive contract that the Homeland Security Department handed to a company owned by a financial supporter of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as an example of what they called rampant corruption under President Donald Trump.

DHS last May awarded Salus Worldwide Solutions a contract worth up $915 million to provide flights out of the country for undocumented immigrants under a self-deportation program set up by the Trump administration. As Mother Jones has reported, Salus had limited prior federal contracting experience but won the business following extensive contacts with top department officials. A DHS contracting officer acknowledged the situation created “an appearance of favoritism,” according to a court document. Salus is owned by a former State Department official who in October 2024 gave $10,000 to a political action committee that supports Noem.

“The web of corruption here will take us some time to fully unpack,” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) said Wednesday at an unofficial hearing held by House Homeland Security Committee Democrats.

Magaziner and other Democrats also pointed to a $220 million ad campaign Noem launched last year. The ads, crafted in part by firms with close ties to the former secretary and to her adviser Corey Lewandowski, were nominally aimed at urging immigrants to self-deport. But they also appeared intended to promote Noem herself, complete with a now infamous spot featuring the former secretary on horse. CNN recently reported that the department paid $20,000 to rent the horse for Noem. The DHS inspector general has reportedly launched an investigation into that ad campaign.

Additionally, lawmakers cited an NBC News report alleging that Lewandowksi requested that companies seeking DHS contracts pay him, or hire people associated with him. A Lewandowski representative has called those accusations “absolutely false.”

The so-called shadow hearing Wednesday was part of a broad effort by congressional Democrats to trumpet plans to commence aggressive oversight of DHS and federal contractors should they take control of one or both congressional chambers next year—and regain the subpoena power that Republicans are largely unwilling to use to scrutinize the Trump administration.

“We want to assure the public that at some point there will have to be a reckoning for a lot of the contracts and other things that we question,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee’s ranking member, said Wednesday. “We plan to put as many people on notice as possible that the committee in due time will look at it.”

Noem’s rocky tenure at DHS is ending this week with the confirmation of former Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to lead the department. But Democratic lawmakers have said they still plan to scrutinize Noem’s role in federal contracts as well as that of Lewandowski, who is expected to give up his role as special government employee.

One Wednesday, Sens. Adam Schiff (Calif.), Peter Welch (Vt.), and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, asked federal contractors including Salus to preserve communications with Lewandowski and with people and firms working with him.

Elsewhere in Congress, House Judiciary Committee Democrats unsuccessfully urged that panel’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), to subpoena Lewandowski over this role in DHS contracting. House Oversight Committee Democrats have launched their own investigation into the former Trump campaign aide.

Democrats have denounced what they call the unprecedented corruption unleashed by the president and his family, whose personal wealth has skyrocketed since Trump retook office. In previously unimaginable ways, the Trumps have accepted money from people hoping to influence federal policy, including secretive investments by foreign interests in Trump family companies.

The contracting scandals involving DHS, by contrast, involve allegations of fairly traditional graft that would have been understandable to “boss” William Tweed of Tammany Hall. NBC News’ report last week included an allegation that an official at a firm seeking a subcontract under Salus Worldwide was pressured by someone at that company to hire “one of several consulting firms tied to Lewandowski.”

Lewandowski denied this claim, and an attorney for Salus told NBC that the account was “entirely false” and that the company “would never entertain this type of arrangement.” Mother Jones has not independently confirmed these allegations.

“I’m not a lawyer, but this sounds illegal to me,” Jon Golinger, a democracy advocate at Public Citizen, said at Wednesday’s hearing, after the caveat that he did not personally know if the allegations are true.

Mother Jones and the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, have reported that Salus Worldwide won its $915 million contract with DHS after extensive contacts between the company and DHS officials. A contracting officer at DHS, according to a court document, found that Salus “appeared” to shape the government’s requirements for the contract that the firm was trying to win. The court filing by DHS disclosed that the same officer found that DHS officials had “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public,” contributing to “an appearance of favoritism toward Salus.”

But the agency waived restrictions meant to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, citing factors including the contract’s supposed urgency and “national security considerations.” And after a limited two-day competition, Salus received the massive contract.

Mother Jones and POGO have also reported that Salus’ owner, William Walters— who donated $10,000 to a political action committee backing Noem in 2024—is closely linked to other firms that are selling airplanes to DHS, including a luxury 737 with private bedrooms that was reputedly used by Lewandowski and Noem.

At Wednesday’s shadow hearing, Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the director of government affairs at POGO, argued that problems with large contracts on the scale or the one held by Salus can occur via subcontracts that firms give to other companies. Those subcontracts are subject to laxer regulation and fewer disclosure requirements than the primary contractors, he said.

Hedtler-Gaudette said there are indications Salus is awarding subcontract work to firms connected to Salus itself. “We are seeing potentially what looks like a shell game of a company and then a number of smaller companies that are linked to that company in some way,” he said.

Committee members said they would come back to the issue. “We’ll go forward in due time holding this administration accountable for this egregious waste of taxpayers’ money,” Thompson said.

Continue Reading…

Exclusive: Al Gore Slams Trump’s “Astonishing Mistake” on Iran

Former Vice President Al Gore delivered a blistering rebuke of President Trump’s war on Iran this week in his first wide-ranging comments on the escalating crisis, calling Trump’s lack of planning “an astonishing mistake” born of arrogance and corruption. “I never would have believed that any president would do even one-tenth of the atrocious things Donald Trump has done,” he said.

In an exclusive sit-down with Reveal host Al Letson for an upcoming episode of More To The Story, a visibly angered Gore linked the war to Trump’s climate recalcitrance and a slew of broken promises.

As the Pentagon prepared to send about 2,000 paratroopers to Iran, Gore argued that the president had brushed aside decades of war planning for just such a scenario. The energy crisis unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz has “been the number one question for all the war games and plans for 50 years almost,” Gore told Letson. “President Trump said, ‘Don’t worry about it. They’ll surrender before that comes into play.’ Well, that was an astonishing mistake of the kind that you really do not want the president of your country to make because it has put us in a terrible situation.”

“Could he be just as wrong about that as he has been in attacking Iran without a plan for the Strait of Hormuz?” Gore added. “Could he be just as wrong about that as he was when he threatened to invade Greenland?”

Elsewhere in the interview, Gore launched another broadside against a series of back flips and failed promises from the president: “He told us prices were going to come down. He told us we would not get into any more foreign ‘forever wars.’ He told us inflation was going to subside. He told us the economy was going to really boom. None of those things have come true.”

“This is the most corrupt administration.”

“This is the most corrupt administration, not only in American history, but more corrupt than I could ever have imagined a president would be able to get away with to the extent that he has,” Gore said. “It’s shocking to me.”

This is one clip from a series we’ll be posting in the coming days, ahead of our longer interview with the former Vice President soon, in which he discusses climate action, religion, and what’s giving him hope. Stay tuned.

And in the meantime, subscribe to Reveal on Apple Podcasts so you don’t miss the latest.

Continue Reading…

An Eyesore Runs Through It

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

An experiment unfolding at the southernmost tip of this state could irrevocably change the iconic Rio Grande and the communities it sustains.

Contractors are installing a 17-mile stretch of cylindrical buoys in the river to prevent illegal crossings from Mexico. These are the first of 536 miles of buoys that the federal government plans to stretch from the Gulf of Mexico deep into South Texas. The Department of Homeland Security has waived environmental laws and issued more than $1 billion in contracts to private companies to install them in continuous chains. Each industrial-style buoy is more than 12 feet long and four to five feet in diameter.

Federal agencies have not made any environmental assessment or flood modeling for the border buoys available to the public. Experts have criticized the secrecy surrounding the project and warn that the buoys could intensify flooding and change the river channel.

“This is an experiment on a continental scale…None of this is based on common sense or science.”

Mark Tompkins, a geomorphologist who studies the flow of rivers and conducted an analysis of the buoys for a group opposed to their use, said the lack of public documentation violates the “basic professional standard of care” for projects of this magnitude. The city manager in Laredo, one community where the buoys are planned, said the city is working to obtain engineering and design information from federal agencies.

Experts consulted by Inside Climate News said they knew of no comparable undertaking on a dynamic river anywhere in the world. They warned that the buoys could speed up flood water in a region that already struggles with flooding. The buoys could also accumulate sediment and create new landforms in the river, provoking treaty disputes with neighboring Mexico. The buoys are planned through Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, Webb, Maverick, and Val Verde counties.

“The design requirements for these barriers, set by CBP and implemented by contractors, mandate that they withstand a 100-year flood event—consistent with CBP established design standards,” a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told Inside Climate News. “Additionally, the barriers are engineered to endure increased currents and elevated water levels, ensuring operational reliability during extreme weather conditions.”

The spokesperson declined to provide any technical information about the design standards.

Elsa Hull on the bank of the Rio Grande River, where CBP plans to install giant border buoys.Martha Pskowski/Inside Climate News

“This is an experiment on a continental scale,” said Elsa Hull, an environmental advocate and resident of Zapata County, near the buoy’s proposed path. “None of this is based on common sense or science.”

The buoys will also reduce access for boating, fishing and other recreation.

While local opposition grows, day by day, more buoys line the river.

During the first Trump administration, in 2020, the US Army Corps of Engineers sought solicitations for a “buoy barrier system.” That year the Border Patrol Academy posted, and later deleted, photos of a “buoy barrier demonstration” by the Virginia-based company Cochrane USA. The Army Corps of Engineers referred questions for this story to CBP.

The idea wasn’t implemented before Trump left office. But it resurfaced in July 2023, when the state of Texas installed 1,000 feet of buoys in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass. The buoys provoked a diplomatic dispute with Mexico and a lawsuit from the federal government.

Unlike the buoys the federal government is now installing, the ones in Eagle Pass were spherical and segmented with saw blades. At least one person was found dead, trapped in the buoys. Advocates warned that the buoys made the dangerous trip across the Rio Grande even more deadly for migrants. More than 1,100 people died attempting to cross the Rio Grande between 2017 and 2023, according to a Washington Post investigation.

“The fact that they have waived these laws means they are creating a law-free zone along the border,”

Despite the controversy in Eagle Pass, the Department of Homeland Security hatched a massive buoy project once Trump returned to office in 2025.

On July 3, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waived more than 30 federal laws in a 20-mile area along the Rio Grande in Cameron County to expedite the Waterborne Barrier Project’s first federal border buoys. Among those laws: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

“A capability gap has been identified in waterways along the Southwest border where drug smuggling, human trafficking and other dangerous and illegal activity occurs,” Noem wrote.

A government Humvee on the bank of the Rio Grande.Martha Pskowski/Inside Climate News

In October, Homeland Security waived contracting and procurement laws along the entirety of the US-Mexico border to speed up construction. Since then, billions of dollars have been awarded to private contractors from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for border fortifications.

The unprecedented expenditure comes as the number of unauthorized border crossings has dropped precipitously. CBP apprehended 73 percent fewer people in the Rio Grande Valley sector between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, according to agency data.

Noem traveled to Brownsville on Jan. 7 to announce the first buoys. CBP granted access to the conservative news outlet Washington Examiner to see the buoys installed. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks explained to the reporter that the buoys are designed to roll when someone tries to climb on them. “It prevents them from ever being able to climb up on it,” he told the reporter. He added that the buoys have been tested in pools with dive teams.

President Donald Trump announced on March 5 that he was replacing Noem as homeland security secretary; she leaves the position on March 31.

Unlike the Eagle Pass buoys, the new buoys are much larger, cylindrical and form a continuous barrier across the river. BCCG Joint Venture was awarded a $96 million contract for the first 17-mile section of buoys in Brownsville. At this cost of $5.6 million per mile, the whole project would top $3 billion.

Inside Climate News reviewed federal contracts and identified seven along the Texas-Mexico border, totaling over $2.5 billion, that reference either “waterborne barriers” or “waterborne buoys.” Three contracts that referred exclusively to buoys and waterborne barriers totaled $1.22 billion. Another four contracts worth a total of $1.33 billion referenced both buoys and border wall construction.

Cochrane USA was awarded $641 million for “waterborne barrier construction.”

Tucson-based Spencer Construction LLC has obtained four contracts totaling $1.21 billion. Fisher Sand and Gravel, which built border walls later embroiled in legal challenges, was awarded a $316.7 million contract. SLS Federal Services LLC was awarded $382.3 million for waterborne and “vertical” barriers.

Contractors install a buoy in Brownsville on Feb. 26, 2026.Courtesy of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network

The federal waivers have allowed this unprecedented project to proceed with little scrutiny. “The laws that have been waived were put in place specifically to protect communities from improperly built structures like the wall,” said Ricardo de Anda, a lawyer in Laredo whose property abuts the river. “The Environmental Policy Act would not have allowed the construction of these structures because they would damage the environment.”

The buoys are planned through the Laredo area, which to date does not have a physical border wall. “The fact that they have waived these laws means they are creating a law-free zone along the border,” de Anda said. “The problem for the country is that if people become comfortable with that … then it’s coming your way.”

In Laredo, landowners and local advocates successfully opposed border wall construction during the first Trump administration. Now, old networks are re-connecting to oppose both renewed efforts to build the wall and the buoys.

“There has been no comprehensive information from the feds,” said Tricia Cortez, executive director of the Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo. “People need to be aware of this quiet, under the radar, but very aggressive move that the federal government is directing on us at the border.”

The organization decided to commission Tompkins, a geomorphologist with the consulting firm FlowWest, to conduct his own study on the potential impacts of the buoys.

Tompkins presented his findings to Laredo’s Rio Grande Riverfront Coordination Ad-hoc Advisory Committee on March 12. He warned that because of the federal waivers there is “a nearly complete lack” of technical information for the buoys.

“What would happen if we did experience some of those bigger floods?”

Tompkins’ report cautions that the buoys could change the Rio Grande in “unpredictable, damaging, and potentially catastrophic ways.”

He explained that the Rio Grande picks up trash, debris and uprooted trees during floods. This debris forms “rafts” in the river that could accumulate along the proposed border wall and the border buoys. He said because the Rio Grande has a soft bed, the force of high flows could cause the anchors holding the buoys to break. “It is inevitable that portions of the buoy system will break free and portions of the [border] wall will fail,” he wrote.

“Even very small changes can have very big consequences,” Tompkins told the Laredo committee.

Laredo city manager Joseph Neeb put out a statement following the presentation. He acknowledged the concerns that Tompkins and the Rio Grande International Study Center have raised but cautioned that, in the absence of technical data, the study relied on assumptions. Neeb said the city is working to obtain technical information from CBP, the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission and the Army Corps.

“Our responsibility is not only to act, but to act correctly,” Neeb wrote. “Any position taken by the City must be based on verifiable, project-specific information that can withstand technical and legal scrutiny.”

Adriana Martinez, a Southern Illinois University geomorphologist originally from Eagle Pass, has studied how the existing state buoys are changing water flows and sedimentation in the Rio Grande.

Drought has lowered the Rio Grande’s level in recent years. But Martinez referenced floods during Hurricane Alex in 2010, when several communities in the Rio Grande Valley were evacuated. She said she has “significant concerns” about how the buoys will act during flooding. “What would happen if we did experience some of those bigger floods?” she asked.

She said the chains connecting the buoys in Eagle Pass to the riverbed would be tested, likening the design to holding a “giant dense yoga ball” underwater.

Martinez said the federal government’s cylindrical buoys will create an even larger impediment for the flow of water than the spherical ones. The water that the buoys divert has to find a new path, which can change the course of the river.

Low water flows cause a separate set of problems, Martinez said. She observed in Eagle Pass how the buoys rested on a sand bar when the river was low. Vegetation started forming around the buoys. If this process continued, the sand bar could eventually form a new island.

The CBP spokesperson said the buoys will meet “CBP established design standards.”

The federal border wall has been damaged in floods on at least two occasions, both in Arizona. The US Government Accountability Office found in a 2023 report that the border wall has exacerbated flooding.

The CBP spokesperson said the river will remain publicly accessible except in cases when Border Patrol determines conditions are “operationally unsafe.” However, even in normal conditions, the buoys will limit how people can use the river.

While federal laws have been waived, the United States is still bound by its treaties with Mexico.

One federal agency that has been publicly silent on the buoys is the US International Boundary and Water Commission. The US and Mexico are signatories to several treaties dictating the sharing of binational waters and the international boundary. The USIBWC implements these treaties, along with its Mexican counterpart, the Comisión Internacional de Límites y Aguas.

In 2023, the USIBWC determined that most of the buoys installed by Texas were on the Mexican side of the river, in violation of treaty terms.

The Rio Grande in Zapata County, Texas, where Customs and Border Protection plans to install cylindrical buoys. Martha Pskowski/Inside Climate News

Upon taking office, Trump pushed out the commission’s popular leader, Maria-Elena Giner, who grew up in El Paso and worked for decades along the US-Mexico border. He replaced her with Chad McIntosh, who previously worked for the Ford Motor Co., Michigan’s environmental regulator, and at the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump.

In response to a detailed list of questions from Inside Climate News, a USIBWC spokesperson only replied, “The USIBWC is fully supporting the Trump Administration’s efforts to secure the border.”

Samuel Sandoval Solis, a water resources professor at the University of California, Davis, said the buoys are likely to violate the 1970 U.S.-Mexico treaty. The treaty sought to resolve outstanding boundary disputes and laid out each country’s responsibility to preserve the international boundary.

“Rivers are meant to bring people together…These buoys are going to be an ecological disaster.”

The 1970 treaty states that both nations will not allow construction in their territory that could cause “deflection or obstruction” of the normal flow or flood flows of the river. The treaty states that if construction by one country causes “adverse effects” on the other country, the offending country must either remove the structures, repair the damage or compensate the other country.

Under the 1970 treaty, the United States would be responsible to repair any damage or compensate Mexico, according to Sandoval Solis.

“We are paying with our federal taxpayer dollars for the border wall and the buoys,” Sandoval Solis said. “But if things move we will also be paying for the restoration.”

The CBP spokesperson said the agency is working with the USIBWC “to ensure that the waterborne barriers deployed by CBP are placed in the United States and do not encroach into Mexico.” He did not respond to other questions about treaty compliance.

Downstream in Brownsville, where buoys are beginning to line the river, environmentalists are raising the alarm.

On February 24, the Cameron County commissioners voted in favor of a resolution presented by local advocates that opposes the border buoys.

“Unfortunately, the federal government, especially the current administration, doesn’t really inquire as to our concerns,” said county Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., a Democrat, before voting in favor. He said there are “numerous questions” about the short- and long-term impacts of the buoys.

The vote came the week of Brownsville’s Charro Days, an annual celebration when colorful parades fill downtown streets and the city celebrates its close ties to Mexico. Residents of neighboring Matamoros, Tamaulipas, join in the festivities featuring mariachis and regional Mexican music.

This year, while charrería dancers paraded down Elizabeth Street, contractors were busy placing buoys in the Rio Grande. Bekah Hinojosa, a longtime local activist with the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, spent a morning driving backroads in Brownsville’s Southmost neighborhood searching for a place where she could see the border buoys.

During a rally in Brownsville along the border wall on February 26, speakers voiced opposition to border buoys in the Rio Grande.Martha Pskowski/Inside Climate News

Hinojosa lamented that even in her lifetime, border wall construction and industrial development have significantly restricted access to the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico. She said the new wall construction and border buoys are just the latest step in disconnecting Rio Grande Valley residents from the river and natural spaces.

“Rivers are meant to bring people together,” she said. “These buoys are going to be an ecological disaster.”

She rushed back to downtown Brownsville to prepare for an afternoon protest against the border buoys.

Dozens of people gathered at a postage stamp park in downtown Brownsville for the protest. On the other side of the steel border wall, the placid Rio Grande flowed toward its terminus at the Gulf of Mexico. Border Patrol vehicles circulated on a levee road in between the river and the wall, rolling slowly past the protest. Cars sat in traffic on the international bridge into Matamoros.

Elsa Hull arrived from Zapata County with a banner denouncing the border buoys. River guide Jessie Fuentes drove the five hours from Eagle Pass to share his experience after the first buoys went into the river. Juan Mancias, chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe, spoke to the long history of human settlement along the river delta. He reminded the crowd that rivers don’t respect international boundaries.

They spoke in defense of the Rio Grande, which distant federal officials call a dangerous frontier that must be barricaded. But the people assembled on its banks in Brownsville embrace it as a part of their home worth protecting.

This reporting was supported by the Water Desk at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Continue Reading…

Bernie Sanders and AOC Are Pushing a Moratorium on Data Center Construction

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

Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) will introduce a bill Wednesday that aims to put a national moratorium on data center construction “until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will introduce a similar bill in the House in the coming weeks.

While it’s highly unlikely that the bill will pass—especially given the Trump administration’s full-throated endorsement of AI, and the massive amount of money the industry is set to spend this year in Washington—the bill marks a new line in the sand for progressives seeking to address both concern around data center construction and the potential harms artificial intelligence may bring.

“A moratorium will give us the chance to figure out how to make sure that AI benefits the working families of this country, not just a handful of billionaires who want more and more wealth and more and more power,” Sanders said in a speech on the Hill Tuesday evening. “A moratorium will give us the time to figure out how to ensure that AI is safe and effective and prevent the worst outcomes. A moratorium will give us the time to figure out how to make sure AI does not harm our environment or jack up the electric bills that we pay.”

Sanders’s bill puts an open-ended moratorium on the construction or upgrading of new and existing data centers used specifically for artificial intelligence—defined in the bill via a series of physical parameters, including energy load above 20 megawatts. The moratorium, the bill states, will end only when laws are enacted that not only prevent data centers from contributing to climate change, harming the environment, and raising electricity bills, but also prevent tech companies from producing products that displace harm the “health and well-being of working families, privacy and civil rights, and the future of humanity.” Tech companies, the bill states, must ensure that wealth generated from AI is “shared with the people of the United States.” (A separate section forbids the export of computing hardware, including semiconductor chips, to any country that does not have similar laws.)

“I don’t think there’s very many people who want to have higher energy bills just so some chatbot can corrupt some 13-year-old kid online.” —Ron DeSantis

The bill name-checks wealthy tech executives, including xAI’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who have both profited greatly from artificial intelligence and sounded alarms at just how quickly the technology could change society.

The urgent push to build out data centers across the US has ignited a wave of opposition over concerns about higher electric bills, water use, energy impacts, and land rights. Recent polling from Pew shows that nearly 40 percent of Americans believe that data centers are bad for the environment and home energy costs, while 30 percent say that they have a negative impact on quality of life for people living nearby.

Public opposition to data centers, and the high energy bills they could cause, has played a role in elections in states like Virginia and Georgia, where data center development has accelerated in recent years. Last year, a report found that $98 billion in data center projects had been stalled or canceled due to community pushback in the second quarter of 2025 alone.

In December, Sanders became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data centers, days after a coalition of more than 230 progressive groups sent a letter to Congress calling for a national moratorium. The letter claimed that “rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security.”

Dozens of cities and counties across the US have introduced local moratoria on data center development in response to local pushback. At least a dozen state legislatures—in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—have introduced state-level moratoriums this year.

But Sanders’s bill marks a significant departure from many of these pieces of legislation. The new bill focuses not only on the environmental and community impacts of data centers, but on AI safety as a whole. Since his announcement in December, Sanders has been outspoken about the potential dangers AI poses to society, particularly to workers.

“It makes sense to me that his bill is going to focus primarily on that aspect,” says Mitch Jones, the policy and litigation director at Food and Water Watch, an environmental watchdog group which has advised Sanders’s office on the moratorium. Food and Water Watch also convened the December letter from progressive groups.

Pew’s polling found that Democrats are more likely to view data centers negatively—but it’s not just national progressives raising concerns. Before Sanders voiced his opposition to data centers, some prominent Republican and MAGA politicians, including representative Thomas Massie, senator Josh Hawley, and then-representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, were already vocally questioning the data center buildout. Last month, Hawley and Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal introduced a bill to insulate customers from electricity rate hikes due to data centers. In December, Steve Bannon, one of the most influential anti-AI voices in Washington, hosted a segment on his War Room podcast called “Data Centers Are Devouring Public Land.”

Many of the bills introduced at the state level were sponsored by Democratic politicians. (Food and Water Watch helped craft the New York bill.) Bills in some states, including Oklahoma, were introduced by Republicans; Georgia’s bill had both Democratic and Republican cosponsors.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been especially outspoken on the potential harms from both data centers and artificial intelligence. “I don’t think there’s very many people who want to have higher energy bills just so some chatbot can corrupt some 13-year-old kid online,” DeSantis said at an AI roundtable in February. In December, DeSantis endorsed legislation that would have established a bill of rights to protect consumers from potential harms from AI, including prohibiting minors from interacting with AI chatbots without parental consent, as well as a data center proposal to strip subsidies from tech companies and prohibit data centers from raising electricity bills. The resulting AI bill of rights legislation passed the state Senate, but died in the House.

Both the White House and Big Tech companies have acknowledged that the push to build out data centers suffers from bad public optics. In March, representatives from top data center developers and AI companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, gathered at the White House to sign a nonbinding agreement intended to make data centers pay “the full cost of their energy and infrastructure” and protect consumers from rate hikes.

“Data centers … they need some PR help,” president Donald Trump said at the event. Experts told WIRED that the agreement signed at the White House was largely symbolic, and that some of the key aims of the agreement—including having data centers absorb any additional costs to customers’ bills—are largely out of both the White House and tech companies’ hands.

“A moratorium would limit internet capacity, slow critical services, eliminate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, drain billions in local tax revenue, and raise costs for American families and small businesses,” Cy McNeill, the senior director of federal affairs at the Data Center Coalition, an industry group, told WIRED in an email. The industry, McNeill says, “remains committed to working with communities, local officials, state and federal policymakers, and the Administration to ensure the continued responsible development of this industry while protecting families and businesses.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Officials Claim They Gutted This $400 Billion Climate Program. They Didn’t.

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

In January, the Trump administration announced that it had completed its dismantling of yet another Biden-era climate program. This time, the target was the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which Democrats had injected with almost $400 billion to support ambitious new clean energy projects.

The Biden administration pursued climate policy primarily by having Congress pass massive subsidies for solar power, wind energy, and electric vehicles. But much of the infrastructure needed to push the US further away from fossil fuel dependence—like new nuclear power plants, high-voltage transmission lines, and battery factories—needed more than the tax credits at the core of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to get off the ground. The Loan Programs Office was meant to fill that gap by making prudent loans to ambitious projects that the private sector saw as too risky. With its $400 billion windfall, the once-obscure office became the largest energy lender in the world.

That ambition apparently put the office in the crosshairs of Trump’s secretary of energy, Chris Wright. He said the Biden administration “rushed [loans] out the door in the final months after Election Day,” and said he had rooted out projects that “do not serve the best interest of the American people.”

“I think in some ways, it’s to convince Trump that they’re shutting down loans.”

Wright claimed to have scrubbed or “revised” around 80 percent of the Biden administration’s $100 billion loan portfolio, and he teased plans to advance new loans that would support President Donald Trump’s anti-renewable-energy agenda. He even rechristened the office as the “Energy Dominance Financing” program—a reference to Trump’s catchphrase for his fossil-fuel-friendly energy policy.

The truth, however, bears little resemblance to Wright’s combative rhetoric. Former federal officials and sources who have worked with the Loan Programs Office say that the program has survived the Trump-era purge in something close to its Biden-era form—and that it is still supporting the buildout of clean energy. Wright has vastly overstated his revisions and left untouched projects that will support emissions-free energy at the country’s utilities, including major transmission upgrades and nuclear power plants. (The anonymous sources quoted below requested anonymity to avoid retaliation or because they have ongoing work with the federal government; the Department of Energy declined to answer questions or make Wright and other program leaders available for interviews.)

The quiet about-face by the Trump administration may signal a recognition that carbon-free energy can play a major role in managing the electricity price hikes that have angered voters in recent years.

“It sounds like the Trump administration seems to be responding to the energy affordability politics in a way that is, if not constructive, at least acknowledges that steel needs to get in the ground,” said Advait Arun, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit that supports government-led economic development. “There are ways to reframe all these projects for their agenda.”

Here’s how the Loan Programs Office typically works: A utility or startup approaches the Department of Energy proposing to build a new power plant, transmission line, or battery factory. Once the applicant is approved, it borrows money from the US Treasury at a lower rate than it could get from private banks, and the Department of Energy guarantees the loan. If the project falls through, the department pays back the Treasury with the money appropriated by Congress.

This program was first established during George W. Bush’s presidency in 2005, to help spur clean energy development. But under Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, the Loan Programs Office became a magnet for controversy. That’s because the authority lent around $500 million to the solar cell manufacturer Solyndra, which later collapsed, leading the government to lose almost its entire investment. Republicans seized on the episode as evidence of the program’s failure—despite the fact that the loan authority also financed success stories such as Tesla, and its overall loss rate of 3 percent is much lower than that of many private sector lenders.

The controversy was largely a distant memory by 2022, when Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gave the office almost $400 billion—around 10 times its initial mandate—in guarantee authority to invest in battery startups, new renewables, and grid upgrades to support a clean energy transition.

But the office was slow to deploy its new authority, and former officials later said it suffered from an excess of post-Solyndra caution and bureaucracy. This led to long negotiations and risk analysis around every individual loan. A report from three former Energy Department staffers later found that the “executive branch machinery…defaulted to caution, process, and reactive strategies.”

It took more than a year for the office to develop a fast-track process for major utility loans, and many deals weren’t completed until after Trump’s 2024 win. The projects that Wright claimed were “rushed out the door” had in fact suffered from too much due diligence, in the eyes of many observers, rather than too little.

When Secretary Wright arrived in DC, he jammed up the program even more. The Loan Programs Office had three different leaders in the first six months of the Trump administration, lost more than half its staff to Elon Musk’s workforce reduction efforts, and halted almost all communication with borrowers.

“They’re sending a signal that they’re only going to approve projects that a New York private equity firm would finance.”

“Moving any application through any milestone would require political appointee approval as part of a new consolidation of decision rights, and approvals were not granted,” said Jen Downing, who served as a senior adviser at the Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration and stayed on for the first few months of the Trump administration, in a letter to Congress last summer.

Downing, who left the office last May and is now a partner at a clean tech investing firm, told lawmakers that the new Trump administration leadership spent months examining almost every loan made under Biden, in an apparent search for wrongdoing or poor lending decisions.

Wright did nix a few major loans such as the Grain Belt Express, a wind power transmission line in Missouri opposed by Republican senator Josh Hawley. But former Energy Department staffers said that many of the $30 billion in loans that Wright claimed to have shut down were in fact cancelled by the borrowers themselves, which is typical for risky and complex projects. Many withdrew even before Trump’s election, including a battery recycling plant project that fell apart due to market conditions.

“The number is fake,” said Jigar Shah, who led the Loan Programs Office under Biden. “I think in some ways, it’s to convince Trump that they’re shutting down loans.”

Other Biden-approved projects have survived, like a $1.45 billion loan to a solar panel manufacturer in Georgia called QCells, which has continued without interruption. In the case of a loan for a mine at Nevada’s Thacker Pass, which was supposed to produce lithium for electric vehicle batteries, the department doubled down and took an equity stake in the project, rather than cancelling the loan.

The new leader of the loan office is Greg Beard, a former executive at the private equity firm Apollo who also ran a crypto mining company. Thus far, Beard has only advanced projects that began under Biden. That includes the office’s most recent announcement of a massive $26.5 billion loan to Southern Company, the regional utility that serves Georgia and Alabama. The loan will fund upgrades at the utility’s new nuclear power plant in Georgia, new long-duration batteries that can store solar power, and upgrades to 1,300 miles of transmission lines.

That said, the final version of the loan also substitutes 5 gigawatts of new gas power in place of a solar project that was included under the Biden-era version of the deal, according to former Loan Programs Office officials. But this change isn’t as big a deal as it might sound; the utility was always planning to build both solar and natural gas as part of its response to surging power demand, and it will still build both. The only thing that changed between administrations is which power plants will receive low-cost federal financing. The Trump administration’s three other announced loans are also holdovers from Biden. They have little to do with fossil energy, despite Trump’s repeated promises to revive coal and oil. They include a new transmission line and the restart of another nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

The last date that the office can make loans is September 30, 2028.

“I do think that it’s in many ways a branding exercise,” said another former Department of Energy official who worked in the loan division.

Beard has said he wants to use the office to “make energy more affordable,” “win AI,” “bolster the grid,” and “get us out from under the China strategy to dominate certain critical minerals.” But it’s unclear how much appetite utilities have for the reconfigured program. The Energy Department has held roadshow meetings with data center developers, courting hyperscalers such as Meta with the promise that they will build nuclear power for data centers on federal land. Beard told CNBC that he has a pipeline of around 80 projects waiting to move forward, but that’s less than half of the 191 projects that were in the pipeline in December of 2024, as Biden prepared to leave office.

Shah said that was in part due to the fact that Beard has applied similar standards to those he maintained in his private sector job at Apollo. Beard has suggested he wants all applicants to provide corporate guarantees for their debt, which makes it hard for many projects to qualify.

“Not only are they sending the signal that they’re canceling loans, but then the other side, they’re sending a signal that they’re only going to approve projects that a New York private equity firm would finance,” said Shah. Sources familiar with the program said that the office has already received at least one major new loan application, which is related to nuclear energy, but it’s still in the early stages. The loan office is also trying to coordinate multiple utilities to purchase nuclear reactor parts in bulk.

Thanks to a change in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the major tax law signed by President Trump last summer, the program can now directly support fossil generation such as natural gas. This federal loan support was illegal under the Biden administration, when projects had to reduce greenhouse gases. But it’s far from clear that Wright and Beard could succeed in repurposing the loan program for pure fossil fuel finance, if that’s their goal. Interest in new coal plants is almost nonexistent, and there is plenty of other capital available for new natural gas generation, including from data center developers themselves. A more likely outcome is that the revamped office will continue to support a handful of deals for “clean firm” energy projects that Trump and Wright find appealing, like nuclear, as well as critical minerals production.

Spokespeople for the Department of Energy and the Energy Dominance Financing office, as the loan program has been renamed, declined to answer questions or make Beard available for an interview.

Experts say that even if the deal flow in the office slows down, there’s still a silver lining for the energy transition. More important than the exact shape of the new loans is the fact that Congress did not slash the program altogether, as it did with other Inflation Reduction Act programs such as the electric-vehicle tax credits and the Environmental Protection Agency’s “green bank.” Still, the long-term future of the program is uncertain. When Republicans in Congress modified the loan office with Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, they also added an expiration date. Unless lawmakers choose to renew the program, the last date that the office can make loans is September 30, 2028.

Even so, the fact that two presidents with opposite views on climate policy have both made use of the program may bode well for its survival.

“I still think that the program is an important tool,” said a consultant in the energy field who has interacted with the loan office. “The technology areas that the current administration is prioritizing, all of those sort of squarely fit into the boundaries or the authorities that exist.”

Continue Reading…

Afghan War Allies Were Promised Safety in the US—Until Now

Back in November, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. One was killed. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who came to the US through a Biden-era humanitarian parole program and had applied for a special immigrant visa, which allows Afghans who worked with the US military to obtain a green card. In the shooting’s aftermath, President Donald Trump halted the visa program and called for a review of all Afghans who have come to the US.

Dozens of American organizations have formed in the past decade to help Afghans with the complicated visa application and resettlement process. Jeff Holder is a pastor with one of them, an organization called Tarjoman Relief made up of military and civilian volunteers.

“I had families that were so very close to getting their visa and being put on a plane when the new administration came in and everything stopped,” Holder says. “I know some of what we’re hearing in the news and from this present administration is: ‘They need to go back. They need to pack up. We didn’t ask them to come.’ But we did promise. We made a promise.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Holder talks with host Al Letson about the Afghan allies now in limbo, the extensive vetting process they undergo to come to the US, and what he sees as lies about America’s Afghan communities being told by people in power.

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

Continue Reading…

Mad Scientist

Editor’s note: O’Rourke ended her candidacy on March 23.

On an unseasonably hot October day, a small crowd gathered at Genesis Farm, a 226-acre nonprofit in Blairstown, New Jersey, to help pull up beets before winter set in. It was the farm’s annual harvest festival and for Megan O’Rourke, a former federal climate scientist running for Congress, a natural campaign stop.

O’Rourke, after all, knows her way around a farm: At 46, she’s spent more than half of her life studying, teaching, researching, or otherwise advocating for sustainable agriculture, most recently at a small agency within the Department of Agriculture that supports food and farming research. Or at least it did. After President Donald Trump took office in 2025, taking aim at climate research and unleashing doge, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture was forced to freeze its funding and suspend accepting new grant applications. She quit NIFA in July and launched her campaign, in part to resist the policies that drove her from government.

At Genesis Farm, seven or eight festivalgoers gathered around O’Rourke. She’d dressed appropriately for the setting, in cuffed black jeans, hiking boots, and a salmon-colored Oxford shirt. Most of the group didn’t seem to know who she was. “You’re running for…” said one attendee, his voice trailing off. “Congress,” she answered warmly, brandishing a business card.

She hopes to unseat Republican Tom Kean Jr., O’Rourke explained, the second-term congressman who she says “inherited” the seat from his ex-governor father. “I emphasize Junior,” she said. She leaned into her wide-­ranging résumé, which includes a tenured professorship at Virginia Tech, a congressional fellowship, and eight years as a civil servant. “So this would be your first public office?” a guy wearing a Smithsonian cap asked. “Yeah,” she said, adding with a laugh, “Start big.”

There’s no doubt her race has big stakes. While the district narrowly went for Trump in 2024, with control of the House up for grabs, Kean is considered to be among the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, and there’s no shortage of Democrats gunning for him. As of March, at least eight had joined the contest, including a former Navy pilot, a marketing entrepreneur, an icu doctor, and a Biden-era Small Business Administration leader, who will first face each other in June. “It’s a bit of a crowded primary,” O’Rourke told the group.

O’Rourke says science—hustling for grants, spreading ideas—is not all that different from campaigning.

However things go, O’Rourke’s candidacy reflects a shift in how scientists are pushing back against Trump. Since he returned to the White House, researchers—traditionally a politics-averse group—have organized “Stand Up for Science” protests, published letters of dissent from within agencies, rescued datasets erased by the administration, and carried on research that would have been abandoned. If elected, O’Rourke would be among the first women in Congress with a scientific PhD, but she is hardly the only scientist running in 2026. In December, 314 Action, a fund that backs Democratic candidates with science backgrounds, announced it was already working with nearly 100 campaigns—more than double what it says is typical.

This shift, O’Rourke believes, is in part a response to Trump’s “assault” on science, which caused “a shock to the system.” “I think it took us a little while, including me, to even start thinking about becoming an activist, because we haven’t had to,” she says, adding that scientists are now figuring out “what should we do and how do we get organized?”

Growing up, O’Rourke was fascinated by food and where it came from. As the “poor kid” in class, she and her family relied on their church’s food pantry. Her father’s mental health issues and her mom’s long hours meant she and her three siblings typically had to fend for themselves, eating things like dry oatmeal, bread slices rolled up into a ball, or hot chocolate mix poured into a glass of milk. “It wasn’t that we went hungry, per se,” she tells me, “but nobody was feeding us.” She also loved the outdoors. Nearby her childhood house in Blairstown, in a forested wilderness now held by the Nature Conservancy that her family nicknamed “Dinosaur Mountain,” O’Rourke and her brother skipped rocks, fished, and picked berries to supplement their lunches.

Agriculture blended her interests in food and the natural world. As a master’s student in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University, adviser Ricardo Salvador recalls, O’Rourke was a quiet, steady presence. “Whenever she did engage,” he says, “you could tell that she had been observing, that she had been thinking, asking questions.” She went on to earn a PhD in agricultural ecology from Cornell University, researching insect pest population dynamics on nearby farms while running a small fruit and vegetable farm and raising three children with her husband, Aaron Rust, whom she met as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. After working as a climate change adviser at the usda’s Foreign Agricultural Service and an environment adviser at the now-dismantled US Agency for International Development, she landed a job at NIFA at the tail end of Trump’s first term. There, she oversaw the allocation of more than $170 million in agriculture research funds related to climate science.

After Inauguration Day in 2025, things turned south. She’d worked under three administrations, but Trump 2.0 and its executive orders targeting climate science were “just so beyond what I’d experienced,” ­O’Rourke says. At NIFA, she recalls, DOGE and other Trump-friendly bureaucrats hunted out work they deemed counter to the administration’s priorities. The agency’s animal reproduction portfolio was flagged, O’Rourke suspects, over the word “reproduction” and its possible proximity to sex and abortion. Her publications on climate change were deleted from the usda’s website, and her projects funded by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act were terminated. At one point, with so much canceled, including all meetings related to the ­National Climate Assessment, Rust recalls O’Rourke looked at her calendar and found it empty. O’Rourke had read that her congressional district in the state’s northwestern reaches, New Jersey’s 7th, was among those Democrats hoped to flip. Considering a run, she did what any academic would do: study. She took trainings from the Democratic National Committee and Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. And she resigned from NIFA.

Her calendar is no longer empty. The day I visited the harvest festival, she’d had at least two other events, including a local Democrats meeting. (To save time, she keeps a hairbrush and granola bars in her Prius.) “I work harder at this than I have ever probably worked at anything,” she says, “and I’ll compare that to getting my PhD with three little kids [while] running a farm.” She’s earned key endorsements from science-minded Democrats like Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, an organic farmer, and former New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt, a plasma physicist. In February, more than 200 scientists across the country publicly announced their support. But so far, that hasn’t led to a windfall in financial support. While she reportedly raised $175,000 on her first day as a candidate, by March, O’Rourke had brought that to only $459,000—significantly less than her better-heeled primary opponents.

In biology, there’s a concept of an ecological niche—how organisms precisely fit into their environment. If the same idea applies in politics, O’Rourke occupies a distinct niche in the Democratic Party: She’s an active member of her Mormon church, a mother, and—as she’d say herself—more of a listener than a talker. When I asked her about political role models, she mentioned Washington state Blue Dog Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (a “rural Democrat,” “working-class,” and “willing to reach out across the aisle,” O’Rourke says), as well as New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury (who also earned a Cornell graduate degree) and New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim (like her, “dorky”)—two lawmakers who’ve been members of the party’s progressive caucus.

If she feels out of place as a scientist in politics, she doesn’t show it. Back at Genesis Farm, she got into the weeds with a farmer on cover crops and seed phenotypes while admiring two species of bees buzz through sunflowers. “I heard you talking about pollinator conservation,” an attendee wearing a flannel and no undershirt said to ­O’Rourke, asking if there were anything the government could do to encourage pollinator-­friendly gardening. On the way out, they posed for a photo.

O’Rourke says doing science—hustling for grants, running a lab, and spreading ideas—is not all that different from campaigning. And, she suggests, more scientists should join her. “I never really wanted to be a politician,” she told me toward the end of my visit. “This is not what I thought I would do with my life.” But “now is the time that our country needs people to step up.”

Continue Reading…

“Flagrant Violation”: Judge Orders Return of Mother Deported Despite DACA

On Monday, a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Sacramento mother who was detained at her February green card interview and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez had active protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which temporarily shields undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, at the time of her arrest and removal.

In a 15-page decision granting Estrada Juarez’s motion for a temporary restraining order, Judge Dena Coggins ruled that she must be returned to the US within seven days of the court order. Estrada Juarez, the judge wrote, “was removed in flagrant violation of the regulatory protections afforded to her under DACA” and the Constitution’s Due Process Clause. The judge determined that she should have the protections afforded by DACA restored “as if her February 19, 2026, removal never occurred.”

Estrada Juarez’s ordeal began in February, when she attended an appointment as part of her adjustment of status process to become a lawful permanent resident as the relative of a US citizen, her daughter Damaris Bello. Having lived in the United States for almost 30 years, and with her DACA status valid through at least April 2026 pending renewal, Estrada Juarez didn’t think she had reason to fear being detained. Still, at the interview, Estrada Juarez was told her case couldn’t be completed because she had a decades-old order of removal from when she first entered the country in 1998. The government then reinstated that order, which Estrada Juarez didn’t know about, to deport her.

In early March, I spoke with Bello, who accompanied her mother to last month’s scheduled interview. She described what happened that day:

Bello recalled that after a brief period of time, someone knocked on the interview room’s door and asked for Maria Estrada. When she answered, Bello said agents without uniform or name identification came in and said she was going to be detained and deported to Mexico. Before the officers could handcuff her, Estrada Juarez asked if she could hug her daughter one last time. She held Bello’s face and told her to be strong, that God would guide them to the right place.

“It was so sudden and unexpected,” Bello said. “It felt like she never really had a chance.”

By the next morning, Estrada Juarez had been sent to Mexico, a country she hadn’t lived in since she was 15 years old. The separation proved devastating for Estrada Juarez and Bello, an only child. After Estrada Juarez’s sudden deportation, Bello said she would likely have to move out of their shared home because she couldn’t afford rent or utility bills without her mother’s income from her job as a Motel 6 regional manager. “My whole life has to change because she’s not here,” Bello told me. “I feel like I’m grieving my mother.”

On March 10, Estrada Juarez filed a petition in the district court for the Eastern District of California, arguing that her removal was unlawful and violated her due process rights. Estrada Juarez has continuously held DACA status since 2013. In 2014, the government authorized her to leave the country for a short trip, and she was lawfully admitted when she returned. The petition claims Estrada Juarez never received a copy of the 1998 reinstated expedited removal order or notice of the reason for her February deportation. Instead, it says she was handed a document stating she was barred from coming back to the United States because an immigration judge had ordered her removed, even though she didn’t appear before one. Records show Estrada Juarez refused to sign the form.

“They’ve reinstated something that doesn’t exist. The whole thing has fallen apart.”

Still, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) denied her adjustment of status application on the basis of that decades-old removal order. But Estrada Juarez’s lawyer, Stacy Tolchin, said the 1998 order, which the government submitted as part of the record in the case, wasn’t signed by a supervising officer and can’t be considered final. “They’ve reinstated something that doesn’t exist,” Tolchin said on Tuesday. “The whole thing has fallen apart.” Even if the order was valid, she explained, Estrada Juarez’s DACA status should have prevented it from being enforced. (Tolchin has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to review the order of reinstatement of removal and filed a motion to reopen and reconsider the green card denial with USCIS.)

The government opposed Estrada Juarez’s petition, arguing the court lacked the authority to review “discretionary decisions” to execute a removal order and mandate her return. The administration also contended that the court didn’t have jurisdiction over her habeas claims because Estrada Juarez had already been removed and was no longer “in custody.” Judge Coggins disagreed, citing Ninth Circuit precedent allowing a noncitizen unlawfully deported from the United States “under extreme circumstances” to seek their return, despite not being detained in the district where they are challenging their removal. “Indeed, it is difficult to argue that Petitioner’s removal constitutes anything less than an ‘extreme circumstance,'” the judge wrote.

She further rejected the government’s position that Estrada Juarez didn’t meet the “extreme circumstances” standard because she hadn’t, within the less than 24 hours between her detention and deportation, rushed to court to secure an emergency order stopping her removal. “Essentially, Respondents argue that the government is immune from liability from any claim for violation of a noncitizen’s right to due process in removal proceedings so long as that right is violated quickly,” the decision reads.

Judge Coggins recognized that “each day Petitioner remains unlawfully separated from her daughter, they both suffer unimaginable irreparable harm.” In a declaration submitted to the court, Estrada Juarez and Bello described the “severe emotional trauma and financial hardship” they have experienced, adding that her “wrongful deportation has deeply broken [her] family.” Bello wrote in her own declaration that her mother’s removal “has left [her] feeling completely alone and afraid.”

To Tolchin, this case shows why the courts and due process are important. “We’re seeing [the Department of Homeland Security] trying to hide due process and people’s constitutional rights from them,” she said.In a statement, Estrada Juarez expressed relief and hope of coming back to the United States soon: “I followed the rules and trusted the process, and I just want to return to my family and rebuild my life.”

Continue Reading…

They’re Already Scared to Come to School. Republicans Want to Kick Them Out for Good.

Top White House advisor Stephen Miller, the longtime architect of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, asked Texas Republicans last week in a closed-door meeting to kick undocumented children out of public schools, according to reporting from the New York Times.

It’s an escalation in the right’s push to restrict public education to children who can prove they are US citizens. Such a move could violate a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, Plyler v. Doe, which held that withholding funds to schools teaching undocumented children violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That case was a result of a class-action lawsuit in Texas in the 1970s.

As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias reported back in 2022, this isn’t the first time that Miller has attempted this. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, he reportedly led a similar push. One that, according to TIME, he’d been driving at since 2017.

In the decades since Plyler, there have been several unsuccessful attempts to upend the highest court’s ruling. The current one is buoyed by the Trump administration’s multi-pronged anti-immigration campaign that has come to define his second term.

Miller isn’t alone. Also this month, Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, led a House hearing to discuss how Plyler “was wrongly decided and how it harms America’s schools and students,” according to his press office.

During the meeting, Roy said in his opening statement: “It’s time for it to go.” Roy went on to criticize programs in schools that taught English to language learners and refugees. Roy is currently vying for Attorney General of Texas in a runoff election.

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, cited Roy’s hopes in his response: “Toying with children’s futures to win a primary election is the tactic of a small, sad man.”

This enlivened push to restrict access to public education comes as scores of immigrant children are already afraid to go to school across the country as Immigration and Customs Enforcement have repeatedly been seen near schools or bus stops. (The Department of Homeland Security has said they do “NOT raid or target schools” despite “media force-feeding the public stories about parents and children being scared to return to school.”)

In Texas’s largest public school district, in Houston, the immigrant student population plummeted by nearly 4,000 students, or a decrease of 22 percent, this school year. In Maine, absences at some schools hit 25 to 30 percent during a week of heavy ICE presence in January. In Minnesota, up to 40 percent of students stayed home during the agency’s violent operations in the Twin Cities.

As Justice William Brennan wrote in the Plyler majority opinion, “It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries.”

A lower court judge put it like this two years earlier: refusing to educate children based on of if their parents came to this country without certain documentation, or were in the process of obtaining that documentation, would create “a permanent underclass of persons who will live their lives in this country without being able to participate in our society.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Says He Made Memphis Safer. Locals Told Me It Felt Like 1930s Germany or North Korea.

President Donald Trump visited Memphis on Monday to praise a surge in federal law enforcement there, while some locals took to the streets to protest the surge.

“For years, our leaders allowed entire cities in America to be destroyed by crime, drugs, and gang violence,” he said during a roundtable discussion about the Memphis Safe Task Force, which launched in September. “Tolerating this violence was always a choice.”

Trump credited the task force—a collaboration of more than 30 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, and the subject of my recent Mother Jones investigation—with a substantial drop in crime in Memphis over last year. Officers have arrested more than 7,000 people.

But protesters say the task force also has changed daily life in less desirable ways. Police are riding around with immigration officers, who ask people of color for proof of citizenship. The law enforcement presence is so pervasive that immigrants have been sheltering at home, afraid to shop for groceries or bring their kids to school.

In November, I saw this firsthand during a visit. I hid in a dark apartment with terrified immigrant parents and their citizen children, who told me they didn’t go outside much anymore because they were scared of police. I also drove around town and talked to activists, business owners, cops, local politicians, teachers, volunteers, and ordinary people. One resident compared the vibe to 1930s Germany—helicopters circling overhead, National Guard patrolling downtown, unmarked law enforcement vehicles roaming the streets, and immigrant citizens carrying their US passports, lest they be detained.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, a Democrat who opposed the task force, speculated that crime—which had been a problem**—**was dropping at least in part because people weren’t venturing out nearly as much. “Our risk is that [America is] gonna become a Yemen or a North Korea or something else altogether, where there is an armed individual with a semiautomatic weapon and military fatigues on many corners,” he told me. “There may be zero crime, but we also won’t be leaving our houses. I know that’s a dark scenario, but that’s kind of where we are.”

Check out the full investigation here.

Continue Reading…

The Case That Could Upend Who Gets to Be an American Is Back at the Supreme Court

Next week, the Trump administration’s bid to deny birthright citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented immigrants and non-green card holders through an executive order will arrive at the Supreme Court—yet again. Last year, the justices didn’t address the constitutionality of the order directly; instead, they ruled on a procedural question to limit the power of federal judges to block the government’s actions nationwide. Now, in Trump v. Barbara, the Court is asked to determine whether the administration’s rewriting of the Constitution has merit.

With its executive order, the government is claiming to want to restore the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens of the country. In a brief to the Supreme Court, the administration argues that the amendment—ratified in 1868 in repudiation of the Dred Scott decision that declared Black Americans couldn’t be citizens—specifically intended to extend citizenship to the children of former slaves and their descendants, but not of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors.

Most constitutional law scholars and historians disagree, pointing to longstanding tradition, legislative history, and legal precedent that support a broad understanding of the citizenship clause. (An understanding that includes extremely narrow exceptions, such as for the children of foreign diplomats and enemy invaders.) The courts have also resoundingly rejected the Trump administration’s executive order, finding it unconstitutional in light of the plain 14th Amendment text.

The highest court has grappled with challengesto birthright citizenship before—and turned them down. In the late 19th century, at a time of rampant anti-Chinese bias, immigration restrictionists and the federal government argued that Wong Kim Ark, born in the United States to Chinese parents who couldn’t become naturalized due to exclusion laws, didn’t have a claim to citizenship. The dispute made its way to the Supreme Court and resulted in a landmark ruling reaffirming that the 14th Amendment applies to virtually everyone born on US soil, regardless of parentage.

Ahead of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on April 1, I spoke with Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and counsel on record in the Trump v. Barbara case. He talked about the government’s ahistorical reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, and how it mirrors previous attacks on birthright citizenship.

The ACLU’s brief to the Supreme Court characterizes one of the government’s arguments in support of its executive order as “atextual, contradictory, and irrelevant,” adding that they relied on “authors engaged in a concerted effort to undermine the Citizenship Clause.” Can you explain what that effort to undermine the 14th Amendment has looked like?

In the late 19th century, there were two threads of legal and political activism that came together. One was ongoing opposition to Reconstruction and opposition to the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment. These are the amendments that eliminated slavery and enshrined the principles of equal protection and due process as to States, as well as voting rights, into the Constitution. The other thread was rising anti-Chinese sentiment. There was huge bipartisan opposition to Chinese immigration, which culminated in a whole series of statutes at the federal level excluding Chinese immigrants and imposing extraordinary burdens on those communities. What we see is those two threads coming together in a set of authors that the government is now relying on, who spent years looking for ways to try to limit the text of the 14th Amendment to exclude the children of Chinese immigrants.

These authors essentially opposed what the framers of the 14th Amendment had put into the Constitution and were looking for ways to rewrite it. That argument came up to the Supreme Court in the context of anti-Chinese rhetoric in the Wong Kim Ark case, and the Supreme Court rejected it. It saw through the racist efforts to exclude Asian Americans from citizenship and essentially said, the Constitution means what it says. The fact that the Trump administration is recycling these same discredited ideas to try to exclude the children of immigrants today just goes to show that it is borrowing from the same playbook that the Supreme Court has already rebuffed.

“It’s remarkable that the Trump administration has taken aim at birthright citizenship. It’s a foundational American value that’s enshrined in the text of the Constitution.”

Much of the debate revolves around the meaning of the sentence “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Some scholars supporting Trump’s executive order argue that children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors fall outside the birthright citizenship rule because, under British common law, their parents wouldn’t have owed allegiance to—or been protected by—the king in a type of mutual contract. In the present context, the parents wouldn’t be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and, therefore, their children should be excluded from automatic citizenship. What do you make of that legal theory?

The text of the 14th Amendment says “subject to the jurisdiction,” and that meant then what it means now: subject to American law. There are some people who are exempt from American law in full or in part, and ambassadors are the classic example of that. The government’s argument, echoed by its amici, uses a lot of different words and phrases that don’t carry a whole lot of meaning. At the end of the day, what they’re arguing is that the citizenship clause has this idea of a domicile requirement that a child’s parents need to not only be in the United States and subject to its laws but also be living here with an intention to remain indefinitely.

But the rule before the 14th Amendment was squarely to the contrary. The absolute leading common law case leading up to the framing of the 14th Amendment specifically held that a temporary visitor’s child born in the United States is a US citizen. That was the rule in the treatises. That was the rule across a variety of different sources. That’s what the framers understood, and that’s totally consistent with the language that they use, which is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. What the government’s really trying to do here is muddy the waters enough so that we won’t notice that it is rewriting the clear text of the Constitution itself.

Looking at the Supreme Court case docket, I counted more than 40 briefs against the Trump administration’s executive order—from historians, constitutional law scholars, civil rights groups—and about 25 in support. Do you think these legal theories questioning birthright citizenship have gone mainstream among Republican and conservative circles?

The overwhelming consensus of historians and legal scholars is that we are right, and the government could not be more wrong. This isn’t the first time the principle of birthright citizenship has come under attack. If you think about this historically, the idea that people born in the United States are citizens goes all the way back to the founding of the country and before. At that time, there were racial limits because of the scourge of slavery. But what Dred Scott—that shameful decision that helped trigger the Civil War—said was that Black people were excluded from citizenship, whether they were enslaved or free. It was an attempt to imagine a kind of citizenship based on parentage that would exclude a whole caste of people. And that is exactly what the people who were putting together the 14th Amendment rejected. They wrote these words specifically to reject that idea.

Then you see the same idea coming up again in 1898, in an effort to twist the words of the clause to exclude the children of Chinese immigrants. And we’re seeing that same effort once again to come up with some way to exclude a politically disfavored part of the country from their birthright as citizens, using political rhetoric and concern about immigration. In some ways, there’s nothing new in that, but the rule that has stretched back to the beginning of the country has always been steadfast. The Supreme Court had no trouble turning aside the last effort to restrict birthright citizenship, even at a time of immense anti-Chinese political rhetoric and organizing.

I think that up until recently, most people would have considered the question of who gets to be an American citizen a settled matter. What is the significance of having the Supreme Court now consider an executive order that puts into questionthe historya nd meaningof the 14th Amendment?

It’s remarkable that the Trump administration has taken aim at birthright citizenship. It’s a foundational American value that’s enshrined in the text of the Constitution. But given the executive order that was issued last year, it’s not particularly surprising that the Supreme Court is taking up the issue. The Trump administration told the Supreme Court that this was a top priority for the administration, and that alone is often enough to get Supreme Court review of an issue. But we are extremely confident about the ultimate outcome of this case. The government is wrong on the text, the history, and the tradition, going all the way back to English common law, and we expect that’s exactly what the Supreme Court will say at the end of the day.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Continue Reading…

The Point of No Return: New Evidence Shows Antarctic Melting Is Already Locked In

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

Drilling through 500 feet of floating ice into the Antarctic Ocean floor, climate scientists have retrieved a rare 23-million-year record of sediments that helps demonstrate why the planet’s southern ice shield could determine the fate of distant low-lying coastal areas.

The layers of rock, silt, and fossils are like pages in a book of geological time, revealing how West Antarctica’s vast ice sheets and floating shelves respond rapidly to modest warming, with significant shrinking and melting in climates similar to today’s.

Along with other new modeling studies and analyses of current ice retreat, the core sample of ocean sediments affirms that human-caused warming is triggering an irreversible long-term meltdown that could submerge the southern third of Florida and other low-elevation coastal areas within two to three centuries.

The lines of evidence from paleoclimatology, as well as from modeling and observations, also converge to suggest that the average global sea level rise in the more immediate future will accelerate, reaching 3 feet by the end of the century and up to 5 feet in equatorial island regions, potentially displacing millions of people worldwide.

The landmark drilling expedition at the remote edge of the Ross Ice Shelf is part of a wide-ranging effort “to answer the question of when and under what conditions the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will disappear,” said Johann Klages, a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and co-coordinator of the international SWAIS2C project to assess West Antarctica’s vulnerability to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of human-caused warming above the pre-fossil fuel era baseline.

The world could reach that mark by 2050, sooner than expected, according to recent warnings from retired NASA climate scientist James Hansen. And exactly how that level of warming will affect Antarctica’s vast ice fields is the question the 29-member ice core team sought to answer when they set up camp for 10 weeks. Their equipment had to be carried by motorized vehicles across more than 600 miles of ice.

Previous attempts to drill the seabed beneath the ice had failed because of technical and logistical challenges, but succeeded this time with critical technical support from the US Antarctic Program and the National Science Foundation.

Binghamton University associate professor Molly Patterson, co-chief scientist of the SWAIS2C mission, said the core’s sediment layers show how the ice advanced and retreated, but determining the exact timing requires detailed geochemical analyses that could take years to complete.

The sediment core is more than 200 meters deep, an unusual depth compared to previous sub-ice sediment cores, which rarely exceeded 10 meters, providing a continuous record of climate conditions spanning epochal swings between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods.

Reading the core is like reconstructing past environments layer by layer, Patterson said. When the ice is in contact with the seabed, it “bulldozes everything,” leaving coarse, mixed debris. But layers of finer mud, studded with larger stones that dropped from melting ice shelves, suggest floating ice. And when those layers contain fossils of light-dependent organisms like plankton, it signals open water, with no ice. Along with a chemical analysis to date the materials, the scientists can tell where the ice margin was and what the ocean temperatures were at that time.

People tend to focus on what happens by 2100, but the real story is what we’re setting in motion over the next few decades that will play out in the coming centuries.

There are other sediment samples from around the edge of the Antarctic continent, but not such a deep sediment core from the interior of an ice sheet, said Ed Gasson, a glaciologist, associate professor at the University of Exeter in England, and member of the SWAIS2C team.

“This is important,” Gasson said, “because it tells us directly that this part of the ice sheet, which we think is especially vulnerable to a warming climate, retreated in the geological past, leaving behind open seawater.”

Two other studies published in the past month add to concerns about the potential vulnerability of Antarctica’s ice. One research team mapped how Antarctica’s ice flows through interconnected basins, showing how melting in one region can destabilize others, accelerating ice loss and sea levels rise. A separate analysis, based on measurements of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, tested the models’ accuracy and showed that the current rate of ice loss is consistent with long-term projections of significant melting.

The sediment record shows what happened yesterday, and the observations of the Thwaites Glacier provide information about recent melting. But the big question remains what will happen tomorrow, said Jonathan Donges, an Earth system researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and co-author of the paper that examined the dynamic links among the continent’s vast tracts of ice.

By mapping how the icy basins interact, the researchers showed that melting in one area could spread and destabilize others, potentially pushing the entire system past a critical threshold that would lock in thousands of years of sea-level rise.

Such long time scales are easy to overlook, even if the consequences are profound, Donges said. People tend to focus on what happens by 2100, he added, but the real story is what we’re setting in motion over the next few decades that will play out in the coming centuries. His team looked at how the ice basins may affect one another because previous research showed that different areas have different thresholds for significant melting; the loss of even a single basin could raise sea level by 20 or 30 feet.

The Amundsen Sea sector in West Antarctica has already been identified as one of the regions most vulnerable to current levels of warming, he said, adding that its ice will retreat for centuries even if global temperatures stabilize.

As the ice thins and pulls back, the boundary where ice meets ocean and bedrock retreats inland, exposing more open water and accelerating further melt. Over time, that retreat spreads inland, altering ice flow and destabilizing neighboring basins in a cascading process that pushes melting deeper into the continent.

The new paper on the Thwaites Glacier noted faster ice flows, thinning at the glacier’s edges, increasing structural weaknesses, and the retreat of the grounding line, which anchors the ice to the seafloor.

All the findings reinforce the growing scientific understanding that, once key parts of the ice sheet begin to weaken, feedback processes can take over, allowing retreat to continue long after the initial warming.

Donges said that even conservative estimates of about 13 feet of sea-level rise by 2300 seem massive.

“When you’re standing at the beach somewhere, it’s hard to imagine this could happen in the amount of time the United States has existed,” he said.

And it could be even worse. The projections for that amount of sea-level rise don’t include a rapid, major collapse of ice shelves, Donges said, explaining that some studies suggest feedback could cause big tracts of ice to disintegrate faster than expected.

If there is extreme warming and melting on the surface, meltwater “pours into deep cracks and then refreezes, widening the rifts,” he said. “This cracks up the ice sheets, which can then disintegrate much faster.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Wants to End Mail Voting. The Supreme Court’s Conservative Justices Appear Eager to Assist.

President Trump has claimed he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and is currently lobbying the US Senate to effectively outlaw the practice as part of his push to pass the Save America Act.

The conservative justices on the US Supreme Court appear eager to assist with Trump’s crusade.

On Monday, the justices heard a challenge from the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration to a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after Election Day as long as they are postmarked by the day of the election. Sixteen states have similar grace periods on the books, and 29 states accept ballots from overseas and military voters sent before or on Election Day but received after. The New York Times found that during the 2024 election “at least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within the legally accepted post-election window.”

“Every time you try to state what your rule is, it seems to me it’s a rule that prevents early voting,” Justice Elena Kagan said.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most right-wing appellate court in the country, struck down Mississippi’s law in the run-up to the 2024 election in what UCLA law professor Rick Hasen called a “bonkers opinion.”

But at least several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices want to turn that bonkers decision into settled law—at the very moment that Trump is trying to eliminate mail ballots nationwide and “take over” elections.

During the two-and-a-half-hour oral argument in Watson v. Republican National Committee, several of the conservative justices spread conspiracy theories and crazy hypotheticals about mail-in ballot deadlines and the use of the practice more broadly.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch suggested that mail-in ballots could be given to a neighbor or a notary, then submitted after Election Day but still be counted if they arrived within five days of the election.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, echoing Trump’s complaints about “vote dumps” during the 2020 election, claimed that if ballots arriving after Election Day changed the outcome of a race it would undermine voter confidence in the result.

Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who defended the law for the state, replied that his opponents “haven’t cited a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipts.” He argued that “states have broad powers over elections” and that allowing mail-in ballots to arrive during a brief grace period did not change the meaning of Election Day since ballots were still cast by or before that day.

But Justice Samuel Alito bemoaned that “we don’t have Election Day anymore. We have election month.”

The complaints from Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh suggested that at least four of the court’s conservative justices were hostile to Mississippi’s mail-in ballot law and shared Trump’s broader goal of limiting access to mail-in ballots.

The liberal justices noted that if ballots must be cast and counted on Election Day, that would also imperil early voting, which 47 states currently use.

“Every time you try to state what your rule is, it seems to me it’s a rule that prevents early voting,” Justice Elena Kagan said to conservative lawyer Paul Clement, who represented the RNC.

Clement and Trump administration solicitor general John Sauer claimed that early voting would not be impacted by a decision in their favor, since voting happened in advance of the election. But Trump himself, along with top officials in his administration, have called for all voting to take place on a single day, which would end both mail-in and early voting.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that states should not change voting laws in the middle of an election. Kavanaugh asked Clement if that would be an issue in this case if the court ruled in his favor by June. Clement said states would have “plenty of time” to prepare for the general election.

In reality, however, changing mail-in ballot deadlines months before the general election could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters who could be unaware of the stricter rules or have their ballots thrown out because of postal delays or because they live in remote, rural locations. And any decision narrowing voting access would embolden Republicans to go even further in their attempts to restrict voting rights. The Supreme Court is also weighing another case that could kill the remaining protections of Voting Rights Act and turbocharge Republican gerrymandering efforts. These two cases have the potential to throw the midterms into chaos.

Many court experts expected the RNC and Trump administration to lose the Watson case given how far-fetched their arguments were. Justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett did not tip their hand as much as the other conservative justices, so it’s possible that Mississippi will still prevail. But the fact that a majority of justices or close to it appeared sympathetic to the arguments against mail-in voting is a reminder that the Republican Party’s war on voting isn’t confined to Trump and that even if the Save America Act appears doomed in the Senate, the GOP’s push to limit access to the franchise will continue full steam ahead.

Continue Reading…

Why Trump Wants ICE to Ditch the Masks at Airports

There is no war in American cities, but masked men shrouded in anonymity, carrying battle weapons and decked out in combat gear, have been hunting down immigrants across the country for nearly a year. In the process, they’ve shot and killed US citizens and terrorized immigrant families. Their tunnel vision of violence has helped the Trump administration manufacture a theater of war where none exists.

But there are limits to this roaming performance, and those limits are now becoming apparent at American airports.

“I am a BIG proponent of ICE wearing masks as they search for, and are forced to deal with, hardened criminals, many of whom were let into our Country by Sleepy Joe Biden,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I would greatly appreciate, however, NO MASKS, when helping our Country out of the Democrat caused MESS at the airports, etc.”

The president’s sartorial advice came as ICE agents deployed to airports on Monday, a strategy Trump insists will help TSA agents—who are not getting paid, while the ICE officers now hovering around them are—as they struggle with massive security caused by the partial government shutdown. (Shout out to “Linda from Arizona” for the idea.) When asked about ICE agents dropping the masks, Trump told reporters that airports don’t tend to see “murderers, killers, and drug dealers.”

“I didn’t think it was an appropriate look for an airport,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very appropriate look when they’re out on the street trying to find one of the 11,888 murderers that Sleepy Joe Biden let into the country.” He then insisted that a side benefit of that arrangement would be that ICE agents could now arrest undocumented immigrants entering the country. “It’s very fertile territory,” Trump said.

In essence, the president was admitting to the outsize role that aesthetics have played as ICE terrorizes communities across the country. It’s this blend of violence and optics he clearly wants to keep from a certain class of Americans. These**,** apparently, are not the folks that Trump wants to expose to ICE’s campaign of violence, abuse, and harassment—at least not firsthand.

Of course, that same logic has forced the people Trump hates—immigrant communities and residents of blue cities—to see ICE and the Border Patrol’s masked terror front and center with maximum visibility. As journalist Radley Balko told me in January:

“This administration sees all of that as a benefit. They want to terrorize immigrant communities. They want to be seen as an occupying force. They’ve been clear about this. They want to make immigrant communities so fearful that they’ll self-deport, and they’ll tell others to stop coming here. Making immigration officers as scary and intimidating as possible is part of the strategy.”

By calling on ICE officers to drop the masks, Trump appears to understand, even narrowly, the inherent theater of his mass deportation agenda. But like ICE’s theater of war, which uses optics to inflict real violence, it seems like a matter of time before trouble will start at airports. After all, these are poorly trained federal agents, not trained in aviation security, and yet stationed at airport security lines to mill about. This time, though, we might actually know what they look like.

Federal immigration agents at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport get some breakfast.Emilie Megnien/AP

Continue Reading…

The Problem With Trump Promoting “Gold Standard Science”

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

Federal agencies have been branding some of their research and policy work as “gold standard science,” a trend that gained new force after an executive order on the term was issued in May 2025. The phrase now appears in speeches and guidance documents from agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. It shows up in social media posts intended to signal credibility, rigor, and authority. The message is clear: This is science you can trust.

The intention may be to reassure the public, but the framing is misleading. The executive order outlines principles that are broadly consistent with good scientific practice, such as transparency, reproducibility, and peer review. These are not controversial. The problem arises in how those principles are translated into a simplified label that suggests a single hierarchy of evidence.

Treating scientific outputs as if they were competing on a single quality scale misunderstands their purpose.

Science does not work in the way that an easy phrase like “gold standard” suggests. From my experience applying scientific findings in community-based settings, I have seen the risk in turning a methodological metaphor into a brand and how it can confuse the public about how evidence is actually produced, evaluated, and used.

In scientific practice, “gold standard” has never meant universally best. It has always been conditional. Researchers have used the phrase to describe the most appropriate method for answering a very specific type of question, under particular assumptions and constraints. Outside of that narrow context, the phrase loses its meaning.

One of the most common examples comes from medicine. Randomized controlled trials are often described as the gold standard for determining whether a drug or clinical intervention causes a particular outcome. The reason is straightforward. Randomization helps isolate cause and effect by reducing bias and confounding. When the question is whether treatment A is superior to treatment B under controlled conditions, randomized trials can be extraordinarily powerful.

But even in medicine, randomized trials are not always possible, ethical, or sufficient. They may exclude populations who most need treatment. They may fail to capture long-term effects. They may tell us whether something can work in limited settings, but not whether it will work in real-world applications.

That is why medicine relies on many forms of evidence, including observational studies, post-market surveillance, qualitative research, and case reports. None of these are inherently inferior. They answer different questions.

The executive order itself does not mandate a single methodological approach. However, its implementation in agency language risks being interpreted as privileging certain methods over others, regardless of context. The problem arises because the logic of “gold standard” is now being stretched beyond its original purpose. Presenting “gold standard science” as a general category, rather than a context-dependent judgment, implies that some kinds of science are categorically better than others. That implication does not hold up under even modest scrutiny.

Science begins with questions. What are we trying to understand? What decisions need to be informed? What constraints exist: ethical, practical, or temporal? Only after those questions are clearly defined can methods be responsibly selected.

The language of “gold standard science” can make it harder to communicate uncertainty honestly.

Different questions demand different approaches. If the question is whether a new medication lowers blood pressure under controlled conditions, a randomized trial may be appropriate. If the question is how a public health policy affects different communities over time, randomized trials may be impossible or misleading. In that case, natural experiments, administrative data analysis, community-based research, or qualitative methods may provide more useful insight. If the question is how an intervention is implemented in practice, mixed methods (those that use multiple research tools like surveys, interviews, and observations) may be essential.

None of these approaches is automatically better or worse than the others. Their value depends on whether they are suited to the question at hand.

This distinction matters because different questions yield different kinds of answers. Some answers estimate causal effects. Others describe patterns, contexts, or mechanisms. Some inform immediate decisions. Others shape long-term understanding. Treating these outputs as if they were competing on a single quality scale misunderstands their purpose.

When agencies promote a single “gold standard” label, they flatten this diversity. They encourage the view that evidence can be classified as approved or unapproved, rather than evaluated on the basis of relevance, limitations, and uncertainty. That may simplify communication, but it does so at the cost of accuracy.

Branding science in this way also risks undermining scientific literacy. The public already struggles with the idea that evidence can be strong without being definitive, useful without being conclusive. When scientific authority is wrapped in logos and slogans, it reinforces the false expectation that good science produces clear, final answers. When those answers later evolve, as science always does, trust erodes.

Ironically, the language of “gold standard science” can make it harder to communicate uncertainty honestly. If something has been labeled as the gold standard, acknowledging limits or gaps can sound like backtracking rather than transparency. Scientists know that uncertainty is a feature of good research, not a bug.

There is also a policy risk that should not be ignored. Once a single standard is named and institutionalized, it can be used to exclude evidence that does not conform to it, even when that evidence is appropriate to the question at hand. Research can be dismissed not because it is unsound, but because it does not fit a preferred methodological mold. Over time, this narrows the range of questions considered legitimate in the first place.

None of this is an argument against rigor, transparency, or accountability. Those values are central to scientific practice and public trust. But rigor is not a checklist, and credibility is not a logo. They emerge from careful alignment between questions, methods, and interpretation.

If we want science to inform policy responsibly, we need to be precise in how we talk about it. That means explaining why certain methods are appropriate in certain contexts, being honest about what different kinds of evidence can and cannot tell us, and resisting language that suggests a one-size-fits-all hierarchy of truth.

There is no such thing as gold standard science.

There is only science that is well matched to its questions, conducted transparently, and interpreted with care. Anything else may look authoritative, but it ultimately obscures how knowledge is actually made and how it should be used. They are selling pyrite.

Continue Reading…

What Exactly Will ICE Do at Airports? No One Seems to Know.

Surprise! Just one day before Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are supposed to be deployed to airports around the country to help reduce long lines caused by the partial government shutdown and spring break crowds, the Trump administration appears to have no coherent plan for what they will do.

Following Donald Trump’s announcement that ICE agents will be sent to airports starting on Monday to fill in for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees who have been on the job without pay for more than a month, administration officials gave conflicting statements about what exactly this would entail.

Officials at ICE were caught off guard by the president’s directive and have been rushing to create a plan, CBS News reported.

White House border czar Tom Homan, who Trump said would be in charge of the operation, told CNN on Sunday that ICE agents will be assigned to jobs like securing exit gates, allowing trained TSA officers to focus on checkpoints and reducing wait times.

“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine because they’re not trained in that,” Homan said.

But when CNN host Dana Bash asked for confirmation about whether ICE agents would be posted at security screening lines, Homan responded, “Those discussions are going on now.” He said the administration hoped to have a plan “by the end of today.”

BASH: Are ICE agents going to move into American airports starting tomorrow?HOMAN: Yes. I'm currently working on the plan. We'll execute tomorrow.BASH: Are ICE agents even remotely trained to handle security at airports?HOMAN: ICE agents receive high-level training.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-22T13:40:22.724Z

Meanwhile,Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy contradicted some of Homan’s statements on Sunday, telling ABC News that ICE agents could work on airport security lines because they “run those same type of security machines at the Southern border.”

“We have ICE agents who are trained and can provide assistance to agents,” Duffy continued.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees TSA as well as ICE, says more than 400 TSA workers have quit since a partial government shutdown starting on February 14 left them working with no pay. On Saturday, almost 12 percent of TSA employees didn’t come to work, the highest rate since the shutdown began, according to ABC News.

The Trump administration blames the government shutdown and TSA shortages on Democrats. As Mother Jones’ Michael Mechanic has pointed out:

Democrats [have] refused to provide more funds until Republicans agree to various reforms related to deployment, training, and management of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. . .

Democratic lawmakers also seek to curtail ICE’s rampant use of surveillance technology and ensure the rights of states and lawmakers to investigate alleged human rights abuses at the immigrant detention centers the administration has set up.

But on Saturday, every single Republican voted against the latest Democratic bill to fund the TSA while the negotiations continue over DHS reforms. “This is the seventh time Republicans have blocked pay for TSA,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York posted on Bluesky. “Seven. Times.”

The funding impasse does not directly affect ICE, Mechanic noted, but the shutdown has frozen other DHS activities, including the processing of paychecks for TSA staff, who are considered essential employees.

It remains unclear whether ICE agents will simply carry out the same tasks as TSA employees or if they will make airports another hub for violence under the guise of “immigration enforcement.”

Trump posted on Truth Social on Saturday that ICE agents would “do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants.” In his post, he singled out immigrants from Somalia, who he claimed have “totally destroyed” Minnesota—a narrative that he and his administration used to justify the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis this winter.

Referring to the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis in January, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) responded on Sunday, “The last thing the American people need is for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports across the country potentially to brutalize or to kill them.”

Continue Reading…

Treasury Secretary Insists Trump Is “Jiu-Jitsuing the Iranians”

“Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate.”

That’s how Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended Donald Trump’s threats against Iranian leaders and infrastructure on Sunday, insisting on NBC’s Meet the Press that such bluster is “the only language the Iranians understand.”

On Saturday night, the president posted on Truth Social that if Iran doesn’t “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT” the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, the US military would “hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”

Around 20 percent of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran has effectively blocked transit since the US and Israeli strikes beginning on February 28.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, was defiant on Sunday, warning that that attacks on Iran’s infrastructure would mean “energy and oil facilities across the region will be considered legitimate targets and will be irreversibly destroyed.”

The US has steered away from hitting Iran’s oil infrastructure in the past month, and Trump reportedly told Israel that they should not repeat strikes on major energy plants after Iran responded to an Israeli attack on a key gas field last Thursday by hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, which processes about a fifth of the world’s liquid natural gas.

Last week, Bessent announced that the administration was lifting sanctions on approximately 140 million barrels of Iranian crude currently stranded on tankers, in an attempt to relieve skyrocketing oil prices. On March 12, Bessent said the administration was temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian oil also stranded at sea that were imposed because of its war on Ukraine.

Bessent doubled down on defending Trump’s actions on Sunday, telling Meet the Press host Kristen Welker repeatedly that she has “terrible framing” when she questioned the administration’s plans in Iran. “We are jiu-jitsuing the Iranians,” he insisted. “We are using their own oil against them.”

In one instance, Welker asked Bessent whether Trump would ever raise taxes to fund the war—a pertinent question as the Pentagon is reportedly seeking $200 billion from Congress to pay for the conflict.

“It’s a ridiculous question,” Bessent said. After an awkward pause, he said, “Why would we do that? We have plenty. We have a trillion dollars in this year’s budget for the military.”

WELKER: Would the administration ever raise taxes in order to fund this war?BESSENT: Again, Kristen, terrible framingWELKER: It's a simple questionBESSENT: It's a ridiculous questionWELKER: Can you answer it?BESSENT: Why would we do that? We have plenty. We have a trillion dollars.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-22T14:22:16.706Z

Speaking on whether Trump would deploy troops in Iran to secure the Strait of Hormuz or another operation, Bessent said, “The command and control system of the Iranian regime is in chaos. This is Hitler’s bunker. Hitler is dead.” And because of the disarray among its leadership, he asserted, Iran’s retaliation to strikes are mostly “lone wolf activities.”

“It’s like they’ve never read a history book,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on Meet the Press shortly following the Treasury secretary’s appearance. “That’s exactly what our leaders said in the middle of Vietnam and in the 20 years of mismanagement in Afghanistan.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Threatens to Send ICE to Airports to Ease TSA Security Delays

The DHS shutdown battle heated up on Saturday as President Donald Trump threatened to send “brilliant and patriotic” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel to the nation’s airports to do security and relieve TSA workers, who are starting to rebel after going without pay since February 14.

The shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security began on midnight that day, as Democrats refused to provide more funds until Republicans agree to various reforms related to deployment, training, and management of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. The intrusive and violent conduct of federal agents in Minneapolis—where they killed two US citizens and assaulted and detained many more—fueled widespread outrage and contributed to the recent ouster of former Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem.

TSA officers require two to three weeks of academy training and months of on-the-job training. ICE agents would have none of that.

Democratic lawmakers also seek to curtail ICE’s rampant use of surveillance technology and ensure the rights of states and lawmakers to investigate alleged human rights abuses at the immigrant detention centers the administration has set up.

The funding impasse does not directly affect ICE, which the Republican-controlled Congress has bankrolled at unheard-of levels, but the shutdown has frozen other DHS activities, including the processing of paychecks for TSA staff, who are considered essential employees.

It is a felony offense for federal workers to go on strike, but after more than a month without pay, a fair number of TSA personnel have been missing days, calling in sick, and seeking jobs elsewhere. This has created nightmarish security lines at airports, putting pressure on both parties to make a deal. It’s been quite the a war of words.

This is the only thing you need to know. Democrats want to open TSA. Republicans are refusing because they want to attach ICE funding. That’s why there are long lines. ICE.

— Chris Murphy (@chrismurphyct.bsky.social) 2026-03-21T12:42:49.078Z

ZERO Republican Senators voted to fund TSA.This is the seventh time Republicans have blocked pay for TSA. Seven. Times.They would rather hold TSA hostage to try to force billions more for an unrestrained, out of control ICE. Despicable.

— Chuck Schumer (@schumer.senate.gov) 2026-03-21T19:08:10.113Z

Nobody wants long lines, in any case. Trump’s solution? Unleash the hounds!The same ones whose aggressive, legally dubious tactics and disrespect for the public helped to inspire this mess in the first place. Naturally, Trump couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to take a shot at his latest favorite targets: Somali immigrants and arch-nemesis Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)

It could indeed be “security like no one has ever seen.” Because if Trump is serious about sending ICE to perform TSA duties, it raises questions as to what, exactly, they would be doing—and their eligibility to perform those tasks. To become a Transportation Security Officer requires two to three weeks of immersive academy training, followed by months of on-the-job training.

ICE agents are poorly trained even for their own duties (ditto CBP), and that, together with government officials publicly signaling that agents are above the law, has been a recipe for disaster.

Of course, ICE agents wouldn’t have to complete TSA academy training if they were merely serving in the role of Security Support Assistants. These are the people who manage lines and do “bin control,” typically as they await the results of a background check so they can move on with their training—one Redditor called them “glorified bin pushers.”

But even then, the ICE personnel may not qualify. “TSOs and SSAs spend a lot of time interfacing with the public and providing customer service,” the TSA careers website notes.

One key qualification: “You’re a people person.”

Continue Reading…

Judge Sides With New York Times Against Pentagon’s Press Restrictions

In a blow to the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against a free press, a federal judge on Friday ruled in favor of the New York Times in its December suit against the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets.

Senior US District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a Clinton-appointee, ruled that a policy the Defense Department established in October, saying the Pentagon could revoke press credentials of any reporter who asked for information the department didn’t want to release was unconstitutional.

“A lot of things need to be held tightly and secure,” Friedman wrote. “But openness and transparency allows members of the public to know what their government is doing in times of peace and, more important, in times of war and upheaval.” The United States ongoing war against Iran, the judge said in his ruling, makes it “more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing.”

In the wake of the Pentagon’s restrictive decree, dozens of reporters—including seven Times journalists—turned in their access badges in protest instead of bowing to the new policy. Five major broadcast networks, too, announced that they weren’t going to comply with the Pentagon’s new rules, writing in a joint statement that the “policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.” NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and CNN signed on, along with Fox News Media, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used to work before heading up the world’s biggest military operation.

In the absence of these journalists, the Defense Department filled in the ranks with pro-Trump commentators and influencers. Friedman noted in his ruling that the policy rewarded those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” On Friday, he tossed out the policy for all journalists covering the Pentagon and ordered the DOD to restore the press passes of the seven Times journalists.

In a social media post, Sean Parnell, chief spokesman at the Pentagon, said it is “pursuing an immediate appeal.”

Friday’s ruling is a key win for press freedom in the administration’s ongoing legal battles againstmedia organizations he views as unfriendly. Trump is currently embroiled in legal battles against the Wall Street Journal and News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, the New York Times (in a different case), the British Broadcasting Company, the Des Moines Register and veteran pollster Ann Selzer, the Pulitzer Prize board, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster, along with media giant Paramount, and CNN.

While some organizations—like Paramount Global and ABC News—have settled with the President, others, like the Times, have pushed back on Trump in court—and won.

On the whole, these legal attacks represent an unparalleled offensive on press freedom from a figure who has been raging against news organizations and individual journalists for decades. During his first term and beyond, on social media and face-to-face, he has attacked the media relentlessly as the “enemy of the people” and incited followers to harass reporters covering his rallies. He calls journalists treasonous and says they should be jailed.

According to a US Press Freedom Tracker database, from the moment Trump announced that candidacy in 2015 to early 2021, he posted negatively about the media more than 2,490 times on Twitter. He often reserves his most biting personal insults for women—since Trump was re-elected he has called female reporters “stupid,” “nasty,” “ugly,” “piggy,” and “maggot.” He also criticized CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling—a misogynistic trope—as she was asking him a question about Jeffrey Epstein.

Following Judge Friedman’s ruling on Friday, a spokesman for the Times wrote that the decision “reaffirms the right of The Times and other independent media to continue to ask questions on the public’s behalf.”

Continue Reading…

Robert Mueller Is Dead at 81. Trump: “Good, I’m Glad”

Robert S. Mueller III died on Friday at the age of 81.

His family confirmed his passing, though did not provide a cause, according to reporting from the New York Times.

Immediately following the news, Trump wrote on his Truth Social page: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Mueller led the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 12 years and came head to head with President Donald Trump as special counsel tasked with looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—an inquiry that led to the president villainizing him

As the Times reported in its Saturday obituary of the former FBI chief, the Russia inquiry culminated in a now-infamous 448-page Mueller report. That document “concluded that Russia had systemically sought to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that the candidate and his campaign encouraged their clandestine assistance.”

Mueller concluded in his investigation: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Trump, who was harsh toward people who posted critically about the late Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination, has shown no such restraint in his own posts involving people recently deceased, including the Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who was slain by his own son in December.

Continue Reading…

A New Year, a New War

As news broke that Iran’s supreme leader had been killed, prominent critic Arash Azizi found himself trying to make sense of a moment he had long imagined.

For years, Azizi studied Iran’s political system and hoped for change from within. Now, with the man who defined that system gone, Azizi was left with questions: What comes next for Iran? And who gets to decide?

This week on Reveal, reporters Najib Aminy, Kiera Butler, and Nadia Hamdan follow the ripple effects of the war in Iran. Expats like Azizi wrestle with what the war could mean for Iran’s future, an influential group of Americans celebrate the conflict as a prophecy foretold, and residents of Lebanon grapple with the spiraling effects of the conflict.

Continue Reading…

You Don’t Have to Love Afroman to Like Police Accountability

Cops failed spectacularly at using the courts to clamp down on a critic this week.

That critic was the rapper Afroman, who created music videos mocking sheriff’s deputies who raided his home in August 2022 with a warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping. Afroman was neither charged nor arrested, and he was not compensated for damages to his family’s Ohio home. But he’s also come under fire for homophobic jokes and possibly backing Donald Trump.

If you missed the details of the case, here’s some brief background: Afroman’s home security cameras captured armed cops breaking down his door and terrifying his wife and children, who were in the house at the time. During the raid, which discovered no evidence of wrongdoing, deputies flipped off security cameras, damaged various belongings, and seized cash that Afroman said was returned short.

According to a VICE interview released in 2023, the rapper, who blew up with the 2000 comedic song “Because I Got High,” said he lost gigs due to the raid, but funneled his anger and feelings of powerlessness at the incident into making viral music videos, including “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” and “Lemon Pound Cake.” Afroman’s videos incorporate his security camera footage, with the latter making fun of one cop who glances down at a cake on the family’s kitchen counter: “They found no kidnapping victims / Just some lemon pound cake.”

In response, seven Adams County deputies captured in the security camera footage sued Afroman in 2023, claiming that he defamed them, used their faces in videos without permission, and caused them to receive death threats and suffer “humiliation, ridicule, mental distress, embarrassment and loss of reputation.”

While there have been countless ridiculous clips of the subsequent court testimony going around, a few struck me as powerful. In one, a lawyer asks Afroman whether he saw one of the officers’ depositions and noted how upset she was about a music video that targeted her.

“She knew I was upset when she was standing in front of my kids with an AR-15 with her hand around the trigger,” Afroman responds, after acknowledging the officer’s hurt feelings. “So I’m sorry for being a victim. Let’s talk about the predators.”

— Solomon (@solomonmissouri.bsky.social) 2026-03-18T13:31:14.965Z

Another comes from a podcast interview of Afroman last month, where the rapper explains that as long as cops are not often held accountable for their actions, they will continue to abuse their authority. “It’s my job to give [police officers] a penalty for violating me,” Afroman says. “It’s not their court’s job, it’s not their peers.”

Put together, these two clips demonstrate a power imbalance where it is up to the “victim” to raise the mere possibility of those in power, like cops, being held accountable for their actions. And in this instance, Afroman has a leg-up on most: the police raid made the news because the rapper has an established audience and access to media and legal resources.

The trial began earlier this week. In the lead-up, he released more music videos about the raid. After singing the title in “Randy Walters Is A Son Of A Bitch,” Afroman delivers the bar “that’s why I fucked his wife and got filthy rich” and dances in front of what appear to be photos of one of the sheriff’s deputies involved in the raid and his wife. As of March 20, the music video currently has over 1.1 million views on YouTube.

The rapper’s lawyers argued that the satirical music videos were free speech protected by the First Amendment and that it was unreasonable to believe that the jokes were factual. After less than a day of deliberation, the jury sided with Afroman on Wednesday.

While the case may help enhance legal protections for people who criticize law enforcement, it also has sparked discourse about Afroman as a person, resurfacing discussions of his possible support for Donald Trump and drawing criticism of homophobic lyrics in a video about the raid. Can the outcome be positive if the subject behind it isn’t necessarily?

Regarding Trump, Afroman told Newsweek in 2024 that he wanted to perform a Hunter Biden–themed parody of his hit song “Because I Got High,” with lyrics altered to mock the former president’s son’s drug use and legal controversies, at Trump rallies in the lead-up to the presidential election. Afroman later posted a photo of himself shaking hands with Trump at the Libertarian National Convention and wrote that they laughed together at the fact that they both were raided by police and had “a lot in common” (Afroman also ran for president in 2024).

And one of Afroman’s music videos in response to the raid targets Deputy Lisa Phillips, the same officer whom Afroman acknowledged was visibly upset during her deposition, is blatantly homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic. The nearly 14-minute video, titled “Licc’em Low Lisa,” features lyrics like “I noticed her voice is a few octaves lower” and “She might whoop out somethin’, somethin’ that’s bigger than mine.” During the latter bar, the music video shows an actor portraying Phillips sitting down and holding what appears to be a large pipe.

But Afroman, whose real name is Joseph Foreman, does not need to be an undeniably good person for people to embrace the outcome of the case: a measure of accountability for institutional wrongdoing. When victims are forced to speak out to try to spotlight abuses against them, the onus does not fall on them to represent any moral standard. Law enforcement officers already benefit from qualified immunity, which allows them to avoid personal consequences unless they violate “clearly established” law, and which, according to the Legal Defense Fund, means in practice that lawsuits must refer to precedents with “nearly identical facts on the record.”

As Afroman said, “Let’s talk about the predators.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Wants $200 Billion for Bombs. Here’s What That Could Buy Instead.

“It takes money to kill bad guys.”

That’s how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth justified reports that the Pentagon is requesting $200 billion in additional funding to pay for its offensive in Iran, where, as of this writing, more than $18 billion has already been spent to kill thousands, with no end in sight.

Here at Mother Jones, we started to wonder: If the Trump administration weren’t so hellbent on “death and destruction,” at a moment rife with rising inflation and recession concerns, what else could $200 billion deliver? A lot, it turns out. We broke down a few line items below.

2.8 million public school teacher salaries

2,857 luxury 737 jets, bedroom included

378 years of federal public broadcasting funding

500 more White House ballrooms

4 years of a fully-funded National Institutes of Health

2 million Kash Patel trips to Milan by private jet

16.2 years of IRS funding, at pre-Trump levels

40 percent of Greenland, if it were for sale

2,666 Melania sequels

16.9 TSA budgets

2 Warner Bros.

1,779,628 Washington Post salaries

182 million miniature busts of Mount Rushmore with Trump’s face added

2,341 Trump heads on the real Mount Rushmore, space permitting

200 years of free New York City buses

Refund 70 percent of the tariffs the Treasury Department collected illegally

Restore Trump’s cuts to clean energy projects, 6 times over

247 Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus

1.4 billion pairs of Florsheim dress shoes

6.6 years of fully funded school lunches for every public school student in America

3 years of dental coverage, finally included in Medicare Part B

4,347 birthday parades, road repairs included

A lifetime supply of period products more than 100 million Americans

2 Metaverses

1.4 years worth of annual ACA subsidies, which expired in 2025

100 Pentagon name changes

90 percent of Americans’ roughly $220 billion in medical debt

10 years of paid family leave funding

Approximately 1 tank of gas, when this is all over.

Continue Reading…

Joe Kent’s Resignation Is Tearing MAGA Apart

If you were to invent a politician ideally suited to appeal to the MAGA base, you might come up with something like this: A classically handsome white guy with a tragically sympathetic life story whose service in US special forces during senseless wars led him to embrace America First isolationism—along with a substantial dose of conspiratorial far-right thinking. That is, they might come up with Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who did 11 combat deployments and lost his wife to an ISIS suicide bomber in 2019 before entering politics as a stalwart defender of Donald Trump.

The fact that Kent’s biography is so compelling to the MAGA faithful is what makes his decision this week to resign as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the Iran war such a problem for Trump and his administration. Unlike others the president has cast aside, Kent can’t be dismissed as a lightweight or a grifter. Instead, he has been built up for years by Tucker Carlson and others on the right as a model of everything the Trump-era GOP should represent. Now by publicly quitting, Kent is fueling a broader confict that is tearing apart Trump’s coalition over the Iran war and the role that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played in pressing Trump into it.

“You wanna rip the GOP apart right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms? Indict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson.”

As Kent wrote in his Tuesday resignation letter, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” On Wednesday evening, he made similar points in a quickly arranged interview with Carlson that has already been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube and X. (The conversation later veered off into unsupported speculation about the assasination of Charlie Kirk and Trump’s near assasination in Butler, Pennsylvania.)

In response to Kent’s departure, the administration has turned to a predictable playbook with White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt putting out a statement lambasting the “absurd allegation” that Trump “made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries.” In a nod to Kent’s appeal, Trump called Kent a “nice guy” before adding that he was “very weak on security.” Administration officials may also be the source of recently leaked news that the FBI is investigating Kent for potentially leaking sensitive information.

If the investigation is pursued, it would pit Kash Patel, Trump’s cosplaying FBI director, against a special forces veteran who moved on to doing covert operations for the CIA. (Carlson also recently released a video in which he suggested that the CIA and the Justice Department might be preparing to go after him as well because he was in touch with people in Iran before the war.) The idea of going after Kent and Carlson after they spoke out against the war would also likely draw attention to Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary who suffered no consequences for accidentally sharing war plans with a journalist and then lying about it.

It’s not hard to guess which side much of MAGA would choose—and to a large extent they already have. The faction of major right-wing influencers who are defending Kent or staying silent is notably louder than the one leaning into attacking him.

It helps that Kent is broadly right about why this war started, although he was wrong later in his resignation letter to portray Trump as a hapless victim of Israeli deception. As reporting from the New York Times and other outlets has made clear, Netanyahu played an essential role in pushing the United States toward war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted as much when he said earlier this month the United States attacked Iran when it did because Israel had decided to strike. It is nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which Netanyahu opposed a war with Iran and Trump started one anyway.

That reality is impossible to stomach for Carlson and other right-wing figures who have criticized the war, such as former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. MAGA is supposed to be a movement of dominance with Trump as its punisher-in-chief. Now, as they see it, the president is being humiliated by a nation the size of New Jersey on the other side of the world that is undermining the isolationism that was key to Trump’s appeal. “This [war] happened because Israel wanted it to happen,” Carlson stressed at the start of the conflict. “This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war.”

There were more MAGA recriminations on Wednesday when Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field, which sent energy prices rocketing even higher. In the wake of the attack, which came well after the United States told Israel to stop hitting Iranian energy infrastructure, a senior Israeli official claimed that it had been coordinated between Netanyahu’s office and the White House. Then, later on Wednesday, Trump posted on social media that Israel had struck the gas field “out of anger” and that the United States “knew nothing about” it in advance.

Neither scenario looks good for Trump. Either Israel explicitly ignored a previous US instruction not to attack Iranian energy sites, or the Trump administration green-lit the strike only to realize within hours that doing so was obviously counter to its own interests. The right-wing podcaster Tim Pool responded by sharing the president’s full Truth Social post with some unusually on-point commentary of his own.

This is fucking embarrassing Holy shit https://t.co/Ys2y6M6O66

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) March 19, 2026

Kelly, the former Fox News host, made the stakes for the Trump administration more clear in a post of her own. “You wanna rip the GOP apart right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms?” she wrote on Wednesday on X. “Indict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson. See how that works out.”

Continue Reading…

A Clarinetist, a High School Student, and Some Climate Deniers Write a Science Paper

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

It sounds like a bad joke, but last week a press release dropped into my inbox: “Leading Scientists Challenge Foundation of Climate Change Assessments, Revealing Fatal Flaws in Ocean Heat Content (OHC) Measurements.”

The article this email was promoting claims to upend the generally accepted consensus among climate scientists that greenhouse gas emissions are trapping more heat on the planet, and most of that heat is ending up in the oceans. It’s thanks to the Argo program—a fleet of nearly 4,000 robotic ocean floats that collect data on temperature and other ocean properties, like salinity—that scientists have been able to measure and track long-term ocean warming, but the paper casts doubt on those measurements.

“As promised, the climate science obliteration has arrived TODAY,” lead author Jonathan Cohler wrote on social media (his emphases). “The IPCC’s central claims have now been torn apart. The oceans are not ‘warming’ let alone ‘boiling.’ That claim is false. The claimed Earth Energy Imbalance is false. It’s no different from zero.”

He added “Full demolition:” followed by a link to the study.

As his provocative post suggests, this would be quite the blockbuster article—if it had scientific validity, which it does not.

“It’s so easy to produce bullshit, and it takes so much energy to refute it.”

“What it’s claiming to show is that these Argo floats, which are one of the main ways that we’ve been sampling the temperature and the warming rates of the ocean, are insufficient in their claim to constrain how much total heat has gone into the ocean,” explained Henri Drake, a professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. “They are arguing that we basically don’t have enough measurements of that heat in the ocean and how it’s changing to say that it has changed. Basically, they’re saying that the uncertainties in these measurements are so large that we can’t even tell whether the ocean is warming or not.”

So is there anything to those claims? In short, no. “It gets everything completely backwards,” Drake said. “They’re claiming that they have this new idea that there are not enough Argo floats in the ocean to constrain [assess] the total amount of heat taken up by the ocean. And in fact, this is like the exact opposite of the case.” The scientists who designed the Argo system decided how many Argo floats to put in the ocean, Drake said, precisely because that number was the most cost-effective way of measuring ocean warming within the uncertainty ranges that they wanted.

Kevin Trenberth—an climate scientist who contributed to the 1995, 2001, and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments, considered the most authoritative scientific analyses of world climate—was even more dismissive. “It is absolute nonsense,” Trenberth wrote in an email. “I do not want to waste my time on it.”

Unfortunately, plenty of people are wasting time on the article (including this writer, for better or worse). Cohler posted a screenshot showing more than 5,000 posts about the paper on just one social media platform, and one of his posts has nearly half a million impressions.

The question: Is it better to ignore the paper, and hope it dies in obscurity, or to tackle the disinformation head on? That is, if you have the time and energy to do so. This quandary is a perfect example of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, or Brandolini’s law, Drake says, “which states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

Lead author Jonathan Cohler is identified by his affiliation with MIT, where it turns out he used to teach clarinet.

And AI is supercharging Brandolini’s law, as this paper and others like it show. “It’s just not worth it for scientists to try to debunk all of the bullshit, because there’s so much more bullshit, and it’s so easy to produce bullshit, and it takes so much energy to refute it,” Drake said.

The Science of Climate Change article certainly has all the trappings of a scientific paper: a list of authors and university affiliations, an abstract, keywords, and a bunch of technical language, numbers, and citations that are virtually impenetrable to a layperson.

But who are the “leading scientists” who wrote the article? Lead author Cohler is identified by his affiliation with MIT—a well-known and highly respected research institution. Surely that means he holds a position in, say, MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department, right? But it appears that Cohler’s connection to the university is limited to being a clarinet instructor. Jonathan Cohler is an acclaimed clarinetist with an undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard, but to call him a “leading scientist” would, in my opinion, render those words meaningless. By the time the paper was published, Cohler was no longer employed by MIT, even as a clarinet instructor.

(The Bulletin reached out to MIT to clarify his role at the university. A representative responded, “We can confirm that Jonathan Cohler held the role of “Affiliated Artist-Private Lessons” in Music and Theater Arts for less than a year, from 10/20/2025 to 2/1/2026. He is no longer affiliated with MIT. In general, researchers should only list MIT as their affiliation in scientific journal submissions if their contribution to that specific research was conducted as part of their role at MIT.”)

What about his coauthors? David Legates is a former professor of geography at the University of Delaware with a long history of questioning climate science. In 2005, he was appointed Delaware’s state climatologist, although in 2007 then-governor Ruth Ann Minner asked him to stop using his title on public statements related to climate change, and he was removed from the position in 2011. During the first Trump administration, he was hired as NOAA’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction and led the US Global Change Research Program, but was removed from a position at the White House in disgrace after he published a series of papers questioning the validity of climate change science without approval from the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. The papers included the imprint of the Executive Office of the President and stated that they were copyrighted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Washington Post reported.

Papers like this are like kindling for anyone “just asking questions” about climate change.

Kesten Green is a senior marketing scientist at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at Adelaide University, the world’s largest center for research into marketing, who also questions anthropogenic global warming. Ole Humlum is a professor emeritus in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Oslo who has argued that global warming is primarily due to natural causes, as opposed to being caused by human activity, like burning fossil fuels.

Finally, Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and longtime climate change denier who dismisses the anthropogenic causes and impacts of global climate change. In 2015, it was revealed that he received more than $1 million from the fossil fuel industry while working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and failed to disclose that funding when publishing his research. Franklin Soon, a student at Marblehead High School in Massachusetts, is also listed as an author. (Cohler declined to address questions about his MIT affiliation or criticisms of the paper, and instead directed readers to the full paper. None of the other authors responded to a request for comment.)

In the acknowledgements of the paper, the authors credit AI tools for substantial contributions to the “drafting, editing, conceptual development, research, logical structuring, literature synthesis, and iterative refinement (including critical independent ‘peer review’) of the manuscript.” They write that they think these AI tools—Grok, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT—deserve credit but many journals prohibit listing nonhuman entities as authors, because they cannot assume legal or ethical responsibility for the work.

“While we regard this exclusion as an unjustified form of prejudice and discrimination against AI contributions in scholarly work, we respect the prevailing standards to ensure the broadest possible dissemination and indexing of this research,” they write. (This didn’t stop Cohler, Legates, and both Soons last year, when they published a paper questioning anthropogenic global warming—with Grok 3 listed as the lead author.)

This paper is just one facet of a bigger problem. Researchers are increasingly using AI chatbots and other large language models to edit or even write scientific articles. Some uses may seem harmless, but AI tools can introduce errors and hallucinations. And it can be hard to distinguish between AI-finessed and fully AI-generated papers when they look and sound the same.

How serious of a problem is this one paper? After all, it seems likely Cohler is merely tweeting into an echo-chamber of likeminded people, who repost and reply with bot-like synergy. By drawing broader attention to it, I may do more harm than good.

But papers like this are like kindling for anyone just asking questions about climate change, or doing their own research, stoking the flames of climate denial. Climate misinformation isn’t new, but AI tools make it that much easier to produce—and it seems worthwhile to point that out.

Continue Reading…

Mr. Rogers and the Fight for Public Media

On the anniversary of Fred Rogers birthday, we take a trip to Mr. Rogers’ real life neighborhood in this special episode that celebrates the life and work of public media’s most famous defender.

Reveal’s Michael Schiller visits WQED in Pittsburgh for a look back at how Fred Rogers, the host of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, championed public television throughout its decades-long struggle to survive Washington politics.

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

Continue Reading…

Workers in Colorado Have Shut Down One of the Nation’s Biggest Meatpacking Plants

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

On Monday at 5:30 a.m., more than three thousand employees at the JBS beef packing plant in Greeley, Colorado, officially walked off the line. Members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, the union that represents the plant, had begun the first major meatpacking strike in more than four decades, effectively shutting down one of the largest meat processing sites in the country. About 7 percent of America’s beef comes out of this single plant on a normal day. But now, thousands of workers—mostly foreign-born laborers from Haiti, Somalia, Burma, and Mexico—formed a picket line across the street, singing in Haitian Creole, chanting through a megaphone in Spanish, and wearing placards that read PLEASE DO NOT PATRONIZE JBS.

They were walking out to protest stalled wage negotiations and poor working conditions. A recent class action lawsuit brought by Haitian workers at the plant claims that they have been segregated onto a night shift and forced to work at “dangerously fast speeds.” Last month’s strike vote was nearly unanimous—evidence, the union says, of worker frustration.

“I don’t think the American public has a sense that the food on our table is being produced by immigrant workers under conditions that would make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave.”

By mid-morning outside the plant, just three semis carrying cattle for slaughter sat idling on the side of the highway—a far cry from the usual long line of trucks, known among workers as “Death Row.” The cattle pens north of the plant were virtually empty. Production was at a standstill. But the company seemed to want to downplay the significance of the stoppage. “This morning,” a JBS spokeswoman told me via email, “many JBS Greeley team members chose to report to work rather than participate in the strike called by UFCW Local 7, and we expect that number to continue increasing in the days ahead.”

But the scene outside the plant didn’t seem to support that optimism. JBS had erected fencing around the employee parking lot, and security personnel in company windbreakers stood at entry checkpoints, scanning IDs and waving through any workers who chose to cross the picket. There weren’t many of them. Union members had voted almost unanimously to strike a couple of weeks earlier. Workers on the picket parted to let the cars enter but speculated that these were probably managers at the plant.

“Don’t be late for work,” one picketer jeered.

Another shouted, “Have fun on the kill.”

All morning, the picket line continued to grow as union officials checked in more workers, handed out more picket signs, and called out simple reminders—stay on the sidewalks, keep moving, don’t block anyone trying to cross the picket line. Kim Cordova, president of Local 7, stood by the folding tables where strike placards were being distributed. She wore a winter hat and down jacket with a yellow reflective vest over top. “My toes are frozen,” she joked, “but everything is going well, very organized.”

She was projecting confidence, but the fact is that this strike is a huge gamble. The price of beef has soared over the past year. The work stoppage—choking off slaughtering, butchering, and packaging of some 30,000 head of cattle per week—promised to further constrict supply and likely send prices even higher.

“I think it’s unavoidable,” said Jennifer Martin, an associate professor of Animal Sciences and Meat Extension Specialist at Colorado State University. The only question, she said, is when. “That depends on how much of the kill they can relocate to other plants,” she said. “That’s going to be the thing that really determines the speed at which consumers see price impacts.”

In short, if the strike lasts more than a few days, then what has been a local battle over workplace conditions, healthcare, and wages could turn into a proxy for bigger picture conflicts—inflation and affordability, the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and corrupt corporate influence.

If the strike continues, it stands to become a national issue, one that might force a reckoning over how our meat is made. “I don’t think the American public has a sense that the food on our table is being produced by immigrant workers under conditions that would make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave,” said Peter Rachleff, a professor emeritus of history at Macalester College and author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. “I don’t think the public has a clue that that’s what’s going on.”

JBS was well aware of the shockwaves such a strike could send through the system. Last week, in preparation for the work stoppage, the company halted slaughtering, canceled cattle shipments, and began redirecting deliveries from feedlots to its plants in Grand Island, Nebraska, and Cactus, Texas—exactly the strategy described by Martin. “By utilizing available capacity at other JBS facilities,” the company spokeswoman said via email, “we can maintain supply, protect the long term stability of the beef chain, and minimize disruption for consumers and retailers.” Still, the price meatpackers pay feedlots for livestock fell 4 percent in anticipation of the strike. (The price of livestock goes down whenever slaughtering slows, since there is more supply and ranchers feel pressure to sell at a lower cost.) “We are operating the facility to the best of our ability,” the JBS spokeswoman wrote. “We will continue scaling operations this week as more team members return.”

Cordova says the company is trying to force employees back to work through implicit threats of firing. On March 9, she says, JBS called workers into a meeting, and managers passed out a form letter addressed to the union, resigning membership. All employees had to do was sign and then show up for work as usual—with no more union representation. I independently obtained a copy of the letter from a worker. On a recording of the meeting made by another employee, a manager can be heard telling workers who declined to sign that they should take all of their personal possessions with them. (The JBS spokeswoman wrote: “This is a legally compliant document that was shared in response to employees asking for direction on how to withdraw their union membership in order to prevent being fined by the union for making the choice to work.”)

Today, the US meatpacking industry is more centralized and monopolized than it was when Sinclair wrote _T_he Jungle in 1906.

On a new website posted to respond to questions about the strike, JBS again hinted that workers could be fired if they don’t return soon—vowing to continue operations “either with workers who choose not to strike, or with replacement workers.” Such language has fed fear among the workforce and fueled speculation that JBS might bus in workers from the recently shuttered Tyson beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, or from Amarillo, Texas, where, in January, Tyson reduced operations from two shifts to one.

This strategy of trying to turn the workforce against itself, some labor historians observed, is a familiar tactic—one that helped create the industry landscape of today. Rachleff, whose book Hard-Pressed in the Heartland is an insider account of the last major labor stoppage among meatpacking workers, the 1985 to ’86 union strike at the Hormel pork plant in Austin, Minnesota, sees parallels between that stoppage and the dispute unfolding in Greeley. During the Hormel strike, the company reopened the plant with more than five hundred “permanent replacements,” escorted through the picket lines by National Guard troops called up by the governor of Minnesota. Under such pressure, the union unraveled. Nearly five hundred members crossed their own picket lines. A thousand unyielding workers were fired. And, eventually, union leadership in DC stepped in and declared an end to the strike—with almost none of the union’s demands met.

The failure of that strike had far-reaching implications. The nearly all-white, US-born workforce was steadily replaced with immigrant workers. Wage increases were slowed or halted. Skilled work was broken down and automated. Most importantly, meatpacking giants were able to grow and consolidate, until just a few companies gained near-total control over markets for beef, pork, and poultry. Today, the US meatpacking industry is more centralized and monopolized than it was when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906, leading President Theodore Roosevelt to break up the so-called Meat Trust.

JBS’s size allows the company to achieve powerful economies of scale. It’s so large, in fact, that JBS and just three other companies (Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef), known as the Big Four, control as much as 93 percent of the market. Other members of the beef supply chain—cattle ranchers, grocery chains, and the fast food behemoth McDonald’s, among others—have argued in multiple lawsuits that the Big Four are working in coordination to depress the market price of cattle, suppress worker wages, and drive up the price of processed beef for their clients, who pass the pain along to consumers. Local 7 is gambling that workers can use the industry’s unprecedented consolidation against JBS: If they can hamstring the plant’s production, maybe prices will rise enough that the government will have to take action against the company.

Beef prices have climbed steadily since the pandemic—but in the last year, they’ve soared.

We’ve already been paying more for beef. Prices have climbed steadily since the pandemic—but in the last year, they’ve soared. Since Trump returned to the White House, the average price of steaks has climbed from $10.87 a pound to $12.51 a pound—a leap of 15 percent. The price of ground beef is 20 percent higher—nearly seven times the increase in overall consumer prices. Then, late last year, Tyson announced its plans to reduce production, cutting the national beef processing capacity by 10 percent and further driving price increases. This led some industry observers to allege that the company was intentionally constricting supply in order to increase profitability. (In a statement, Tyson said it was working to “right size its beef business and position it for long-term success.”)

President Trump took to Truth Social. “I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation,” he wrote. “Action must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People.” The Department of Justice immediately announced an investigation into JBS and other members of the Big Four. Last week, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that mandated a breakup of the large meatpacking corporations and specifically called for an investigation of JBS for “corruption” and business practices that “distorted competitive conditions” across the industry.

The union is betting that if it can take another 7 percent of the nation’s slaughter capacity offline, it may drive up food prices enough that Trump and Congress would be forced to follow through on their promises to investigate JBS—and even break up the company.

But it could also backfire. Cordova worries that JBS will be protected by the Trump administration—in part because the company was the single largest donor to his second inauguration. And also because the plant’s workforce is estimated to be 90 percent non-white immigrants, including more than 1,200 Haitian workers, whose visa statuses are on shaky ground. The administration is currently arguing before the Supreme Court that it should have the power to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants who entered the country legally under the Biden administration. If that happens, Cordova believes there’s a chance that the Trump administration could use the strike as justification for a raid of the plant by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Cordova was a union representative in 2006 when the plant, then owned by Swift & Company, became a central target of the first major ICE action ever undertaken. “Those raids,” she told me in an earlier interview, “were a push by [President George W.] Bush, I believe, to make some sort of political statement—to come in and really go after the industry and these plants for what he believed were undocumented workers.” The situation today is different: All of the plant’s employees, who herald from dozens of countries and speak some fifty different languages, have documentation. At least, for now.

On Monday afternoon, as night shift strikers took to the picket, the threat of an immediate ICE raid dissipated. The Supreme Court had declined to allow the administration to revoke TPS protections for Haitians and begin deportations immediately. But no one could breathe a total sigh of relief: The justices had agreed to hear oral arguments for the case in late April.

Despite their precarious status, the Local 7 membership voted last month nearly 99 percent in favor of the strike—driven, many say, by years of mistreatment. “The chain speed is the main thing,” Robenson Franc told me, speaking in Haitian Creole through an interpreter. Franc is one of more than a thousand Haitian workers who arrived at JBS in 2023 as part of what Local 7 describes as a human trafficking scheme, aimed at undercutting the union and forcing new employees to work on the night shift at unfair speeds. The suit claims that the line on the daytime shift usually averages 300 head of cattle processed per hour. But the night shift, when many of these newly recruited Haitian workers are on the line, runs at 370—and has reached as high as 440 head per hour. “They put up the speed as fast as they need,” Franc told me. And regardless of the speed, he said, workers are expected to keep pace.

Last month, Trump’s Department of Agriculture removed all restrictions on the speeds of poultry and pork production lines—a move that will increase output and help stabilize JBS’s profits through its pork operations and Pilgrim’s Pride, which is majority-owned by JBS and one of the largest poultry producers in the world. Cordova says JBS is now pushing to lift restrictions on beef production lines. The prospect of government oversight being removed has made documentation and negotiations over staffing to safely match line speeds a central issue at the Greeley plant, where workers say that lines currently run so fast that there’s no time to sharpen their knives, leading to debilitating repetitive stress injuries.

On the new website posted by JBS, the company says it is “false” that “UFCW Local 7 is striking over worker conditions.” The website claims that JBS “and the union resolved all non-economic items in bargaining” and says that the company has implemented “a process to provide newly sharpened knives frequently throughout the day”—with new, state-of-the-art knives to be installed soon. JBS says that the only remaining disagreement is over hourly wages and other “economic considerations.”

“They’re just trying to push that this is an economic strike,” Cordova said, which she believes is an effort to paint workers as only concerned about money. “That’s not true,” she said: Unresolved issues include disagreements over who should have to pay for worker personal protective equipment; the amount of sick time and paid leave benefits workers receive; and accurate accounting of line speeds, in order to make sure there’s enough staff to keep up with the pace of sped-up lines. While those issues may be strictly economic considerations for JBS, she said, for workers “it’s a staffing issue, it’s a safety issue, it’s a transparency issue.”

It remains to be seen whether this strike is short-lived or stretches on for weeks or months in the way of historic strikes of the past. Jennifer Martin emphasized that the length of the strike will determine the future for consumers. “If the strike continues, would we expect to see higher prices? Yes. And would we expect that to be compounded by higher input costs, fuel prices, all of those sorts of things? Yes.”

“Is this the final straw where all of these pressures have been building, and this is the thing that sends it over the edge?”

What she couldn’t predict is who would feel the impact of those changes the most. Would it be the workers, who are forced to risk their livelihoods or accept what they consider unsafe conditions; the ranchers, who will have to sell their cattle at a lower price; the company, which says its razor-thin margins are “pressuring profitability”; or the American people, who are struggling to put food on the table?

“Is this the final straw,” she continued, “where all of these pressures have been building, and this is the thing that sends it over the edge, where prices move far enough that consumer behavior changes in a meaningful way?”

“That’s an unknown. It will really depend on how long this strike continues.”

Continue Reading…

Military Families Brace for What Comes Next

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

Caryl Banks dragged a kitchen chair beneath the overhead light and climbed onto it with a bucket of warm, soapy water balanced on the countertop. She wrung out a sponge, lifted it toward the ceiling, and began working it in slow, deliberate circles. Water slid down her forearm and dripped onto the kitchen floor.

It was close to 1 a.m.

Across the room, her friend Russell stood quietly in the doorway, watching her scrub the same patch of ceiling. “Do you want me to help you scrub,” he asked gently, “or do you just want me to stay here?”

Banks didn’t look down. She squeezed the sponge once more and pressed it against the ceiling.

“I don’t want help,” she remembers saying in a calm but sharp voice. “I just want to scrub my own ceilings.”

The ceiling wasn’t even dirty. All she could think about was her son, Sgt. Dominick Banks, who was somewhere in the Red Sea on a deployment with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. It was October 2023. The war in Gaza was heating up, and U.S. forces were countering Houthi missile and drone strikes at Israel. Days had passed without a message. In the absence of anything she could control, Banks looked for something to do with her hands.

So she started scrubbing.

This is how military families live inside the wait for war.

Sgt. Dominick Banks and his mom, Caryl, pause for a predeployment photo in 2023. For military families like theirs, these snapshots often become the images they return to while waiting for the next phone call home. Courtesy of Caryl Banks

They feel the tremors of global conflict long before the rest of the country notices. But the wait for war rarely looks the way people expect. It doesn’t usually happen with big, dramatic moments, and no clear beginning or end. Instead, it settles into daily life, with a phone kept within close reach throughout the night, or one more glance at the news before bed, and a question from a child that parents suddenly realize they don’t know how to answer.

In recent weeks, another war in the Middle East has once again placed U.S. forces on heightened alert across the globe, leaving many military families like the Banks in Maryland, the Pretes in Germany, the Grants in New Mexico, and the Baginskys in Virginia anxiously watching for signs of what might come next.

Dominick finished his active duty tour and is back home in Bowie, Maryland, but he still has two years left on his Individual Ready Reserve contract, which means he can be recalled for deployment until then. His childhood best friend is now deployed to the Middle East, so Caryl Banks said she is reaching out to offer her mom-to-mom support.

“The grief and the worry, the emotions I have for the families going through it,” she said, “it’s like, it just makes me sick.”

An F/A-18F Super Hornet aircraft, attached to Strike Fighter Squadron 213, lands on the USS Gerald R. Ford on day three of Operation Epic Fury in the eastern Mediterranean.US Navy photo

When the House Goes Quiet

A few weeks ago, Air Force service member Desiree Grant got the call that her husband, Brayton, who is also serving in the Air Force, would be the one to deploy with Operation Epic Fury. The last chance they had to talk, they didn’t spend any time talking about the US-Israeli surprise attack on Tehran or the death of Iran’s supreme leader.

The main topic of their 10-minute call was how she had to rush their 1-year-old son, Bennett, to the emergency room at Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, New Mexico, when he was feverish and wheezing from RSV, the respiratory syncytial virus. They talked about how he was doing, the little milestones he was hitting, and the funny moments that happened during the day. “Sharing those everyday moments helps keep us connected.”

Only 3.2 percent of Americans live with an active-duty service member in their immediate family. While nearly half of all military members are married, only 7 percent are part of dual-military couples like the Grants, where both spouses serve.

For Desiree, when her husband Brayton deploys, the structure of daily life changes quickly, affecting everything from daycare drop-offs to bath time, feeding the dogs, household chores, yard work, and dinner.

“I take on more of the day-to-day responsibilities at home,” she said.

“Knowing he’s part of such a dedicated and capable team gives me a lot of confidence and peace of mind.”

No matter the level of resilience, there are times when the absence becomes impossible to ignore. Like after Bennett finally falls asleep and the house grows quiet.

“I miss having my spouse there to talk about the day with,” she said. Those silent, lonely hours are also when she reminds herself why he serves and the mission he and his fellow air commandos carry out. “That sense of pride helps balance those moments,” she said.

When the news cycle becomes overwhelming, Desiree tries not to follow every update. But it’s hard to ignore the stories of 13 US service members who have lost their lives in the first weeks of the war. Information changes quickly, she said, and speculation can spiral. Instead, she focuses on staying connected to Brayton, exchanging messages whenever possible, and trusting the training and professionalism of the airmen he serves beside. “Knowing he’s part of such a dedicated and capable team gives me a lot of confidence and peace of mind,” she said.

A US Marine Corps carry team transfers the remains of Marine Lance Cpl. Kevin Melendez of Fort Worth, Texas, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. He was one of 13 US service members killed in the first weeks of the war.Photo by Jason Minto, U.S. Air Force

Holding More Than One Worry

Sabrina Baginsky understands more than most people the weight of worry. She has two sons serving in the Navy. Nate is stationed in Jacksonville, Florida, and Michael, an aviation machinist’s mate, third Class, is currently deployed with the USS Gerald R. Ford in the thick of Operation Epic Fury.

Communication had been shut down as the ship became integral to flight operations from the Red Sea for air strikes against Iran. But a fire that burned for 30 hours last week in the ship’s laundry facility, displaced hundreds of sailors and crew members from their sleeping “racks” and is forcing the world’s largest aircraft carrier to sail to Crete for repairs.

The one silver lining? Michael was able to quickly call home, Sabrina said, to tell his mom he is safe and that he loves her.

The aircraft carrier has been at sea for more than 260 days after departing Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2025. Deployments at sea typically last six months. But Navy officials have indicated the USS Ford’s deployment could stretch to roughly 11 months, or about 334 days, as the carrier continues operating in response to the war.

If the ship remains deployed that long, it would surpass the historic 332-day deployment of the USS Midway during the Vietnam War from April 1972 to March 1973. That’s still the record for the longest US aircraft carrier deployment.

The extended timeline means even more months of uncertainty, living in the wait for war, as the ship has traversed the Atlantic, Northern Europe, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean, and now around the Red Sea.

Back home in Virginia Beach, Sabrina has another worry: Her partner, the boys’ stepfather, is undergoing treatment for cancer.

“My heart and head are very full,” she said.

Aviation Machinist’s Mate 3rd Class Michael Baginsky has been deployed since last summer on the USS Gerald R. Ford.U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Mariano Lopez

Homefront Agility

Destinee Prete is also juggling to prepare for what comes next in her military household. She is an Army veteran and military spouse stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany. For her family, readiness looks like an ordinary office binder resting on a shelf in her home. It’s their “go binder,” and inside it are the important documents that allow life to keep moving if everything suddenly changes: birth certificates, Social Security cards, passports, and copies of military orders. The most important documents are the powers of attorney.

Years ago, during another deployment, Prete tried to make a simple change to the family’s cell phone plan but couldn’t. Her husband, Lt. Col. Ryan Prete, was the name on the account, and without the proper authorization, even a simple administrative task became impossible.

“It was a huge wake-up call,” she said.

Now, the go binder contains what Prete says is among the most important documents they need, a general power of attorney for everyday decisions, and others tailored for specific responsibilities. Living overseas adds another layer of complexity. In Germany, Lt. Col. Prete is the family’s official sponsor for nearly all services tied to the military community. That means planning ahead for bureaucratic hurdles that might appear if he suddenly isn’t there to sign something.

Ryan works in a “manning cell,” a special unit primed to increase operations to 24 hours a day at any moment; ensuring readiness meets the military’s operational needs of getting the right people to the right places during campaigns like Operation Epic Fury.

With years of experience, Destinee is already ready with what she calls “home front agility.” But she knows all too well that logistical preparation is only a part of it. Preparing for the emotional impact of deployment is just as critical. The wait before a deployment carries what Destinee describes as a “constant, low-grade hum of anxiety just under the surface of everything you do.”

Twins Aiden and Landon, 14, and Ethan, 13, line up on the opposite side of the Leichtenstein-Swiss border from their parents, Ryan and Destinee Prete. The family is stationed in Germany, and for many military children, growing up means building a sense of home wherever the military sends them. Courtesy of the Prete family

Parenting Through Uncertainty

At home, the uncertainty often shows up in conversations with her sons, twins Aiden and Landon, 14, and Ethan, 13. Teenagers absorb news more quickly than anyone, especially through social media, where rumors can travel faster than facts, she said. The Prete family has developed a nightly ritual to manage what’s real and what isn’t.

At dinner, the table becomes what she calls their “debriefing zone.” The boys share what they heard that day, maybe something they heard at school, something they saw on TikTok, or something a friend repeated without knowing whether it was true or not.

“You know, you often hear about military spouse resilience,” she said. “But the real heroes are the kids.”

When that happens, Prete says she and her husband walk through it with them. “OK,” she might say, “that sounds like an opinion, not a fact.” Or: “Why do you think that person wants you to feel angry?” The goal isn’t to hide reality, she explained. It’s to keep uncertainty from taking over their children’s world. Helping them understand what’s real and what’s not is their priority. Even in tense moments, Prete says the thing that surprises her most is how quickly military kids adapt.

“You know, you often hear about military spouse resilience,” she said. “But the real heroes are the kids.”

An E-2D Hawkeye aircraft, attached to Airborne Command and Control Squadron 124, lands on the flight deck of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, days into the start of Operation Epic Fury in the Mediterranean Sea.US Navy Photo

The Mouthpiece

The first real shock of military life for Caryl Banks didn’t happen during a deployment. It was the summertime, June 2019, when it hit her like a ton of bricks. Dominick left for Parris Island, South Carolina, the home of Marine Corps boot camp.

Caryl says she didn’t volunteer to become a Marine Corps mom. It was her son’s choice, and for that reason, she pledged her unconditional support to honor his call to serve. Dominick’s communication with home suddenly became rare.

For the first time in his life, calls with his mom had to be brief, and they were unpredictable. In the early stages of specialty training, privileges—like phone calls, civilian clothes, and time off base—had to be earned.

Dominick wrote to his mom to report that if he could knock his opponent’s mouthpiece out during drills, he would earn a phone call home. Caryl didn’t hold back: Do whatever, she told him. She needed a phone call from him more than anything.

She was sitting in a nail salon a couple of weeks later when a strange number popped up on her phone. She almost let it go to voicemail.

It was Dominick.

“As soon as I heard his voice, I just kept repeating, ‘I love you, I love you, I’m proud of you, I love you…a thousand times,’” she said through heavy tears. “It was so hard and so beautiful, right, that moment of like, thank God I’m hearing from him, but oh my God I have to get off because he has to hang up.”

Months later, after his training had ended, Dominick came back home with something he needed his mom to have.

The mouthpiece.

It didn’t matter that she never knew the original owner of that mouthpiece. Banks kept it anyway. It represents the moment she realized how much military life changes the way families stay connected, Banks said, and just how much that connection means to her.

Sgt. Dominick Banks gives his mom, Caryl, an embrace before leaving for the Middle East in July 2023.Courtesy of Caryl Banks

Somewhere Out at Sea

Before Dominick Banks deployed on an eight-and-a-half-month mission with the 26th MEU in July 2023, he was supposed to go on a European tour, but plans changed quickly for his unit when Iran began seizing oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and the surrounding waters, like the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has now locked down following the latest attacks by the US and Israel.

Dominick was part of a special operations-capable Marine expeditionary unit assigned to the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group, similar to the one ordered to the Middle East from the Pacific late last week. The forward-deployed, rapid-response Marine air-ground task force is designed to respond to missions ranging from humanitarian aid to combat operations within six hours’ notice.

“That deployment changed my life,” his mom said, weeping. “People wanted me to care about work and these trivial things when my kid was fighting for his life and others.”

These are the “boots on the ground” that commanders in chief are asked about in news conferences and that experts on CNN and Fox News debate the necessity of as war drags on.

Back at home, his mom, Caryl, was sick with worry. She knew the USS Carter Hall, the amphibious warship her son was deployed with, was the middle ship in the escort lineup meant to lead other warships through the Strait of Hormuz. “That deployment changed my life,” his mom said, weeping. “People wanted me to care about work and these trivial things when my kid was fighting for his life and others.”

She asked friends and neighbors to leave their porch lights on to help light her son’s way home.

A friend gave Banks two glass jars and a bag of beads before Dominick deployed that fall. One jar started full. The other sat empty. Each day he was gone, she moved a single bead from the full jar to the empty one. Slowly, with each bead, the days remaining dwindled down.

“[I just needed] tangible things, like he’s one day closer,” Banks said.

On a small table in Caryl Banks’ home sit the things she’s kept from her son’s time in uniform: letters he mailed home, dried roses from his graduation, and a mouthpiece he once knocked from an opponent’s mouth in training, earning the privilege for a call home.Courtesy of Caryl Banks

The Things We Hold On To

In Caryl Banks’ home, that mouthpiece Dominick brought her isn’t tucked away in a drawer. It sits in plain view on a small wooden table as part reminder, part proof that the years her son has spent serving were real, and that they both survived. A stack of letters Dominick mailed home rests beneath it, the pages covered in tight handwriting that traveled across oceans like the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden before reaching her mailbox.

Now, even more, as the war in Iran stretches through a third week with no clear end in sight, Banks feels the same familiar tightening in her chest, remembering when her son was deployed in the region, during attacks on Bahrain in September 2023.

While watching the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet Headquarters in Manama, Bahrain, fall under missile attack this month, just as the war began, the levee holding back Caryl’s fears broke, and all at once, they came rushing back.

She is painfully aware that Dominick’s contract extends far beyond his discharge papers. In a time of war, he can be recalled. Caryl says the feeling isn’t just worry. It’s closer to something she recognizes from what she’s experienced in the past.

“Not almost PTSD,” she said quietly. “It is.”

Caryl Banks tries not to dwell on the chance her son, Dominick, could be recalled for deployment.Courtesy of Caryl Banks

When the Phone Finally Rings

On the morning of March 11, Dominick called his mother at 7:45—much earlier than usual. She braced for the news. Was he bound again for the Middle East?

He just wanted to talk about basketball. The night before, Miami Heat center Bam Adebayo had scored 83 points, surpassing Dominick’s all-time favorite player, Kobe Bryant’s famous 81-point performance.

“I’m just like, you’re calling me at 7:45 a.m. for this,” Banks said, laughing.

But she answered the phone on the first ring, and she always will. In military families, even the most ordinary conversation can feel like the comforting reassurance that everything, at least for the moment, is still OK.

Banks knows that living inside the wait for war means carrying uncertainty day after day, while the rest of the world moves on around you. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, it means standing barefoot on a kitchen chair, a sponge in your hand, scrubbing the same spot on the ceiling while someone you love is somewhere across the world, and there is nothing else you can do.

Natalie Oliverio is a Navy Veteran, an entrepreneur, and an award-winning journalist whose reporting focuses on defense policy, military news, veterans affairs, and military family life to uncover human stories behind service. She can be reached at natalie@militarytalentpartners.com.

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

Continue Reading…

Democrats Urge Windfall Tax as Oil Firms Prepare to Cash in on the Iran War

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

With big oil companies poised to reap billions of dollars in profits from the war in Iran, Democratic lawmakers and progressive groups are calling for a windfall tax on major fossil fuel companies.

The US-Israeli strikes on Iran have triggered the largest ever disruption to fuel supply, according to the International Energy Agency, sending crude costs surging over $100 per barrel in recent days. Those high prices have hit US pocketbooks, with average domestic gas prices topping $3.70 a gallon, and Americans spending more than an additional $2 billion to fill their tanks in the past fortnight according to one estimate.

“Surges in energy prices exacerbate inequality in our societies.”

As ordinary people struggle, corporations are seeing windfall gains. Since the war began last month, share prices for US oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron have climbed by more than 5 percent and 7 percnt respectively, while their market values have soared.

With oil prices continuing to rise, the Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have proposed taxing big oil’s windfall profits from the Iran war-fueled crisis. “Trump’s war of choice in Iran is not just a moral mistake but an economic blunder that is skyrocketing gas prices for working Americans,” said Khanna in a statement.

The Guardian has contacted the American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil lobby group, for comment.

Hours before the bill’s release, dozens of consumer and environmental advocacy organizations sent a formal letter to Congress backing such a proposal. “Revenue from a windfall profits tax should be returned directly to struggling American households to help offset rising costs,” says the letter, which was signed by the Make Polluters Pay campaign, the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, and more than 70 other state and national groups.

The time to impose the tax is now, supporters say. If oil prices remain at their current level, gas prices will continue to rise while US fossil fuel firms could collect an additional $60 billion this year, analyses from consultancy firm Rystad Energy and investment bank Jeffries show.

“Energy producers and commodity trading firms benefit from volatility in energy prices,” Isabella Weber, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told the Guardian last week. Windfall taxes, she said, can “raise money to cushion the more vulnerable sections of society from cost-of-living pressures.”

Though the United States has not imposed a windfall tax on oil companies since the 1980s, the sector has profited from various fuel crises since. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, oil companies recorded historic profits—profits that one 2025 study co-authored by Weber found were 13 percent higher than total investment in the US’s green energy transition that year.

“The only reason Congress won’t pass it is because too many politicians are bought and paid for by big oil.”

Donald Trump has insisted that such excess profits benefit ordinary Americans.

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump posted on Truth Social last week.

The post only holds true if by “we” Trump meant to refer to wealthy people, according to another 2025 analysis co-authored by Weber. Oil firms’ profits flow to those who own shares in them, either directly or via retirement funds, pensions, or other investments. Those people tend to be well-off, the study found.

During the 2022 fuel crisis triggered by Russia’s war on Ukraine, 50 percent of the profits of US oil and gas firms went to the wealthiest 1 percent of individuals, while the bottom 50 percent only obtained 1 percent of profits. “Since stock ownership is so heavily skewed towards the richest people in our societies, record profits for energy firms means record income for them,” said Weber. “The evidence clearly shows that surges in energy prices exacerbate inequality in our societies.”

A windfall tax could help “contain inequality and raise money to cushion the more vulnerable sections of society from cost-of-living pressures,” said Weber.

In their Tuesday letter to congressional leaders, supporters cited a University of Massachusetts Amherst study indicating that if a similar tax had been enacted during the 2022 price shock, roughly $1,715 could have been returned to each American household. “Other countries have already demonstrated that this approach works,” the letter says, noting that after the 2022 fuel shock the United Kingdom imposed a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, raising $3.3 billion in its first year and $4.5 billion the next.

Khanna and Whitehouse previously proposed a windfall profits tax during the 2022 energy crisis. At the time, one poll showed some 80 percentof Americans supported the move.

“A windfall profits tax is overwhelmingly popular,” said Jamie Henn, director of the anti-oil and gas nonprofit Fossil Free Media, which helped organize support for the current and earlier proposals. “The only reason Congress won’t pass it is because too many politicians are bought and paid for by Big Oil.”

Ultimately, the US should quickly move toward a managed transition away from “volatile fossil fuels,” said Collin Rees, US policy manager at the climate research and advocacy nonprofit Oil Change International, which signed the Tuesday letter supporting a windfall tax.

“That could deliver huge potential benefits there in terms of decreased conflict, in terms of ending the deadly wars for oil that the US keeps waging,” he said. “In the meantime, we need to stop the oil billionaires from profiteering.”

Continue Reading…